God's Gentle Whisper

God’s Gentle Whisper

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 13, 2017

Scripture: 1 Kings 19: 9-14

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? You have to listen hard. You have to focus. You have to pay attention. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? It’s not loud. It’s not shouting at you. It’s easy to miss. It’s easy to ignore. What is it? Who is it? Shhh. Listen. Do you hear it? It’s the gentle whisper of God. It’s not forceful. It’s gentle. It’s not a shout. It’s a whisper. God is whispering to you. God is whispering to me. God is whispering to us. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? Elijah heard it. There in his cave on a mountain. He saw and felt other things. A violent wind. An earthquake. Fire. He saw those big impressive things, but he learned that that’s not where God was. Elijah heard it. He heard God’s gentle whisper. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Do you hear it? Do I? Do we?

The Bible has the story we just heard of God being present in a gentle whisper, but the Bible also has lots of stories full of what the Germans call Sturm und Drang, storm and stress. Storm and drive. Lots of action. Lot’s of drama. Lots of noise. God floods the whole world because God has had it with the sinfulness of God’s humans. God parts the Red Sea so the Israelites can escape the pursuing Egyptians, then closes the sea over the Egyptians and drowns them all. Joshua leads the people across the Jordan River, and the walls of Jericho come atumbalin’ down. The shepherd boy David slays the Philistine champion Goliath with a rock thrown from a sling. The Babylonians besiege Jerusalem, conquer it, and haul the people off into exile in Babylon. The Persians conquer the Babylonians and send the people back home. The Bible has these and many other stories of Sturm und Drang, of storm and stress, storm and drive. Lots of action. Lots of drama. Lots of noise.

Some of those biblical stories of Sturm und Drang are among the best-known stories in the Bible. We turn the story of Noah and the flood from a story of divine vengeance against a sinful world into a nice story about a grandfatherly Noah and boat full of charming animals, but everyone who’s ever been to Sunday school knows that story. When I see depictions of it on Sunday school walls I always wonder where the floating corpses are, but never mind. Stories like the parting of the Red Sea have entered Western culture so that even people with no religious affiliation or experience know them. Growing up a lot of us learned to sing “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls come a tumbalin’ down.” And everyone knows the story of David and Goliath. These are great stories apart from whatever spiritual meaning they may or may not have, and we all know them.

And here’s a thing about all of those stories. The Bible sees the hand of God at work in all of them. In these stories God acts sometimes as a warrior destroying Israel’s enemies. Sometimes as a judge, letting a foreign power conquer God’s people because of the people’s faithlessness. Sometimes as a redeemer, freeing the people from slavery and foreign exile. The ancient world that produced the Bible thought that God controlled everything that happens on earth, so it saw God at work in all of these big, dramatic stories. In so many of these stories God acts violently. In these stories God is big and strong, a force no earthly power can overcome.

I think these big, violent Bible stories have had an unfortunate effect on a great many people. They train us to look for God in big, noisy, dramatic events. They set the framework for books like Revelation, in which God is even more violent that God is in any of the other stories, in which the end of the world comes with massive violence and the death of a great deal of humanity. Even today we hear preachers like Pat Robertson claiming to see the work of God in big, violent events like hurricanes, in which of course he always see God doing just what he wants God to do whether God would ever really do it or not. There is a lot in our Christian tradition that can condition us to see God as big, strong, noisy, even violent. To see God at work in the big things of human history, the macro events that we read about but rarely experience ourselves.

Yes, all of those stories are in the Bible, but then there’s the story we just heard about the prophet Elijah. The lectionary selection for today doesn’t give us the background of that story or explain just why Elijah is holed up in a cave on a mountain, so let me set the scene for you. Elijah is perhaps the greatest prophet of ancient Israel, or at least the Jewish tradition treats him as such. He’s the only person in the Bible who never dies. Even Jesus dies before he rises again, but Elijah doesn’t. He’s taken up into heaven still very much alive. Throughout his ministry Elijah is in conflict with the evil King Ahab of Israel and his Canaanite wife Jezebel. Elijah’s biggest issue with Ahab is that Ahab worships Baal, his wife’s chief god, rather than Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew people. Just before we encounter Elijah in his cave he has had a dramatic confrontation with the prophets of Baal, 450 of them we’re told. He bests them in what is essentially a miracle contest in which Yahweh proves real and powerful and Baal turns out to be either impotent or not to exist at all. Elijah than rounds up the 450 prophets of Baal and kills them all. We don’t often think of Elijah as a mass murderer, but he is; and the Bible has no problem at all with him being one. That it doesn’t raises lots of questions, but never mind for now. Elijah massacring her prophets angers Jezebel and her husband Ahab, and they swear to get him for it. So he flees into the desert of Sinai and holes up in a cave on a mountain. That’s where the part of the story we just heard begins.

