A Sermon for Pescadero Community Church on August 13, 2017.
“Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by." 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. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"
Let me tell you a couple of things about Elijah.
Elijah is called to be a prophet to God’s people—to remind them that they belong to God and God belongs to them. The nation of Israel is divided, and the people have ignored the commandments of God.
In the stories about him in the Bible, Elijah runs 100 miles to escape Queen Jezebel who gets angry with him after he kills her prophets. That story goes that he’d been asked by God to go tell the Queen that she and her priests have led the Israelites astray and to prove that her priests are false. That’s the story in the Bible where the priests of Queen Jezebel and Elijah have a show down to prove who is the most powerful.
Several times in his life story, he gets so overwhelmed by his calling as a prophet that he asks God to just kill him—it’s too hard. God asks him to do things like yell at the queen or say that the government is corrupt. He’s had to stay with foreigners and perform miracles, including the first instance of raising someone from the dead. When the people meet Jesus in the stories of the New Testament, they think he is Elijah returned.
But here in this story of Elijah, we meet Elijah in this text at Horeb, in a cave on Mt. Sinai, the same place where Moses heard God and received the Ten Commandments.
Let me tell you a couple of things about the people of Israel at this point in history when this story from 1 Kings was told.
They are a people in exile, a people who have been led by corrupt leaders who destroyed the kingdom of Israel. The Kingdom is now divided into North and South and the North is being ruled by a king who does not follow the laws given to the Israelites by God.
They are a people who have learned to question authority, because their history is full of kings who have been corrupt or unethical or who have made laws and decrees that favor one kind of people over others.
They are a people who have been on their own journeys- traveling to a land that was promised to them and then taken to Egypt as slaves and then out of Egypt by Moses and then wandering for forty years. They are perpetual immigrants in a strange land, trying to decide what parts of their identity to hang on to and what to let go of.
In the Bible, whenever the people of Israel are wandering and a little confused about who they are, God sends prophets to teach the people and help them come back to the teachings that they have been given by the prophets and Moses. Many of the prophets are written as angry and frustrated because the people are written as confused and forgetful—and I always feel a little better about my faith journey when I realize that my questions and doubts and confusion are just the same as what the questions and doubts and confusions have been for the people who try to follow God for generations.
But I also get their wandering and wondering about their identities. Many of you know that I now live part of the time in California and part of the time in New Jersey as I’m working on a PhD in religion. I’ve never felt more out of place living in New Jersey—I’m older than a lot of my colleagues… I’m one of the only religious members of my cohort (though no one is particularly hostile to faith)… and I often take notes in class by drawing. I’m also the student in many classes who argues when other students focus on just white theologians… and I got some strong glares at a conference when I told a panel on agriculture and religion that they really missed the mark by not even mentioning farmworkers. I’m making a lot of friends! But really, being in a new place with new people has helped me understand what’s most important to me, and has helped me see who I’m called to be. And to be fair, I’m not this ornery on my own—I have good mentors and friends at school who support and guide me when I have doubts about whether I should even be in New Jersey. It has, indeed, felt like a calling to be there, however, even as I try to find God there. It’s harder to hear and see God in New Jersey when I’ve gotten used to feeling God at the ocean or in the woods or on a trail.
This summer I went to Nicaragua and Peru for six weeks as a sort of pilgrimage. I studied Spanish and did a lot of painting and learned a lot about Andean cosmology and climate change. But I also spent a lot of time running, covering 110 miles in the month of July and those miles felt like wandering. Those hours running in the mountains were good opportunities to think about what I’d learned during the day but also to think about how God is calling me in my life—how I’m being changed by the world around me—how what I know about God is being informed by other people. And it was time for me to listen to whatever God was calling me to next. I didn’t ever hear a voice out of the silence, and there were moments when I wished for something flashy and loud like a windstorm. But instead I listened to the silence of rural Peru and stopped to look at the river and tried to remember who I am.
