Grace Presbyterian Church
June 19, 2016, Pentecost 5C
Psalm 77:1-2, 11-18; 1 Kings 19:1-16;
Galatians 3:23-29
Not the Lone Ranger
I’m a little young
to remember the TV show – not as young as some here, but a little young for
that. And because of my history of studying and teaching music history, if you
played me the musical theme to that show I’d be much more likely to identify it
as the final theme from Gioacchino Rossini’s overture to his opera Guillaume Tell, or the “William Tell
Overture.”
But, yeah, we know
about the Lone Ranger.
Some of you might
be mentally rehearsing the opening to that show right now: “Return with us now to those thrilling days
of yesteryear … From out of the west with the speed of light and a hearty
‘hi-yo Silver!’” … Yes, I can see you, it’s showing on your faces… .
I don’t think it’s
a stretch to say that the Lone Ranger, because of those old radio serials and
the later television series, has been established for many decades as one of
the iconic fictional characters in American popular culture.
Funny thing about
the Lone Ranger, though; he was almost never really “lone.” The name, it turns
out, is traceable to the character’s “origin story,” in which he was the lone survivor of a unit of Texas Rangers
that was ambushed on a patrol. The five other members of the patrol, including
its captain – the older brother of the eventual “Lone Ranger” – were killed.
Rather than being truly “lone,” The Lone Ranger was instead virtually always
accompanied by Tonto, a Native American who found the man barely alive after
the ambush and nurtured him back to health. Again, I didn’t hear or watch the
show, but it seems that most of what he accomplished required Tonto’s help.
Nonetheless, the
image, or maybe the myth of the “Lone Ranger” as a singular individual who
pursued justice on his own has persisted in the American mindset in particular,
and has sometimes curdled into a image of a loner seeking revenge or
retribution instead of justice (an appropriation that does no justice to the
original character).
Though he lived
innumerable centuries before the Lone Ranger mythology, the prophet Elijah
seems sometimes to fall prey to the mindset of “going it alone.” You might
remember from a few weeks ago, how Elijah took a simple command from God to
announce the end of a drought and drew it out into an elaborate contest with
the Baal prophets, culminating in the spectacular display of fire from heaven
coming down and consuming all the waterlogged altars and soaked sacrifices.
Afterwards, as the rain approached, Elijah (apparently now possessed by the
super-speed of another modern hero, The Flash) ran ahead of King Ahab’s fully
equipped chariot to the town of Jezreel, serving then as the seat of power in
Israel.
And that’s where
today’s reading kicks off, with Ahab whining to his wife Jezebel about what
Elijah had done, and Jezebel issuing (via messenger) a not too veiled threat to
Elijah: what you did to my Baal prophets,
I’m gonna do to you.
And Elijah, the
man who had been sustained in the wilderness by ravens, who had seen God
miraculously extend meal and oil for weeks for the widow and her son, who had
challenged the Baal prophets and won, who had slaughtered all those Baal
prophets in triumph and humiliated the king … now, Elijah was scared. And
Elijah ran. To be blunt, he ran like a scared chicken.
You can see the
account of Elijah’s flight, falling asleep in despair only to be awakened, fed,
and sent on his way (not once, but twice); arriving at Horeb the mount of God
(in Exodus, that mountain was called Sinai), and repeating what almost sounds
like a rehearsed, pre-packaged answer to God:
I have been very zealous for the
Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown
down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and
they are seeking my life, to take it away.
Elijah says this
two times: first, when he comes to the cave on Horeb the mount of God, and then
after the progression described in verses 11-12; a great wind, a strong
earthquake, and a mighty fire, a scene not unlike that at the end of the psalm
we read earlier. But God was in none of those; only in the “sound of sheer silence” did Elijah
discern the presence of the Lord.
So somehow, the
bombast and tumult of the mountaintop display, not completely unlike the
bombast and tumult Elijah himself had initiated back at Mount Carmel, somehow
doesn’t seem to get through to Elijah, for afterwards when he is asked a second
time “what are you doing here, Elijah?”
he responds the exact same way as before:
I have been very zealous for the
Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown
down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and
they are seeking my life, to take it away.
He doesn’t get it.
Maybe if Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio with its vivid and exhilarating depiction
of that scene had been available, Elijah might have had a better time
understanding it. (Insert misguided
attempt to sing here.) But Elijah doesn’t get it, so God has to hit him
over the head with it, if Elijah is ever going to get over his severe case of Lone
Ranger Syndrome.
