How to Continue - Snacks, Naps, Silence

May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

We are dropped very suddenly today into the middle of this story of Elijah.

So I want to take a few minutes to sort of situate us and recap what has happened

that has led Jezebel to want to kill him.

So big picture stuff, the people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham,

the family that God has chosen to be the bringers of salvation for the whole

cosmos, the people of Israel wanted a king.

This was after God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt,

and they had wandered, and they had been ruled by judges and by prophets.

But as they settled down into the promised land, they looked around at the other

tribes and nations and they said, we want to be like them. We want a king.

And God warned them, a king will conscript your children into his army.

A king will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and your cattle.

He'll tax you. And ultimately, a king will make all of you his slaves.

The Israelites thought about it and said, still, we want a king.

Someone who will lead us into battle like the other nations have.

And so God gave them a king, Saul, and then David, and then Solomon.

And when Solomon died, the nation of Israel splits. But on both sides, things were bad.

The kings forgot the God of Israel and turned to worshiping other gods.

Perhaps the worst of all these kings was Ahab.

Ahab married Jezebel, a woman who wasn't an Israelite, and together they led

the nation of Israel to worship the god Baal.

Baal was a Canaanite deity who supposedly controlled fertility and the weather, rain.

And so it's in this context that Elijah comes in.

He sort of appears out of nowhere in the story.

He's an Israelite prophet who desperately wants his people to forsake Baal and

to return to the true God.

Elijah visits King Ahab with a message from God.

You think Baal controls the rain? He says.

Well, then look forward to a drought, because you will not see rain or even

dew again for three years.

Over the next three years, as Israel faces drought, God cares for Elijah through it.

He leads him to a creek where he can get water. He has a raven who brings him food day by day.

And eventually, God leads him to the house of a widow, where he is miraculously

provided with enough bread for all of them.

Meanwhile, at the palace, the famine has grown severe, and the king's wife has

been killing the true prophets of God.

Those who remain have gone into hiding. They're protected by a double agent

in the king's administration.

And Elijah returns to the palace. He's hopeful that after these three years of drought,

of Baal failing to provide rain, now he can convince the king and all the people

to leave their Baal worship behind and worship the true God.

So with this in mind, he suggests a test. Bring all 450 prophets of Baal, he says.

Let them choose a bull to sacrifice, and then let them call on Baal to send

down fire and consume their sacrifice to demonstrate his power.

If that doesn't work, he says, then I'll take a bull, and I'll sacrifice it

to the true God and ask him to send fire and we'll see which one answers.

So they agree to this and the prophets, all 450 of them, assemble and they pray

and they chant and they stomp and they dance and nothing happens.

Elijah goads them a little. Maybe your God is sleeping, he says. Pray louder.

And so they do. They pray louder. They pray frantically.

They even slash their own bodies with their swords, hoping that maybe their

blood sacrifice will get Baal's attention.

Nothing happens. So after a full day of this with no response from Baal,

Elijah goes to his own altar, and he douses it with water.

Three times. He wants to make it impossible to light on fire.

And then he steps forward and he prays a simple prayer.

Answer me, Lord, answer me. So these people will know that you are God and that

you are turning their hearts back to you again.

And the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the sacrifice, the wood,

the stones, the soil, and the water that had fallen below it.

And then in the sky above them clouds gathered and rain began to fall,

But Ahab, even after witnessing all this, does not change.

Ahab does not repent. He doesn't bow to the God of Israel.

Instead, he goes to his wife, Jezebel, and complains to her about what happened.

And that's where our text today picks up.

Jezebel sends word to Elijah that she's going to kill him, and Elijah runs.

Fresh on the heels of what should have been his greatest success as a prophet,

he finds he's running for his life again and he is burned out he's exhausted and despairing,

he's losing hope in his people's potential for change he's losing hope in the

possibility of a government that's just and good.

He's losing hope in the possibility of a future where people actually give up

their idols and return to God.

He's losing hope in his own capability to be effective at all.

And so he runs into the wilderness and lays down under a scrub brush, and he wants to die.

I don't know where you are in your life. I hope it is not there exactly.

But I bet that Elijah's emotions here are recognizable to most of us.

We have worked so hard for change.

