Kings 19: 1-4, 8-15a
June 20, 2010
First United Church – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
What is the nature of God’s power? Believe it or not, these are the kinds of questions you have to deal with before bedtime if you are the pastor’s husband. A few weeks ago, I was wrestling with this question as David and I were settling in for the night.
Four months after having an unplanned, emergency c-section, this is not just some academic question rolling around in my head. It’s been rumbling up inside of me every day since our son was born. And when it finally found voice a few weeks ago, it didn’t come out in that neat and clean question, “what is the nature of God’s power?”
I think it came out something more like, “Just where the hell was God when we thought we might lose our child?”
************
The night M was born, there were about 5 hours where we were genuinely concerned that he might not be able to be born safely. I stand before you, humbly, knowing that what we went through that one evening is nothing compared to what many of you have been through in your lives.
Some of you have lost children. Many gathered here have lost partners, parents, siblings.
My grief is not your grief. It is, nonetheless, grief.
- grief because we imagined a scenario where we left the hospital empty-handed;
- grief because I had a vision of what I thought it would be like to bring a child into the world;
- grief that at the moment my child was born, I couldn’t even see him or hold him because I was in the middle of a major surgery myself;
- grief that he was met – not by my gentle and loving hands – but by bright lights and cold gloves and life-saving measures that he needed, but were not gentle.
Grief is grief – no matter the source.
It’s slow, it’s burning, it’s hard to voice, it’s hard to confess because it feels a little embarrassing. And it causes us to ask questions like, “where the hell was God when that happened?” or, if you prefer the cleaned up version, “What is the nature of God’s power?”
When the going gets tough, how does God act in the world? Is God all-powerful or impotent or something else altogether?
What do you think? Can we find the answers to those questions in the next 15 or 20 minutes?
************
As I’ve been hanging out with the Prophet Elijah each day this past week, the nature of God’s power is where my brain and heart have lingered.
The lectionary cycle of texts have had us hanging out Elijah for several weeks now. For a guy who looms so large in our Jewish and Christian heritage, he really only has five scenes in the Bible.
A few weeks ago, we heard the first story – where Elijah comes to the widow of Zarephath and her son who are almost starving to death. Last week, we heard the fourth story (the lectionary cycle gets them out of order, I’m not sure why) about Jezebel’s murder of Naboth over a garden plot that the king wanted to own.
This week, we heard the story at the center of the Elijah cycle – the third story of a suicidal Elijah cowering in a cave on Mount Horeb, waiting to see God.
And right before this story, there is scene two of Elijah’s life. We didn’t hear this one in church, so allow me to briefly summarize. It’s in 1 Kings 18 if you want to look it up yourself.
There was a severe drought in Israel that had been going on for three years. God told Elijah to go and speak to King Ahab and tell him that God would soon send rain for the fields. Elijah confronts Ahab and scolds him for being idolatrous. He asks Ahab to have all of Israel gather on Mount Carmel with 450 of Baal’s prophets and he challenges them to a divine dual.
In a scene that reminds me of something you might see on reality TV, Elijah tells the 450 prophets of Baal to ask their god to cause a slaughtered bull to burst into flames on a pyre. Try as they might, they are unable to create fire. Of course, when Elijah tries the same task, he is immediately successful, and the people gathered confess that Elijah’s God is the only God. Elijah then kills all 450 prophets of Baal. God sends rain on the earth and everyone lives happily ever after (well, you know, except the prophets of Baal).
Immediately after this, Queen Jezebel threatens Elijah’s life and he runs away. And that’s how we get to today’s story. There is no way around it – the Mount Carmel scene is just a thoroughly disturbing story.
A mountaintop contest involving sacrificed animals, fire, rain, the murder of 450 people in one fell swoop – in my mind, it’s certainly not Yahweh’s finest moment in the Bible.
But in the context of the time and, given the theology that permeates this part of the Hebrew Bible, it really should be Elijah’s finest moment. He has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Yahweh is God and Baal is just a pretender. He has scared everyone into worshiping his God. On top of all that, he is a rainmaker.
And yet…something is amiss. How does a prophet so on top of his game go from this mountaintop experience to an attempted suicide in the next chapter? After all, if Yahweh is God and Elijah is on top of the world, why is he even afraid of Jezebel’s threat? Why does he run away and lay down under a tree to die?
It’s possible that these two stories have nothing to do with each other and whoever edited the book of Kings put them together and added the bit about Jezebel to create a better flow.
I’d like to suggest another possibility, though, which is this: maybe Elijah, or whoever wrote this story about Elijah, wanted to open our eyes to another way of understanding the very nature of God.
The God on Mount Carmel looks very different than the God Elijah encounters on Mount Horeb in today’s reading.