First of all, we
the reader know that Elijah has been fundamentally incorrect all along. Back in
the first verses of chapter 18 we read of Obadiah, a servant in Ahab’s court
who despite the threats of the royal family had secreted away a hundred
prophets loyal to the Lord, hiding them in caves to thwart Jezebel’s plans to
kill them. That’s at least a hundred and one examples of how Elijah was wrong
when he claimed that “he alone was left,” and Elijah knows this because Obadiah
told him to his face in 18:13. God then, in 19:18 just outside our reading,
points to seven thousand loyal
Israelites who have not bowed the knee to Baal, seven thousand faithful that
God would preserve.
But maybe the
unkindest cut of all comes in verse 16. Not only was Elijah not the Lone
Ranger, he wasn’t even irreplaceable. Another prophet would take his place, and
it was Elijah’s job to go anoint him. If that’s not a direct slap in the face
against Elijah’s pity party I don’t know what else it could be.
Now God still had
work for Elijah to do, but God needed Elijah focused on God’s call to him, and
not hung up on his self-obsessed and self-possessed despair. It’s not hard to
extrapolate the lesson for us from such a story: the same thing applies to us.
It’s not uncommon
for us to fall into that pit. Australian biblical scholar and pastor Howard
Wallace points out that Elijah needs to be released from the zealousness and
self-control that had ruled his previous service and learn that it was the word
of the Lord, which sometimes did not speak in the wind or earthquake or fire,
to which he needed to submit his prophetic witness.[i]
We’re convinced it’s all up to us. No one else is going to step up, it’s all on
our shoulders. Yes, it’s easy to slip into that particular quality of despair,
but it can be possibly the worst place for a follower of Christ to end up, It
can go either of two different ways, both disastrous and potentially
destructive.
This has been a
week where perhaps we’ve felt that despair and sense of aloneness, in the wake
of the horrific murders of forty-nine patrons in a nightclub in Orlando
patronized primarily by gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer persons (and
primary a Latino/Latina audience on that particular night). That event happened
only a few days before the first anniversary of another infamous shooting, of
nine members of an African-American congregation in Charleston. In the face of
such horrific evil, it’s not hard to slip into that despair that no one is
faithful anymore, no one will stand up and do what needs to be done.
Of course, on the
flip side of that “I alone am left” mentality is the misguided, vengeful
would-be Lone Ranger who takes up weapons to commit the murders, because he
believes blacks are inferior or gets offended by the sight of two men kissing.
“I alone am left” is not just a despairing place; it can be a pathway to acts
of unspeakable evil. Even Elijah has already shown himself capable of grotesque
violence in the throes of this mindset, commanding the slaughter of all those
Baal prophets back in verse 18.
We can’t go there.
We must not fall into that mindset (which has nothing of God in it) that the
problems of the world are ours to solve by any means necessary. We also can’t
be the one who is paralyzed by grief and despair, unable to take up the work of
God’s kingdom. We need God, we need Christ, and we need each other too much.
The passage from
Paul’s epistle to the Galatians reminds us that for all the ways we differ, God
insists on making us one. Not making us “the same,” but one. We are one in Christ. We can’t go thinking we’re the Lone
Ranger, folks; if we are truly following Christ, we literally can’t be alone – it is not possible. We
are never abandoned, no matter how much we may feel like it.
Speaking of that
masked man, besides Tonto, the Lone Ranger as originally written was bound to a
strict moral code, one which governed all his actions and prevented him from
veering off into revenge or other departures from his mission. For us, our
ground is simpler, and yet amazingly complex; our “moral code,” our ground is
Christ. It is in Christ, after all, that we are never alone; it is in Christ
that we are one.
Even in dark and
despairing days, we’re not alone in this, friends. Let’s not act like it.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] http://hwallace.unitingchurch.org.au/WebOTcomments/OrdinaryC/Pent41Kgs19.html,
accessed 17 June 2016.
Hymns (From Glory
to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):
#4 Holy
God, We Praise Your Name
#317 In
Christ There Is No East or West
#322 We
Are One In Christ Jesus
#824 There
Is a Place of Quiet Rest
Yep, there's Tonto. See, he's really not "lone."