Prophet Margin, Part 2

The following was preached at Veedersburg and Hillsboro UMC on Sunday, June 20, 2010.  The text for this week's message is 1 Kings 19:9-15a.

We are picking up where we left off a couple weeks ago in our series exploring some stories about the prophets Elijah and Elisha.  Last time, we looked at our introduction to Elijah, and how he had to rely on God for his provision in a difficult time.  Elijah is introduced by telling Ahab, one of the worst kings in the history Israel, that there will be a severe drought in the land.  Ahab, prodded on by his wife Jezebel, led the people of Israel into worship of the Canaanite god Baal.  Elijah’s proclamation that there would be no rain was a direct affront to the sovereignty of Baal, who was the storm god.

Immediately after he confronts Ahab, Elijah goes into the inhospitable wilderness east of the Jordan river, where God provides for him with a brook and food delivered by ravens.  In due time, the brook runs dry and Elijah must move on.  His time of spiritual preparation in that location had come to an end.  It was now time for him to go to Zarephath.

When Elijah arrives in Zarephath, a town near Jezebel’s hometown of Sidon and a town located in the heart of Baal worship, he sees a widow collecting sticks.  He asks her for some water and some bread.  In the difficulty of the drought, she was running low on both.  In fact, she was at the end of her supply, and was preparing to make one last cake before sitting back and waiting to die alongside her son.  Elijah reassures her that she will not run out of flour or oil until the drought is over.  God once again had provided in a miraculous way.

As we keep going through the story, we see that Elijah was used by God in some amazing ways.  The widow’s son dies, and Elijah prays that he would live again, and he does.  After three years of severe drought, it comes time for Elijah to confront Ahab once again.  Elijah is very bold when he talks to the king, and challenges him to bring all the prophets of Baal and all of Israel together at Mount Carmel.

Elijah addresses the people and tells them that they need to make a decision.  They need to decide if they going to follow Baal, or if they are going to follow Yahweh, the one true God.  And they have a demonstration.  They put a bull on the altar, and Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to have Baal consume the bull with fire.  If Baal is truly God, then this should not be a problem.  And all morning and all afternoon, the prophets of Baal try unsuccessfully to get Baal to burn up the offering.  Finally, it’s Elijah’s turn.

Elijah puts the bull on the altar, and then dumps twelve giant jars of water all over the offering until a trench that he dug around the altar was overflowing with water.  And after half a day of listening to the prophets of Baal cry out to their god and watching them dance around and cut themselves, Elijah simply offers a prayer.  He says, “God, let these people know that you are God and that I am your servant.”  That’s all he says, and then a fire comes down from heaven and burns up everything – the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust and even the very water is consumed by a flame from heaven.  The people return to the Lord, seize the prophets of Baal and have them all killed.  Then the rain comes and the drought is over.

Ahab tells Jezebel what happened, and instead of realizing that indeed Yahweh is God, Jezebel sends a messenger to Elijah and says, “By this time tomorrow, you will be dead.”  And Elijah is afraid.  He gets up and runs for his life into the town of Beersheba in Judah.  Once he gets there, he leaves his servant behind and goes another day’s journey into the wilderness.  He sits down under a tree and says, “This is too much.  I can’t take it any more.  God, please be through with me.”

It was probably about a six-day journey to Beersheba, plus another day into wilderness, and in just one week, Elijah goes from this amazing spiritual high to calling it quits in the wilderness.  Do you ever feel like that?  Do you ever feel like you just can’t take any more?  That’s where Elijah is.  And to be at that point so soon after the spiritual high of Mount Carmel has to be devastating.  There was a reason why Elijah needed a period of spiritual preparation, and this is it.  He’s at the end of his rope, and it is all because of one person who threatened his life.

Elijah falls asleep under this tree, and twice he is woken by a messenger from God, an angel, who invites him to eat and drink.  The second time, the angel tells him that the journey he is about to go on is going to be too much for him.  He gets up, eats and drinks a second time, and begins his journey deeper into the wilderness.  For forty days and forty nights, Elijah had nothing else but that food, and he goes to Mount Horeb, the mount of God.  In an earlier time, it was known as Mount Sinai.  And it’s there that we come to today’s passage.

By this point, you have an idea about the dejection and exhaustion that Elijah must be experiencing.  In verse 9, we are told that Elijah came to a cave and lodged in it.  A better translation of the Hebrew, however, tells us that he went to “the cave.”  Up to this point, the writer has made some serious connections between Elijah and Moses.  Both of them went 40 days and nights without food, and both of them went up on the same mount.  And perhaps  you remember the story where Moses asked to see God’s glory, and God told him to go to a “cleft in the rock,” and He would pass by, allowing Moses to see the glory of the Lord.  It is believed that where Elijah stands during this passage is the same place.  We know that something significant is going to happen here.

As Elijah is in the cave, the word of the Lord comes to him.  The word of the Lord is a powerful force.  It is by this very word that creation took place.  It is by this very word that there is day and night, water and dry land, living creatures all over the place.  The word of the Lord is powerful.  We get a small glimpse of the power of His word when we read Scripture.  Scripture is the word of the Lord given to us.  But there is a problem in today’s world.  So many people will venerate the actual Bible, but ignore the word of God.  Do you see the difference?  

There are people that refuse to throw away a Bible, but at the same time, couldn’t tell you what was in it.  The Bible in a Year challenge that we are going through right now is not just for the fun of it.  It is to get us into the word of the Lord.  Because that word is powerful.  That word has the power to change our lives.

