Tag Archives: Elijah

Sermon – I Kings 19.1-15a, P7, YC, June 23, 2013

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

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This past week, I went down to a monastery in South Carolina for my annual spiritual retreat.  An annual spiritual retreat is one of the stipulations from my letter of agreement here at St. Margaret’s, so one could assume that we all know what going on a spiritual retreat means.  But I cannot tell you the number of people – parishioners, friends, family members, and fellow travelers – who have asked me the same question:  so what do you do on a spiritual retreat?  Some follow up with other questions about whether I have a schedule of meetings or classes or whether I really have to be silent the whole time.  But most people do not know what a spiritual retreat really looks like.

So imagine my surprise this week, when I opened the text for today, only to hear God twice asking Elijah, “What are you doing here?”  Having been asked that question by countless others over the last few weeks, I got a little defensive about God’s question for Elijah.  Thinking that I somehow needed to answer this question too, my first response was a response not unlike Elijah – who twice explains to God, in the exact same words, “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.”  As if God did not know that already.  God’s double question, and Elijah’s double response give a little clue about what is happening here.  God is not really asking what Elijah is doing there – at least not in the sense of, “What led you to come here?”  God is asking a much deeper question.  God’s question is the deeper question, “What does your being here say about me, about you, and about our relationship?  Given what you know, what are you doing here, Elijah?”

So instead of answering the question in the standard way – telling others about the silence of the day, the times of worship, the periods, places, and practices of prayer, or even about the monks themselves, instead I let God’s deeper question sit with me this week as well.  What are you doing here?  I found that each time I tried to answer the question the response was not as deep as God’s question.  So if I said I came to rest and refresh for my ministry, God’s response was, “What are you doing here?”  If I said I wanted help discerning answers to some heavy questions, God’s response was, “What are you doing here?”  If I said I just wanted clarity, God’s response was, “What are you doing here?”

This is the hard question from the text for all of us today.  God is asking this question of you this week too.  When you came in those doors and sat in that pew, God asked you, “What are you doing here?”  When you listened to scripture and when you pray, God is asking you, “What are you doing here?”  When you come to the Eucharistic table and consume Christ’s body and blood, God is still asking you, “What are you doing here?”  Today is one of those tricky days in Church.  There is no coasting through this service, just hoping to feel some sense of peace.  God is actively in our faces, asking us the tough question.

The truth is most of us feel like Elijah a good portion of the time.  We hear Elijah’s whiny response throughout this story.  When Elijah flees from Jezebel’s death threat, Elijah sits down under a tree and asks God to just let him die.  He even flops down under the tree hoping for death.  Of course, God does not allow that.  Twice angels wake him to give him food for the journey.  Even after this sustenance, Elijah finds another place to hide – a cave hidden away.  But God does not allow hiding there either.  We know Elijah’s pain.  We just want to come to church, hear some good music, hear a decent sermon, get that sustaining meal, and go back to the daily grind.  We do not want to hear what God says in the sheer silence.  In the sheer silence, God says, “Go.”  God tells Elijah to get back out there and do God’s work.  God does not coddle Elijah or comfort him in his fear.  Instead God tells Elijah to go.

At the end of the day, God’s words for Elijah were the same words for me during my retreat.  I may have lamented to God.  I may have worried to God.  I may have given some lengthy explanation to God about why I was there.  But before I could go any further, God stopped me.  “What are you doing here?  Go.”

When I was in college, the first year I danced with a team, we went to a training camp.  The coach realized pretty quickly those of us who were lacking in certain areas.  My challenge was that I could not yet do a toe-touch.  When we started doing them in training, the coach had us stand in line and one-by-one we had to do a toe-touch in front of him.  When he saw mine, he laid into me.  I basically remember him screaming something to the effect of, “I don’t care if you have to do sit-ups non-stop, or if you need to lift weights, or you just need to stand there and do toe-touches all day until you can’t move, I better see you up in the air before the season starts.”  At least, that is the clean version of what he yelled.  Never having played sports, I had never had anyone yell at me like that, and he put the proverbial “fear of God” in me.  And figuring he was serious, I started working out more and practicing more just to get to where he wanted me to be.

I hear God as being like that coach for us today.  God is kind of like a coach, getting up in our faces today, demanding to know, “What are you doing here?”  And before we can stumble through some Elijah-like complain fest, God says, “Go.”  God says that the dismissal we hear every week is not some cute phrase we say to conclude the service.  That dismissal is our “Go.”  “Let us go forth in the name of Christ.”  “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”  “Let us go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.”  The answer to what we are doing here is to be empowered to go.  We can be fed by the word, by song, and by the meal, but the reason we do those things is so that we can go.  God’s question today is deep, hard, but simple:  What are you doing here?  And in case we are wondering what the answer is, God tells us:  Go.  Amen.

