Sermon: Psalm 42-43, 1 Kings 19:1-15a

Scripture: Psalm 42-43, 1 Kings 19:1-15a

Preacher: Bailey Bjolin

Title:

Holy, Holy, Holy One,

your words feed us,

the Word frees us,

and the Spirit gives us life.

Grant our ears an appetite for hearing

and our spirits strength for loving you.

Amen.

There’s a story (maybe an apocryphal one) about Mother Theresa that goes like this.

Once, an interviewer asked Mother Teresa the following question: “What do you say when you pray?”

“Nothing,” she responded, “I just listen.”

The interviewer asked, “Well then, what does God say to you?”

“Nothing much,” Mother Teresa replied. “He just listens.”

This image, of Mother Teresa and God sitting in amicable silence with one another, is simply beautiful. But it is also unusual in a couple of ways. For one, when we pray, we tend to speak our hearts and minds to God. In speaking, we tell God a story, about the people in our lives and the things that weigh on our hearts. We say our prayers and we wrap them up in a little bow with the words ‘amen’ at the end, and then we go about our merry way. To sit instead in silence, listening for God, is a different posture altogether.

And then there’s the other part, which is this: when we think about God speaking to God’s people, we expect God to… well, we expect God to say something. When God speaks, God speaks. Like to Moses on Mount Sinai, or to Elijah during the drought. Right?

Mother Teresa, of course, is known as the founder of the Missionaries of Charity, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, and as of 2016, a Catholic saint. The Sisters who carry on Mother Teresa’s work are devoted to "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor,” caring for "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society” (Mother Teresa). What began in Kolkata in 1950 by 2023 has grown to include 5,750 members serving 139 countries in the world.

In a world that is heavy with suffering, perhaps we have something to learn from Mother Teresa’s willingness to listen to God.

Our story today takes us into the wilderness with the prophet Elijah. In the previous chapter, Elijah confronts King Ahab, the Samarian king and worshipper of other gods, on Mount Carmel. Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to ask their god to consume an offering with fire. When they are unsuccessful, Elijah then calls upon God to consume Elijah’s offering with fire, and God responds by consuming not only the offering, but also the water-drenched wood and stones upon which the offering is placed.

Victorious, Elijah orders the execution of the prophets of Baal. This infuriates Jezebel. She calls for Elijah’s head, saying: “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.”

Elijah’s triumphant narrative quickly goes sideways, because he’s become a wanted man. He flees, fearful and uncertain. He asks that God “take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” What a turnaround. Perhaps here he is referring to his horrifyingly violent actions on Mount Carmel. Does he regret what he’s done? Or is he simply upset that his life is now at stake and there still remains so many people who worship other gods?

God, however does not take his life. Instead, Elijah is given comfort and nourishment by an angel. The food gives him the energy to keep going, and when he arrives at mount Horeb, which is also known as Mount Sinai, the word of the Lord comes to him and orders him to “go out and stand on the mountain.” This is where we have the famous scene: the great wind, the earthquake, the fire— but God is not in any of these. Finally, after the fire, “the sound of sheer silence,” or, in other translations: “the still, small voice.”

Elijah, a prophet who asked of God to come down to earth dramatically in fire, now encounters God in “sheer silence.” The still, small voice of God. What challenge does this pose for Elijah?

What opportunity does it offer him?

I can picture Elijah in this moment, terrified by the uncertainty of his own future and stunned by the ferocity of the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. The last time he saw God, God was a great, searing flame, so hot that God gobbled up everything that God’s flame touched. Now, Elijah, in his fear, is certainly perplexed— didn’t I just see God in the fire? But where is God now? And when finally, Elijah hears that still, small voice, the voice that emerges from the utter silence in the aftermath of the chaos, how must that have felt for him? Was he scared? Was he comforted?

It is this still, small voice that we will be reflecting on today.

In 1652, a man named George Fox had a vision from God on Pendle Hill. In this vision, he saw the plan God had for God’s people. From there he began preaching across Europe. He believed that God could be felt anywhere, in the fields and forests as much as within the walls of the church, and he believed that God dwelt within those who were faithful followers of God. For George Fox, things like scripture and liturgical worship weren’t necessary— what was important was a person’s experience of God, without clerical intermediary. Gradually and in spite of persecution, people began following George Fox and his teachings, and the movement grew into the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers.

If you’ve been to a Quaker meeting before, you know it’s not like the kind of services that we have here in the United Church, or really like any church service, anywhere. This is because Quaker theology is about gathering together in “expectant waiting upon God.” This involves listening for the “still, small voice” of God, and allowing for the spirit of God to speak in their midst.

Quaker meetings are often held in meeting-houses, which are plain buildings. I want you to imagine this for a moment. There is no religious iconography to be seen— no crosses or banners, no paintings or scripture. When you attend a Quaker meeting, you enter the meeting house in silence and sit on chairs or pews arranged to face one another. Then, you sit. You sit in silence for an hour. You can close your eyes or keep them open, so long as you remain silent. During this time, if someone hears the voice of God and feels called to speak, they can stand and share what they heard with the rest of the group.

When we have the opportunity to enter into stillness and listen for God, we are entering into a different place and time. Richard Rohr describes the practice of silence as a “living presence of itself,” something “primordial and primal”— that is, silence is characterized by presence rather than absence (Rohr, 2014). In this alternative consciousness that is silence, we can see the world without being called to react to it. Silence is how we receive the voice and grace of God.

