Preaching Notes for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (June 19, 2016)
Sermon Series: The Vocation of a Prophet – Week Four
By the Rev. Dr. Dawn Chesser
During this six-week series on The Vocation of a Prophet I will be referring to a recently published book entitled The Shout: Finding the Prophetic Voice in Unexpected Places by Rev. Hannah Adair Bonner (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 2016). (Please note that I was not provided a free copy of this book, but became interested in it because I have followed Hannah Adair Bonner’s work for some time.) encourage you to purchase a copy of the Six-Week Journal as a resource for this series. You might also consider leading this study with a group of people from your congregation as you preach through this series.
1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a
This week, we find Elijah in despair. He is tortured because the people continue to be unwilling to reform. In spite of the incident at Mt. Carmel, they still have not rejected the pagan cults brought into the land by King Ahab’s marriage to Jezebel.
So God calls Elijah to come to Mt. Sinai, the sacred place where Moses received the covenant. On that holy mountain God comes also to Elijah. Hidden in the crack in the rocks, Elijah experiences a great wind, earthquake, and fire, but God is not revealed in these displays of nature’s power and might.
It is only after all of this noise and chaos has died down and things become very still that God speaks, gently revealing God’s presence to his troubled prophet: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
This week finds me on the verge of despair. As I write these words, we are in the first week of General Conference. By the time you read this,it will be over; and we will all be living into whatever the elected representatives have decided is best for our denomination for the next four years. I have no idea what changes this General Conference will bring. Perhaps nothing will change. Perhaps everything we currently recognize as being The United Methodist Church will look different. More than likely, there will be only small changes that will not have an impact on many of us.
I am watching General Conference via a livestream from Portland and comments in social media. I am not there, so I know that what I see and experience from my vantage point is limited and filtered. I will never know the full story of how it unfolded.Many of my colleagues and friends are there, and I am praying and trusting that God’s will will ultimately prevail, whatever it is. Weeks like this are so difficult. They throw any imagined semblance of order into chaos and threaten our stability like an earthquake shakes the ground beneath us. Ominous news from the Twitter feed sweeps across this land like a whipping wind, like fire raining down from above.
Where in the world is God in times like this? Where is the reassuring voice of the one who sent a Son to preach good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed and to announce that the time has come when God will save God’s people? Where is the one whom God sent to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and eat with sinners? Where is Christ when life becomes frightening and overwhelming?
Just like us, Elijah was afraid. He was so afraid that he had fled for his life. In the wilderness, he found a quiet place where he sat down and asked the Lord to free him from the chaos and pain of life. Death seemed like the better alternative under his circumstances.
And that’s just when the Lord sent an angel to comfort him. The angel of the Lord fed him cake and gave him water to drink, and this gave him the strength to continue on his journey for another forty days and forty nights.It was only after all of this had transpired that the Lord finally called him to come to the holy mountain and spoke to him.
In this story, I want to suggest that Jezebel represents the loud, crashing forces of chaos, brokenness, injustice, and evil that are all around us. Jezebel may not be evil herself, but her actions are evil. She sees no wrongdoing in taking a man’s land, arranging for someone’s death, or threating a prophet.
Jezebel is a metaphor for the very hard fact that evil is in this world. We can’t seem to get rid of the powers of evil. My husband made the observation that “there seems to be no level of inhumanity that human beings are unwilling to inflict upon other human beings.” It is true.
And if the stories in the Bible represent the cold, hard truth for all generations, it seems that evil has always been loose in the world. Human beings have always been willing to commit atrocities against one another and against all of God’s creation. Human beings have always been willing to fight to uphold one group’s privilege at the expense of another group. Human beings have always judged that their desires and actions are right and good and the desires of those who think and live differently from them are wrong and uninformed. Human beings have always been selfish and self-centered. Human beings have alwayslusted for blood and revenge rather than mercy and sacrificial love.
But even in the midst of admitting this cold, hard truth, we can testify that God is never far away. God is never absent. Maybe God doesn’t prevent, stop, or interfere with the consequences of human action or inaction, but God remains steadily and actively present in large things and in small things.
Every day that I have watched General Conference on my live stream, I have been uplifted at the start of the day by the worship services. I have been infused with hope for what is to come during the business meeting by the voices of individuals speaking in one of the many different languages that United Methodists around the globe speak. I have been inspired and invigorated by the calls to confession, the prayers of and for the people, the singing, and the challenginginterpretations made by those who have been called to preach the Word of God.Signs of God’s continuous presence keep popping up, even in the midst of long, difficult, and sometimes painful days. A prophetic word is being spoken, even during a week like this one.
God’s presence is evident all around us in creation. Prophetic sounds are heard in bird calls, and whale songs, and wind whispering through the leaves of the trees. Prophetic words are heard through the still small voices of the people who love us, the people who make sacrifices in order to lift others up, the people who reach out to comfort the afflicted and the people who afflict the comfortable for the sake of a better world.
God is present. God is with us. And God’s prophetic voice is still speaking in the still small voices among us. We just have to listen. We just have to listen more widely.
In her study, The Shout: Finding the Prophetic Voice in Unexpected Places, author Hannah Adair Bonner suggests that one of the most important ways we can join in the fight for justice is by listening for God’s voice from those we may not normally be able to hear, be it because those voices are silenced or because they are shouting. Perhaps one vocation, then, of a prophet is to listen for God’s voice in places where we might not expect to hear it. Maybe it comes in the shocked silence after we witness something terrible and horrific: anotherrecklesskilling of a human being caught on camera; the aftermath of yet another suicide bombing, or earthquake, or tornado, or hurricane, or angry crowd brought to riot violently because they cannot tolerate another day of being treated unjustly by their neighbors. Maybe it comes in the voices of the angry and shouting crowd itself, or in the pain and tears of someone whose life has been forever altered by an act of violence or injustice.
One of the reasons I recommend that you consider doing the six-week study The Shout: Finding the Prophetic Voice in Unexpected Places alongside this six-week sermon series on the vocation of a prophet is so you can literally “listen” to some voices from among us that you may not regularly hear. The links below are to videos from Shout artists in Houston, TX. Maybe you will even be inspired by what is happening in Houston to find ways to listen more carefully to the unheard, under-represented, or purposefully silenced voices in your own community. What do you hear the still, small voice of God sayingin Hit & Run? Or in“The Shout Can We Stand Together”? Where can you listen to the voices of people different from you where you live?