The God on Mount Carmel is omnipotent in the traditional sense of the word: bloodthirsty, indignant, jealous, a bit of a show-off…in short, the nature of God’s power on Mount Carmel is destructive.
The God in today’s reading is omnipotent in a very different way. God repeatedly sends messengers to Elijah while he is still in the desert. They bring him freshly baked bread and cool, clean water to drink. They urge him back to life and away from his despair through life-giving words and actions. They coax him on until he finally reaches Mount Horeb where he has a bit of a pity-party and learns that God is about to appear.
He stands outside and awaits the arrival of God. First a strong wind….but no God. Then a huge earthquake…but no God. Then a big ol’ fire…but no God. Now, according to everything Elijah knew about God, this would have been quite puzzling. God in the Hebrew Bible often shows up in wind, earthquakes, and fire. In fact, God’s control over fire was the very thing that made Elijah such a rockstar on top of Mount Carmel.
But God has a different face this time. The God on Mount Horeb does not show up in a lazer light show. No, no my friends, the God on Mount Horeb shows up in the sound of sheer silence.
This God comes not to exercise power in the traditional way – by being big and scary – but in a different way.
God comes to Elijah bringing a new task and a new call. In doing so, Elijah is lured back on the road and finds the strength to journey on. Just as the bread and water nourished him in the desert, the words of God on Mount Horeb feed his soul and allow him to imagine a future for himself.
The God on Mount Horeb is powerful, yes. But the nature of that power is life-giving and sustaining, not destructive.
Nothing is ever this neat and easy, of course. In fact, the call that God has for Elijah is to go and anoint some new kings and prophets so they can kill some folks. That sounds fairly destructive, right? As near as I can figure, the folks who wrote down these stories for us weren’t perfect. They didn’t understand everything about God. The struggled a lot with the big question I posed at the beginning of this sermon: what is the nature of God’s power?
In short, they were a lot like us.
They understood that a major part of being in a relationship with God is about the struggle. And although we typically think of them as telling us that God is omnipotent in that traditional, destructive, big-scary-guy way….we can also see that they understood God’s power in some other ways, too.
I think the good news in today’s story is that God’s power is one that affirms life and sustains us. God is the power in the universe that coaxes us towards life.
When we can’t handle it anymore and we throw ourselves down under a tree in a hot, dry desert, God sends messengers to remind us we aren’t alone.
When I made my midnight confession to my husband a few weeks ago, through the tears I told him I’d never felt so alone in my entire life as I did when we were sitting up in the wee hours of the morning at the hospital, worrying that our baby might not be okay.
I wasn’t alone, of course, I was surrounded by my husband, my midwife, my doula, and several nurses. But the weight of the world seemed to be on my shoulders alone.
I felt powerless in that moment – as though there was very little I could do to do the one thing I desperately needed to do in the moments I was becoming a mother. I needed to protect my child and I was unable to do so by myself.
My memories of those hours of great loneliness seem to be void of God’s presence. As a person who confesses to be a follower of Christ, this causes deep agony in my soul.
Why am I unable to see God’s presence when I look back on those hours in the darkness?
I asked David, “Just where the hell was God that night?” And my husband, often the one to remind me who I am and whose I am, gently suggested to me that God was present in the nurses and doctors who made sure I wasn’t left alone struggling to protect my child.
And as soon as David said those words, I knew them to be true.
On the night that M was born, God wasn’t some invisible being, coming down to Mount Carmel in a rush of fire to do magic tricks and put on a lazer light show and beg to be worshiped.
- God was present in the voice of my midwife, who gently suggested that we needed to consider a c-section in order for our child to be born safely.
- God was present in the sharply honed skills of the O.B. who rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night to bring a new life into this world.
- God was present in the strong shoulders of the nurse as I leaned on her and waited for the anesthesia to be administered.
- God was present in the flow of words from the anesthesiologist who stood behind my head throughout the surgery – he promised me he wouldn’t leave me alone for even one minute and he did not.
- God was present in the hands of the pediatrician – her hands may have been glove-covered and not as gentle as mine would have been, but they performed life-saving measures that our child needed.
As God sent messengers to Elijah in the desert, God sent messengers to me during the midnight of my soul.
Late at night in the hospital room, I was not alone…I was just searching my memories for a Mount Carmel kind of deity and it turns out that the one we call Holy is more of a Mount Horeb kind of God.
God’s power is not about showing off and making a scene on Mount Carmel. And it’s certainly not about killing and punishing and destroying.
God feeds us and urges us to keep moving on the journey. God’s power calls us into new life. God never stops dreaming dreams for who we can become.
The nature of God’s power is the same as the nature of God – it is Love.
And that Divine Love moves in and through our world today just as it did in the time of Elijah, beckoning us into new life.
Thanks be to God.
