“Can You Speak a Little Louder?” / Rev. Gradye Parsons preaching / 8.9.26

Our second scripture reading is from 1 Kings chapter 19.

1 Kings 19 · chapter mention

At that place Elijah came to a cave and spent the night there.

Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, What are you doing here, Elijah?

He answered, I have been very zealous for the Lord, O God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, killed your prophets with the sword.

I alone am left, and they are seeking my life to take it away.

God said, Go out and stand for the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.

Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting the mountains and breaking rocks and pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire 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 came a voice to him and said, What are you doing here, Elijah?

He answered, I've been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, 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 Elijah, Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus, and when you arrive you shall anoint Hazel as king over Aram.

Also you shall anoint Jehu, son of Nimshe, as king over Israel, and you should anoint Elijah, son of Zaphath of Abel, as prophet in your place.

Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazel, Jehu shall kill, and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elijah shall kill.

Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every male that has not worshipped him.

The word of the Lord.

King Solomon liked to build things, temple being one of them.

And because of that, he really, there was it was a cost to it, of course.

And King Solomon evidently went to a leadership course of some kind, because it says in 1 Kings 10, 14.

I'm reading this from a paraphrase so the uh amounts are translated into our English.

Every year King Solomon received over 25 tons of gold.

That's three and a half billion dollars worth today, in addition to the taxes paid by merchants, the profits from trade, and the tribute paid by the Arabian kings and the governors of the Israelite districts.

Solomon made two hundred large shields and had each one overlaid with almost fifteen pounds of gold.

He also made three hundred smaller shields and overlaid each one of them with nearly four pounds of gold.

He had all these shields placed in the hall of the forest of Lebanon.

He also had a large throne made, and part of it was covered with ivory, and the rest of it was covered with the finest gold.

So I guess it's just a leadership thing, right?

This gold to stuff.

So after Solomon died, his son Rehobam was made king.

And as soon as he was made king, there was a giant sort of a protest.

All the people gathered, and they protested all the taxes that Solomon had laid on them to build these great things.

And Rehoboam, you know, wanted to have a tough start, so he refused to bend.

He refused to give in to any of their requests for relief.

And so because of that, the ten tribes left, the ten northern tribes, and formed the country of Israel.

So the real country of Israel in the Old Testament is the country north of Jerusalem.

And what followed after that was a series of bad leadership, internal strife, and attempts to add every religion in the region to Israel's life.

Which brings us to King Ahab.

1 Kings 16, 33.

Ahab did more to provoke the anger of the Lord than all the kings of Israel before him.

It's not the legacy you want to leave in the world.

He marries the infamous Jezebel, and she wants to make Israel's worship more like the worship back in her home country of Assyria.

So she introduces Baal and other worships and basically and kills all the prophets of the Lord.

And until this mess, until this crisis, enters Elijah.

He enters the story as a thorn in Ahab's side.

The first thing Elijah does is bring a severe drought to the area, but he survives the story of staying with the widow whose miraculous jar of oil never runs out.

So eventually Elijah comes back and he challenges Ahab to a prophet contest.

So all of Jezebel's prophets, the ones that have been eating and dining and have been enjoying water while the rest of the country is in a drought, all of them come together around Mount Carmel.

They build two kind of bonfires.

They go and kill two bulls, put one on one bonfire, one on the other.

And then Elijah says, give it your best shot.

And so they do the whole day of different kinds of Baal worship.

They sing all the hymns in the Baal worship hymn book.

They do dances, they cut themselves to do everything.

Nothing happens.

No fire comes down.

The wood is still there.

The bull is still there.

Then Elijah gets his chance.

And just to add some drama, he makes them soak the wood with water and soak the cow with water and build a trench around it with water.

Then he invokes the Lord.

And the fire comes down and consumes the water, it consumes the stones, it consumes the cow, all that.

And then just to put the cherry on the top, they slay the prophets of Baal and they end the drought.

