This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 8/11/24, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: 1 Kings 19:1-18. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
This morning’s scripture passage is a Quaker favorite. We really love the story of Elijah encountering the “still, small voice” of God amidst all the noise and tumult of the world.
This metaphor – the “still, small voice” of God that speaks into the life of every human being – is central to the Quaker faith. It’s at the heart of George Fox’s message, that “Christ is come to teach his people himself.” Our faith identifies this still, small voice as the resurrected Jesus – the rock and foundation of our lives. The Quaker tradition of Christianity teaches us that all our discernment, all our decisions, as individuals and as a community, should be rooted in this still, small voice – the light of Jesus within us and among us.
Given how important this metaphor is to us as Quakers, it’s worth our time to dig into the context of the story we’ve heard this morning. What led the Hebrew prophet Elijah into his famous encounter with the voice of God?
Prior to our reading this morning, Elijah has just gone through a huge amount of conflict – literal battle with King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, who are supporting the idolatrous Baal religion of the wider region. (Jezabel is a foreign princess, from Phoenicia, who has brought her idol worship with her. She is a major patron of the Baal cult, and Ahab has joined her in this. Together, they’ve set up a temple to Baal at Mount Carmel, in Samaria.)
In the midst of Ahab’s disastrous kingship, Elijah has been a servant of the Lord. He is serving as God’s agent and mouthpiece to Ahab and the ruling classes of Israel. He has been challenging the intrusion of false religion into his society. God has given him authority to declare a drought of three years because of Ahab’s evil actions. The drought is so severe that Elijah is only able to survive it through God’s miraculous intervention, and the hospitality of a poor widow at Zarephath.
After three years of climate disaster and famine, it is time for the drought to end. Elijah marks this occasion by showing up at Mount Carmel in Samaria, where Ahab and Jezebel have set up a temple to Baal. Elijah says that he is the only prophet of God left, and he challenges the 450 prophets of Baal to a contest: Each of them will call upon the name of their own god, and whichever god sends fire from heaven will be acknowledged as the true God.
The priests of Baal spend the whole morning calling on the name of their God, but Baal doesn’t answer. Not a peep out of Baal. But when Elijah calls on the name of the Lord, the bull, the altar, and even the water that Elijah had poured on the offering are immediately consumed by fire from heaven. Seeing the power of God, the people are convinced, and Elijah orders them to slaughter all of the prophets of Baal. The penalty for false prophecy is death.
Once the slaughter of the priests of Baal is complete, God sends a miraculous thunderstorm to conclude the three years of drought.
This is where our passage begins. Ahab runs back home and tells Jezabel what has happened, and she is furious. Jezabel sends a message to Elijah, letting him know that before the day is out, she intends to kill him. (By the way, I wonder why she didn’t send an assassin, rather than a messenger!)
So Elijah runs, overcome by fear of Jezebel and her murderous threats. Elijah is terrified! After all that has happened – after God has sent his power from heaven and confirmed his might – Elijah runs. He runs away into the wilderness, again, where God sends a ministering angel to feed him so that he will not be too weak to make the journey.
And journey he does, all the way to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God where the Lord once spoke to Moses.
When Elijah arrives at Mount Horeb, Elijah hides himself away in a cave to spend the night. And that’s when Elijah hears the voice of God, asking him, “What are you doing here?”
Elijah says, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
No mention of the fire from heaven. No mention of the thunderstorm. No mention, even of the provision from the angel, that allowed Elijah to reach this place. No memory that the priests of Baal have been defeated, put to death by the people of Mount Carmel, who are now convinced that the Lord is God. To hear Elijah tell the story, all is lost! (Elijah’s lack of perspective is truly baffling here.)
To all this, God simply replies: “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”
Standing there, Elijah gets the moment of glory that we Quakers love to reference:
Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.
And then it says that the voice of God asks him again: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” And Elijah gives God the same answer, word for word.
This is a very boring conversation, and a confusing one: Elijah has just encountered the presence of the Lord on the mountain of God, where Moses before him received the Law and the tablets of the 10 Commandments. And after all this, his mindset hasn’t changed at all. He’s still afraid and self-pitying.
The encounter with God winds down at this point. It’s still not clear why Elijah came to Mount Horeb. He gives no compelling answer to God’s query, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” But the conversation moves on. God tells Elijah to return the way he came, and continue the work of the Lord: Anoint a new king over Aram, and another one over Israel. And God tells Elijah to anoint a successor, Elisha, to continue his work.
