The 12th Sunday after Pentecost – A Day of Holy Communion
Scripture
Hebrew
Scriptures – 1 Kings 19: 1-3a, 8-13[1]
1Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done,
and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2Then Jezebel sent a messenger to
Elijah, 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.” 3aThen
he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life,… 8He got up, and ate
and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty
nights to Horeb the mount of God. 9At
that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.
Then the word of
the LORD came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10He 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.”
11[The voice]
said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about
to pass by.” Now there was a great wind,
so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces 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; 12and after the earthquake a
fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer
silence. 13When Elijah heard
it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of
the cave. Then there came a voice to him
that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Gospel
– Matthew 14: 22-33[2]
22Immediately [Jesus] made the disciples get
into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds.
23And after he had dismissed
the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24but
by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the
wind was against them. 25And
early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. 26But when the disciples saw him
walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. 27But immediately Jesus spoke to
them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
28Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you,
command me to come to you on the water.” 29He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking
on the water, and came toward Jesus. 30But when he noticed the
strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord,
save me!” 31Jesus immediately
reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why
did you doubt?” 32When they
got into the boat, the wind ceased. 33And
those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
“What Are We Doing Here?"
Long
before I realized that it was a book written as much (or more) for adults as it
was for children, I remember reading Lewis Carroll's books about
Can’t you?" questioned the Queen in a
pitying tone, "Try again. Draw a long breath and shut your eyes."
"
"I daresay you haven't had much
practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for
half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast."[3]
I tell you all up-front: that's definitely not an attitude that I take
in reading the Bible, nor is it any part of my way of understanding
Christianity. I don't expect that it
should be yours. Take these stories
today from 1 Kings and Matthew metaphorically (as I do), or in some other way
that you find most helpful, but we ought to at least pause in search of the
meaning behind their message.
Are Jesus' chiding words to Peter, "You of little
faith," supposed to be interpreted the way that we do the placebo effect
in medical research: it only works if
you believe that it works? Faith is not
struggling to believe in the unbelievable.
It is trusting in the ultimate goodness of creation and, often, placing
such trust in another human being. It is
not an exercise in irrationality.[4] It is an existential commitment to a way of
being in the world – a way that most of us here have come to discover was the
way of one Jesus of Nazareth.
Like Elijah and Peter discovered in today's scripture
lessons, though, much of what it means simply to be a human being is learning
how to react to the endless series of crises that life puts in our way. It's my understanding that that word,
"crisis," in Chinese script is composed of two ideograms that, when
seen separately, mean "danger" and "opportunity" – together
they define the nature of any crisis: it
can go one way or the other, often depending upon the decisions that we
make. In both of our stories from
scripture today, the crises aren't just external, but internal as well. As is said in the Jewish Talmud, "We do not
see things as they are; we see things as we are."[5]
Where do you find God?
Where do you experience the awesome and mysterious presence that you
might name "holy?" I hope that
for or many of you here your answer would be "in church." One very good reason for coming here, Sunday
after Sunday, is to meet or be met by God – and, yes, that can happen anywhere
and at anytime, but it ought to happen here.
Those mystical signposts that are the liturgy and rubrics of Holy Communion
are meant to point us in the direction of God.
But we who are the followers of Jesus believe something even more
significant about God: God is everywhere
and always present to us in countless ways.
Like Elijah and Peter, though, often something dramatic has to happen to
us before we begin to pay attention.
So listening – paying attention – is a key motif in today's
scripture passages. That's most of what
prayer is; after all, prayer without listening can mean that we're just talking
to ourselves, hearing the echo of our own voices. Marriage without listening – without paying
attention to each other's needs and moods – is often just living together,
"hanging out" in the same house, but without any depth of intimacy
that is crucial to making a good marriage.
Sympathy for the poor, without listening, isn't kindness but another
name for apathy dressed up in the latest church jargon. Politics that isn't rooted in listening isn't
leadership. Devotion to God without, at
least in some way, paying attention to the myriad ways in which God is being
revealed in our lives, only gives rise to a tragically masked spiritual
loneliness.
Elijah spent a night in a cave; but while he was there he
began to listen. It took careful,
attentive listening for him to perceive just how it was that the presence of
God was being revealed to him. We, too, will
have to listen very deeply in order to move through all of the chaos to the
sound beneath sound, to the voice beyond the noise, to the sacred Word in the
midst of the wordless "groans of roaring wind and rain."[6] God can be missed. For lack of paying attention people failed,
and continue to fail, to hear the Word of God – even when it came dressed in
flesh and blood. Religion then becomes a
ship stuck in a dry dock, instead of a vessel from which to leave a sheltered
harbor. So many of the religious leaders
of Jesus' day didn't recognize him. The
church, too, can fail to hear his voice in spite of all of our singing and praying,
preaching and pleading.
Obviously, some people have a more mature and deeper faith
than some of the rest of us. While the
opportunity to listen and respond is given to all of us, we're often distracted
by other things. There's something to be
said, then, for "spiritual disciplines" – for intentionally putting
ourselves in a place and frame of mind and heart where we can begin to pay
attention, to really and deeply listen.
One of the first persons described by the scriptures as leading such a
life of contemplation is the prophet Elijah.
He may have run away and hid for all of the wrong reasons, and he may
have stayed "holed up" in a cave a bit too long, but he is the one
who invites us today to hold out our hearts over the windowsill of time and
touch the space that borders on the eternal.