There was a movie that came out at the beginning of the year called The Book of Eli.  You may have heard of it recently because it just came out on DVD.  I thought it was great, but I won’t recommend it for a lot of people because there is quite a bit of violence in the movie, but the core of the movie is that there is a book in the possession of a man named Eli that is exceedingly rare.  And it’s a Bible.  In fact, it may be the only Bible left on the planet because all the others were burned following a nuclear holocaust that scorched the earth.  Religion was blamed, and all the religious books were burned.

  The bad guy in the movie wants this Bible because he believes it contains the words that will help him control people.  What he fails to realize is that Scripture doesn’t contain the power to control people; it contains the power to change people from within.  And that powerful word of the Lord, comes to Elijah – a man who is broken down and ready to give up.

God says to Elijah, “What are you doing here?”  And just for clarification, this is not an informational question.  It’s not like God was spelunking on Mount Horeb and stumbled upon Elijah.  He is not surprised by Elijah’s presence on the mount.  In fact, an angel of the Lord sent him there.  God is not asking this in a “when did you get here” sort of way.  The question is more rhetorical, as in “What are you doing here?  You are supposed to be in Israel, sharing my word with the people there.”

Do you ever hear that question?  Do you ever find yourself doing something that maybe you shouldn’t be doing?  Of course not, me neither.  But when those times come, you look around and you think, “What am I doing here?”  You get convicted that maybe you aren’t spending your time in the best way possible.  Maybe there’s something that you could be doing that would benefit the kingdom of God right now, but instead there’s that really good show on television that you just can’t miss.  Maybe you’re playing Farmville on Facebook, and you’re getting really bored, but instead of turning it off to spend time with God, you just keep playing anyway.

I don’t think that God is trying to guilt Elijah into going back to work.  I think God wants Elijah to realize that he has been called to something much greater.  We can draw strength from this because remember what Elijah has been through over the past three years – ravens were feeding him twice a day, the same little jar of flour fed him and a family for a long time, a child was raised from the dead, fire came down from heaven and burned up the offering and everything around it.  These are things that Elijah has seen with his own eyes, and yet, one threat was enough to throw him into a tailspin.  “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  I think God is calling Elijah back to his great work.

We, as a church, have a great work that we need to be doing.  Have we lost sight of that work?  At Annual Conference last week, it was reported that 60% of the congregations did not welcome in a single new person to the faith last year.  What are we doing here?  Have we missed our call?  Have we gotten sidetracked from our great work?  As a United Methodist Church, we exist to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.  But I can’t help but think sometimes that God might be saying to us, “What are you doing here?”

When that time comes, we can do what Elijah does here.  We can start coming up with all sorts of excuses as to why we are where we are.  But is it the reality of our situation?  Elijah says that there are none left in Israel who follow after the Lord, but right after the incident on Mount Carmel, the writer tells us that all the people fell on their faces before the Lord, proclaiming the Lord to be God, not Baal.  And Elijah wasn’t alone.  Obadiah, a man who was in charge of the household of Ahab, had hidden 100 prophets of the Lord and made sure they had bread and water.  Elijah is focusing on the bad that has taken place and is forgetting the good, and there has been a lot of good. 

If you want to move forward into what God is calling you to do, you have to realize that you are not alone.  There are people that surround us who are on the journey with us.  One of my favorite things about Annual Conference is the people that I don’t see very often, literally people from one end of the state to the other.  We get together.  We enjoy each other’s company.  We talk about ministry together.  We pray together.  And there is no reason why every single person in the Christian faith should not have a group of friends with whom they share their lives and their faith.  The fellowship of Christian believers gives us the strength to live and minister in a world that doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, about Jesus.  Elijah claims that he is alone, but he is not alone.  We are never alone when we surround ourselves with fellow believers, committed to the same goal.

After Elijah has said his bit, God tells him to stand before the Lord.  A strong wind comes, but the Lord was not in the wind.  An earthquake shakes mount, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  A fire blazes, but the Lord was not in the fire.  After these three, there was a low whisper, and Elijah knew that God was present.  God is not always going to be present in the big and flashy things.  Sometimes, we have to be paying enough attention to know when God is present in a low whisper.

And once again, the voice comes, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  And he doesn’t get it, responding the same way that he did before.  It’s not enough to know that God is in the low whisper; we have to realize what He is saying as well.  God is telling Elijah to listen for His voice in the midst of the difficulties that he is facing.  Go where you are supposed to be.  

The section ends with God giving Elijah more instructions – Go to the wilderness of Damascus.  Don’t sit here and wallow in self-pity; there’s no time for that.  You have a great work to be doing.  What are you doing here, Elijah?

When God shows Himself, we need to be seeing a profound life-change.  We don’t see that in Elijah.  In fact, he is no different than when he first got there.  He was so absorbed in his own troubles, that he missed out on what God was showing him.  Elijah does get back on the horse, so to speak.  He continues to fulfill his call, but we don’t hear much more about Elijah until he is taken up in a whirlwind, which is what we will look at next week.

It makes you wonder – did Elijah ever really regain his spiritual strength?  What happened here?  And then we bring it a little closer to home.  When we are at the point where we just want to give up, do we press on half-heartedly, or do we move forward, full force, knowing that God is the one who has sent us to do this mighty work in His name?  

Let us not forget what He has done, let us forget that we are surrounded by brothers and sisters in Christ who have been called to a great work, let us not forget that we have been called to a great work.  Most of all, let us not forget that we have been given this great and awesome task by a great and awesome God.  Because it is through Him that our task is accomplished.