Sunday, June 23, 2013

What Are You Doing Here? by Rev Steven R Mitchell, based on I Kings 19:1-15a


What Are You Doing Here?

By Rev Steven R Mitchell

Mountain View United Church, Aurora, CO 6-23-2013

Based on I Kings 19: 1-15a

        Two years ago during our first Lenten Season together, I showed a movie titled “Meet the Browns”.  The series was called Theology according to Tyler Perry, an African American story teller and producer.  In the opening scenes of this movie you meet Mss Brown, a single working mother with three children.  You learn that she has been deserted by the men she had loved, living in the projects, victim of wage theft, and because of that wasn’t able to keep up with her bills.  She was literally at the end of her rope.  She breaks down at the dining table of the wise old woman who is babysitting her youngest daughter, sharing her utter helplessness and saying, “I just don’t know why I can’t keep it together anymore.”  The old woman asks her if she prays.  “Yes I pray all the time but it seems like God isn’t listening.”  The old woman responds, “Then God is getting ready to do something special in your life.  When you keep faith with God and nothing seems to be going right, then God is getting ready to do something special in your life!”

I think Elijah might have been feeling the same way as Mss Brown was feeling.

Here is a story about a man who was called by God to help Israel remember their God.  Times were tough for a prophet of God in those days.

King Ahab had a wife who didn’t worship Israel’s God, nor did she ever intend to abide by any other god other than the one she had grown up worshiping, the god Baal.  The conflict between whose god was going to be worshipped, that of Israel’s or of Queen Jezebel was so intense that there was a show down between the priests of Baal (Jezebel’s god) and Elijah (Israel’s prophet.)  Elijah and the priest of Baal had a contest on which god would come and accept an offering first.  Elijah let the priest’s of Baal go first, letting them do all their ritual acts of worship through half the day, their god didn’t come down to accept their sacrifice.  Elijah then build his alter, had the wood that was to be used to burn drenched in water, not once, not twice, but three times.  Then he sacrificed the calf and prayed to the God of Israel to accept this sacrifice and show Israel that their God was still their God and a God of action.  Down comes fire from heaven and consumes the offering, the wood, and the alter, leaving nothing.  At which point, Elijah feeling he had God’s justification had all the priests of Baal killed on the spot.

One would think, with this kind of power behind you, as Elijah was showing, if you were Ahab and Queen Jezebel, you would have repented and turned to once again worship the God of Israel.  Not Jezebel.  She wasn’t going to let something like that stop her from having her way.  She retaliated by putting a contract on Elijah’s head, which is where our story picks up this morning, a story about despair, confusion, and defeat.  It’s a story that we all will face at some point in our lives, if we haven’t already been there.  I believe that there is a time in each person’s life where we are at the very end of our rope.  I just can’t go on Lord.”  There’s no more fight in me, God.  I just want to die, please.”

Elijah has now become a man with a price on his head.  He has to go on the lame in order not to be killed.  He heads south, as far south as he can get, down to Mount Horeb.  Elijah was a man totally confused and utterly dismayed, not because of Queen Jezebel trying to kill him but because he was not seeing the fruits of what he believed he was “called” to be doing.  Elijah was called by God to show the Israelites that their God was still with them, was the one true God, the God that would and could intervene in their lives.  After the defeat of Baal, people should have been going back to the Temple in droves, yet that wasn’t the case.  Jezebel hadn’t repented and had systematically worked at having all of Yahweh’s priests put to death and Ahab didn’t seem to be doing anything to stop her. 

Was I wrong God?” Elijah must have been thinking to himself.  This is the type of second guessing, the type of questions that we start to ask ourselves when we have been following a course of action and yet nothing constructive seems to be coming out of it.  It’s the feelings of failure that you get when you know deep in your gut that what you were working to achieve was the right thing for you, and yet it didn’t work out the way that it should have.  Your standing there left to pick up the pieces, and yet those pieces seem like they will never fit back together, just like Humpty Dumpty.

Elijah’s going south to Mount Horeb wasn’t just running away, he was looking for answers.  His trip down to Mount Horeb was known as the mount of God.  We also know this mount as Mount Sinai, where God spoke to Moses.  Once Elijah got to Mount Horeb God came to him saying,”What are you doing here?  Elijah didn’t say, “Well it was because I was told to come here.  Rather, Elijah was so filled with his emotional stuff that he tells God all that’s gone wrong, “I have been zealous for you God; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with sword.  I am the only one left and they want to kill me as well.

Then Elijah was told to do this one simple thing.  Go out and stand at the mouth of the cave, because God was going to be passing by.  Then God does this Cecil B. DeMile thing with the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, each time scripture says, “God wasn’t in it”, and then comes the sound of sheer silence.  Now there God was to be found!  Then came the voice of God once again, “What are you doing here?  Did Elijah say, because I was told to be here?  No he proceeds to unload his story of woe to God once again.  Do you know what advise God gave him?  After all, Elijah had come down to the place where God hangs out to get first hand advise.  God tells him, to stay out in the wilderness and go up to Damascus!  So what is this, doesn’t God give us answers?  Are we supposed to just figure it out on our own? 

The story tells me a couple of important truths.  The first truth is: when we are at our lowest God is still walking with us.  God sent an angel down to Elijah and feed him, and then he sent another angel down and feed him again telling to eat because he had a long journey ahead of him.  A second important truth is: When looking for advice from God, be ready to receive it.  Even when Elijah was at the place where God was passing by, Elijah wasn’t ready to hear what God had to say.  How do I know?  Because he sent him back up North on another long journey.  If it took forty days for Elijah to get from where he was at to Mount Horeb, it was going to take about twice as long for him to make his way up to Damascus.  That’s a lot of alone time for soul searching thoughts on a walk such as that.  A third truth is: God is generally working behind the scenes through other people, not just ourselves.  If you look ahead in scripture, you find that God has all sorts of people for Elijah to anoint to do God’s will.  Elijah anoints a couple of new kings that end up taking out Ahab and Queen Jezebel.

        The question that God asked Elijah and it’s the question that each of us when we are at our lowest points in life is, “What are we doing here?”  Sometimes the answers are giving to us readily, but more times than not, I think we are more like Elijah, needing more quiet times in order to be able to receive the answers that God has for us.  Amen

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