Poor old Elijah!

 I'm afraid there is no recording this week; I have a new tablet and it came with its own integral recorder.  Which didn't.  I have now downloaded the one I'm used to, so I hope that next time I preach (not until August), the recording will work!

Well, poor old Elijah! Sounds as though he went properly through the mill, doesn’t it? For a bit of context, this chapter is giving us the aftermath of the great trial between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. Now, back then, Baal was a rival god to Yahweh, our own God, and a great many of the children of Israel had started to follow him, encouraged by the Queen of the day, Jezebel, who seems to have been dominant over the king, Ahab. Jezebel, it must be said, was not an Israelite, but a Sidonian princess, who had been brought up to worship Baal, and brought that worship with her. And many prophets of God had been killed, although Obadiah, Ahab’s chief administrator, had saved at least a hundred of them. Obadiah was a devout follower of Yahweh, as God was known back then, despite everything.

Elijah, you may remember, had declared a severe drought over all the land because of the worship of Baal, but finally it was time for a great showdown. He went to Ahab and told him to bring all the prophets of Baal to Mount Carmel, and they would build two altars, one to Baal and one to Yahweh, place a sacrifice on each altar, and whichever god lit the sacrifice with fire from heaven would be declared the god that Israel should worship. Elijah was so confident that God was God that he ordered that altar to be drenched in water, with water in a sort of moat round it. The Baalites went first, and nothing happened. Elijah teased them that Baal must have gone for a walk, or be on the loo, or something, and they worked themselves up into a terrific frenzy and cut themselves and so on, but nothing happened. And then Elijah prayed, and fire came down from heaven and consumed the sacrifice, and the wood, and even the water! Whereupon the people fell on their faces and said that God was God. But Elijah had the prophets of Baal killed, which doesn’t sound very Godly of him, but we mustn’t judge people who lived in the Iron age by our own standards!

Anyway, Ahab goes home that evening and tells Jezebel what has happened, and she is absolutely incandescent with rage, and vows to kill Elijah within the day. Elijah, hearing of this, runs away, and that’s where our reading comes in. He’s obviously totally knackered and completely out of cope, and he prays that he might die, and then he falls asleep. An angel comes, bringing him food, and he eats and sleeps again, and then he eats a last meal before heading off towards Mount Horeb, a journey which it is said took him forty days and forty nights – a foreshadowing of Jesus in the wilderness. I don’t know whether it was actually forty days and forty nights, or whether this is just code for “a long time”, and I don’t know whether he was able to find anything to eat along the route, but whatever. Anyway, he goes into a cave to spend the night, and God comes to him and says “Elijah, why are you here?”

To which he replies, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

And God tells Elijah to go and stand outside to experience the presence of the Lord. And we know what happened next: there was a huge wind, but the Lord was not in the wind; a mighty earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and a big fire, but the Lord wasn’t in the fire, either. And then there was only the sound of silence. And again God asked Elijah why he was there, and again Elijah replies, self-pityingly, that he was the only one left.

To which God says, more or less, that’s bollocks! He tells Elijah to anoint new kings of Aram and Israel, and to appoint Elisha as his successor, and between them they will kill the followers of Baal, but there are at least seven thousand people in Israel who haven’t ever worshipped Baal. Elijah is not alone.

And, just to finish off the story, Elijah is reassured, and goes and does what he has been told.

But poor old Elijah! I feel very sorry for him – I’m sure you know what it’s like to be absolutely exhausted and totally out of cope. I know I do, and all one can really do is go to bed and sleep it off. Things usually look brighter in the morning.

Only, in this case, for Elijah, things still looked pretty grim. Yes, the food the angel brought him helped, but the one thing he wanted was to go to where he knew God would speak to him. And sure enough, when he got to Mount Horeb, or Mount Sinai, which is probably another name for it, there God was. But he didn’t get the reassurance and praise he had hoped for. Instead it was “What are you doing here?” Elijah had no business being on Mount Horeb; God wanted him back home in Israel.

