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.

Do you want to be made well?

Children's talk (of course, there weren't any children, but I gave the talk anyway): Shalom

This Sunday we had two choices of Gospel reading, so I thought that, for a change, we’d have both of them. We’re going to read the second one in a bit, and I’ll talk about it, but for now, let’s all look at something Jesus said in the first reading.

He said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Now, when we have a Communion service, and quite often in other services, too, we wish one another God’s peace – that peace, that Jesus left with us. But peace, here, doesn’t just mean no war, although that, too! It doesn’t just mean feeling calm and happy, although that, too! It’s both of those things and more, beside. It’s about wholeness, and justice and living in unity – in short, it’s about the way things are like in God’s country, and the way they ought to be here.

The way things ought to be! When you wish people “Peace be with you”, you’re wishing them wholeness and healing and unity as well as peace!

I think, don’t you, that we need to stop and wish one another God’s peace, and then we’re going to hear a song on YouTube that you may well know – if you do, please join in!

This picture is not of the pool of Bethesda; it’s of the source of the Danube in Donaueschingen, Germany! But when we went to see it, all I could think of was the pool of Bethesda – it totally fits my mental image of what the pool was like!

The original pool was, of course, in Jerusalem, near the Sheep Gate, which is called the Lions Gate today. Apparently it may have been built in the 1^st century BC as a Greek shrine to Asclepius, their god of healing. It was just outside the original city walls, so as not to offend the Jews, who would not have cared for a pagan temple in their midst. It was not until later in the 1^st century AD that the city walls were expanded and the pool or pools turned into a full-on temple, built by Hadrian, and by the 5^th century AD there was already a church there.

Anyway, whether it was an active shrine, with sacrifices being offered to Asclepius or not, we are told that many people came there for healing. A verse in the narrative which is now omitted from most translations, as they are not sure whether it was in the original, says that periodically an angel would come down and stir up the water, and the first person to get into the pool while it was still rippling would be healed.

And one of the people there that day was paralysed, and had been for 38 years. We aren’t told whether he had been coming to the pool every day for 38 years, or whether he only started coming more recently, but he had fairly obviously been there for some time. Jesus asks him if he wants to be made well, and his response is that every time the water is stirred up, someone else gets there first, as he has nobody to help him get into the water. Jesus tells him to get up, pick up his mat, and walk, and the man promptly does so.

That was as far as we got in our reading, but the story goes on to tell us it was the Sabbath day, and the authorities clocked the man carrying his mat, which was not allowed, and tore him off a strip for it. He said that he had been told to carry it by the person who had healed him, but couldn’t say who it was, as by then Jesus had disappeared. Later, Jesus meets the man again in the Temple, and tells him not to sin again or worse things could happen. The man went and told the authorities that it was Jesus who had healed him, and that was basically when they started to persecute him, mostly because he had been healing on the Sabbath. Healing, like carrying mats, was considered work, and working on the Sabbath was completely forbidden.

It’s a very strange story, I think. The more I look at it, the odder it becomes. We know that the man was Jewish, so why was he at a pagan shrine? How did he get there? Was he there twenty-four seven? Did someone bring him each morning and fetch him at night? How did he manage for food and drink, or for warmth on a cold day? How did he manage about going to the loo? He must have had some kind of carer, even if they couldn’t be with him full-time! As, I expect, did most of the people round the pool. And why was he the only person healed, if there were crowds there? Was he the only Jewish person? It seems improbable. Really, a very odd story. I believe some authorities suggest it was included to remind people that it is Jesus we need to turn to for healing, not some pagan religion. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that it isn’t a true story, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we have nothing to learn from it!

Jesus asks him “Do you want to be made well?” This seems like a silly question, really. Of course he wants to be made well, why would he be at the pool every day, else? But, think about it a minute. Did he want to be made well? Was he, despite what he claimed, really quite comfortable with this life, where he could spend the day doing not very much, chatting with his friends, dependent on other people to do pretty much everything for him. And if he were healed, he’d lose all that. He would have to start looking after himself. He might have to start looking after his family, if he had one, instead of depending on them to look after him. He might even have to get a job!

Whatever happened, if he were to be made well, his life was going to change radically. Because that’s what happens when Jesus heals you. Life changes.

