Avoid the Tamed God (1 Kings 19)

Avoid the Tamed God

Charles Dickens made famous the line: “It was the best of times, and the worst of times”. The phrase comes to mind as I Kings 19 opens.  The prophet Elijah has been at the height of his prophetic work, confronting the corrupt court of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel and decrying the worship of the false god “Ba-al” that had taken over the worship of the God of Israel, the same God who made covenant with Abraham and brought the people out of bondage in Egypt.   Elijah is the old roaring lion, speaking with authority.

            Yet the text tells us, after the great defeat of the false prophets of the false god Baal, Elijah got wind of Jezebel’s threats to kill him, and Elijah ran for his life and hid.  What happened?  Why would Elijah the prophet be in the middle of the fray and then head for the hills?  The prophet once confident in the center of the court and public square is now out in the hinterlands.  The old icon of Elijah in the middle of nowhere (see your bulletin cover) sums this story up well:  the mighty prophet has lost his confidence.

            As for me, I find this story most empathetic.  While we tend to think of the characters in the Bible sometimes far removed from “our life” (aka “real life” with its pressures, stresses, and circumstances well beyond our understanding and control), the truth is this:  these folks called prophets, kings, matriarchs, and priests are as just as human as ourselves.  These are people who may be called to speak for God or get entangled in the drama and pathos of the sacred text, yet they are fallible, capable of following the right path or straying. 

Elijah, there in what appears to be the standard dress of male religious figures (aka “the old dude with flowing beard and a bathrobe”), is a man broken, frightened, and with very little hope within himself.  What we might dismiss as a two-dimensional text is quite textured with the same shades of grey and storm clouds that we live with.  He’s gotten through a number of challenges, yet he has nothing left within or no reservoir of inner strength to call upon. 

            As I read this text, I recalled a song lyric by the television writer Joss Whedon.  In one of his television series, one episode takes the form of a musical with the characters putting their inner strife or anxieties into song form.  At the end of the episode, the ensemble sings these words:

               Where do we go from here?

               where do we go from here? 

               the battle's done and we kinda won

               so we sound our victory cheer

               tell me...

               where do we go, from here?  (“Once More with Feeling”, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

            The characters in the Whedon “musical” are singing of “victory cheers” with half-hearted belief, knowing that their lives are less than perfect or not remotely going to plan.  So it is with the prophet hiding out in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Elijah sits in a far off part of the kingdom, far enough from Jezebel’s threats but not from the deep misgivings within.  He has “won” yet there is no “victory cheer” rising up from within.  He goes out into the desert in a deep depression.  He lies down to die, considering himself no better than those who have come before.  Despite his success, he feels hollow inside.  He’s ready to let go and give up.  “Just take me now,” he mutters as he lays down, ready to die.

            In Christian history, the desert serves as a powerful symbol of nothingness, where people have gone after becoming fed up or overrun by the passions and excesses of life.  Such people might be called monks, mystics, wanderers, or pilgrims, however, this is after they have found something transformative out in the desert.  Most enter the desert weary of life or confused about life’s questions.  Only after they have acclimated to the harsh “otherness” of the sand, the heat, or the barrenness do they begin seeing the prospects of the better path.

            Belden Lane, a Presbyterian scholar teaching at a Catholic university in St. Louis, has written a searing reflection on such experiences.  Entitled The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Lane guides you through the writings of many desert travelers, himself included, all out in the less traveled places of the earth.  He jokes that he seeks out those places where travel agents complain no person has ever wanted to visit.  In these places, where harsh desert extends as far as the eye can see, Lane contends the divine can be encountered. 

            Elijah is in the midst of depression when an angel appears, bringing good word and sustaining food.  It is a gift from the God that Elijah has thought absent or without care to his fate.  Despite the great defeat of the false idols and worship, despite the certain reality that Ahab and Jezebel’s corrupt reign surely shall crumble,  despite Elijah’s experiences being “the” prophet of God, he has had a failure of nerve and resigned himself to irrelevance.  The food Elijah is given is not a grand banquet, yet it is given to him as food for the journey, the same journey that he has veered off.

