Sermon: "Still, Small Voice"

 

Scripture Intro - 1 Kings 19:9-18 (RSV)

The first and second book of Kings chronicle the exploits of the kings of Israel who ruled after King David and after the once mighty kingdom had split into two.

The two books are essentially a tell-all tale of corrupt and wicked leaders and the people they led astray.

The hero of the story is the prophet Elijah, who pulls out all the stops to get the people of Israel to amend their wicked ways and find their way back to God.

The passage we’re about to read tells us of a very personal encounter that Elijah has with God.

When we enter the story, Elijah has just killed 450 priests of the pagan god, Baal, on the summit of Mt. Carmel.  Elijah had challenged Baal and his prophets, to a head to head duel with his God, Yahweh.  And Baal lost, badly.

Elijah celebrated the victory by having all of Baal’s prophets killed.

The problem was, Israel’s current King, Ahab, and his very influential wife, Jezebel, were followers of Baal, not Yahweh, and when Jezebel heard what Elijah had done to her priests, she became enraged and declared a vendetta on Elijah’s head.  In fear for his life, Elijah fled…and it is while he was fleeing that he ran headlong into the presence of God.

Now, before we go any further, we should note that this is one of those Old Testament texts that has parts to it that we may find distasteful or not in line with how we see God acting in the world or in our lives.

The passage contains divinely sanctioned violence and vengeance, and has God getting mixed up in local politics and naming who should rule next and whom they should kill in God’s name.

For some of us, this is a big enough obstacle to impede our understanding of this text so we’ll come back to this later.

But lets set it aside for now and put our focus on the part of Elijah’s encounter with God that rises up through all those difficult layers and speaks to us as people of God today.

As we enter today’s reading, God finds Elijah hiding in a cave and demands to know what he is doing.

“Why are you here?” God asks Elijah - not once, but twice.

And both times Elijah says he fears for his life because of his loyalty to God.

Let’s listen for God’s response to Elijah in this reading from 1 Kings, and listen for the word of God.

1 Kings 19:9-18 (RSV)

Elijah Meets God at Horeb

And there he came to a cave, and lodged there; and behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said to him, “What are you doing here, Eli′jah?” He said, “I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”

And he said, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord.”

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.

And when Eli′jah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Eli′jah?”

He said, “I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”

And the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; and when you arrive, you shall anoint Haz′ael to be king over Syria; and Jehu the son of Nimshi you shall anoint to be king over Israel; and Eli′sha the son of Shaphat of A′bel-meho′lah you shall anoint to be prophet in your place.

And him who escapes from the sword of Haz′ael shall Jehu slay; and him who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Eli′sha slay. Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Ba′al, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

The Rev. Maureen R. Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

August 13, 2017 – Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

1 Kings 19:9-18

“Still, Small Voice”

My wife Stephanie and I adopted two kittens a few weeks ago.

They’re two and three months old and they’re adorable.

They do all the wonderful kitten things that kittens do.

They chase their tails. They ping straight up in the air and dance sideways across the room while they’re playing.

They nuzzle their soft little bodies up against your neck while emitting a small rumbling purr and ask for attention with the tiniest and squeakiest meow.

They bring us hope and joy in the midst of what is a very challenging world.

They’re also a lot of work.

The litter box needs to be cleaned, constantly.

They get underfoot while we’re trying to cook dinner or carry a laundry basket down the stairs.

They climb up the window screens and scratch up the furniture.

They jump on our heads in the middle of the night wanting to play.

They have us leaping up out of our chairs to see what the loud crash was in the other room,  or what small object they’ve managed to find and are trying to swallow before we can pry it out of their little mouths.

Yes, it’s like having a toddler in the house.

And like a toddler, when you buy them a new toy, they’d much rather play with the box it came in…

because in their curious kitten minds every thing in the world is a toy.

Your computer keyboard, the window blinds, a thread on the carpet.

The other day one of them came trotting through the living room carrying the wet sponge from the kitchen sink in her mouth. 

I think it weighed more than she did.

Anyone who has ever owned a pet knows that it’s not all sweetness and unconditional love.

