God Speaks to Elijah

    The morning scripture at the recent Annual Meeting of the New York Conference of the UCC was from I Kings 19, the familiar story of God passing by the prophet Elijah.  And God was not in the earthquake, fire, or storm but in the sound of sheer silence (NRSV) or the more familiar “still small voice of calm.”

    A couple of things struck me as we reflected as a conference on the passage which are quick thoughts of somewhat less than a full sermon’s length!

    The first was that the voice of God interviewing Elijah (who was hiding out in a cave from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel for calling judgment down on them) asks a couple of times, “Elijah, what are you doing here?”  Rolling different inflections around in my head, I imagined it with God’s voice an exasperated, “What are you doing here?” as in why are you cowering a cave when you could be out doing something somewhere else?  Come on, get it together, Elijah!  There are lots of times when we just wuss out.  The other way I heard it was “What are you doing here?”  It’s not just why are you hanging out here, as opposed to some other place, like Jerusalem instead of a hole in a rock out in the wilderness.  The way I heard it was as a genuine question, nearly a challenge: what are you doing, here, in Ithaca NY?  You are in a specific place with specific needs and specific resources and specific challenges in the community… so what are you doing about it, right here, right where you live?  Instead of sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, Mr. Prophet, what are you going to do?  Instead of sitting there, FCC Ithaca, what are you going to do here? Here.  Where God planted you.

    The last idea that nudged me was that all of this conversation and the vision of God passing by not in earthquake, fire, or wind but in the sheer silence took place at the entrance to the cave.  The entrance.  At the entrance where Elijah’s inner life met the whole wide world.  And sitting in the conference space, I was struck that in a profound way, Elijah was being invited to leave the darkness in which he was hiding and enter the world where God was still working and still speaking.  It was not the entrance to the cave, but the entrance to the world.  And it is “out in the world” where God is making both the commotion and the deepest truth the human heart can experience in the sheer power of God’s ever-present silence.

    Come Sunday to hear how God speaks to Elijah… but listen how he speaks to you.


                                                                                       In Christ,
                                                                                     
                                                                                               David

Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Hebrew Bible     I Kings 19:1-4, 8-15a
From the Epistles             Galatians 3:23-29
From the Gospels             Luke 8:26-39