“Do you want to be made well?”
Sometimes it is our behaviour which changes – perhaps we used to get drunk, but now we find ourselves switching to soft drinks after a couple of glasses. Perhaps we used to gamble, but suddenly realise we haven't so much as bought a Lottery ticket for weeks, never mind visiting a bookie! Perhaps we used to be less than scrupulous about what belongs to us, and what belongs to our employer, but now we find ourselves asking permission to use an office envelope.

Very often these sorts of changes happen without our even noticing them. Others take more struggle – sometimes it is many years before we can finally let go of an addiction, or a bad habit. But as I've said many times, the more open we are to God, the more we can allow God to change us.

But the point is, when God touches our lives, things change. Life changes. Life changed for the man who Jesus had just healed. Life changes for us, when we allow God to heal us.

“Do you want to be made well?” Sometimes, of course, we cling on to the familiar bad habits, as we don't know how to replace them with healthier ways of acting and thinking, and that's scary. Perhaps we don’t really want to be made well. Perhaps we are quite comfortable with our life as it is, even though it isn’t ideal.

Perhaps we are used to our pain, even comfortable with it. Maybe if we were to be healed, we would have to confront the source of our pain, and it would get a lot worse before it got better. A wise person once said to me that nobody does any work on themselves until it becomes impossible not to, as the process is so inherently painful. That’s more about mental and emotional healing, but it can apply to physical healing, too – if I have this operation, it will make things better, but it’s going to be so much worse at first…

The man who Jesus healed didn’t answer directly, you notice. He just whinged that he had nobody to help him into the pool, so he could never get well. But when Jesus told him to get up, pick up his mat, and walk, he doesn’t seem to have argued or anything, just done as he was told. In spite of the fact that he got into trouble for it later. That sort of touch from God is irresistible, isn’t it? And frightening.

This isn’t the only occasion in John’s gospel where the consequences of being healed are spelled out. In another place, Jesus heals a blind man, also on the Sabbath day, and the authorities get themselves in a right muddle. Nobody born blind gets to see, it just doesn't happen. And if it did, it couldn't happen on the Sabbath. Not unless the person who did it was a sinner, because only a sinner would do that on the Sabbath – it's work, isn't it? And if the person who did it was a sinner, it can't have happened! And even the blind man’s parents get caught up in the row, telling the authorities that yes, it was their son, and yes, he has been blind from birth, but yes, it does seem that he can see now, and no, they haven’t the faintest idea why, or what happened!

“Do you want to be made well?” Later in John 5, Jesus tells the man he’s just healed not to sin again or something worse might happen. It’s not the only time he equates paralysis with sin – there’s that time when he’s teaching at home and a man comes with four friends who have to let his stretcher down through the roof because it’s simply too crowded else. And Jesus looks at the man on the stretcher and says “Your sins are forgiven!”

People do get stuck – sometimes physically, like these men, but more often mentally and emotionally. I know several people who found it extremely difficult to get back to normal life after the pandemic. I personally found it nearly impossible to make plans, in case things changed again and we went into another lockdown. That passed off fairly rapidly, but for others, not so much. Perhaps they were frightened that they might still catch Covid-19 – not an unreasonable fear, of course; people do still get it today, although far fewer and it seems far less fatal. Perhaps they had just got used to being mostly at home and only going out briefly for exercise, and changing that habit was difficult. But the thing is, they got stuck, and sometimes needed help becoming unstuck.

“Do you want to be made well?” It's easy to fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch you and change you. I know I have, many times. The joy of it is, though, that we can always come back. We aren't left alone to fend for ourselves – we would always fail if we were. We just need to acknowledge to ourselves – and to God, of course, but God knew, anyway – that we've wandered away again.

That's a bit simplistic, of course – there are times when we are quite sure we haven't wandered away, and yet God seems far off. But I'm not going into that one right now; nobody really knows why that happens, except God! But for most of us, most of the time, if we fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch us and heal us and change us, we simply have to acknowledge that this is what has happened, and we are back with him again.

“Do you want to be made well?” Sometimes dreadful things have happened to some of Jesus' followers, to those who speak truth to power, to those who refuse to conform to this world’s standards. But then, we always seem to be given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes. It’s not necessarily true that God never gives us more than we can handle, but what is true is that we don't have to cope alone. God is there, not only changing us,
but enabling us to cope with that change.

It is not, of course, just about healing us as individuals, but as communities – as families, as churches, as societies, even as nations. Being open to God, being open to God’s power to change and heal, can have consequences far beyond ourselves. We may not see them ourselves, we may never know that we were the catalyst, but it can happen, nevertheless.

Do you want to be made well? Amen.