We have worked so hard to get the people around us who claim to love God to

see the idols that are tearing us and our community apart.

We have tried to get kings to stop being kings.

We have tried to help the people we love stop choosing things that only hurt themselves and others.

We are not all prophets, but I bet we have all grown weary in trying to do good,

I bet at times we have all lost hope that change is ever going to come,

and what i love about this story of elijah

is that we get to see how god responds

to someone who's in that emotional place god does not accuse elijah of giving

up god does not say buck up buddy try harder god lets elijah rest take a nap eat a snack repeat,

If you're tired, take a nap.

Have a piece of cake and a long drink of water, and then go back to sleep some more.

God gives rest to those God loves.

And after this, God takes Elijah to a holy place, the same mountain where Moses

had once encountered God.

And here, God invites Elijah to come to know God in a new way.

See, all his life, Elijah has known a God of miracles, of food that appears

as if by magic of the dead raised to life, a fire raining down from heaven in

a showdown against hundreds of enemies.

But here on the mountain, God is not in the fire or the wind or the earthquake.

Here, God shows up as sheer silence.

Elijah has known a God of drama and action. now to continue in faith he must

come to know a god that is every bit as present in silence,

elijah has known answers now he must know an answer that's ineffable that's

beyond human language now he must come to know a presence that can feel very

much like absence and to trust that God is at work.

Even when God's work cannot be seen or heard, even when there is evidence to

the contrary in the nation and in the rulers, even when it feels like all is lost,

he must begin to learn the faith that continues when it appears all is lost.

In the Orthodox Christian tradition, Elijah is the only figure from the Old

Testament who is presented in a detailed, individual way in icons.

Icons are a big part of Orthodox worship. And so it's interesting that Elijah

is the one figure from the Old Testament who sort of gets his own icon treatment.

And he always looks the same in these icons.

There's an 18th century guide for iconographers that says that he should always

be presented as a man, an old man with a white beard.

There should be a dark cave that he's sitting inside. He should have one elbow on one knee.

And then above the cave, there should be a raven watching him and carrying bread in his beak.

Bread that looks suspiciously like a round wafer. Elijah is always wearing a

mantle, usually red, and it's sort of like his mantle is here and right behind

that is the darkness of the cave.

Orthodox writers stress that this darkness is not the darkness of depression.

It's the deep and dazzling darkness that is divine transcendence,

that is the essential unknowingness of God, that is the culmination of the mystical

experience of the divine life.

They stress that it's not the darkness of depression, but I wonder if it isn't

the darkness of depression that often opens us up to the deep and dazzling darkness of the divine.

I keep this icon on my desk. I bought it in Greece last summer when we were

there with our high schoolers.

At a family of icon makers that have been making icons for generations at the

foot of a monastery on top of a cliff.

That cliff kind of reminds me of Elijah in his cave.

But the icon on my desk, I look at it and I remember that even in ineffable

silence and the long, long wait for kings to be cast down,

for people to throw away their idols.

God continues to provide through

birds, through bread, through the Eucharist we're about to receive.

If we were to read just the next few verses in 1 Kings, we would see that what

happens next is that God sends Elijah back to work.

He gives him three specific tasks, and one of those tasks is to find a partner for his journey ahead.

God also lets him know that God has reserved 7,000 faithful Israelites.

It's a nice round number signifying a perfect remnant who remained faithful to him.

Elijah has felt alone, but however hopeless and alone Elijah feels,

the reality is that there is more going on spiritually than what he can see

from his narrow and burned out vantage point.

And so maybe this is the word for us as well. Take a nap. Eat a snack.

Begin to learn that kind of faith that can hear God speaking even in silence.

That knows that there are things going on that are beyond what we can see.

And then get back to work, knowing that we are not alone.

Amen.

Thanks for listening to 60 Church Street, a podcast of Trinity Episcopal Church

in Asheville, North Carolina.

Now, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

The Homily was offered by the Rev. Amy Peterson. Musical contributions were

performed by Dr. Kevin Seal.

Introduction and closing reflections were shared by the Rev. Amy Peterson.

Sermon audio was prepared by Nanette Popa. Production was guided by Karen Marie Frederiksen.

Thank you.