I’ve been thinking about those moments a lot this week as I’ve been watching the events unfold in Charlottesville, NC. I wasn’t listening when there was a call for 1000 clergy to come to hold vigil during the time when members of the Alt Right and the KKK were gathering to protest the removal of a General Robert E. Lee statue from a park. I wasn’t really paying attention when the KKK-related protesters surrounded a church full of those clergy in a prayer service—didn’t really hear that they came with torches and angry shouts and death threats. Instead I’d been paying attention to our family who had come to visit and to the small world around me which I love so much. But I started to listen when a car plowed through the people who gathered to face off against the group of white supremacists. I started to hear the words of my friends and colleagues who stood in those lines who said that to not actively denounce white supremacy in our country would be to denounce Jesus the Christ and his teachings of love, acceptance, healing and justice. And then I heard the President of the United States refuse to denounce white supremacy and heard colleagues say that we who are white must put our bodies and safety on the line for antiracism because people of color have been taking the brunt of race-based violence for centuries.
It feels a little like we in the United States are a people who are wandering and who have forgotten who we’re meant to be. If we identify as Christians, as people of God, we must claim who we are going to be in our country. What do we hear when we listen?
I wonder if the windstorm, earthquake, and fire were meant to try to distract Elijah with flashiness—would Elijah assume that God would appear in whatever was loudest or scariest? Instead, God comes in the silence, like a calm that cuts through the noise.
Elijah meets God in a place where God has appeared before and God does not ask for anything new. God simply says to Elijah, “what are you doing here?” And then God sends Elijah back to do the work he’s been called to do—to love the people and to call the people to love God. It is a simple—and hard—task, one that is at the heart of the work of a prophet.
And what will we hear today? As we listen to the outcry about Charlottesville, will we be distracted by calls to militarization or flashy explanations about how racism is just a problem in the South? Or will we be distracted by people who call themselves Christians but say that racism has a place in the church or in the world? Or will we be moved by our calling to love all people, but especially people on the margins, across boundaries and borders, across race and gender and sexual orientation, welcoming the stranger and working for justice—hard tasks but simple because these are the tasks we’ve always had.
What are we doing here, church, to be God’s people?
***
Litany against white supremacy
By Elizabeth Rawlings and Jennie Chrien
Gracious and loving God,
In the beginning, you created humanity and declared us very good
We were made in Africa, came out of Egypt.
Our beginnings, all of our beginnings, are rooted in dark skin.
We are all siblings. We are all related.
We are all your children.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
Violence entered creation through Cain and Abel.
Born of jealousy, rooted in fear of scarcity,
Brother turned against brother
The soil soaked with blood, Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
When your people cried out in slavery,
You heard them. You did not ignore their suffering.
You raised up leaders who would speak truth to power
And lead your people into freedom.
Let us hear your voice; grant us the courage to answer your call.
Guide us towards justice and freedom for all people.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
Through the prophets you told us the worship you want is for us
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke;
Yet we continue to serve our own interest,
To oppress our workers, to crush our siblings by the neck because we are afraid.
Because they don’t look like us, act like us, talk like us.
Yet, they are us. And we are them.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
In great love you sent to us Jesus, your Son,
Born in poverty, living under the rule of a foreign empire,
Brown-skinned, dark-haired, middle-Eastern.
They called him Yeshua, your Son,
Who welcomed the unwelcome, accepted the unacceptable--
The foreigners, the radicals, the illiterate, the poor,
The agents of empire and the ones who sought to overthrow it,
The men and women who were deemed unclean because of their maladies.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
The faith of Christ spread from region to region, culture to culture.
You delight in the many voices, many languages, raised to you.
You teach us that in Christ, “There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female.”
In Christ, we are all one.
Not in spite of our differences, but in them.
Black, brown, and white; female, non-binary, and male; citizen and immigrant,
In Christ we are all one.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
Each week, we confess our sin to you and to one another.
We know that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.
We are captive to the sin of white supremacy,
Which values some lives more than others,
Which believes some skin tones are more perfect than others,
Which commits violence against those who are different.
We confess our complicity in this sin.
We humbly repent.
We ask for the strength to face our sin, to dismantle it, and to be made anew
We trust in your compassion and rely on your mercy
Praying that you will give us your wisdom and guide us in your way of peace,
That you will renew us as you renew all of creation
In accordance with your will.
We ask this, we pray this, as your children, all siblings, all related, all beloved children of God.
