What are you doing here?

Passages for reflection: Psalm 38 and 1 Kings 19: 9 - 18 

Throughout this time of pandemic and uncertainty I have encouraged people to be honest about how they have been feeling. We have had good days and extremely bad ones, haven’t we? 

I’ve also encouraged people who have said they don’t have any words to give God in prayer to use the Psalms, for every human situation and emotion is in them, every sentence a cry to God or a reminder about God, every one of the Psalms written in the middle of a situation that is real and which often hurts or the writer feels they cannot move on from. Often they are quite stuck, and there feels no way out.

I have the Book of Common Prayer by my bed which I use for morning and night time prayer. My edition uses good old fashioned language and while I was thinking about what to share in this week’s sermon, Psalm 38 drew my attention. I don’t think I’ve really read Psalm 38 properly. How about this for where many of us have been and still find ourselves at the moment as we work out when we go out what is safe... 

“And I, truly, am set in the plague: and my heaviness is ever in my sight.”

The Old Testament reading for this Sunday is one of my favourites because it is an account of human frailty and of a God who comes into that frailty and panic and encourages a movement towards him to enable us to see his presence again, restoring us and helping  us move from our fear back into faith. 

I’ve been reflecting this week a lot on how when we are overwhelmed we focus on the fear rather than the faith we have, so if you are fearful and panicky hear the story of Elijah and his God for yourself...

Elijah, fearing for his life after destroying the prophets of Baal runs from the wicked King Ahab and his cruel wife Jezebel (go back a few chapters in 1 Kings if you need reminding of the back story.) Given a chance they will have him executed for challenging their rule and undermining their authority “in the name of the Lord.” Elijah runs for many miles until, utterly exhausted, he lays down in a desert place and prays that he might simply be allowed to give up... to die. An angel comes to feed him - who are your angels I wonder who come when you are at your wits end? 

Elijah wants to give up, to hide, to have life taken away from him. It’s all been too much. It’s easier to withdraw than face the problem...

At junior school I used to hide most of the day in a toilet. I remember we all had a number which we would shout out when the register was taken and I remember calling mine out when the teacher got to it. I was scared of the other children so I hid. I have no idea how I was persuaded to come out! 

In one of my appointments as a minister I had a lady who liked to try and find me to vent her spleen about everything that was wrong with the church and me! I had a little office on the premises and naughtily when I heard her coming into the building on the war path about minutiae, I would go and hide in there until the storm had gone home! I’ll remember her long lists of complaints for ever. I didn’t need her shouting at me. I could do nothing right so I hid away. 

Elijah finds that God comes into the hiding place, the place of exhaustion, the place where one is set in the plague and one is overwhelmed with heaviness. He asks Elijah to name his problem. “What are you doing here?”

“I am all alone. You gave me an impossible job and I did it. But now I’m in trouble and I just want to give up and die.”

The Psalmist in Psalm 38 pleads for God to hurry up and come, to not forsake him, he knows God can save him. 

The good pastoral carer will listen to the situation described and work out how to help the person move out of it. 

In this story, God sets to work to show Elijah he is there. But we have to note where God’s voice is not heard. Elijah saw God in whirlwind and in earthquake and in fire and sometimes yes, God does speak in those places. But God knows what we need when we need it and he knows Elijah in his torment and depression and contemplation of suicide, maybe, needs something different. I guess something Elijah is not used to when thinking about God. 

“Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

How does the Lord pass by for us just where we are, no matter how rubbish where we are is? 

In sheer silence.

In a still, small voice.

In calm. 

In a new way we have our eyes and our hearts opened to. 

To a prophet at the end of his tether, drained of strength and wishing he was dead, it is not supernatural displays of power, but God’s whispered word that speaks to him at his time of crisis. And so it is for us.

Two thoughts occur to me. 

First, God coming into the silence. 

I love silence. I’m not good at noise. That’s why I love quiet days rather than exuberant noisy worship! That’s why the most powerful times of reminder of the divine being with me through this pandemic have been on my walks alone where only the sounds of creation have been heard, no other people, no issues to worry about, a resetting of my soul and deep peace. Perhaps we need in our panic just to breathe deeply a bit and listen. God comes just how we need him to. I often go to this Edwina Gateley poem and I’m reminded of it thinking of Elijah:

Be silent.
Be still.
Alone.
Empty
Before your God.
Say nothing.
Ask nothing.
Be silent.
Be still.
Let your God look upon you.
That is all.
God knows.
God understands.
God loves you
With an enormous love,
And only wants
To look upon you
With that love.
Quiet.
Still.
Be.

Let your God -
Love you.

Then maybe we like Elijah need to be open to God coming differently. 

I read of a lady who had to go into her church building this week to read the meters. She got upset seeing the empty worship space, and she felt that God was not there and she felt alone in what she describes as an “eerie silence.” 

Then she left the building and something powerful happened as she went into town: she met people who asked her how she was, she saw strangers on the street chatting to each other, she saw a happy family group with two little boys skipping along and she realised of course God wasn’t in the empty church but he was there with her on her journey home, working in the world. 

In our upset, panic, sense of abandonment, times of overwhelming workload or too much information, times of heaviness set in the plague, come O God and remind us of what I can put no better than how John Greenleaf Whittier put it in one of the greatest pastoral hymns ever written:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire,
speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,
O still small voice of calm.

Reading the story of Elijah again I notice how it ends. The still small voice of calm, the sound of sheer silence doesn’t get rid of Elijah’s problem. Elijah repeats to God word for word his complaint, just as he spoke it before God passed by. But God speaks within the situation and gives Elijah a job. He isn’t let off his duties. He doesn’t get to be laid off or have a holiday or retire quietly. 

“Go, return!”

God also wants to say to him “ But remember, you are not as alone as you think.”’ 

What’s the message of this story for us?

To give our pain to God.

When God asks us “what are you doing here?” to watch for how he comes.

To listen for the sound of sheer silence to calm us.

To be open that God might not be where we expect and might well be ahead of us and when we see him, he will laugh how slow we are to get that he is in the world and not in our narrow box of God only being in the chapel. God hasn’t stopped working these past few months has he?

 

And finally to be reminded of this through a lovely quote I found:

“When we reach the end of our resources we have only come to the beginning of his.  Put your trust in him, and know that he will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Wherever you find yourself today, know that God will find you. 

From where you are, come out and watch for him passing by.

Then know peace beyond measure.

Your Jezebel, your complaining woman, the ongoing pandemic, your huge fears will still be about, but you do not face them alone but with an inner calm that God’s calm is your strength. Today and always.