July 19th, 2014: Prophet Elijah - Bp Alexander

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and

of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Father Lawrence apparently

unsatisfied with my performance this morning,

has demanded more of me, asking that I speak

to Elijah. So if you'll sit for a moment, I won't

keep you all that long, but I will say something.

This is one of the wildest and most frightening

figures in all the sacred scriptures. You might

have noted, if you were listening to the readings,

that he personally dispatches the 400 plus. priests

of Baal. I suppose the other ones as well. Jezebel's

whole stable of missionaries. But that's not

quite what I want to talk about. Let me begin

with his name. Elijah's name, like every Hebrew

name, and most every name in the ancient world,

means something. El Iyar. Yah is my God. Yah,

the first syllable of the tetragrammaton, the

name that God gives to Moses at the foot of Mount

Sinai, the burning bush, that no one knows, whose

pronunciation no one knows. We know it's Y -H

-W -H. and the first syllable seems to have been

yah so wherever you see yah in the scriptures

like you'll know that word is theophorus and

elijah's name is his program he's come to bring

israel back to worship of the god of sinai and

the covenant Because Israel was faced with a

grave temptation. A wandering people, shepherds

doubtless, had settled into the agricultural

life of the ancient Near East. And the agricultural

life then, as now, was predicated on the existence

of water. If you know your geography, you know

that the Holy Land isn't exactly abundant in

that commodity. It's like here. And just like

here, the weather comes from the west. And just

like here, it doesn't come until sometime late

October and is done by April, usually. And just

like here, the Holy Land in summer is brown,

and in January is green, if it rains. Now, whether

or not it rains in those days, even more than

now, I mean, we've had a terrible drought here,

right? But no one has starved to death. We've

got trains, we've got semis, we've got refrigerated.

containers. So food comes to us from all over

the world, even if there may be drought here.

Well, it wasn't that way in Elijah's time. You

made your own food, normally. Most people lived

in the land, and they were hardscrabble farmers.

And if they didn't get the rain, they died. So

whether or not those clouds formed at the end

of October was a matter of life and death. And

in consequence, the peoples round about had developed,

I guess we would call it a religion, but it was

also a kind of technology. Since controlling

the weather was the item on the agenda of personal

survival. And the religion involved the mating,

as it were, of earth and sky. That mating being

understood as fulfilled in the rain. Sky was

Baal and earth was Ashtaroth, or Astarte, or

Ishtar. She has different names. And encouraging

the sacred marriage of earth and heaven, meaning

the rain, was a matter of life and death, and

people understood that you could help it along

by engaging in similar activity on earth. Humans

coupling helped the gods couple. And as it were,

Joe Israelite, living next door to that, well,

he had his God, yes, and his God had his feast

days, but then there was the matter of how do

you eat? And the neighbor's survival techniques

looked pretty good, and of course it involved

some fun as well. So they took it up. And a queen

had just come to the northern kingdom. who was

something, one of the more interesting people

in this Old Testament. She doesn't get a very

good rep, of course. She's a girl from the Lebanese

coast, daughter of a queen, a king, rather. A

good dynastic marriage for the Northern Kingdom.

But she's also, unlike most queens, right into

the early 20th century, who might have been of

a different faith, but married their husband.

for dynastic purposes, like Alexander married

Nicholas in Russia. She was Lutheran, at least

when she came to Russia. He was, of course, Orthodox.

Well, she stays where she is. And moreover, she's

a missionary. And is prosecuting the religion

of Earth and Sky. So... a little bit more profoundly,

perhaps. Thank you. I don't know if this stuff

is going to work. A. B. When God's already acknowledged

the reign of God. All the way to the showdown

with God. But third, you might recall that how

he is following his victory. She issues a death

warning. She takes out a contract with a girl.

And he beats it. That's how it got there. And

that's how it went on for a second. And that's

how it went on for a second. And that's how it

went on for a second. it earth, air, fire, or

water. He is none of the four elements. God is

not a cosmos. He is not a created universe. But

the universe is created, precisely created. There

is a creator who And so far as we can tell whether

the right name means anything, it seems to me

something that it could mean, something like

he will be, or he will cause to be. But there

is no name, there is no handle. Not in the sense

that we learn from the story of Elijah. I could

bring in that this is about the fire from heaven,

because that has all kinds of interesting echoes,

but that's another thing. And, of course, the

issue of bloodshed, and there's quite a bit of

that in the whole Elijah legacy, but I won't

go into that one. But I will stress that these

things, the story of Elijah's... There is only

one. In one translation of that sequence of the

fire, the wind, the earthquake... the champions

and we have two hours Thank you