There are challenges, difficulties, and heartbreaks.

And given how many pets are returned to shelters not too long after being adopted, or are abandoned once they grow out of their cute phase,

it’s sadly apparent that some people are not willing to live with the challenges that being a pet owner brings – Things get hard, and they give up.

Perhaps pets should come with a warning label.

Perhaps the Bible should as well.

The Bible is also full of challenges, difficulties, and heartbreaks.

Not just in the stories themselves, but in the relationship we have with this odd and wondrous book as a whole.

It too is not all about sweetness and unconditional love.

While we often see the Bible reduced to inspirational sayings that are sewn on to throw pillows, stuck on car bumpers, and shared on Facebook,

the discerning mind and spirit knows that this book is about so much more than positive platitudes.

There’s a lot of hard stuff in here.

Some of it that you definitely wouldn’t want sewn on a throw pillow.

We may know that the Bible is not one book but many books.

That it’s a collection of history, and poetry, and prophecy, and song.

But it’s also a collection of myth, satire, political commentary, and humor.

It’s written by many authors over thousands of years each writing from their own perspective, with their own agenda, to a particular audience,

and too often the subtlety of the language and nuances of the context are lost to our modern ears.

The Bible is full of inspiration, and mystery, and joy, and hope.

And it’s also full of violence, prejudice, immorality, and people and divine beings behaving very badly.

Over its lifetime the Bible has been used to justify wars, colonialism, slavery, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, the mistreatment of those with mental illness, addiction, disease, and disabilities, and the misguided belief that we’re either blessed or damned based on our income, our social standing, or our ability to follow a set of arbitrary rules to perfection.

So where is God in all of this?

How do we pick out God’s still, small voice with such a loud chorus of human voices overlaying it and masking it from our ears?

There are likely very few of us here who believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God, in fact we may struggle to understand how anyone can see the Bible in this way given what we know about the contradictions it contains, the difficulties of transcription and translation, and the glaringly human fingerprints we see all over its pages – in its biases, inaccuracies, and limitations of context.

But even if we believe as many of us do, that the Bible is the sacred and inspired word of God, which has obviously been sifted through a myriad of human filters - how do even begin to remove those filters to get to the kernel of divine truth that lies beneath?

The passage we heard this morning about Elijah’s encounter with God is one of those Bible stories that is covered in human fingerprints.

Let's first consider the passage in its most basic form as a story.

Elijah is hiding in a cave when God seeks him out and asks him to name why he is not with God’s people as a prophet should be.

Elijah’s response is that he’s afraid of the people.

Too many of God’s prophet’s had been killed as it is, and now that he had killed 450 of the King’s priests there was a bounty out on his head as well.

Violence begets violence, as we may say today.

But for Elijah there was no such connection.

God then instructs Elijah to come out of the cave and go up on the mountain.

The implication here is that God wanted to be present to Elijah just as God was present to Moses on the same mountain, 500 years before.

But Elijah doesn’t budge. 

Then the world erupted around him - as he stood in the cave and looked for God –in a mighty wind that tore apart mountains and broke rocks into pieces,

in an earthquake that shook the ground beneath his feet,

in a roaring fire that threatened to singe his skin –

But, we’re told, God was not in any of it.

Then the world went quiet, and Elijah heard a still, small voice –

The Jewish Study Bible translation calls it “a soft, murmuring sound.”

It was only when Elijah heard this soft, murmuring sound that he came out of the cave and was fully present before God.

Here God asks Elijah again, “Why are you here?”

And Elijah gave the same response he did earlier.

He feared the people of Israel were out to kill him.

This is where God does something that may seem un-God like to our modern day religious sensibilities.

God instructs Elijah to appoint two new kings and a new prophet to take Elijah’s place.

And as for the people Elijah feared, they would all be killed for their unfaithfulness, if not at the hands of the new kings, than at the hands of the new prophet, Elisha.

So we ask again, where is God in this story - and where are our human fingerprints obscuring God’s presence?

We see our human fingerprints when we consider that the entire history of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel contained in 1 and 2 Kings was written down hundreds of years after the northern kingdom had fallen and the inhabitants of the southern kingdom had been taken into captivity.

