God’s Discouraged Saints (All Saints' Sunday; 1 Kings 19:1-18; November 5, 2017)

God’s Discouraged Saints

1 Kings 19:1-18

November 5, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

It was a classic case of burnout. Oddly enough, it came at the moment of his greatest triumph.

Elijah’s mission had been to call the people of Israel to renounce their allegiance to the gods Ba‘al and Asherah. and back to their allegiance to Yahweh, the God of the covenant. Ba‘al and Asherah were fertility gods. They claimed to control the growth of crops and the birthing of lambs, calves, and even children.

Ahab and Jezebel, the king and the queen, liked the technology of production and control offered by Ba‘al and Asherah. So they sponsored them and put their prophets on the royal payroll.

Elijah’s mission was to confront Ahab and Jezebel and to win back the Israelite people for Yahweh. So Elijah challenged Ahab to a contest: summon all the Israelites and bring four hundred fifty of Ba‘al’s prophets to Carmel. Carmel means “garden-land.” It should give a home-field advantage to fertility gods. Each side would have a bull and wood for a burnt offering. They would each cut up the bull and arrange it on the wood. The prophets would call on Ba‘al and Asherah and Elijah would call on Yahweh. Whichever god sent fire would clearly be God.

The prophets of Ba‘al went first. They killed the bull; they cut it into pieces; they arranged it on firewood on an altar. And they called on Ba‘al. But Ba‘al was strangely unresponsive. Elijah made fun of them: “Yell louder! Maybe your god can’t hear you. Maybe he is meditating. Or maybe he’s in the bathroom. Or maybe he’s asleep.”

Give the prophets of Ba‘al points for persistence. They kept it up all morning long. They cried; they danced; they even cut themselves to show just how serious they were. Nothing. This should have been easy. After all, Ba‘al was a fire god. But, nothing.

Then it was Elijah’s turn and he gathered twelve stones, built an altar, put the firewood on it, killed the bull, cut it into pieces, and arranged the pieces on the firewood on the altar. Then he had water poured over the altar until everything was soaked.

Then Elijah stepped back and prayed, “O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.”

And fire came down on the altar and consumed the bull, the firewood, even the water lying in puddles around the altar. The people of Israel got the point, reaffirmed their covenant with Yahweh, and killed the prophets of Ba‘al. It was a triumph for Elijah.

Queen Jezebel was furious. She sent a death threat to Elijah. He feared for his life and ran south. He was “heels and elbows” into Judah and right through Judah out into the southern wilderness.

That’s where burnout caught up with him. He was overwhelmed with a sense of failure and despondency. So he asked to die. “I am no better than the prophets who came before me. They tried to call Israel back and failed. So did I. The conversion I saw happened only because they were razzle-dazzled. As soon as that wears off, they’ll be back to their old tricks. I am a failure. I’m finished. It’s time to die.” How’s that for a bedtime prayer?

Physical exhaustion had caught up with him and he fell asleep. It’s just as well. Being awake wasn’t doing him any good.

He slept until an angel tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Wake up; it’s breakfast time.” Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he looked around and saw a cinnamon roll from Ruby’s and a venti-sized cup of coffee from Java John’s. So he ate and drank and promptly fell asleep again.

It’s amazing when we’ve come to the end of our rope and we are emotionally exhausted and spiritually spent. We feel the pain in our spirits and think we need some remedy for the heart and for the soul, but the first thing is to take care of our bodies: we need to get enough rest, to eat enough, make sure we’re properly hydrated, and get a little exercise. The cure of the soul begins in the body, it seems. It was certainly true for Elijah.

So an angel poked him awake a second time and had him eat some more—food for the journey this time.

Where is Elijah going? Before, he was simply wandering off into the wilderness to die. Now he has a destination: the mountain called Horeb. Horeb is another name for Sinai. It’s a holy place, the place of Israel’s beginnings. For Elijah the way forward lies back, back to where the covenant journey began.

It took him a month or more to get there, on foot and traveling through the wilderness. When he got to Horeb it was deserted. He passed the night in a cave and when morning came he heard the familiar voice saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

I think Elijah expected some such question. I think he’d worked out a little speech: “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.”

It was a nice speech, full of self-reproach and self-pity, but it didn’t seem to impress Yahweh much, because Elijah got no reply at all, only a summons to stand on the mountain as Yahweh passed by. There was a great wind, but God wasn’t in the wind. There was an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake. There was fire, but God wasn’t in the fire.

Why God wasn’t in any of those things, I don’t know. I do know that wind and earthquake and fire are all pretty noisy and I do know that I can’t hear God in the noise. There’s a lot of noise in our lives: televisions, traffic, dogs barking, lawn mowers. For those who are afraid to leave their noise behind, there are car radios, iPods, and mp3 players. There are cell phones ringing and people carrying out cell phone conversations in restaurants as if they had to shout to wherever they are calling.

There is the noise of information, too: televisions (again), radios—even my beloved NPR, newspapers, billboards, Facebook feeds so that we know instantly that some celebrity has violated their probation in California and that three-quarters of our fellow citizens on Puerto Rico still have no electricity. But it’s all noise without any guide as to what is important and what is not.

The worst noise of all is in our own heads. Todo lists; bits of conversations and the brilliant things we wish we would have said; anxieties about a sick parent hundreds of miles away and no one, really, to make sure that they are safe and well; melodies that get stuck in our heads and won’t go away; the scripted tapes from our childhoods that tell us what we’re doing wrong and why it is that we’ll never, ever measure up; half-forgotten dreams; abandoned hopes and plans; unfinished projects. All that is ready to play as soon as we turn off the electronics.

And the voice of God? Is it anywhere in that noise? Who can tell?

“Listen to your heart,” a friend of mine told me once before I went on retreat. It was good advice, but there was a problem. “I can’t hear my heart,” I answered. Too much noise. It took the better part of a week for the noise to die down and for me to begin hear the faintest whisper. Maybe it took that long for Elijah, too. The text doesn’t tell us how long before he heard the “sound of sheer silence” that he knew was God’s voice.

He wrapped his face to protect himself from seeing God face-to-face and went out of his cave to meet God. Oddly, they have—word for word—the very same conversation they’d had just four verses before. Maybe the tone of voice changed. And maybe some of the force of Elijah’s rehearsed speech began to dissipate. Maybe when Elijah heard himself say it all a second time, it started to sound foolish. Maybe the words just sort of died on his lips. I don’t know.

Anyway, Yahweh didn’t answer him the second time, either. Instead, God gave him a fresh todo list, saying, in effect, “You’re a prophet. So get out there and do some prophet stuff. Stir things up a bit. Anoint a couple of kings (over countries that already have kings and aren’t looking for new ones); prepare your successor. Go. Do what you are called to do. Oh, and, by the way, you’re not the only faithful person left in Israel. There are seven thousand of them. So stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

And just like that Elijah’s renewal leave was over.

Now, opportunities for a three month pilgrimage to Horeb, or even a retreat at a monastery, are pretty rare. For almost all of us, almost all of the time, if we are going to hear God’s voice at all, it’s because we have managed to find a little silence in the midst of the daily-ness of our lives. Silence is hard to come by. A minute of silence on television or the radio would get someone fired. “Dead air” they call it. But silence here, well, that’s a different matter. Here the silence can be alive.

So here are two minutes of silence—a gift for you, an appetizer, if you will—a minute with no agenda except to be available to God.

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