Sermon Title: "Elijah!  God's Sometimes Fearful Prophet"
Date: May 24, 2009
Minister: Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  1 Kings 19:1-15

During the week before last Sunday’s children’s musical about Elijah, I re-read chapters 17 and 18 of 1 Kings, which relates the story the children dramatized.  A brief recapitulation is that the prophet Elijah, the champion of Yahwism, the traditional monotheistic religion of Israel, proposes a contest with the priests of the Canaanite god Baal.  The prophets of the respective deities—Baal or Yahweh—were to invoke their divine patron to consume the sacrificial offering placed upon a stack of wood.  Nothing happened when the adherents of Baal pleaded for fire to come; whereas Elijah, the sole prophet of Yahweh, was able to summon fire from heaven, which “consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench.”  (18:38)  Thus, Elijah humiliates—and shortly executes—the priests and prophets who had enjoyed royal patronage under the ninth century B.C. King Ahab of Israel, and his scheming wife and queen, the Baal-worshipping Phoenician Jezebel—whose name alone has gone down in history to represent a particular type of woman.

That story was told with much more color, dancing, humor and good singing by our children last Sunday.  But in my earlier reading of these chapters, I read ahead to find out what happened next, and it is right after last Sunday’s musical that today’s 1 Kings chapter 19 picks up.

We would expect that after such a great triumph over a pagan god and believers, Elijah would be held in high esteem.  Perhaps this was the greatest sign of his success as a prophet; it was surely a great victory in convincing the Israelites that Elijah’s God Yahweh was the one true God if he could even bring fire to a pile of wood drenched in water.

Yet the ruthless Jezebel—the royal patron of the Baal cult—was a force to be reckoned with.  “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 declares.  In other words, ‘You, Elijah, killed my prophets; now may the same happen to you.’

Elijah, who just last Sunday was God’s faithful prophet, by verse 3 today we hear of him, “Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-Sheba…”  He went into the wilderness, set himself under a solitary broom tree, and waited there, wishing to die.

In that sense, Elijah’s actions could be very much like ours.  What do we typically do when we are threatened, when we are fearful, when we are depressed about our future?  We retreat; we stay home; we withdraw; we hunker down; we stop communication with others.  ‘If I don’t put myself out there, no one’s going to hurt me anymore,’ we say.

But his God, Yahweh, the one for whom he has been faithful, even zealous, won’t let it be.  An angel summons Elijah awake and tells him to eat.  And there, in the vast barrenness of the wilderness, was set a cake and jar of water.  Elijah ate and fell asleep again.  A second time the angel of the Lord summons him awake and commands him to eat, for he has a journey ahead.  God is not done with him yet, even though Jezebel and her forces are after him, even though he alone is left to speak for the Lord.  The food gives him nourishment to travel forty days and forty nights to Mount Horeb, or Mount Sinai, where Moses himself had encountered God.  In fact, one cannot help but draw parallels between Elijah and Moses, Israel’s greatest prophetic figure:  the solitary prophet in conflict with oppressive and corrupt rulers, the flight of the prophet into the wilderness, the appearance of the Lord on a mountain to the fleeing prophet.

There, instead of the angel, it is the Lord God Yahweh himself who asks him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  Can you imagine having to answer to God?  Was Elijah ashamed, humbled, afraid he had abandoned God?  Elijah 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.” (19:10)  It is admirable that Elijah does not attribute his fear to Jezebel’s forces; rather, he is fearful that in spite of his past triumph in the name of Yahweh, now he alone is left to speak for him.

Next, after the story of the Lord speaking to Moses in the burning bush, comes the second greatest theophany—or divine appearance—of the Lord.  Elijah is commanded to go and stand on the mountain, as God was about to pass by.  Just as God may unexpectedly intrude into our own private caverns of fear and despair and self-pity, the experience of God’s visitation on the mountain breaks into the midst of Elijah’s complaining.  The God of all creation, the Almighty God of untamable, uncontrollable power and might is felt in the great and strong wind, the quaking earth, the searing flames.  But while this is the God Elijah expected to come down in a rain of fire to teach wayward Israel a lesson last Sunday, it is not the God Elijah’s fearful inner self really needs.  So God is purposely not in the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire.

“Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee…” we sang in our middle hymn today.  It sounds as if it were written to describe Elijah’s plight.  Still cowering in the darkness of the cave, Elijah now hears something quite different.  From deep inside this cave, from deep inside his soul, Elijah hears a voice, small in size yet great in strength.  This voice pierces his lament of failure and despair.  Wrapped in soothing silence, this still, small voice gives Elijah the courage to creep back outside of his cave of withdrawal and once again face his God and his responsibility.  God is not done with him yet.  “Go, return on your way…” says the voice.  (19:15a)

The late Mother Teresa said, “We need to find God and God cannot be found in noise and restlessness.  God is the friend of silence.  See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grow in silence; see the stars, the moon, the sun, how they move in silence.  Is not our mission to give God to the poor in the slums?  Not a dead God, but a living, loving God.  The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life.  We need silence to be able to touch souls.  The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us.  All our words will be useless unless they come from within—words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.” (quoted in James Roose-Evans, The Inner Stage, Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1990, 130.)

Elijah’s experience suggests we rethink the image of how we expect to hear from God.  Angels can be our personal still small voices, whispering into our skittish souls the comforting truth of God’s power and God’s love for us.  Angel voices do not accuse and condemn; all the angels in the Bible serve to nurture, protect and support, to give sustenance and to share good news.  The silence that enfolds Elijah when he encounters his inner voice suggests that we too periodically need to seek silence in order to hear the whisper of angelic voices.  There is a time when we need to, as Job would say, “lay a hand over our mouths.” (Job 21:5)  While God does reveal the truth sometimes in the strong wind, sometimes in the earthquake, sometimes in the fire, many times God is in the voice of gentle stillness.  God seldom shouts; we shout.

Sir Paul Reeves offered this Listener’s Prayer at the World Council of Churches 1991 Seventh Assembly in Canberra, Australia: 

God

Grant me to be

    silent before you –

        that I may hear you;

    at rest in you –

        that you may work in me;

    open to you –

        that you may enter;

    empty before you –

        that you may fill me.

Let me be still

And know you are my God.  Amen.