It was written by a demoralized people who were searching their past for an answer to a nagging question in their present. 

They asked, “Why has God forsaken us? Where did we go wrong?”

And their response is in this story they wrote about the unfaithfulness of their ancestors, led astray by corrupt and wicked kings, and a prophet cut from the same cloth as Moses who took on the mighty Baal and his priests and won.

We see our human fingerprints when we consider that the people who wrote these stories about this new God, Yahweh, were living in a polytheistic culture where gods controlled everything – the sun, the rain, the good and bad fortune one had in life – and while these gods could be appeased and cajoled with blood sacrifices and gifts, they could also destroy and kill if they were displeased or disrespected.

And while the people of Israel were just beginning to understand how this one God called Yahweh was a very different kind of God – one who was not in the destruction of the earthquake or the fire or the wind  – they still envisioned a God who could and would punish them or reward them at will.

They envisioned a God who expressed all of the emotions that human beings were capable of expressing.

And they told stories of a God who reflected all the best, and the worst parts of our humanity -

Our love, compassion, and mercy, but also our anger, our jealousy, our spitefulness, our vindictiveness, our impulsive urge to hurt and destroy that which has hurt us.

Because our ancestors couldn’t imagine any other way to BE in the world.

they struggled to imagine God any other way.

As Biblical Studies Professor, Peter Enns, explains in his book, The Bible Tells Me So, the people who wrote these stories had no other language or cultural reference to do otherwise.

If they stepped outside of their culture and wrote about a God who never took sides in a war, never struck anyone dead for disobedience, and didn’t meddle in local politics, the story wouldn’t have made sense to them or anyone else.

“So God let his children tell the story,” Enns says.

With the hope that we will continue to tell it and refine it re-imagine it as we go along. 

Even with all its messy human fingerprints, we should resist the urge to discount these ancient Biblical stories because they no longer make sense to us or fit in with our image of a loving, compassionate, and merciful God.

Because we’d be overlooking the fact that these stories are still very much about us.

We need only look at today’s news to find stories of modern day people who mirror these ancient world views.

People who believe our God created one race to be superior to others.

People who believe our God blesses and backs one nation over all others, especially in times of war.

People who believe our God endorses or chooses the people who lead us and thus we should never question or disagree with those leader’s divinely sanctioned words and decisions.

We may be 3,000 years removed from the world described in our Old Testament but in many ways we’re still standing in that cave with Elijah, straining to hear God in the wind, and the earthquake, and the fire.

Catholic theologian and Franciscan Friar, Richard Rohr reminds us that

all of us are capable of hearing the voice of God from our “very first inhalation and exhalation, which is the very sound of the sacred.

It is the literally unspeakable Jewish name for God, YHWH (The name that) cannot be spoken aloud but only breathed: inhaling and exhaling through parted lips. It is the first and last “word” we will ever utter—most likely without knowing it.”

Perhaps this is the still, small voice, the soft murmuring that Elijah heard in that cave. The sound of his own rapid breath rising in the silence as he cowered in his fear.

Perhaps it was the sound of God moving through his lungs as he let go of that fear and embraced hope in a better tomorrow.

The kernel of divine truth that we find in this text that points us to a God who is found not in destruction but in the very breath that gives us life.

We may sometimes strain to hear the voice of God speaking to us through the pages of this wonderful yet difficult book.

But we should remember, the Bible is not an answer book, an owner’s manual, or a “How To” guide that tells us how to get God to love us so we can collect our rewards in heaven. 

It’s a story.

It’s a story told over thousands of years by a people who little by little are getting to know and understand their Creator, while struggling to comprehend the role they play – we play - in re-creating this world anew.

And like any story involving human beings, it can get messy, and complicated, and have us shaking our heads in disbelief at times.

The Bible can still be that purring kitten that we pick up and nuzzle when we need a shot of hope and joy in the midst of suffering and sadness.

But when it challenges us – when it gets hard,

I urge you to stick with it.

I promise you, that still, small voice will rise up and be heard.

Amen.