Diverse Call of God: God's Calling Leads us to rest

1 Kings 19:3-13 (TFET/Inclusive)

3 Full of fear, Elijah fled for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his attendant there, 4 while he himself went on a day's journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. "I have had enough, YHWH," he said. "Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors." 5 Then he lay down under the tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel of YHWH touched him and said, "Get up and eat." 

6 He looked around, and there near his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate the cake and drank the water and then lay down again. 

7 The angel of YHWH came back a second time and touched him and said, "Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you." 8 So he got up and ate and drank some more. Strengthened by that food, he traveled for forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. 

9 There he went into a cave and spent the night. And the word of YHWH came to him: "What are you doing here, Elijah?" 

10 Elijah replied, "I have been very zealous for YHWH God Omnipotent. The people of Israel have abandoned your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death by the sword. I am the only one left, and now they're trying to kill me, too."11 God said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of YHWH, for YHWH is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountain apart and shattered the rocks by YHWH's power—but YHWH was not in the whirlwind. After the wind there was an earthquake—but YHWH was not in the earthquake. 

12 After the earthquake came a fire —but YHWH was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. 13 When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" 

Intro

Thank you for having me again this Sunday! It is always a blessing to speak, whether in person or over zoom, this community really grounds me!

We are in the midst of this series, exploring the way God calls us, the way that we have various calls of God, what God calls us to do. We have explored that God calls us in spite of whether our society has deemed us worthy or not, we have spoken about how God calls us to build, how we have to be attentive to the voice of God… The theme of ‘calling’ has been prevalent in our recent sermons.

But today, we focus on something that happens during our call. See, in Christianity we talk often about doing the work and making sure we follow through, and as we have said, we are trying to redefine call here, or rather, re-understand, re-conceptualize the call of God in our lives. One of the aspects of the call is understand and accept that even in the midst of our executing this call of God, as we answer the call, as we exercise the call, we will face a void, a period where we are down or rejected, a period of time where we don't want to do this anymore. so let us read the text today and see what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.

Background

So we are thrust right into the text, right in the midst of the action. This is like a movie that starts at the middle and slowly goes back to the beginning and then shoots us to the end. Elijah is a prophet of God, who, as we read, is very zealous for the worship of God to be correct. 

He does a lot of things before we see him here fleeing for his life. In Chs. 17-18 Elijah gave strength and sustenance to those in need, was fearless in confronting Ahab, a “bad king”, and triumphed over the prophets of Baal. So before we see him fleeing for his life and being despondent, he was victorious, enjoying the height of his prophetic ministry, and that is when fear filled him.

Quick sidebar

I would like to acknowledge that the readings of Elijah are often accompanied with a negative view of Jezebel, a woman who Dr. Wil Gafney in her book Womanist Midrash, calls a “straight gangsta” because of the agency she has… her piece on Jezebel is great because it is Jezebel who wields power not her husband and so while many people call her evil and her name actually means fecal matter, Jezebel as a woman is good to look at. The history of why she is made evil and the impact that has had on women, especially women of color, is covered there and if you want to talk to me about it afterwards let me know.

Elijah is having his A Tribe Called Quest “stressed out” moment. Not one of ATCQ’s most known songs but one of my favorites and the chorus or hook to that song goes "I really know what it means to be stressed out, face to face with your adversity." 

I think it is important to note that it is oftentimes it is during our heights, not our lows, that fear may strike. Isn't it sometimes the fact that when we are in the midst of hustling and bustling and things are going well that something happens and fear grips us, and a problem arises, something we did actually leads to the fear?

I think part of what we are seeing here is the scripture’s acknowledgement of the fragility of the servants of God. 

Finding God in the Void

When churched people talk about Elijah they talk about the miracles and all that, the fact that he hasn't died, the fact that he killed a bunch of people (not ordered by God, btw) the fact that he was zealous, but we don't highlight that he was despondent, or fearful. We highlight that he heard God in the whisper as the text says, but not what happens before the whisper; and that is because we don't like to admit fragility. We don't like to admit it within ourselves or even with Jesus when we consider that he too was incarnate and had to be somewhat fragile.

But if we look at the icon of Elijah it shows us that at the center of the Elijah story is him despondent. That’s why I like it, because what is at the center is not any of the other moments, but the moment of his being in a cave, fearful, tired, sad, down; that is the central point of the image and of his story. Here he is fearful and despondent, powerless to sustain himself. He is really at the whim of God.

This story of Elijah features two things that are important for us to consider, when we consider the call of God. 1. Is that we will have moments of fragility and 2. That in those moments we will be sustained by God. 

The story of Elijah is like many of our stories, who here has not had a moment of despair, and emptiness? We all have had moments where we have felt abandoned, alone, where we say like Elijah said to God, “I am doing this by myself.” 

The same was always true for me. I used to have a phrase I believed when I was growing up, one that I gave up just recently and it was that I was always laboring alone. Laboring alone. That was my word for it. I always felt that I was alone. And that was because there was some truth to that, well depending on how I told myself the truth. I was often the only Colombian in latino spaces, I was often the only black Colombian in Colombian spaces, I was the only kid from my middle school to go to my specific high school and the only kid from my high school to go to my specific college. The only Latin American history major who was Colombian, I could go on and one about these “uniqueness” I would highlight. I literally have pointed out all of the instances where I was the only one to x. And all of those things are true, but the myth that I was alone is what made me feel alone more so than the reality. Yes, I was the only black Colombian youth minister in the denomination I grew up in, sure, but I wasn't alone. It's cliché to say God was the only one with me, but in reality there were many others, journeyers, people who God sent alongside me to walk this walk and those people journeyed with me, some came and went, some stayed, but I was not alone. 