Sermon – I Kings 17.8-24, P5, YC, June 9, 2013

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

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Last week I lost my watch.  When I say that I lost my watch, I do not mean I misplaced my watch.  I went for a walk, took the watch off while I was walking, and about an hour after my walk realized the watch was gone.  I searched the path of my walk, I looked all over the church and our house, but the watch is gone.  Now, truthfully, a watch is certainly replaceable, but this watch was sentimental – a gift from a special occasion that meant a lot to me.  So, of course, ever since I lost my watch, I have been praying to St. Anthony.  St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things.  The prayer I learned, and have been praying for over a week is, “St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around, something is lost that cannot be found.”  Though I know the watch is most likely gone, I keep occasionally offering up the prayer with some desperate sense of hope.

We do funny things in our prayer lives, especially when things are not going our way.  We have been known to bargain with God.  “God, if you please just grant this one thing, I promise I will never blank again.”  We have been known to try to negotiate with God.  “I know that I am not perfect, God, but let me tell you about all the good I have done.  Surely you can grant this one thing to your faithful servant.”  And we have been known to rail at God.  “How can you do this to me God?  Haven’t I been through enough?!?”  Sure, we know the Lord’s Prayer, and we may pray the daily office at home, and we may even pray with scripture, especially our favorite psalms.  But when we are at our lowest, when we feel like we have tried everything we are supposed to say or do with God, sometimes our prayers simply reveal our broken, frustrated, desperate spirits.

This is the prayer that Elijah offers today.  Elijah has already created quite the imposition on a poor widow.  Elijah goes to the widow, a woman who is about to die of starvation, and asks her to feed and house him.  Now, God takes care of the widow’s lack of food, but while Elijah is still there, the woman’s son almost dies of illness.  The woman blames Elijah, and Elijah at first seems fairly composed as he asks for the boy.  But when he retires to another room with boy, Elijah lets God have it.  Elijah cries out to God in anger, rage, and despair.[i]  “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?”  Elijah does not come to God with a polite request that God heal the son.  Elijah does not offer some traditional prayer of healing.  Elijah simply cries out to God.  He cries out to God for the injustice done to this poor widow – who is already clearly impoverished by having no husband.  The death of an only son would mean certain death for her as well.  Her son was her only hope for survival in this world.[ii]  Elijah boldly accuses God of an injustice – in fact accuses God of killing this boy and all that he represents to the widow.

Some may hear in Elijah’s prayer a sense of self-interest.  If he is proclaiming to be a man of God, and God then kills this woman’s only sense of hope, then the death makes Elijah look bad.  Who wants to follow a prophet of a God who kills the downtrodden?  Or, we might hear Elijah’s prayer as petulant.  Perhaps he sounds like a man whining about fairness – something childish and narrow-minded.  But I hear Elijah’s prayer as both fully human and as an honest portrayal of someone with an intimate relationship with God.  In any intimate relationship, the overly polite ways of being with one another end eventually.  In time, the only thing that works in that intimate relationship is being brutally and fully honest, holding one another to account and being totally open about the good and the bad of the relationship.  This is what Elijah is doing here.  Elijah, who knows God intimately, holds God to account.  “Really, God?  This is how you are going to treat people?  You claim to care about the poor and oppressed, and you have forced me to impose on this poor widow, and now you are going to let her only son, her only source of potential security die??”  Elijah does not ask this of God for himself or out of a sense of injustice.  Elijah asks this of a God whom he knows to be better than this – a God who loves and cares for the poor and oppressed.  And he also knows that God can do the impossible.  Elijah knows that God can bring this child from death to life.

What I love about this passage is twofold.  First, I love the very human, intimate depiction of prayer.  As Episcopalians, with our reliance on our Prayer Book and our desire for beauty and intelligence when we talk to God, we can become so formal with God that we forget that we have a real relationship with God who can handle our real words.  We can be brutally honest with God or even angry with God, and God will still love us.  We can be vulnerable and frustrated and desperate with God.  We can even come to God when we do not have words – when our emotions are so overwhelming that we no longer have anything left to say.  Elijah gives us permission today to be fully ourselves with the God who loves us no matter what.