For Quakers, it’s only in the stillness that we can hear that still, small voice— it is a voice that dwells in each of us as Christians, because God dwells in all who are faithful. God speaks to us in this still, small voice. The notion of evangelism for Quakers is that we demonstrate our connection to this still, small voice-- the voice of God— through our actions in the world (Smith, 1998). We live the Word and demonstrate it to others.

The Quakers were formed in a post-Reformation world where nevertheless the church and state was still largely inseparable from one another. People were trying to understand their relationship to God and to the Church. During this time, the Quakers did something really important: they offered a connection to God that was not mediated by the institutional church. The Quakers saw in silence a great equalizer. Silence allows for connection to the present moment, allows all of us to dwell in the beauty of our created nature in the here-and-now, while also connecting us to God (Rohr, 2014).

Because of this, it was no coincidence— and with no small amount of irony—that Elijah was the one who heard the still, small voice of God after the bombast of the wind, the quake, and the fire. Elijah, after all, is a man of steel: a self-professed zealot for God, prepared to confront the powers of the day publicly and with a great show of force.

However, when we encounter Elijah in today’s scripture, he is small and scared and asks God to end his life, then and there. In the aftermath of the spectacle and afterwards, the violence of murdering the false prophets on Mount Carmel, God shows him the small voice, and later God urges him to pass on his mantle to Elisha. God shows Elijah that the big show of force, while possible, isn’t the only things that God is. God can also be found in the sound of sheer silence.

When we read the Hebrew Bible, it can be difficult to reconcile the violence of these scriptures with our deep and intimate knowledge of our loving God. The God who is for us, who loves us unconditionally. We tend to think of God as the a mother hen, who longs to gather us all together under her wings (Matthew 23:37)— this is God come down to dwell among us in Jesus. There’s not an easy answer for the violence that we encounter in the scriptures, Old or New Testament. And we should never turn our backs to these depictions of violence, or write them off, or pretend they don’t exist. These violent events and actions— the massacre on Mount Carmel, the fall of the wall of Jericho— these are our burdens to carry, as Christ followers. However, in this passage, I see a reckoning with the Elijah’s actions.

We see God revealing Godself in the silence, rather than through the force of nature.

And we have the opportunity to see Elijah bear witness to this silence.

We see Elijah stepping away from zealotry and violence and we see him becoming a mentor to Elisha.

He is a changed man. Changed in the silence, and held by the still small voice.

But just where, and how, do we find that opportunity for silence, for stillness in our own busy lives?

We can find this kind of silence in contemplative practices as well as in the daily presence of ordinary life. Like the Quakers, we believe that God is with us everywhere, and therefore we can encounter God anywhere. We can be open to God’s voice because we can ask God to speak to us. We can practice this openness, this receptive posture, while doing the dishes or walking a labyrinth, or while going on a hike or holding a baby. God is with us, everywhere and always. God is inside of us and speaking to us in God’s still, small voice.

Stillness goes against everything we’ve been taught and many of the things we believe about what it means to live in the world today. Our world is a flurry of motion, of beauty and pain, of striving and success, of failure and loss. Everywhere we look, there is motion and action, activity and discourse, bullets and bombs.

It is overwhelming and frightening. We are living in the time of the wind and the flame and the earthquake, we are shaken to our core— we are wondering: “where is the voice of God in the midst of all of this?”

I feel a deep fear and sadness in my heart, a sense of dread that will not leave me. I suspect I am not the only one in this room who feels this way. We are living in exceptionally precarious times. When we think about everything that is happening in the world right now, the idea of stillness can feel exceptionally futile. But I want to share with you something I heard from Rev. Ingrid at Weird Church recently. It’s about the idea of slowing down. This idea helped me to put the need for stillness into perspective.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, a Nigerian academic and activist, has this to say about the state of the world: “the times are urgent: let’s slow down.” When we are pulled in different directions, when we feel the urgency of a precarious world that threatens to implode all around us— the first thing we should do is the opposite of what we’ve been taught: we should slow down. It is in the slowing, the slowing to stillness, that we may have the opportunity to listen, to receive, and discern how we are needed in this world. How is God calling for us to use our unique gifts and talents? This is counter-cultural work in that it resists the urgency of our day. We must first slow down, and then listen for the unexpected, small voice of God, before we can embark on the task of reconciliation.

And in all likelihood, this voice may have unexpected things to say to us. Just like Elijah may have expected God in the fire and the earthquake but instead hears God in the stillness, so too might we expect God’s voice to say one thing, to appear in one place, but find that God is, in fact, calling us into something else, something we could never have imagined.

This is where we should follow Elijah’s lead— we should listen and take seriously this voice. Being faithful people of God, we are allowed to doubt and we are allowed to question, to ask God ‘why,’ and ‘why me?’ This is as much a part of our relationship to God as is our obedience to God. In the end, though, may we find comfort in the fact that God calls us to our work, as confounding as it is, and as seemingly-unequipped as we are— and we have no choice but to answer.

Aș we leave this place and go forth into the world, as uncertain and as precarious as it may be, I pray that we may all find God’s still, small voice speaking to us, urging us into a future where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

Amen.