Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 3

Pentecost and Season after Pentecost 1 (Propers 3-16)

David L. Bartlett, Barbara Brown Taylor

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781611641172
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

With this new lectionary commentary series, Westminster John Knox offers the most extensive resource for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes of the series will cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints' Day.

For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays--one each on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. This gives preachers sixteen different approaches to the proclaimation of the Word on any given occasion.

The editors and contributors to this series are world-class scholars, pastors, and writers representing a variety of denominations and traditions. And while the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers, as well as teachers and students, may make use of its contents.

PROPER 7 (SUNDAY BETWEEN JUNE 19 AND JUNE 25 INCLUSIVE)

1 Kings 19:1–4 (5–7), 8–15a

¹Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. ²Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” ³Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there.

⁴But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” ⁵Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” ⁶He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. ⁷The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” ⁸He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. ⁹At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.

Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ¹⁰He answered, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

¹¹He said, “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; ¹²and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. ¹³When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ¹⁴He answered, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” ¹⁵Then the LORD said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus”

Theological Perspective

“Message? God wasn’t in the sound bites. God was in the silence bites.”

So went one pastor’s sermon on today’s passage, which identified verses 11–13 as the theological heart of this text. When faced with congregants fully immersed in the trappings of contemporary North American culture, whether it be the flash and bang of Hollywood or the bluster endemic to cable political commentary, preaching the God who comes to Elijah in “a sound of sheer silence” (v. 12) can prove difficult to resist. In addition, such a sermon can almost write itself: “God’s way of getting through to us is not through the sensational or the bombastic; God, instead, acts in our lives restrainedly and understatedly.” “We need to take time out from the frenetic pace of our lives and embrace stillness and silence; through them God’s word comes to us.”

While there certainly are occasions for such sermons, biblical scholar Richard Nelson contends that 1 Kings 19:1–15a is not one of them. He bemoans the fact that this text is frequently used to inquire into the nature of revelation, which evinces, he believes, “a serious misreading of the narrative.”¹ According to Nelson, one should not make too much of the declaration that God was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire (vv. 11–12). The text’s inclination to distinguish “the divine presence itself from its outward manifestations” follows, he argues, standard theological procedure as far as the Hebrew Bible is concerned.² Nelson further believes that there is no textual warrant to conclude that God is uniquely present in the “sound of sheer silence” that follows. Verse 12 makes no definitive determination concerning the nature of the relationship between God and the silence.

Nelson is no doubt reacting to commentators like John Gray, who concluded that the text’s presentation of the “revelation of God in an intelligible communication rather than in the spectacular phenomena described marks an advance in man’s conception of God as personally accessible and intelligible to man within the framework of human experience.”³ Gray’s reading clearly reflects the general approach to revelation often taken by liberal theology, particularly its nineteenth-century Protestant version. When taken too far, however, this interpretive slant can lead to the very unbiblical notion that the conditions for God’s revelation are things that can be anticipated (“God prefers to work in the stillness”) or, worse, created by us (“Quiet your hearts, and then you will hear God”).

While I am not as pessimistic as Nelson about the value of conducting explorations of the nature of revelation through verses 11–13 (surely there must be something special about the silence described in v. 12), his determination that this text is primarily about God’s response to Elijah’s loss of prophetic nerve should be taken to heart. The preacher who resists the temptation to talk tritely about the “God of silences” and invests his time and energy where Nelson recommends will, in the long run, be pleased with the sermon that results.

To this end, it is important that one recounts for the congregation the preceding events in chapter 18. There, on Mount Carmel, Elijah faces off against 450 prophets of the god Baal to determine which deity—YHWH or Baal—is the true God of Israel. YHWH, of course, triumphs where Baal fails, by consuming a designated sacrifice by fire. Elijah then leads those gathered in the slaying of Baal’s prophets.

What is striking in chapter 18 is Elijah’s confidence and resolve, which are nowhere to be found in the text before us. He shows no hint of fear or doubt in his contest with Baal’s prophets and is even so bold as to openly and sarcastically mock them in verse 27, despite being drastically outnumbered.

In chapter 19, however, YHWH’s cocksure prophet comes unhinged. Afraid for his life after hearing of Jezebel’s desire to eliminate him, Elijah flees to the wilderness and asks, four verses in, to die rather than face her wrath. Elijah, who earlier stood tall against 450 rivals, now desires to opt out of existence altogether. He later sequesters himself in a cave on Mount Horeb.

According to the mid-twentieth-century existentialists, the cold, hard fact of human existence is that we find ourselves adrift in an indifferent, even hostile, universe, shouldered with the added burden of having to summon the strength to continue on nonetheless. This is certainly how Elijah felt. “I alone am left,” he says in verse 14, “and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

This text, however, shows Elijah to be in error here. As the apostle Paul recalls in Romans 11:1–6 (in arguing for the continued faithfulness of God to the original covenant with Israel), Elijah later learns that God has kept seven thousand free from that taint of Baal in Israel (1 Kgs. 19:18), which serves to highlight the unfounded and solipsistic nature of Elijah’s despair (“I alone am left”). Huddled in his cave, convinced of his unique status as the last remaining person of faith, Elijah’s primary temptation is to think that he has to go it alone, that it is all up to him. This illusion presents itself to us when our concepts of reality do not include the dynamic presence of God, which empowers us to trust in the resources of divine grace—which specializes in making the impossible possible.

That there is a future for him beyond the cave—and for Israel after Elijah—-is not rationally obvious to Elijah. Such insight can be received only as a gift from God (v. 15a), not inferred strictly on the basis of the immediate circumstances.