Elijah is holed up in his cave hiding from the murderous Ahab and Jezebel when the Lord, that is, Elijah’s god, finds him and says: “What are you doing here Elijah?” Elijah apparently is feeling pretty sorry for himself, for he complains that the Israelites are trying to kill him as they have killed others of Yahweh’s prophets. It’s not too hard to understand why Ahab and Jezebel would want to kill Elijah after what he did to their prophets of Baal, but the Bible wants us to understand Elijah as the hero of the story and Ahab and Jezebel as the villains, so I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for Elijah too. In any event, God isn’t too impressed with Elijah’s complaint. God says something rather cryptic to Elijah: “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Our story doesn’t tell us why Yahweh is about to pass by Elijah on the mountain, it just says that that’s what Yahweh is going to do.

Then comes the part of the story that I think is really interesting and important. That part of the story goes like this:

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. NIV

Given the way God appears in big, noisy, dramatic scenes in other stories in the Bible we perhaps find it surprising that God is not in the big, noisy, dramatic events in this story. After all, things like winds strong enough to shatter rocks, earthquakes, and fire are big, powerful things. They’re the kinds of things Hollywood loves to depict. Things like that grab our attention. We’re afraid of them, but we’re also in awe of them; and awe is a reaction to God that is actually quite appropriate. Still, in this story God isn’t in any of those big, dramatic things. No, in this story God is in the “gentle whisper.” A more traditional translation of the Hebrew original there that has passed into our culture is “a still small voice.” God is in the still small voice. In the gentle whisper.

Folks, that I think is the great truth of this story. We so want God to display God’s power in the world through big, dramatic, noisy action. We want lightning and thunder. We want trumpets blaring and cymbals clashing. We want God to sweep us off our feet with big actions that we can’t possibly overlook. That’s the God that so many people want, but this story gives us a very different image of God. Here big impressive things happen, but they aren’t where God is. They’re just natural phenomena, and story says don’t look for God in them. No, this story says listen for God in silence. God’s not going to speak to us in peals of thunder or mighty gales. God will speak to us in a whisper so gentle that it almost amounts to silence. To hear it we must be silent. To hear God we must not look out at powerful events, we must look inward in silence lest we miss God’s still small voice.

And maybe that’s not how we want it to be. God’s presence would be a whole lot easier to discern if God were in the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. We so struggle with being silent that we’re more likely than not to miss God’s gentle whisper, to miss God coming to us softly, gently, and so quietly that we hardly notice God coming at all. Well, I can’t speak for you; but as for me, that’s mostly how I experience God. God doesn’t overwhelm us. At least most of the time God doesn’t. God doesn’t force God’s presence on us. At least most of the time God doesn’t.

Both as a church and as individuals we need to discern who God is calling us to be and what God is calling us to do too. We need the truth of the story of Elijah on the mountain to do that. We need to listen not for a big dramatic voice yelling at us but for a still, small voice whispering to us. Sure. It would be easier if we didn’t have to do that, but the reality is that we do have to do that. How God comes to us is up to God, not up to us. My experience and the experience of a lot of other people tell us that our story of Elijah and God on the mountain gets it right. God comes to us in a gentle whisper, in a still small voice.

So hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? You have to listen hard. You have to focus. You have to pay attention. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? It’s not loud. It’s not shouting at you. It’s easy to miss. It’s easy to ignore. What is it? Who is it? Shhh. Listen. Do you hear it? It’s the gentle whisper of God. Elijah heard it. There in his cave on a mountain. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Do you hear it? Do I? Do we? Amen.