Strength and Weakness Together
Sermon by: Rev. Mary Alice Mulligan, Ph.D.
Scripture: 1 Kings 19:1-19
Let’s look at 1 Kings. Although not a well-known section of Hebrew scripture, there is an interesting story here. For political reasons, the Israelite King, Ahab, marries the Phoenician princess, Jezebel, who brings with her the worship of her nation’s god, Baal. So the people of Israel are torn between Baal and Yahweh. To call the people of Israel back to Yahweh, Elijah challenges Jezebel’s henchmen, 450 of her top prophets, to a show of strength. They should call on Baal to set a sacrifice alight. On the appointed morning, they begin imploring Baal to send down fire on a sacrificial bull. Nothing happens. Around noon, Elijah, who has been cooling his heels all morning, begins to ridicule them. Maybe they should shout louder; their god might be napping. They get more intense, cut themselves, cry out violently. And still nothing happens. Then, Elijah has servants dig a trench around his stack of wood. He lays his bull on the wood, has the wood doused over and over with huge jars of water, until the trench around the bull is full. Then he calls on LORD Yahweh to send fire, and fire falls (just like that), consuming the wood, the bull, and the water in the trench. Then Elijah seizes the prophets of Baal and kills them. The amazing contest between a single prophet Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal makes for a really good read. 1 Kings, Chapter 18. Give it a glance later today. Elijah was fearless, zealous, and apparently unstoppable. But that isn’t the end of the story. Stop now and read 1 Kings 19:1-19.
Many of us may not have a very firm picture of Elijah, the ancient Israelite prophet of Yahweh. We may remember people always seem to mention him first when they talk about ancient prophets, but what do we remember of his prophetic life? The scene where he challenges Jezebel’s prophets of Baal, mocks them, then shows Yahweh’s power and faithfulness is one of the best parts. But something we may like even more about Elijah, actually, is how he shows his human frailty right on the heels of his seeming to be an almost superhuman priest. He singlehandedly proves the supremacy of Yahweh over Baal and 450 opponents, and then he has a nervous breakdown. Lucky for him he isn’t alone.
The truth is, crises come to everyone. Even God’s prophetic stars can falter. Lots of faithful people do fantastic faithful work, beyond the point of normal fatigue. Some people even seem to gain energy as they perform whatever tasks God sets before them. But then suddenly they hit exhaustion like a brick wall. They crash – overwhelmed.
No one was more cocksure of himself than Elijah, challenging 450 prophets of Baal. With Yahweh’s companionship, 450 to 1 seemed fine odds to Elijah. But after, when the queen flies into a rage, threatening that she will not rest until Elijah is dead, he freaks out, runs away, and collapses in the desert. He’s afraid, depleted, and asks to die. If Elijah can have a crisis of faith, certainly anyone can.
St Teresa of Calcutta’s biography reveals she experienced long periods without sensing God’s presence. Even as she struggled to continue her grueling ministry as servant to society’s poorest during their final, desperate days of illness, she sometimes felt so abandoned by God that she wondered if she would ever feel God’s presence again. People were shocked by her admission, but the truth is no one is immune. Anyone’s faith can be strong enough to carry them through a catastrophe but then all of a sudden it’s as if some monster comes and sucks out their faith.
Think of the strong church member who takes on leadership of an important, new mission, say the youth spaghetti supper fundraiser. He carefully plans out all the steps, pushes himself beyond human limits, and the event is a miraculous success. But when he finds himself still in the building at midnight with two surly teen-agers and several loads of dishes yet to do, as the garbage disposal backs up the drain on the kitchen floor, spreading red sauce dishwater everywhere, he just can’t go on. He is done.
The wall has a familiar feel to it, often topped off by the question: “If God is so powerful, why isn’t there some divine intervention here?” Most folks who step out in faith, who succeed at some amazing faith effort, also know the feeling of hitting the wall. Exhaustion comes to everyone.
But God is constant. We might better say, God never fails. Even when we don’t sense God with us; even when God cannot intervene to change some horrible circumstance, still God has not abandoned us. However, we know God’s presence happens around us in various ways. Scripture indicates God is present sometimes in the sending of holy fire – which is able to consume a water-logged, slaughtered bull, in the blink of an eye. But most of us don’t experience such displays.
Other times the presence of God is almost indescribably mysterious. People use imprecise language because the experience is beyond words – like what Elijah heard at the cave, indicating God was present. The old King James Version used the phrase, “a still small voice;” but the modern translation is probably clearer, “the sound of sheer silence.” Perhaps like the eerie lull just before the storm erupts, sheer silence. Or just the opposite, when the presence of God explodes in earthquake and tornado and wildfire, until the power and sound and chaos combine into sheer, hold-your-breath, almost palpable, silence.
But most of us may not have experienced God like that, either. For us, God’s faithfulness is most often experienced as the continuing presence of the Spirit of the Resurrected Christ among us, which is a presence we trust, even when we cannot sense it; for we believe what scripture reports Jesus said, “…remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”(1) The Spirit will never abandon us. Robert Farrar Capon says it this way: “The Mystery of Christ manifested in Jesus, therefore, is the Mystery of the irrevocable marriage of God to creation – of a completely restored relationship ‘for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health.’”(2) The word the Bible uses over and over is grace. Our Creator loves us, forgives us, and is always with us. God never leaves us.
And then God gives us each other. We discover God intends us to be together. We are never alone. God’s gift to us is other people to share living out our faith. If we flip back to Genesis to hear again the creation story, everything is divinely pronounced as good, even very good. But one thing we are told God says is not good. God is reported to say, “It is not good for the human to be alone.(3) We need each other.
Perhaps here was Elijah’s trouble. He had the mistaken notion that he was the only faithful one left in all of Israel. No wonder he was ready to cash in his chips. A person cannot do ministry alone. So, when Elijah finally listens, God says there are 7,000 others. Hear it? Seven thousand others, including folk ready to step into important leadership.
What this means for us is God gives us each other, here in St Andrew Church and beyond. Followers of Jesus are drawn into Christ. We live in him. And because we live in Christ, we are intimately connected to each other. Our prayers for each other are perfect examples of this connection. In prayer, we open ourselves into the eternal presence of God. Then when we lift others before God, we find we are all connected. There we are in the most glorious place, as if completely absorbed into the very being of God, with the very being of the person we are praying for. What a gift.
We are invited together to step into divine life, where each of us brings whatever little gifts we have, dumps them into the presence of God, and finds ourselves caught up into the holy “communion of saints.” All the followers in the community of faith, where Christ is the head; we find ourselves in mutual relationship, with God and each other. In Christ, we bear each other’s burdens, strengthen each other for the tasks ahead, and breathe in the power of the Holy Spirit, together. A poet reminds us: “For the strength of the pack is the wolf, And the strength of the wolf is the pack.”(4) So with us. The divine plan is that not one of us is ever alone, for we are all in Christ. God has given us each other.
1 Matthew 28:20b.
2 Robert Farrar Capon, The Mystery of Christ …and why we don’t get it (Eerdmans, 1993), 66.
3 Genesis 2:18.
4 Rudyard Kipling, quoted in Story Anthology for Public Speakers, ed. Morris Mandel (Jonathan David, 1966), 51.