Sometimes we need to reframe that for ourselves, it isn’t to deny that we are or are not alone, but to recognize that many people are alongside us or have paved the way for what we are doing and thus we are the continuing of a lineage.

Now, we certainly have moments where we feel alone, where we feel empty and we have to be willing to accept and face those moments. The biggest myth we can tell ourselves as we are exercising this call of God, whatever that may be for you, is that nothing negative will happen to us along the way. That once we do the work of God we will face no opposition, no persecution and everything will be peachy;  but that is false, because we have experienced what the old street adage warns “haters gonna hate” 

Hate is gonna happen, maybe it comes from the outside; but sometimes we have internal hate to deal with, we become our own critics and when we do well, in the midst of that, we let self-doubt creep in. Maybe it's because of the narratives that have been told to us, maybe it's because f the way society has treated us, there could be many reasons, but it happens that we face hate from within and without. 

What we have to do is realize that those moments are normal, and allow God to work through us during those moments. When we face moments of emptiness, of dry-ness, sometimes that is the place where God meets us. We don't often think that emptiness is a place where God meets us, where God touches us, where God sends us back into action, but I believe that often God meets us in the midst of emptiness.

To be a saint is not always to be filled with the presence of God, it doesn't mean that we are always winning battles and always just trudging along, to be a saint is to be a person, to be like Elijah, someone who has to contend with the reality of the emptiness, of feeling alone.

But sometimes we need distance to do so. The hustle and bustle of our daily lives sometimes don't allow us the chance to hear God.  In this text, I find it interesting that in order for Elijah to hear God he has to leave his surroundings. He isn't sent there, we are led to believe that because of the text, but he wasn’t commanded to go, he just goes and he goes where he thinks God will meet him. I have always wondered why he did this, and it brings to mind another important point to consider, we need to develop a spirituality of listening.

Many of you know that we practice contemplative prayer and during our practice we devote a time of listening to God, this listening is a way to develop a muscle of listening, a way to be able to discern God’s voice. Patricia Loring, a Quaker, described this spirituality as follows:

By listening I mean the widest prayerful, discerning attentiveness to the Source intimated within us, evidenced through others, and discernible through the experiences of life. This kind of listening is not only auditory. It may be visual, kinesthetic, intuitive or visceral as well, depending on the deepest attentiveness natural to the particular person.

There is a lot that Quaker spirituality has to say to us about listening to God and God’s spirit. But suffice it to say, we have to develop this, we have to be atuned to the Spirit in audible and non-audible ways. And sometimes those moments of despair that we face provide the room for us to hear God clearly. It is the emptiness that often is filled by God. Simone Weil says it thusly:

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it”

It is once we trust that the emptiness will be filled by God that we will be able to discern the voice. If Elijah hadn’t, he would have thought God was in all those shows of power that precede the silence/whisper… that's what we would expect, but God was in the silence. But it is how Elijah responds that really struck me.

Elijah responds in action

When we read this text, we often focus on how God talks to Elijah in a small whisper, vs. 12. The Hebrew for that word is literally “a sound, a thin silence” and is the only time that word occurs in the OT. “Typically, readers, especially preachers, assume that God was in the quiet event that happened third. Translators struggle to render these words. Do they convey complete silence, or a soft sound/voice/whisper? The narrator does not say explicitly that God was “in” the quiet. “

Yes and there are many things we can say about that. But it is the answer after that. Elijah gives the same answer as he did earlier, god asks him what he was doing there (kinda implying he wasn't where he was supposed to be, which happens in times of trial we go to places we may not have needed to be at) and then Elijah gives him the answer but each time responds with action. And reminds me of this line:

“Remarkably, it is neither the experience of God’s dramatic nor quiet presence, for which many so long in the midst of such feelings, but in attending to the work at hand and needing to be done through which life is renewed.”

Sometimes continuing to do God’s work. Continuing to stay true to God’s calling is what renews us and brings us back. I am not talking about the eternal grind or grind culture, in which we glorify being overworked, I am talking more about fidelity to God’s call.

It is God's presence in the suffering/emptiness that sustains the us, the church and that is what sustains the work... God meets us at the bottom, at a low moment, so that God can bring us forward. Brother Lawrence, a Carmelite monk whose work ethic is written in Practicing the Presence of God, a beautiful book, says that the most effective way in which he communicated with God was by attending to his work. 

Conclusion

Sometimes, Metro, it is this faith, espoused by us seeing God during our moments of emptiness that leads us forward. As you all know, I went through a mild anxiety / depression period last year around this time, and it was in the way God met me during that time, the things that Metro would still allow me to do, the fact that I was still teaching and yet being gentle, that allowed me to “get back” 

We have to realize that we will face emptiness, we will face tough times, we will face moments where we want to die, but let us have faith that God will hold us in those moments. And we will be able to carry out God’s call. 

Prayer

Powerful God, Although you can make your presence known in a mighty wind, or an earthquake, or a fire, you often speak to us in the sound of sheer silence. Help us to hear. Amen