Great story so far.

And then King Ahab goes back to tell Jezebel what happened.

Now you would think if you were Elijah, you'd be running pretty high right now, right?

I mean, you've just done a great miracle.

You brought fire down.

You could consume stones with fire.

Everybody was probably praising him, patting him on the back, shaking his hand, naming things after him, naming their babies Elijah, printing Elijah t-shirts, getting Elijah tattoos.

I mean, you know, he was riding the, should have been riding the wave, man.

He should have been riding the wave.

His brand was golden.

But what does Elijah do?

When it fears that his life is about to be gone, he runs.

After doing all that, he still runs.

In the first stage of his running, he ends up under this solitary, what they call broom tree, which is a shorter shrub, and he sits there and he deeps dives into the deep end of the pity pool.

You know, woe is me, nobody loves God but me, and they're out to kill me.

And God sends an angel and sends him food, tells him to take a nap, get ready for the rest of the journey.

Now I find this kind of interesting in itself before we get to our main story, in that Elijah is running away from his challenge.

He's running away from his problem.

And it seems, at least in this early part of the story, that God is helping Elijah do that.

And maybe God sometimes knows we're not ready.

We're just not ready to face whatever challenge in front of us.

Our bodies have way to go into shock or other ways to deal with things happening to us.

And maybe God sometimes knows that we're not ready to, we're not really up to the challenge in front of us sometimes.

Self-preservation is built into every living thing.

Even in the forest, and all natural atomists have some sort of self-preservation.

And sometimes a holy retreat can be a strategic retreat.

And so it sort of tells me and reminds me that we need to extend grace to people sometimes who aren't ready for whatever challenge is in front of them.

Perhaps they're prepping on God's schedule and not my schedule or your schedule.

And maybe our job is just to walk along beside them until they are ready to face whatever it is they're challenging, to give them the space they need to build up their own courage or to get over the shock of whatever is in front of them.

But maybe not try to define when they should be brave based on our calendar, but let it be God's calendar.

So after 40 days, Elijah travels 30 miles, 300 miles in 40 days, 40 bit sound familiar.

He gets to Mount Horeb, which is also known as Mount Sinai, and there he spends the night in a cave up on the mountain.

Now, sometimes we're comfortable with silence.

There's that beautiful silence that happens when it snows, you know, and everything gets quiet.

Cars kind of get off the road, everything kind of just like if there's a great big quiet blanket that exits the earth.

That's a beautiful kind of silence.

Or the kind of silence that's not really silence when you go off in the mountains and you don't hear the sounds of civilization anymore.

That's pretty good.

Or the silence of your own home, you know, when you go to sleep at night and there's no no dogs barking, no babies crying, nobody, you know, no, no C PAC going off in your ear.

They're kind of good silences.

But there is a silence sometimes that just comes because you don't know, you don't know what the answer is.

The silence that happens sometimes before, all those anxiety people come out in your head around three o'clock in the morning.

Wouldn't you think, after living as many years as I've lived and some of you have lived, that your anxiety would know your sleeping rhythms?

Wouldn't you think they would know if they would just wait another hour or two?

I'll be up anyway.

Catch me then, you know, and I'll be ready.

But God comes in a whisper, and there are times when a good whisper is all you need.

A whisper of encouragement to take that takes the sting out of a big stumble you've just done in life or in front of others.

A whisper of courage when all we can see is one scary thing after another, after another, after another.

A whisper of belonging when we don't feel we belong anywhere or to anybody at all.

A whisper of confidence that we have what we need to figure out the very next step that we need to take.

A whisper of solace when we're nursing a wound to our very depths of our soul.

A whisper of assurance when we lose someone and the hole seems too big, and it'll never be filled.

I told you before, my both my parents worked, so we were cared for by a series of different women over the years, and one of those women was was Annie.