Amen.
“Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by." 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. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"
Let me tell you a couple of things about Elijah.
Elijah is called to be a prophet to God’s people—to remind them that they belong to God and God belongs to them. The nation of Israel is divided, and the people have ignored the commandments of God.
In the stories about him in the Bible, Elijah runs 100 miles to escape Queen Jezebel who gets angry with him after he kills her prophets. That story goes that he’d been asked by God to go tell the Queen that she and her priests have led the Israelites astray and to prove that her priests are false. That’s the story in the Bible where the priests of Queen Jezebel and Elijah have a show down to prove who is the most powerful.
Several times in his life story, he gets so overwhelmed by his calling as a prophet that he asks God to just kill him—it’s too hard. God asks him to do things like yell at the queen or say that the government is corrupt. He’s had to stay with foreigners and perform miracles, including the first instance of raising someone from the dead. When the people meet Jesus in the stories of the New Testament, they think he is Elijah returned.
But here in this story of Elijah, we meet Elijah in this text at Horeb, in a cave on Mt. Sinai, the same place where Moses heard God and received the Ten Commandments.
Let me tell you a couple of things about the people of Israel at this point in history when this story from 1 Kings was told.
They are a people in exile, a people who have been led by corrupt leaders who destroyed the kingdom of Israel. The Kingdom is now divided into North and South and the North is being ruled by a king who does not follow the laws given to the Israelites by God.
They are a people who have learned to question authority, because their history is full of kings who have been corrupt or unethical or who have made laws and decrees that favor one kind of people over others.
They are a people who have been on their own journeys- traveling to a land that was promised to them and then taken to Egypt as slaves and then out of Egypt by Moses and then wandering for forty years. They are perpetual immigrants in a strange land, trying to decide what parts of their identity to hang on to and what to let go of.
In the Bible, whenever the people of Israel are wandering and a little confused about who they are, God sends prophets to teach the people and help them come back to the teachings that they have been given by the prophets and Moses. Many of the prophets are written as angry and frustrated because the people are written as confused and forgetful—and I always feel a little better about my faith journey when I realize that my questions and doubts and confusion are just the same as what the questions and doubts and confusions have been for the people who try to follow God for generations.
But I also get their wandering and wondering about their identities. Many of you know that I now live part of the time in California and part of the time in New Jersey as I’m working on a PhD in religion. I’ve never felt more out of place living in New Jersey—I’m older than a lot of my colleagues… I’m one of the only religious members of my cohort (though no one is particularly hostile to faith)… and I often take notes in class by drawing. I’m also the student in many classes who argues when other students focus on just white theologians… and I got some strong glares at a conference when I told a panel on agriculture and religion that they really missed the mark by not even mentioning farmworkers. I’m making a lot of friends! But really, being in a new place with new people has helped me understand what’s most important to me, and has helped me see who I’m called to be. And to be fair, I’m not this ornery on my own—I have good mentors and friends at school who support and guide me when I have doubts about whether I should even be in New Jersey. It has, indeed, felt like a calling to be there, however, even as I try to find God there. It’s harder to hear and see God in New Jersey when I’ve gotten used to feeling God at the ocean or in the woods or on a trail.
This summer I went to Nicaragua and Peru for six weeks as a sort of pilgrimage. I studied Spanish and did a lot of painting and learned a lot about Andean cosmology and climate change. But I also spent a lot of time running, covering 110 miles in the month of July and those miles felt like wandering. Those hours running in the mountains were good opportunities to think about what I’d learned during the day but also to think about how God is calling me in my life—how I’m being changed by the world around me—how what I know about God is being informed by other people. And it was time for me to listen to whatever God was calling me to next. I didn’t ever hear a voice out of the silence, and there were moments when I wished for something flashy and loud like a windstorm. But instead I listened to the silence of rural Peru and stopped to look at the river and tried to remember who I am.