The poet Jessica Powers puts it this way, in her poem "Night
Prayer: To the Prophet Elijah:"
This is
the edge of time; this cliff encounters
the
valleys of the measureless unknown
and the
great surges of those outer seas
where
swim Orion and the Pleiades.
I like
to come here in the night alone.
I like
to seek this arched and alien window,
lean
into night and lift my restless love
to
pastures where an ancient prophet tethered
horses
of fire….
He who
was swept by fire to time's suspension,
yet to
be slain and in the judgement tried –
is he not
closer to our human pity
than
those who triumph in a lasting city,
the far
impassable beatified?
Here I
touch space that borders the eternal;
here,
undistracted by the clock's poor rhyme,
I
stand, an emigrant of earth whose place
is
nearer heaven, being near to grace,
and
hold my heart out, over the sill of time.[7]
I truly believe that God is revealed in all the things that
we take for granted: waking up in the
morning, eating, working, loving, sleeping, the scent of newly mown hay, the
cry of a loon from the far shore of a mountain lake…kayaking (anywhere!). Yes, the presence of God isn't easy to
discern in places of chaos and misery, hunger and bloodshed. Over a dozen years ago the May issue of National Geographic showed a picture of
the residents of a neighborhood in Basra, Iraq, as they walked through pools of
sewage. The bombing stopped…for awhile,
but the suffering has not. The caption
next to that photograph reads: "'We
cannot endure this any more,' a woman shouted as she passed the author." The article goes on:
In the
stricken city barefoot toddlers wade casually through ponds of
sewage….Waterborne diseases – typhoid, cholera, amebic dysentery – have
bred…. "The main drugs, even
diagnostic kits, are simply not here," says hospital manager H. A.
Borak. Smoldering quietly, he
demands: "Why is
That was 1993 – long before "9/11."[9] Now, with hundreds of thousands dead, we're
still doing what we're doing in
Elijah came to discover that God was not to be cast as some
kind of parlor-magician, lighting fires to vindicate prophetic voices. God was involved in the world's history in a
far more mysterious and subtle, yet constant, way. Religious belief and adherence to the
promises of the covenant wasn't going to be forced by some supernatural
incendiary miracle, but by our ability to discern the presence of the holy in
everyday events. So every day, and in as
many ways as possible, we should pause and hear the question asked of us,
"What are you doing here?"
Our readings for today invite us to pay attention to that
still, small voice of God, even when storms rage and – maybe more importantly –
when they do not. There in the silence,
we will be assured of a grace-filled and creative presence. There, at that point of stillness,[10] even
though the solutions to life's storms are rarely as clear as the stilling of
the Galilean sea, and even though wind and waves threaten to toss us overboard
or the entire boat upside down, we will "hear the voice of God"
giving us assurance that, at the last, we will be safe.
Jesus
was a human being through whom a band of early Christians came to see something
of God. No one is to be despised because
he or she does not believe this. Jesus
must never become the ground for rabid factionalism, hatred, and oppression,
but to be that "still, small voice," saying to us all that the place
on which we stand is holy ground.[11]
* * *
[1] This is
the story of Elijah's encounter with a Mysterious Presence, a disembodied Voice,
on
[2] This experience of the disciples seeing Jesus coming to them over the water in the midst of a furious storm, ends with a message of deliverance that's not unlike Elijah's experience of God as a barely imperceptible "sound" of nature. Many of the stories of the Bible speak of such things in our lives that have the potential to destroy us, and yet become the very means of our salvation. It is, indeed, a Mystery.
[3] English logician, mathematician, and novelist, Lewis
Carroll (the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) is best-known for his
classic fantasy novels Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through
the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Not unlike the technique of a parable-telling
rabbi named Jesus, Carroll used the surrealistic settings of his fantasy world
to question the commonly accepted ways of thinking. Most readers don't know that Carroll also
wrote poetry which remains open to all kinds of explanations of meaning.
[4] This was
my initial attraction to the faith of The United Methodist Church as it's been
expressed in the so-called "Wesleyan Quadrilateral" – i.e., we are a people seeking a balance
between scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. One is never meant to overwhelm the other
three. Thus the extreme scientific
rationalist is just as misguided, and "unbalanced," as the biblical
fundamentalist. Sadly, in my
quarter-of-a-century of ordained ministry, I've seen our denomination swing
perilously far to the right, while reason and informed experience have been
swept from the table.
[5] There are actually two Talmuds: one written in
[6] William
Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III,
Scene II, Line 36.
[7] Jessica
Powers, O.C.D., in The House at Rest
(Pewaukee, Wisconsin: The Carmelite
Monastery, 1984).
[8] Priit J.
Vesilind, "Water: The
[9] See http://www.september11news.com/,
"The Day the World Changed" – but has it, or are we being asked to
listen, to finally pay attention, to the rest of the world?
[10] That "still, small voice," "low murmuring sound," or gentle breeze that we read about in the story of Elijah is aptly conveyed, I think, in one of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" (The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1971, p. 119), this from "Burnt Norton" (Take the time to read all four at a website like http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/ ):
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshness;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time….
Yet the enchainment of past and
future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
[11] A reference to the "voice" that Moses heard, saying to him, "Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground" (Exodus 3: 5).