Annie was a very large African-American woman, and back then it was very popular to sell uh these life insurance policies that were basically burial policies, and they were weekly policies.

You had to pay for them weekly.

And Annie didn't always have the money uh to pay for it.

So when the so they would knew where she worked, they knew she worked at our house.

So this guy would come to our house and he would knock on the door, and there was one place in our house where she could push this big chair from the living room into kind of this corner in the hall where he could, because our front door had a glass on it, and she could sit there and he couldn't see in the house, and she'd put my brother on one arm of the chair and me on the other, and she'd be patting us on the leg, just you know, be still, be quiet, be quiet.

And and I knew she was dealing with some kind of anxiety, but for us it was it was the most secure place in the whole universe.

We knew we were there, so we need silence sometimes to hear God speaking through all the other noises in our head and in the world and all the people that think they know all the answers.

Sometimes we need silence.

But I gotta be honest, I gotta be um, I just have to be honest.

But sometimes I think God could speak a little louder, right?

I don't know about you, but if I would get one spam caller that would say, Look, I'm gonna talk real clear and real loud while I talk to you, I'd say, okay, I'll listen.

I might even give you my social security number just for doing that, you know, out of appreciation.

I would like for God to get a little louder.

You know, it's gonna be hot this week, but as you may have seen recently, by the time winter comes, there's only gonna be two warming shelters in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Two warming shelters.

Salvation Army doesn't do anymore, a lot of people don't do anymore.

And what we're we're caught between these two solutions, or two theories of solutions.

One is housing first, get homeless people and housing, you know, that's solve the problem that way, and then do the therapy.

Another one's therapy first, they gotta be no, they gotta be fixed, and then to get housing.

Now, the problem with that in our community and other communities is housing first works great if there's enough housing, right?

Therapy works great if there's enough places for therapy.

So I think I would like for God to speak up about that.

I would like for God to get real loud about that.

Maybe you saw the story last week about this hiker out west who was hiking up a mountain and had a freak accident and drove his hiking pole through the side of his body.

Hope you've had your breakfast was a long time ago.

Anyway, so his decision was to hike down the mountain.

Okay, to hike down the mountain.

And part of the reason he made that decision, because he didn't want to have to pay the cost of a Medevac.

And that's just a that's just a big crazy example of the kind of challenges that people face every day about the cost of medicine and the cost of health care and all the decisions they have to make about that.

And I think I I would like for God to speak up about that, right?

I God could shout about that.

And then, again, I'm trying to keep, you know, think about our own world.

We're gonna, you know, we are we are reinvigorating coal plants.

In 2026, we are reinvigorating coal plants.

Do you know part of the reason why gas has stayed as cheap as it has during this war is because China is using renewables and not so dependent on coal fuel.

So we're gonna re we're gonna reinvest in coal plants.

And if anybody on God's earth knows more about coal ash and the destruction of coal ash than we do in East Tennessee, they can stand up.

God could God could speak up about that.

God could say a lot about that, and we and we know what he should say.

And of course, we're worried about cameras catching people's license plates, which I and I understand the law part of that, but we don't seem to be as worried about the invasion of privacy when it comes to medical decisions for individuals.

But you know what God's gonna say.

I you know, if I bring this up to God, you know what he's gonna say.

You know what he's gonna say, y'all know what he's gonna say?

He's gonna say, Grady, how many times have you said, We are God's hands, we are God's feet, and God's gonna say, and you're my big mouth.

All right, you're my big mouth.

Very, I mean, from the very beginning in the garden, there's cut there's there's language the way that people remember tell the story.

And God's gonna say, We have to talk.

We have to get our own earthquake going and our own big wind, and we have to get our own fire in the world.

So there's a place there's a place for whispers, there's a place for silence when we all have to just be still and be quiet and let God say something to us.

And then after God said something to us, there's a place to get loud.

And we have to do that if we want the world to be the kind of world God is calling us to make it.

Amen and amen.