            Behind the scenes, those who read Hebrew (and those of us like myself who read people who read Hebrew!) note with some animation that the angel’s choice of table dressing.  The food Elijah is given appears on a hot coal.  This particular Hebrew word for “hot coal” only appears one other time in the Hebrew Scriptures when Isaiah is being commissioned as a prophet.  It is one of the more spectacular moments in the sacred text as Isaiah’s mouth is purified with a hot coal, made ready to speak God’s prophetic word.  Such rare use of this word highlights the intensity of this moment.  It is not a mere moment of feeling down.  It is Elijah at the crossroads of his life, being summoned anew to his calling.

            In Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning novel Gilead, the elderly preacher the Rev. John Ames writes a long letter to his young son.  (The Rev. Ames had a late-in-life, May/December marriage.)  Writing in the mid-1950s, he muses about his life as a third generation Midwestern preacher and ruminates on his declining health. 

He recounts a day in his own childhood during hard economic times when his father’s church burns down after lightning strikes.  The next day, the women and men of the parish gather to try their best to salvage what is left and tear down the smoky remains of the church building.  He remembers his father taking a moment to bring him something to eat.  In his father’s soot-covered hands is a small biscuit. 

“Never mind,” his father says, “there’s nothing cleaner than ash.”  But it affected the taste of that biscuit, which I thought might resemble the bread of affliction, which was often mentioned in those days, though it’s rather forgotten now. [Ames muses,] “Strange are the uses of adversity.”….

I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing “The Old Rugged Cross” while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost” (Gilead, p. 94-5)

Whether it is the prophet of old or the old preacher looking back at a traumatic childhood event, we learn in the midst of great loss or events that make you feel vulnerable or lost, God provides in unexpected ways.  Rev. Ames sees his father’s soot-dusted biscuit as something as sacred as the bread and wine of communion.  Elijah eats his meal and sees some sort of point that breaks his gloom and sets him back on the right path.  Elijah is told to eat up, otherwise, without such nourishment he would not survive the journey.  Indeed, this one meal is said to sustain him for forty days and forty nights!

Onwards, Elijah travels to Mount Horeb where he encounters the divine presence of God.  Much has been made of God’s choice of self-revelation.  There comes a mighty wind, a strong earthquake, and yet the text says God has yet to show up.  Then, in the least expected manner, God is said to be known in silence, or in the Hebrew: the sound of sheer/fine silence. 

Elijah is still claiming his insufficiency, though now with a bit more humility.  He feels a bit alone, still insufficient.  He has given much and done great things, yet he has very little confidence that things will turn out alright.  Encountering the divine presence chastens him as he wraps his mantle to protect himself from being overwhelmed by being so near to the holy, yet he still unnerved enough that he cannot be fully present in this moment. 

In the unique way of God at work in the world, we learn a bit about human and divine nature.  Elijah reflects the reality of human fallibility, being shown the path ahead yet still slow to embrace God’s abundance. God demonstrates how the world really works:  it is not about the spectacular or the expected.  God moves in ways unexpected and less obvious.  In the spectacle of silence, God is made known.

Elijah stands on Mount Horeb, again serving as a “call back” to the earlier history of Israel, recalling Moses and the time of the Covenant being made between God and the people.  Weary from wandering the desert, the people are summoned to a new way of understanding their identity and their calling.  This is the same covenantal relationship that Elijah finds the people breaking with disregard, and he has been a champion of proclaiming the covenant loyalty expected by God of God’s people. 

Elijah finds himself at the cusp of a new chapter in his life.  He has been given many signs of God’s presence in his life, culminating with being brought literally into the divine presence.  He has struggled as much as the next, yet in the midst of his travails, God has been slowly reminding Elijah of his heritage and his destiny.

            In a nutshell, 1 Kings 19 recalls the tapestry of Israel: the wanderings in the wilderness, the call to be a prophet, the danger of worshipping other gods, the summons to be the people in covenant loyalty.  Elijah rises up and continues his journey, faithful beyond his misgivings.  So this story is handed down to us:  wherever you are in life, whatever you assess your lot in life to be, have you been silent and listened for God?  Have you made yourself receptive to God’s plans rather than those of your own toil and worry?  Have you listened?  Have you discerned?  Have you been transformed by God’s holy presence at work in your life?