The Sound of Sheer Silence

On this Second Sunday after Pentecost, I am serving in the Berkshires at Trinity Church in Lenox. The rector is currently in the midst of a sabbatical; I'm glad to be able to pinch-hit for him. 

The Book of Kings begins with King Solomon on the throne, and then plows along under his varied successors until you get to chapter sixteen. That’s where it begins to get really interesting. That is when Omri (up to that point dubbed the “worst king ever”) dies. He is succeeded by his son, Ahab, who will reign for twenty-two years. (16:25) This comment from the narrator pretty much sums up what Ahab’s two decade reign was like:

Ahab, son of Omri, did what was displeasing to the Lord, more than all who preceded him. Not content to follow the sins of Jereboam, son of Nebat, he took as his wife, Jezebel, daughter of King Ethbaal of the Phoenicians and he went and served Baal and worshiped him. (16:30-31)

You should know that Baal is a god of fresh water, a rain god. So in chapter seventeen when we are introduced to Elijah the Tishbite, he issues a challenge: “As the Lord lives, the God of Israel whom I serve, there will be no dew or rain except at my bidding.”  Elijah is throwing down the gauntlet: Ahab has built an altar to Baal because he wants rain. But Elijah’s response is that it will only rain when YHWH says it will rain!

The problem with droughts is that they affect everybody, not just the bad people. Even Elijah will suffer the consequences of this drought. At one point in the narrative, he shows up at the home of a widow in Sidon who is down to her last little bit of flour and oil and preparing to die. Yet when the prophet invites himself for dinner, she welcomes him to her table. She chooses hospitality and generosity over fear and xenophobia and shares the little bit she has, which as it miraculously turns out, is enough.  

By the time we get to chapter eighteen of First Kings, three years have passed and the famine brought on by this drought is much, much worse. Elijah approaches the people and puts it bluntly, the way prophets are prone to do: How long will you keep limping along between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow God! If Baal, then follow Baal. But make up your minds already! (18:21)

It is at this point that Elijah takes on 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. They get a bull and cut it in half for a sacrifice, and set up two wood piles. No matches allowed; just prayer. Elijah allows the prophets of Baal to go first and to pick their wood pile and bull. From morning until noon they shout: “O Baal, answer us!” Nothing. So then they performed what one translation calls a “hopping dance.” We get to see here that Elijah is a bit of a trash-talker because when nothing happens he chimes in: why don’t you shout louder! Maybe Baal is sleeping and you need to wake him up! Maybe he’s deep in conversation with some other god, or he’s away on vacation. Nada.

Then it’s Elijah’s turn. He decides to make it interesting, filling four jars with water and soaking the whole thing. And then he says: do it a second time. Actually you know what—do it a third time until water is running even around the trench of the altar! Until the whole thing is so sopping wet it would be impossible to light it up. And then he prays:

O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel! Let it be known today that you are God in Israel, and I am your servant, and that I have done these things at your bidding. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people might know who is God…

And then? Woosh. Fire! An all-consuming fire that devours the bull, the wood, the stones, the earth, the water—everything! And everybody falls down on their faces and says, “Wow! The Lord alone is God. The Lord alone is God.” (18:39)

What happens in the next verse, however, is very troubling. Elijah can’t just let it be; he turns the impressed crowd into a mob and tells them to seize the prophets of Baal and “let not a single one of them get away.” So they seized them, and Elijah took them down to the Wadi Kishon and there he slaughtered every last one. (18:40) It is texts like that which make people say they don’t like the Old Testament. And as much as I do totally love the Old Testament, I totally get that.

But this brings us to today’s reading and gives us a much better context to hear what was read a few minutes ago. Ahab has reported to his wife, Jezebel, what happened on Mount Carmel and at the Wadi Kishon. She responds by sending a message to Elijah: "So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow."  She is issuing his death warrant, saying that he will not get away with what he has done.

