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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