Trinity 1, Year C
OT Reading : 1 Kings 19.1-4, 8-15a
Gospel : Luke 8.26-39
Our Old Testament reading this morning, about the heroic exploits of the great prophet Elijah, is almost uncannily appropriate to our situation this morning. It’s more than three months since we had any rain to speak of, and we are beginning to worry about it. In Elijah’s Israel, there had been no rain for more than three years, and the people were getting really desperate. Scientific forecasting was of course unknown, so it was natural enough to blame the gods for the life-threatening drought which they were experiencing. But to whom should they turn for relief?
Elijah put his trust in the God of Israel, who had helped him to find both food and water during the years of drought and famine, but Israel at that time was much influenced by King Ahab’s wicked Queen Jezebel, who had introduced the worship of a false god called Baal. (We can call her wicked Queen Jezebel because she really is depicted as something of a pantomime villain, with no redeeming features). Elijah had challenged the prophets of Baal to a great contest on Mount Carmel, in which he and they would each prepare a sacrifice, and the winner would be the god who sent fire to consume the sacrifice. The prophets of Baal danced frantically around their altar all day, to no avail, but when Elijah called on his god, the fire came down from heaven to roast the sacrifice. When the contest was over, Elijah sent his servant to the top of the mountain to look for rain. Not a cloud in the sky until, at the seventh time of asking, his prayers were answered with the first sign of the clouds which would bring rain to the parched land.
Fire and rain. A double triumph for Elijah. But our reading tells us how Jezebel reacted with swift and murderous intent when she hears that all her prophets had been put to the sword. Threatened with the same fate, our courageous prophet is caught suddenly off balance. Fearing for his life, he runs the whole length of Israel, from Mt Carmel in the north to Beer Sheba in the south, and then out into the wilderness beyond, where he calls on God to end his life.
Sitting there in the wilderness under the shade of his solitary broom tree, Elijah confesses before God that for all his zeal for the God of his ancestors, when the chips were down, he has been a coward in the face of Queen Jezebel’s wrath, a failure as God’s prophet. Now there is nowhere to go. But he is so tired that he goes to sleep, and as he sleeps an angel brings him food. When he wakes, he knows that he needs to go further in his search for God, and he has just enough strength for the next stage of his journey.
When he reaches Horeb, the holy mountain, and confesses his sense of failure in the presence of God, God responds with an astonishing revelation of his nature. There is a great wind, an earthquake, a fire, all signs of the God of overwhelming power, whom Elijah thought he was serving. But Elijah senses that the Lord God is not present in any of these manifestations; and after all that there is a sound of sheer silence. It is when he listens to the silence that he receives in his heart the guidance he needs for the next steps in his own great career as a prophet. He is to anoint various kings, and Elisha as his servant and successor. Moreover, he is not alone. He receives the assurance that there are in Israel seven thousand faithful souls that have not bowed the knee to Baal.
So what might Elijah’s roller-coaster experience of triumph, despair, and a new equilibrium have to teach us to-day? How might it be relevant to Sebastian and Maximilian as we receive them by baptism into the family of God’s people, and set them on the path which we hope will lead them into faith?
Elijah’s experience put me in mind of Rudyard Kipling’s poem IF:
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two Impostors just the same …
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – what is more – you’ll be a Man, my Son.
That may be sound advice for Sebastian and Maximilian, and for all of us, so far as it goes, but there are times when Kipling’s robust but rather blinkered and masculine attitude isn’t enough. That’s when we need to remember Elijah’s awesome encounter with God in the sound of sheer silence. That silence, pregnant with God’s presence, is still there to hold and envelop us, amidst all the highs and lows of a stressful life, when we find the confidence to relax into the arms of the God who knows us and loves us.
Elijah’s experience of the sound of sheer silence may was as true an expression of the presence of the Spirit of God as was the peace, after all the troubling demons had been dismissed, that rested on the man Jesus encountered in the wild country of the Gerasenes (Luke 8.26-39). When he went away proclaiming what Christ had done for him the contrast between his distraught troubled past and the peace he had found when the demons left him, will have been at the heart of his message. Is it not that same peace which filled the disciples, gently when Jesus breathed on them in St John’s account of the sending of the Holy Spirit (John 20.19-23)? Is it not that same peace which steals into our hearts, with the sound of sheer silence, as we share in the body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who is the Prince of Peace.