And that’s what Elijah does. He goes back the way he came. He returns to the wilderness of Damascus and encounters Elisha, whom he calls as his disciple and successor. And Elijah continues serving as God’s prophet for some time afterward. The road goes on; the work continues.
What is the meaning of this story? Why did Elijah travel to Horeb to take refuge in that cave? Why was he so afraid of Jezebel, right after seeing the Lord’s power at Mount Carmel? What was the purpose of this repetitive conversation with God – no law was given, as to Moses, just a simple question asked, repeatedly: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
There was wind, and earthquake, and fire, but the still, small voice was there in the midst of it all, just like it was before.
Elijah had been an instrument of God’s visible power – famine, fire, mass violence – and would be an instrument of even more of God’s judgment before his time as a prophet was done. Elijah was fully engaged in the work of the Lord, a work that took him to very dark, dangerous places.
What was he doing at Horeb? God’s query does not seem rhetorical. The voice is there when he arrives. It is there in the midst of the chaos. And it is there afterwards, when he stands at the mouth of the cave. “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
What are we doing here this morning?
Do we imagine that here, in this quiet retreat, in our sanctuary of cedar, God will tell us something different from what he has been trying to tell us all week long?
What are we doing here?
I’m reminded of how Jesus asked the blind man, Bartimaeus, when he came to him for the restoration of sight: “What do you want me to do for you?”
Did Elijah recognize his own blindness – his fear in the face of human threats, when God was so clearly with him, so powerful that he would rain down fire from heaven and send thunderstorms to end a drought?
What about us? Do we recognize our own blindness – our need to have our sight restored, so that we can see the world the way God sees it?
“What do you want me to do for you?” “Why are you here, Elijah?”
The world is not what we expected it to be. It is full of darkness and evil and pain. The winds and earthquakes and fires of this chaotic age threaten to throw us off our foundation, to distract us from that still, small voice of God that is speaking to us in each and every moment.
We are tempted to think that the point of the Christian life is to seek that quiet moment, the tender voice that will whisper to us and tell us that everything is OK.
But what Elijah discovered, and countless generations of faithful people since Elijah’s day have discovered is that this still, small voice is calling us into the hard places. He is sending us back into the world, with all its terror and violence. It is sending us as men and women of God, who can get directly involved in the suffering of the world, and speak God’s word into it. Even when we don’t want to go, even when it’s frightening and uncertain.
The still, small voice is there – always there, always available – to remind us that we belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. The power of God, the majesty of God is at work within us, to bless the world and bring about God’s kingdom.
The experience of Elijah is confirmed in the experience of the early Quakers, who found that, in the words of William Penn: “True godliness doesn’t turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavors to mend it…” Penn wrote that, “Christians should keep the helm and guide the vessel to its port; not meanly steal out at the stern of the world and leave those that are in it without a pilot to be driven by the fury of evil times upon the rock or sand of ruin.”
When Elijah made his way to the mountain of God at Horeb, he was tempted to “steal out at the stern of the world” and leave the people of Israel without a pilot, to be “driven by the fury of evil times upon the rock or sand of ruin.” But that’s not why God called Elijah. That’s not why he has called us.
God has chosen us so that we, being strengthened by his inward power, might take the risks of full engagement with the world as it is, encountering it on its own terms, so that it might, through our faithful presence, one day be reconciled to God.
Will we be faithful? Will we avail ourselves of this time of inward listening, hearing and receiving the still, small voice of God in our midst – to encourage us, strengthen us, and direct us in our course back out into the world that so desperately needs the light of God?
It’s hard to conclude this sermon simply, because we’re left with a tension here in this story. On the one hand, we are called to listen and attend to the voice of God. At the same time, we are encouraged to be faithful to the word that we have already heard, refusing to be dominated by fear and doubt. We need to listen, but once we’ve heard, we need to be faithful. We need to obey.
Sometimes, the truth is, we already know enough. We’ve heard what the still, small voice wants to tell us, and all our prayers and supplications can be a distraction from the hard work of acting on the message we’ve been given.
I’m reminded of a famous quote from the eclectic philosopher, Alan Watts, who said, “If you get the message, hang up the phone.”
Have we gotten the message?
There is a time for contemplation and discernment. There is also a time for action. What is the action that God is calling us to, today? What is the message that God has revealed in us, that we must be faithful to?
What are those things that we do know? What will it take for us to finally stop deceiving ourselves, imagining that we need just one more “talk with Jesus” before we can do the work and lead the lives he has commanded us?