In other words, the catalyst for faith—which allows the understanding to surpass the limits set for it by reason—must originate somewhere other than the self or the situations in which we immediately find ourselves. It must originate instead in God, a monumental theological principle that can either help to illuminate, or be illuminated by this pericope.

TREVOR EPPEHIMER

Pastoral Perspective

“There is not much truth being told in this world. There never was. This has proven to be a major disappointment to some of us.”¹ Hearing God’s truth out of Elijah’s lips was disappointing to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. This third of five successive Elijah/Elisha stories relates Elijah’s hiding from Ahab in the wilderness and receiving God’s unexpected sustenance for his next ministry. As with many Ordinary Time texts, this is an invitation to experience God’s unexpected encouragement for perseverance in the daily mazes of our lives, whether we are facing abundance, adversity, or dulling routine.

Humanity does a fine job of fooling itself about God’s truthful intent for our daily maze-meandering lives. Anne Lamott puts it wittily:

When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth. .. . It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me. .. . Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else.²

Elijah escaped the maze by running into the wilderness. And there an angel fed him—twice! I know what a blessing it is to be fed. When my husband and I had our daughter, we received a steady stream of dinners in the first few weeks of her life. Until then, I had no concept of what a luxury it is to be fed a tasty variety of meals I did not have to plan, acquire, prepare, and clean up. I had not even realized just how much I needed to be fed—both spiritually and physically. Those in the pastoral profession are rewarded for being dogs at a whistlers’ convention. Peeling ourselves away from the steady diet of adrenaline upon which first responders feed can feel as threatening as undergoing detoxification in a recovery center. Unfortunately, like any addiction, an adrenaline high gets us lost in our mazes and gets in the way of a relationship with God.

Congregants have barriers to their relationships with God too. One barrier might be a sense of inadequacy, as Elijah seems to be expressing in verse 4 when he compares himself to other great prophets. This story reminds us that although we may feel separated from God and are tempted to give up on both ourselves and our ministries, God is always providing for us. Why would God do otherwise? After all, God created each one of us uniquely for a purpose. We water the expensive plantings we put into our summer gardens and take interest in their flourishing. How much more does God want to provide for our blossoming!

Where is God when we feel needy? Elijah certainly expected to find God in the earth (quake), wind, and fire, but God was not there. Instead, God was in the sound of silence. Simon and Garfunkel had it right—we need to listen to those sounds of silence (e.g., the plight of the oppressed, the vacant faces of the homeless, the inarticulate cries of undernourished children), because in them God is encouraging us to persevere. Being stubborn people, we forget what Elijah learned: the presence of God is not always obvious. Our preconceptions of God’s truth and ways in which God will communicate it get in our maze-minded way.

Children seem to grasp this truth much more readily. In the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness, a child is trying to tell his distracted father an old story while his father is trying to figure out where the two of them are going safely to spend the night: “A shipwrecked man prays to God to save him. A boat approaches, but the man tells it to go away because God will save him. The boat leaves. A second boat arrives, and the man sends it away, saying God will save him. The man dies of exposure. When he gets to heaven, he complains to God for not saving him when he prayed. God tells the man he sent two boats to save him but the man sent them away.”³ We must remain open to God’s communication vehicles, rather than our preconceived expectations.

God often defies our expectations. When Elijah first responded to God’s calling, he did not expect to have his life threatened by Queen Jezebel and then protected by an angel. Few of us would expect that. When my husband and I were pregnant, we discovered an entire publishing division was devoted to helping people overcome uncertainty. The original editors of What to Expect When You’re Expecting have expanded their repertoire to include an overview of what to anticipate in each stage of a youngster’s life. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have such a detailed overview of what to expect for each of life’s major transitions? Just imagine the possibilities: What to expect when my high-schooler graduates; what to expect when my spouse and/or I retire; what to expect when I and my parents age.

We are a people who like to know what to expect; but when we stop expecting God in the seemingly obvious places, God exceeds our expectations. Helping our congregants reframe their maze-minded expectations and persevere is this text’s call to action. Given that this lectionary reading falls in the summer, we can suggest this as the perfect time for slowing down sufficiently to hear God’s sounds of silence. By alluding to the multiple ways Elijah receives provisions from God (ravens, a widow, an angel), we can also suggest looking at our past for hints as to how God will exceed our expectations in the present and future. Our understanding of God’s truth for our lives will be more authentic for having escaped the false-expectation maze.

CARRIE N. MITCHELL

Exegetical Perspective

The lectionary cuts this passage off too soon. The story in chapter 19 sets the stage for the downfall of Ahab’s house and for the transfer of prophetic power from Elijah to Elisha. At the very least, verses 15b-17 must be included in the reading in order to explain who will complete the work Elijah has begun and to suggest how Jezebel and Ahab will be eliminated (through the agency of Hazael, Jehu and Elisha). Ideally, verse 19a would be included as well, since verses 9–19a form a rhetorical envelope beginning and ending with the word “there” (referring to “Horeb, the mount of God”) and verses 16–19a form an envelope beginning and ending with “Elisha son of Shaphat.”

Under David and Solomon, all of the tribes of Israel were organized into one united kingdom. After Solomon’s death, however, the people of the ten northern tribes rebelled against the Davidic line of kings and set up their own kingdom, which they called Israel. Only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained loyal to the Davidic line of kings, who continued to rule over the southern kingdom, now called Judah. The northern kingdom of Israel, with its capital in Samaria, and the southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, coexisted (sometimes as enemies and sometimes as friends) for almost 200 years (until Israel fell to Assyria in 722/721 BCE). The stories of Elijah are interwoven with the political and religious history of the northern kingdom during the reign of King Ahab in the ninth century BCE.

First Kings 16...