I wonder why God chose that moment to show the wind, earthquake and fire to Elijah, but only spoke to him in the silence. And then to say again “Why are you here?”
I think it’s important, often to wait on God in silence. In my early Christian life, I had no real idea how to pray – all that was modelled was the public prayer meeting, with the earnest Evangelicals going “Oh Lord, we really pray that you will just….”, and it wasn’t until I was many years into my Christian life that I discovered that there were other ways of praying, and that talking to – or perhaps more accurately, talking at – God was not the only way to pray. I’m sure you’ve found this for yourselves, but I do want to remind you that prayer is often, if not mostly, a matter of waiting on God in silence, of stilling your mind, of opening yourself. Some people like to use a mantra – “Jesus, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”, for instance; others like to use a rosary, perhaps using the “Saviour of the World” prayer. Still others use conscious relaxation methods. And it is while listening to the sound of silence that God speaks.

Don’t get me wrong; of course there is a place for prayer in words, as in the public prayer meeting, as in the liturgy. You can pray to God in your own words, and that, I suspect, is what most of us do, but of course there are loads of other prayers one can use, dating right back to the beginning of Christianity! Or even before – many people find praying the Psalms works for them, or perhaps a hymn. There’s no right or wrong way to pray; there’s no one way is right for everybody, and most of us will pray differently at different times! What matters is the contact with God, not the way you do it.

For Elijah, at that moment, it was running to Mount Horeb, where he knew God would speak to him. And indeed God did, but not in the way he expected. Instead of the – I was going to say hugs, but you know what I mean, that Elijah wanted and expected, it was pointed out to him that God doesn’t always deal in the spectacular, that Elijah still had work to do, and that there were at least seven thousand other people in the land who hadn’t and would not, bow to Baal!

Poor old Elijah! But as God never calls without enabling, I am sure Elijah received the reassurance and recovery he needed to enable him to go back and do as he’d been told. Elijah might have done the wrong thing in running away, but he was not sent back in his own strength. He was reassured that he wasn’t the only one, even though it felt like it. He was told to anoint two new kings, and eventually they would replace the current weak ones; and above all he was told to anoint his successor, Elisha. From now on, he would have someone shadowing him and helping him.

I think that’s a really good model for us, isn’t it? When we have gone wrong, as Elijah went wrong, God speaks to us – not normally in a spectacular way, but in the silence of our hearts – and reassures us, and heals us, and enables us to go right again.

I don’t, incidentally, think that Elijah had depression – that’s a very nasty illness, and I’m sure God wouldn’t have been so bracing with him, although I’m equally sure God would have healed him. But Elijah was exhausted and out of cope, and had lapsed into self-pity – all too easily done. But he knew the right thing to do, to go to God, even if he went about it the wrong way.

And that’s the same for us, isn’t it. Always, always, go to God. Sometimes we don’t want to; sometimes we feel too ashamed to show our faces before God. But we know that when we do, God will act – God will heal us, forgive us, and enable us to get up and go on.

The man who Jesus healed in our Gospel story was rather similar. We don’t know, from this distance, what had gone wrong for him, but it sounds like the worst kind of mental illness, and he felt he had a whole army of demons inside him. So he asked Jesus, firstly to leave him alone, and when that obviously wasn’t going to happen, to send his demons into the herd of swine that was grazing in the neighbourhood. And when this had happened, he was healed, and was able to get dressed and sit, clothed and in his right mind, at Jesus’ feet.

Sometimes, when we are too ashamed to go to God, or hindered by other reasons, it’s God who will come in search of us, as Jesus came to the man in the graveyard.

They are both odd stories in today’s readings, but I think what they spell out is God’s love and care for us, whoever we are. We may have trouble approaching God, but God is always looking out for us! Remember the father in Jesus’ story, who saw his estranged son coming and ran to meet him? That’s what God is like and it’s what I want to leave with you this morning!

Poor old Elijah! But God healed him and helped him and sent him forth. As he will do with us. Elijah was not alone – there were over seven thousand others. And we are not alone – we have our church families to love and support us. Amen.