Sermons

“What Are You Doing Here?”

Psalms 42 & 43; I Kings 19:1-15a– Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – June 23, 2019

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might always seek your love in the face of suffering and live in hope.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

It’s a useful question.  “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?”  Most of us probably don’t use those exact words, but we’ve had that moment.  Why am I so grumpy?  Why do I feel so unsettled?  Why am I so easily tipped into rage?  Why do I feel like nothing matters and like I don’t want to do anything but sit?  In ordinary times, most of us have times when things aren’t going right, when everyone else is annoying, and it seems the universe is against us.  Even just not getting enough sleep can cast our souls down.

But we are not living in ordinary times.  Our government is keeping untold numbers of children in cages, 300 to a cell, without soap or toothbrushes, often with no grown-ups to care for them.  If that isn’t disquieting our souls, we need to examine our hearts.  We were on the brink of war with Iran this week and may be again soon.  The democratic norms that have held our nation together for centuries are breaking down, and no one seems to know if they can be restored.  And if that isn’t enough, one can now be diagnosed with “climate anxiety”, the technical term for being overcome by a sense of dread because you can’t stop thinking about the devastating impacts of climate change, which are arriving sooner than we thought.  Disquieted, indeed.

Elijah’s story is quite dramatic, in a variety of life-or-death, drought and firestorms kind of ways.  I encourage you to read more from this section of First Kings when you go home today.  Elijah is very clear, when God asks, about the fact that people are trying to kill him. What he doesn’t mentioned is that he just killed 450 prophets of Baal himself, after showing them all up in a “bringing down fire from heaven” contest.  Funny how easily we humans tell the story in ways that make us the heroes, or at least the victim of other people’s treachery, without revealing our own culpability.  If you are feeling oppressed or abandoned by God, you can find lots and lots of scripture passages to express your indignation or despair.  Our lives may look nothing like Elijah’s – let me be clear, I really hope you haven’t murdered anyone, and if you have, let’s talk about it and how to get you to a police station to confess – but we certainly have our moments when we’re afraid or disquieted, and we just want to flee into the wilderness and die.

So it’s worth looking at what happens to Elijah in this story, because it can give us some hints about how God wants us to approach our own lives.  Elijah decides to run away into the wilderness, and God doesn’t stop him.  It’s useful to know here, that in previous stories, when God needed Elijah somewhere, “the hand of the Lord” often just moved him there.  So while God doesn’t stop Elijah from running away in fear, he also didn’t help him get where he was going as he had before.  At least not as efficiently.  There was this other kind of assistance.  “Get up and eat,” said the angel, “otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

God may not find our running away in fear very helpful, but that does not mean God abandons us.  We are still fed.  We are still nourished with what we need to face what’s coming.  God doesn’t want us to be afraid, but our fear is not a failed test that kicks us out of the running.  Even if we want it to be, like Elijah sort of did.  Elijah wanted to just die, but instead God sent the angel saying, “Nope.  Get up and eat.  I’ll let you run away for a while, but no dying.  This isn’t over yet.”

Forty days and forty nights Elijah ran away, and God was there the whole time, biding God’s time till Elijah was ready to try again. I find this part of the story helpful when I think about my own patterns of listening to the news.  I go in waves, where sometimes I’m deeply engaged, reading lots of articles and responding in whatever ways I can.  And then a different phase sets in, as I start to feel overwhelmed by the suffering of the world and my seeming incapacity to staunch it, and I sort of tune out, skimming quickly through headlines with subjecting myself to the painful details, listening to music in the car instead of the news, trusting that others are carrying the weight of the world so I can take a break. The story of Elijah tells us that God sustains us through both sorts of phases.  But God doesn’t want us to get stuck in that pleasant cave far away from it all.

Yesterday, as we closed up our Leadership Retreat, we did a three-part ritual of naming our worries, our hopes, and our commitments. You can see the results up there on the baptistery, by the Christ candle.  I gave everyone little, rattle-y glass pebbles to represent their worries. You won’t see them if you go look at the display after worship, because they got covered up with the rose petals representing our hopes and then doused with life-giving water as we piled up our rocks of commitment inside the vase.  But there was an aside during the worry part that struck me.  “They’re so pretty,” someone said.  And they were.

The little glass pebbles, clear ones and blue ones of various colors, are very shiny and smooth and pretty.  You might be tempted to hold onto one or two.  And we do that to our worries sometimes, don’t we?  We run off to that cave, and we take out our worries and live with them in that worrying space, where we’re too far away from reality to do anything about them, but we focus on them so much, they become familiar and shiny and precious to us.  Sometimes, we find it easier to worry about our worries than to actually address them in ways that would make them go away.  Those are the moments when God asks us, like God asked Elijah, “What are you doing here?”

Because, yes, God sustains us when we’re afraid, and God nourishes us even when we’re running away from the world’s problems. But that’s not what God put us here for. What are we doing here?  It’s as important a question as the one we started with.  We may suddenly notice that our souls are cast down and disquieted.  And we may need to sit with that for a bit.  But eventually, we need to let God ask us, “What are you doing here?  Why are you hiding out?  Why are you pretending you’re supposed to be fixing everything on your own power and thus giving up and running away, instead of trusting in me to guide you and empower you?”  God will feed us when we’re afraid, but the moment comes when we hear that voice saying, “Go, return on your way!  Get back in there.  Break’s over.”  And if Elijah can do it, so can we.

There’s another interesting dynamic in this story that can be instructive for us.  Usually when we read this passage, preachers will focus on that bit about God’s presence. Or rather, all the dramatic forces in which God is not present.  There was a violent wind, but God wasn’t in the wind.  There was an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake.  There was a fire, but God wasn’t in the fire.  Then there is this mysterious “sound of sheer silence”.  How does silence make a sound?  What does that even mean?  And is the implication that God is in the silence?  It’s not as clear as we sometimes act like it is.  But it certainly got Elijah’s attention; he covers his face to protect himself and goes out to the front of his cave.

But here’s what’s really weird.  The conversation that is held after all of that dramatic meteorological overture and attention-grabbing sheer silence is exactly the same as the conversation beforehand.  “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  “Dude, people are trying to kill me!  I’m hiding out!”  The words are exactly the same.  Elijah’s feelings may not have changed.  But the results are different.  For now, God says “Go” and Elijah goes.  It’s not that his fear has turned to courage that inspired him to take action; it’s that he chooses obedience despite his fear.

What are we doing here?  Are we feeling afraid and overwhelmed?  Yes.  Is God present with us, nourishing us despite our lack of courage.  Yes.  But what are we doing here?  Is it perhaps time to remind ourselves that break doesn’t last forever, and it’s time to return to the wilderness of confusion and suffering that is our world, carrying the love and hope of Christ to those in pain?  “Send out your light and your truth,” the psalmist writes, “let them lead me.”  No more lingering, waiting around for a moment when we feel more ready.  It’s time to let God’s light and truth lead us out of our worry caves, leaving behind those nice, shiny anxieties we’re grown so attached to.

Our souls may be cast down and disquieted, but we have to ask ourselves from time to time “What are you doing here?”  We must remind ourselves and one another, to “Hope in God, for we shall again praise him, our help and our God.”  Alleluia and Amen.