I also love that we get this passage today because today is our monthly healing service.  Since I have been at St. Margaret’s, I have been regularly asked questions about our healing services.  Our tradition of monthly healing services that began well before my time here still has many of us questioning.  I have had adults ask me who they are allowed to ask prayers for – whether they can only ask for healing prayers for themselves or whether they can ask for healing for others as well.  I have had some of our teens ask me what we are actually doing when we lay hands on people.  Even my own daughter asked me why I made the sign of the cross on her forehead when she came forward once.  Elijah points the way to answers for those questions today.  By praying our litany of healing and by coming forward for ourselves and others, we proclaim several things.  We proclaim that intimate relationship with God means that we can be fully honest about all that is ailing us, our neighbors, and the oppressed.  We proclaim that God can do the impossible through prayer and we offer up our hopes that the impossible is possible for us too.  And we proclaim that although we may not understand God in the midst of suffering, we still come to God, hoping for healing, hoping for clarity, hoping for peace.  Whether you come forward today for healing is actually not that important.  What is most important is that you know that you can, that you know that your God is a God who can do the impossible but who also cares for you so deeply that God can handle all the parts of you – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Amen.

[i] Carolyn J. Sharp, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 100.

[ii] Glaucia Vasconcelos Wilkey, “Pastoral Perspective, Feasting on the Word, Yr. C, Vol. 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 102.

Homily – I Kings 18.20-39, P4, YC, June 2, 2013

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

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Having gotten through Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, we now enter the season the church calls “ordinary time.”  But there is nothing ordinary about the lessons we get during this time.  This Sunday’s Old Testament lesson is a classic example.  King Ahab is one of the worst kings the Israelites have had.  He encourages worship of Baal, the god who is supposed to bring water to fertilize the soil, in addition to the God of Israel.  But there has been a three-year drought in the land, and Elijah is going to use this opportunity to prove the Israelites wrong about Baal.  So he challenges the prophets of Baal to a duel.  Whoever can get their god to rain fire upon the bull sacrifice will be the true God.  So the Baal prophets spend all day praying to Baal, dancing around the altar, going to extremes such as cutting themselves to get Baal to perform.  The whole time Elijah mocks them.  Then Elijah dramatically gets his sacrifice ready, and even has the Israelites pour water all over the wood, just to prove how awesome Yahweh is when Yahweh rains a fire down that consumes the whole thing.  One could argue that Elijah is being a bit rude, if not pompous, in this story.  But what Elijah is actually revealing is an intense, deep trust in God – a trust that is so profound that he is willing to make bold statements without hesitation about God in front of everyone.

One of the things Elijah accuses the people of is limping along with two different opinions – not entirely sure that God will care for them, so investing devotion to Baal just in case.  Too often we are like the Israelites.  We too can be found only sort of trusting God, and putting our trust in other things – just in case.  We lack Elijah’s boldness because we are just not as sure as he is.  I have seen that lack of total trust just in these last several months.  Since I came here about a year and a half ago, we have been working hard, making lots of changes.  But I see the hard work is taking a toll.  We are getting tired and I am not sure we are convinced all our work will pay off.  And so we are beginning to hold back.  I noticed the reaction first in myself.  The questions started bubbling up:  Can we make this work?  Will we have the money?  Will we have the energy?  Do we have the same chutzpah that Elijah has?  I have noticed us starting to eye one another, as we peer over what feels like a cliff.  There is this sort of stand-off:  If you jump, I’ll jump.  We are like the Israelites.  Elijah says to them, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions?  If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.”  The text says that the Israelites do not answer him a word.

In contrast to all of this is Elijah.  He has a brazen trust in God.  He is so bold that he mocks others; he has water poured on the wood, not just once, but three times; only then does he call down the fire from God.  Even after three years of draught, Elijah does not doubt that God will give a sign to the people – he trusts that God does not abandon God’s people.

In the midst of our silent stand-off, I see a glimpse of Elijah in all of us too.  Just watching us at the Parade last week gave me hope.  Over twenty of us gathered to walk – even those of us who have told me that they do not feel comfortable with evangelism at all.  And when we gathered, I watched us talking to friends and strangers, having meaningful conversations, handing out our business cards, smiling, and waving.  These are actions that show a bold trust in God.  Our invitation is to hold on to that trust, to stop limping along with two opinions, and to just jump off that cliff with each other.  I am willing to make that jump, and I know that God will enable us to jump together.  And when we do, we will say those same words that the Israelites proclaim when they witness God’s power:  The LORD indeed is God; the LORD indeed is God.  Amen.