Listening for God Michael Jinkins Text: I Kings 19: 1-13

New life starts in the dark, says Barbara Brown Taylor. “Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.” Barbara came to this realization sitting in absolute darkness in a cave deep under the ground in West Virginia, the “smell of the damp stone and dug earth in the air” all around her.i Barbara knows something about darkness and new life, as anyone knows who has followed her vocation, about which she has written beautifully and honestly. She knows something about listening for God. So does the poet, Christian Wiman. In a book a friend sent me with the note (you’ve got to read this!), Wiman tells his story of returning to faith in God in the face of his own struggle to survive a rare form of cancer. “It takes a real jolt,” Wiman says, “to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake.” God speaks in a “still, small voice,” he says, quoting the most famous passage in our text today. “That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it.”ii Darkness. Terror. Sometimes pain. Confusion. Uncertainty. All the things, together with joy and love and laugher, that make up life. We listen for God in the midst of all of this. We listen for God in the midst of life. I’ve never been one of those folks who find it easy to say things like, “God told me to do this,” or “God says I ought to do that.” I’ve always resonated more with the attitude of Leslie Weatherhead who once described himself as “a Christian agnostic.” Not knowing, but trusting; not seeing, but feeling our way along; that’s closer to my understanding of faith. Like a person entering a dark room her hand searching along the wall for a light switch and wishing she had possessed the foresight to bring a flashlight. Some part of me may sometimes have envied those people who speak with utter certainty about what God wants and doesn’t want to happen, people who claim to know the mind of God intimately and in considerable detail. But a larger part of me suspects they are just fooling themselves or maybe they’re trying to fool us. I think most of us are in the dark, at least a good chunk of the time. I remember a conversation I once had with a person who was being examined by a presbytery. During her presbytery examination, she had been asked the question, “How do you know when God is speaking to you?” She said, “If I really want something very, very much, then I know that desire must be from God.” Utterly surprised by her response, and probably speaking too quickly, I said to her, “Wow. If I want something very, very much, I suspect my desire is being driven by my own compulsions, not by God.” 1

Her response was, “I pity you.” Maybe she was right. I don’t know. But, I suspect that my experience of God is pretty common. It’s certainly pretty common in the Bible. And it may even have something of faith about it. The heavens in my neighborhood are notoriously quiet. Technicolor rainbows do not illuminate a divinely chosen path for my benefit, and I have yet to hear an inspiring movie soundtrack in the background signaling to me that God is communicating. How do we listen for God in this world? I think it’s good question. I think it’s a pertinent question for all of us. I think it’s a question of faith. And I think Elijah’s story has something to tell us about it. When we meet Elijah in chapter nineteen of First Kings, by anyone’s standards, Elijah had had quite a week. He had just won a high-stakes preaching competition with the prophets of Baal. I mean, you don’t get higher stakes than the losers are consumed by divine fire. Then, on the heels of this apparent victory, he ran for his life with a royal death threat hanging over his head. Notice this: After an experience which seemed to be a pretty categorical indication of God’s full and unequivocal endorsement of what he was up to, Elijah found himself a day’s journey into the wilderness sitting by his lonely under a juniper tree, sounding clinically depressed, begging for God to kill him. An angel, we are told, encouraged Elijah to eat something (often good advice whether from an angel or not; maybe the angel felt he was suffering from a low blood sugar thing), and then Elijah hit the road again. We catch up next with Elijah in a cave. Elijah is in a dark place. Literally. The grave-like smells of damp earth and stone hang about him. And, in that dark place, the Word of the Lord came to Elijah in the form of a question: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” I want to pause right here for a moment with this Word from God hanging in the cave. Notice God’s Word comes in the form of a question. “What are you doing here, Elijah?” And I want to pause right here because this is exactly the kind of thing God seems to say when God shows up in our lives. God seems to show up often asking questions. Like this one: “What are you doing here?” Before Elijah fills up the musty air around him with his self-justifying, feeling-sorry-for-my-lonely-self prattle about being the only prophet left in the world, and nobody really appreciating me or understanding me or loving me, and the queen wanting my head; before Elijah says anything at all; I just want to pause here for a moment to notice that the Word of the Lord, when the Word of the Lord comes, asks a question. And it is a really good question for all of us to ponder: “What are you doing here?” Elijah says what he has to say. And most of us have made his speech at some time or the other. And after Elijah fills the air with his self-justifying, self-righteous, self-pitying prattle, the Word of the Lord ignores what Elijah says (do you notice that?). God ignores his prayer. And God says to him, “Go, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.” 2