So Elijah does what most of us would probably do; he runs away. As we heard, he came to Beer-sheba, where he leaves his servant to go on another day’s journey into the wilderness. To say that Elijah is tired and scared is probably an understatement. He wants to die. He asks God to let him die. But an angel comes to him in a dream and tells him to get up and eat, and a little cake and some water are provided. He eats and drinks and falls asleep again and the angel returns and tells him for a second time:

Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you. He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.

Elijah is at a mountain that the narrator calls Horeb, but that earlier generations called Mt. Sinai. He’s back, in other words, at the very same place where the story of God’s people began, back where Moses got the Ten Commandments and encountered God in the midst of thunder and lightning. Elijah declares how lonely he feels – I alone am left and Jezebel wants to kill me. (As if the God who created all the pyrotechnics doesn’t know this already.) And then the wind, so strong it was splitting mountains. But God was not in the wind. And an earthquake and a fire but God is not there either. And then “a sound of sheer silence.”

When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" He answered, "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." Then the LORD said to him, "Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus."

Now Episcopalians (including me) love that “sound of sheer silence” (or as the older translations put it, the “still small voice of God.”) We tend to like our worship and our prayer and our spirituality on the quiet side, tending more toward meditation than speaking in tongues or doing any hopping dances around altars. Fair enough.

But the reason I’ve taken the time to tell the larger story on this day is that I’ve heard too many sermons on that “still small voice” that forget this larger socio-political context. The point of the story is not to encourage us to pray daily and include quiet times in our lives—although clearly those are very good and important practices. I’m all for those! Rather, the more important point of the story is that being faithful in dangerous times is risky. And sometimes, it can get you in trouble with the powers-that-be. Eljiah is not the first, nor is he the last. I think of St. Paul and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela all sitting in prison cells. As discouraging and isolating as that must have felt for them, perhaps they took some solace in remembering Elijah. And perhaps, they, too, in the sounds of sheer silence, were comforted by an awareness of God’s presence, so that they could carry on.

I think of what others have gone through (or perhaps even now are going through) what the mystics have called “the dark night of the soul”—when we feel like we are in a cave, lost somewhere in the wilderness, and feeling very afraid. And perhaps we, too, are ministered to by angels in those times. God may not be in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. But in the sound of sheer silence we know that we are not alone.

This is the larger point of the story and even when there are parts of it that may trouble us or feel unrelatable (or very “Old Testament”) this much holds true across many centuries. Being faithful to the living God can get us into trouble with the law. It got Jesus, and many others who have followed him through the centuries, killed. Sometimes we will feel very alone. Yet, in the silence, Elijah comes to realize that he is not alone. He knows—not in his head only, but in his heart and in his bones - that God is with him. And that gives him the strength and the courage and the hope to go on. The Word of the Lord that comes to him in that sound of sheer silence reminds him that there is work to be done, and he needs to go back and face that. He realizes anew that what God gives us is strength and courage to do the work God has given him to do; not a get-out-of-ministry-free card.

And then, just like that, Elijah disappears. Next weekend we’ll hear the final chapter of the Elijah story, about how in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire he passes into the heavenly realms, passing the baton to his disciple, Elisha, before he goes so that even after he is gone the work will continue. He will vanish from our sight, at least until three years from now when we return to this cycle of readings again.

But who knows; maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of him from time-to-time before then? Every year at Passover, our Jewish friends set a place at their Seder tables for Elijah, even as they pray for peace “next year in Jerusalem.” Who knows when he might show up at their table? Or perhaps even at ours? And as Christians, we catch a glimpse of Elijah every Advent season when John the Baptist suddenly appears in the wilderness, looking and sounding a lot like our friend as he proclaims that message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Like Elijah, John points beyond himself to insist that the future belongs to not to the King Ahabs or King Herods of this world,   but to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords: the One who comes to bring peace on earth and good will to all and teaches us to pray, “thy Kingdom come, on earth as in heaven…”

In the meantime, there is work to be done. And no one said that work was easy. Jesus said that discipleship was about taking up a cross. May each of us hear, in the midst of our own journeys (and in particular when the road is difficult) that sound of sheer silence: God’s unique call to each of us to find a little more courage, and a little more hope to keep on keeping on: to not lose heart. And to not be afraid.