Scripture: 1 Kings 19
When we first thought of having William Williams come today and get us started on our visioning process, we talked about having an abbreviated service today and I thought maybe that would mean that we would sing and pray, but that I would not preach today. When I first imagined this series of sermons on Elijah, I thought that the sermon on this reading from chapter 19 would be on the theme of burnout, since Elijah seemed pretty burned out. As it turns out, I have changed my mind on both counts. I am going to preach this morning, though not very much, but it’s not going to be about burnout.
I do want to say at least a few words about this passage because I want to stay on schedule and finish up with Elijah two weeks from today when I’m back from vacation, and I also don’t want to skip over this passage. It is after all perhaps the best known of the passages featuring Elijah and finally we get an Elijah who is not pretending to be god, announcing droughts or going around killing people. Finally we get an Elijah I can identify with a bit more, an Elijah who is tired and discouraged and afraid—the way human beings get sometimes—and so I can deal with him a little better. But I decided not to preach on burnout because although burnout may describe the state Elijah was in, I’ve thought about it and decided that it’s not really appropriate to our situation.
Not that people can’t get burned out from time to time about specific things, but mostly I’m going to say burnout is not such a big problem, not at Sojourners and not for most people I know. As a community at Sojournjers we are not burned out. We may have too many things we want to do and too few people to do it all, and we always need to be careful about relying too heavily on some people and making sure we give one another breaks and work at involving everyone. There is always the possibility in any organization of some people being overworked, but overall we are not burned out at Sojourners, not in the sense of being discouraged and world-weary and having lost all enthusiasm and wanting to quit. That was Elijah, but it’s not us. It’s not that there’s nothing we want to do. It’s that there’s too much. We’re not burned out. We’re just getting started. And as individuals, yes it’s possible to be burned out, but when people have too much to do, too much they want to do, it’s a different thing from burnout, and it’s a good thing even though it doesn’t always feel that way. Burnout can be a real issue for some people at some times, but it’s not what’s on my mind this morning. Maybe I’ll come back to it another time.
This passage that I read is actually a pretty popular one among the preachers that I have tended to hang around with over the years, largely I think because it gives us preachers some good lines to work with. God finds Elijah out in the wilderness and asks him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Now I think God meant that question in a very specific sense. What are you doing out here in the wilderness? Why aren’t you back in Samaria where I sent you in the first place? But preachers can easily turn this into a very large, philosophical question. What are you doing here? As in, why are we alive? What are we doing on planet earth? Or less broadly we might ask what are you doing here, you Sojourners, in Charlottesville, at the corner of Monticello and Elliott. What are you up to? That’s a good question for a congregation beginning to build a vision of what it’s space and surroundings should look like and feel like. Preachers can pick up on this question at lots of levels. What are you doing here Elijah, Jim Bundy, Sojourners?
Then there’s that still, small voice that spoke to Elijah after there was no voice in the earthquake, wind, and fire. And among my friends and associates this is a popular one too, since it seems that God doesn’t tend to speak to the people I hang around with in very thunderous voice. In fact God often doesn’t speak very clearly to people I know. Lots of the time God seems to be pretty subtle with people I know, and so the idea that God speaks to us in a “still, small voice” or even through the sounds of sheer silence seems to ring true to experience for many people. And it rings true to mine.
As far as how God speaks to us, there’s lots to reflect on and I have to save many of those thoughts for another time. For this morning I have just a thought to express. It is paradoxical in the same way that I said last week that a fervent faith is something that I both deeply distrust and profoundly desire at the same time. This week I’m thinking a paradoxical thought about that still small voice of God.
The last line in the hymn we sang, written by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, says “speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, o still small voice of calm.” I chose that hymn because it obviously is based partly on this scripture passage, but then I began to wonder: Is the voice of God a voice of calm? I know it’s a still small voice. I know the story says the voice of God in this case didn’t come in a spectacular way, with the earthquake, wind, or fire. But the story also doesn’t say exactly that it was a voice of calm. I think that was Whittier’s idea.
And it’s not a bad idea. We do need a voice from somewhere at the heart of things that is a voice of calm. When there is so much going on in our world that might legitimately make us afraid, and when there seem to be plenty of people who are interested in exaggerating the fear level so it can be turned into money or votes, then we do need a voice to speak to us that appeals to something better in us than fear. We need God’s voice to be a voice of calm. When there are so many angry and strident voices all around, we need a voice that may not be as loud as others but that will be stronger and truer. We need God’s voice to be a voice of calm, and a voice that will help our voices to be voices of calm and compassion. In lives where there is always more calling to be done than we have time or health or strength to do, and where open hearts give us much to be anxious about, from the well-being of people we love to the direction our society is heading, we need something that will center us, something quiet in the spirit that will steady our nerves and our most loving resolve. We need God’s voice to be a voice of calm.
But we also need God’s voice at the very same time not to be a voice of calm. In a world where there is every temptation to pursue a life free of what the hymn calls the “strain and stress” of our living, to avoid and block out and deny those things that might prove straining and stressful to us, we need the voice of God not to be a voice of calm but a voice that calls us to a fuller vision of living. In a world where there is every temptation to retreat into our various private worlds, disengaging from the turmoil of the world “out there”, we need the voice of God not to be a voice of calm but a voice that calls us back to an engagement that quite often is out of our comfort zone. In the church, where we often speak of the peace of God and imagine that faith will bring us serenity in our souls, it is important that the voice of God not be just a voice of calm, that peace not become complacency, that the voice of God also be a voice of restlessness, that it continue to stir us up, make us uncomfortable with the world and with ourselves.
We do need a voice at the heart of things that is a voice of calm. We also need to listen for that still small voice that is not a voice of calm but that does call us always to the continuing of a journey, and that promises to be with us along the way. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 24, 2005