This is where the passage gives us a clue to what it sounds like when God speaks to us, because this is where we are told: “And behold, the Lord was passing by.” So – SO - what’s that like? Well, we are told: “a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the Lord.” Yeah, yeah. That’s how Stephen Spielberg would direct this scene. Isn’t it. That’s the Hollywood version of God speaking. And tell me, in the midst of that hurricane, that whirlwind, that awesome tornado, was the Lord speaking? No. The Lord was not in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground beneath Elijah shook and rattled and rolled. Spielberg on steroids! This is it! This is X Men Meets the Prophet. Then, tell me, was the Lord speaking from the earthquake, when the mountains tumbled like tinker toys, was that God? Nope. No, the Lord was not in the earthquake. Well, there was a fire too. A wildfire swept along, consuming, burning. Surely, surely the Lord speaks from the fire. Maybe it was another of those amazing displays like a burning bush. No. The Lord was not in the fire. For all of those who like their God with special effects, this must be a real disappointment. Because this is where the King James Version of the Bible gives us that lyrical passage telling us what we should be listening for when we are listening for God. After the fire, Elijah heard a “still, small voice.” This is where the New English Bible translates the ancient Hebrew more accurately than the KJV, “and after the fire a low murmuring sound,” and The New American Standard translation reads, “a sound of gentle blowing,” and the New International Version says, there “came a gentle whisper.” But none of these translations quite get it right. A former colleague of mine who is an Old Testament scholar was puzzling with me over how to translate this passage several years ago. She said, you know, this sound is not necessarily pleasant at all. I think it’s really a low, scratching sound, maybe closer to fingernails softly scraping over a blackboard. It’s the kind of sound you hear in the deep of the night after a storm has passed when everything is spooky quiet, unearthly quiet, and you become aware of this sound in the stillness, this annoying, incessant, unignorable, “what-the-heck-is-that-noise?” kind of sound. That’s it. This is the sound of an open question. This is the sound of a question mark carved in the silent air. And it came about that when Elijah heard that sound, that incessant, scratching, picking at the scab of his soul sound, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave, and behold a voice came to him and said: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 3

And you know that question wasn’t just, “What are you doing in this cave?” This is the kind of “What are you doing here?” that means “Why do you occupy space and time on this planet?” “Why are you running away from the path I’ve set you on?” This is the question of existence itself. Not existence abstractly considered, not existence as a subject in a philosophy course, not existence in general. God doesn’t trifle with the question of existence in general. God asks the question of my existence, your existence, because our existence belongs to God. “What are you doing here?” And after Elijah fills the air again with his self-justifying, self-righteous, self-pitying speech (to which the Lord does not seem to pay any attention at all), the Lord says to him: “Go. Get on with this life, embrace this calling. Anoint some kings and anoint a prophet.” Don’t waste the life you’ve been given.

Several months ago, I was sitting in a room with my spiritual director, Father Paul. I had just made an eloquent self-justifying, self-righteous, self-pitying speech. It was very, very good. “I have been zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts,” I explained to my spiritual director, “And I am all alone. The true prophets have been slain. I’m the last one standing, and they are after me too. I’ve been sitting under a juniper tree, and you know how allergic I am to juniper, and I’ve just been waiting to die, to lie down and to sleep with my ancestors.” It was one of those moments when you just long for your pastor, or your spiritual director, or your mother to offer you a warm beverage and say, “there, there,” or sing you the sweet kitty soft kitty song. Elijah knows how I felt that day. But to my shock my spiritual director asked me a question: “What is God saying to you?” “I don’t know,” I answered. He said, “Well, at least you’re honest.” And then he said something helpful, at least potentially helpful, though it didn’t feel all that helpful at the time because it wasn’t the least bit warm and cozy. He said, “When you are in a dark place, God doesn’t tend to talk very loud. You have to get quiet and listen really carefully. Why don’t you get some rest, and listen for what God is trying to say to you.” “What are you doing here?” With your existence? With your life? The only life you’ve been given. The only life you’re going to get. “What are you doing with that life?”

Thomas Merton, the theologian and mystic, who spent so many years of his life just down the road from us in his monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, had a prayer that I often return to. “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will 4

does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

I suspect that in that place deep in the dark underground of our hearts, in our minds where God is scratching quietly but incessantly, when we will listen, there is a question that demands an answer, and the shape of that answer will shape our future: “What are you doing here?”

Amen

i

Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 129. Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 146-147.

ii

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