I’ve been thinking about those moments a lot this week as I’ve been watching the events unfold in Charlottesville, NC. I wasn’t listening when there was a call for 1000 clergy to come to hold vigil during the time when members of the Alt Right and the KKK were gathering to protest the removal of a General Robert E. Lee statue from a park. I wasn’t really paying attention when the KKK-related protesters surrounded a church full of those clergy in a prayer service—didn’t really hear that they came with torches and angry shouts and death threats. Instead I’d been paying attention to our family who had come to visit and to the small world around me which I love so much. But I started to listen when a car plowed through the people who gathered to face off against the group of white supremacists. I started to hear the words of my friends and colleagues who stood in those lines who said that to not actively denounce white supremacy in our country would be to denounce Jesus the Christ and his teachings of love, acceptance, healing and justice. And then I heard the President of the United States refuse to denounce white supremacy and heard colleagues say that we who are white must put our bodies and safety on the line for antiracism because people of color have been taking the brunt of race-based violence for centuries.
It feels a little like we in the United States are a people who are wandering and who have forgotten who we’re meant to be. If we identify as Christians, as people of God, we must claim who we are going to be in our country. What do we hear when we listen?
I wonder if the windstorm, earthquake, and fire were meant to try to distract Elijah with flashiness—would Elijah assume that God would appear in whatever was loudest or scariest? Instead, God comes in the silence, like a calm that cuts through the noise.
Elijah meets God in a place where God has appeared before and God does not ask for anything new. God simply says to Elijah, “what are you doing here?” And then God sends Elijah back to do the work he’s been called to do—to love the people and to call the people to love God. It is a simple—and hard—task, one that is at the heart of the work of a prophet.
And what will we hear today? As we listen to the outcry about Charlottesville, will we be distracted by calls to militarization or flashy explanations about how racism is just a problem in the South? Or will we be distracted by people who call themselves Christians but say that racism has a place in the church or in the world? Or will we be moved by our calling to love all people, but especially people on the margins, across boundaries and borders, across race and gender and sexual orientation, welcoming the stranger and working for justice—hard tasks but simple because these are the tasks we’ve always had.
What are we doing here, church, to be God’s people?
***
Litany against white supremacy
By Elizabeth Rawlings and Jennie Chrien
Gracious and loving God,
In the beginning, you created humanity and declared us very good
We were made in Africa, came out of Egypt.
Our beginnings, all of our beginnings, are rooted in dark skin.
We are all siblings. We are all related.
We are all your children.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
Violence entered creation through Cain and Abel.
Born of jealousy, rooted in fear of scarcity,
Brother turned against brother
The soil soaked with blood, Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
When your people cried out in slavery,
You heard them. You did not ignore their suffering.
You raised up leaders who would speak truth to power
And lead your people into freedom.
Let us hear your voice; grant us the courage to answer your call.
Guide us towards justice and freedom for all people.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
Through the prophets you told us the worship you want is for us
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke;
Yet we continue to serve our own interest,
To oppress our workers, to crush our siblings by the neck because we are afraid.
Because they don’t look like us, act like us, talk like us.
Yet, they are us. And we are them.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
In great love you sent to us Jesus, your Son,
Born in poverty, living under the rule of a foreign empire,
Brown-skinned, dark-haired, middle-Eastern.
They called him Yeshua, your Son,
Who welcomed the unwelcome, accepted the unacceptable--
The foreigners, the radicals, the illiterate, the poor,
The agents of empire and the ones who sought to overthrow it,
The men and women who were deemed unclean because of their maladies.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
The faith of Christ spread from region to region, culture to culture.
You delight in the many voices, many languages, raised to you.
You teach us that in Christ, “There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female.”
In Christ, we are all one.
Not in spite of our differences, but in them.
Black, brown, and white; female, non-binary, and male; citizen and immigrant,
In Christ we are all one.
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
Each week, we confess our sin to you and to one another.
We know that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.
We are captive to the sin of white supremacy,
Which values some lives more than others,
Which believes some skin tones are more perfect than others,
Which commits violence against those who are different.
We confess our complicity in this sin.
We humbly repent.
We ask for the strength to face our sin, to dismantle it, and to be made anew
We trust in your compassion and rely on your mercy
Praying that you will give us your wisdom and guide us in your way of peace,
That you will renew us as you renew all of creation
In accordance with your will.
We ask this, we pray this, as your children, all siblings, all related, all beloved children of God.
Amen.
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