Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 24, 2007
1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a
Psalm 42
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39
Well, we certainly have a pitiable assortment of characters in today’s scripture lessons. And they all seem to have something in common. They all seem to be living in a prison of their own making. And one thing put them there. FEAR. The fear of facing challenges in their life that might require them to change the way they live it.
Yes, we certainly have a pitiable assortment of characters in today’s scripture. But, in fact, they are us, and if we are honest, we will see something of ourself in them. We might not identify with the particular circumstances of their situation, but we cannot escape finding the same fear in us as we find in them. Fear which causes us to run away from circumstances we are afraid to face; fear which keeps us chained and bound to situations we cannot or will not change, fear which keeps us acting on beliefs which are no longer true, and fear which causes us to die, or want to die, as we feel our life fading from us in our loneliness or pain.
Perhaps you can identify your fear in Elijah’s fear. Elijah is running for his life, literally. Because he is afraid of losing it. Elijah is trying to get to a safe place where he can hide from a danger he does not want to face. After a day’s journey, he finds a place where he feels safe, only to find that he is miserable. Elijah is so miserable, in fact, he wishes he were dead. How ironic. Elijah wants the very thing he is running away from. So he asks God to take away his life. He believes he is of no use to himself or to God anymore. His prophetic acts have brought him to a dead end; a solitary man, in a solitary desert, sitting under a solitary broom tree, he asks God to just take him out of this world. Then he lies down under that tree and falls asleep, hoping he will sleep the sleep of death.
Have you ever felt like Elijah? Have you ever felt as if you were no longer of value or worth to anyone, including yourself? Have you ever wished that you would die? Have you ever gone to sleep hoping you would not have to wake up? Honestly, I don’t know how anyone gets through life without experiencing such thoughts and feelings. They come from fear. Fear of the life that we are living in, and fear of changing anything about it for fear of the unknown. So we get stuck. Like Elijah, we get stuck in a life which has little meaning or purpose, and we can’t imagine anything else. If a doctor or a therapist were to diagnose Elijah’s condition they would likely say that he is depressed. They would give him medication to treat his symptoms and hope for the best.
But Elijah does not need modern medicine and therapy to turn his life around. He has everything he needs out there in the wilderness. Elijah is not alone, in a solitary place. Nor will he be allowed to sleep until he doesn’t wake up. Instead, he is awakened by the Angel of the Lord, not once, but twice. And I think the angel would have awakened Elijah as many times as it needed to take to make him pay attention to God. The first thing the angel does is she touches Elijah, then she tells him to “Get up and eat,” because he will need strength for his journey. And where will Elijah’s journey take him? It will take him to a new place in his life. A place where Elijah will become the new person and prophet God made him to be. But not before he does the hard work.
Elijah must go on a journey for forty days through the desert to the top of Mount Horeb. Elijah eats and drink what the angel has provided for him so that he has strength for the journey. And when Elijah gets to the top of Mount Horeb he must listen attentively to hear the voice of God. Elijah expects he will hear God’s voice in the wind, in an earthquake or in fire, but in the end, all he hears is “the sound of sheer silence. And I can’t help but think what a metaphor Elijah’s experience is for our life. What a metaphor wind and earthquake and fire are for the turmoil in our life when we find ourselves facing our fears. And what a lesson, too. The lesson is that we will are not likely to hear the answers in the turmoil and tumultuous places of our life. We are morel likely to hear them in the place we fear the most. The place of silence. The voice we need to hear can only be heard in sheer silence. And that is a real problem for people in the modern world.
Because, let’s face it, silence is pretty scary for us. And the world accommodates our fear very nicely. It fills up our life every moment with necessary things to do and important places to be. We have all learned the gift of multi-tasking because we have to. And God forbid we should find ourselves in a moment of sheer silence with nothing to do or no one to talk to. We can find only panic in it, so we pick up our cell phone, or find anything we can to fill our time and space. There is a reason why we fill up every waking moment of our time. Because we fear silence, and we fear being alone with ourselves. We know that enough silence over a long enough period of time forces us to listen to what our mind and body and spirit want to say to us. It forces us to hear a voice some of us know as God’s voice. That can change us. And that’s scary. That’s what happened to Elijah after he put aside his frantic prophesying and he stopped running. Elijah fell into silence and he listened to it. What he heard is that his life lacked meaning and purpose. That’s what made him lonely and miserable, wishing that he could die.
So it is that after Elijah hears God’s voice in the sheer silence, he steps out of the mouth of the cave. God asks him what he is doing there, and Elijah is finally able to face his fear. And he is able to name it. His fear expresses itself in his anger and pain, and in his disillusionment. And do you remember what God says to Elijah after he expresses the reasons for his fear? He tells Elijah to go back to his people. God knows that Elijah has done the hard work of facing his fears. He has found God and he has found himself in sheer silence, and now he was ready to live a new life among his people and be in new relationship with them.
In modern times, Elijah’s therapist would be and satisfied with the work Elijah does to face his fears in the silences which result from intentional listening. And a modern day monk or sister in a religious order, any spiritual director would thank God that Elijah heard him in the silence of that mountaintop. Those of us who have ever made a retreat in silence, or made intentional time for silence know what Elijah knows. It can put you in a place of healthy detachment from the world, and send you back into it a new person. Less fearful, less frantic and much at ease with the person who is really living inside of you.
Paul’s voice addresses fear in our epistle lesson today as he confronts the Galatians with a common fear we all have. The fear of people who are different from ourselves. It is a voice we have heard often since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. It is the voice of tolerance for difference in others, and inclusion of all people of difference in all the public places of our lives. The Civil Rights movement of the 60’s made us confront our fears, and what we learned is that we feared so many things about people of difference. We learned that perhaps our most hidden fear is that accepting and accommodating people of difference changes us. And just like Elijah, and just like the demoniac and the townspeople we meet in our Gospel lesson today, we don’t like change. We want to stay in our comfortable places, even though we might be dying in them. Fear of change is still a great malady of our society and it is an important reason why churches find it hard to grow their membership. It is not that we fear new and different people coming to church; we fear people will come who are not like us.
But Paul reminds us that we are children of God, and God’s children are a diverse lot. In fact, there are no two people alike. We are all different. God made us that way and no distinction was ever meant to set us apart from each other. But it is the distinctions we fear. We even give names to people who are not like us so that we can set ourselves apart from them, and above them. So while civil rights legislation continues to break down walls of distinction between race and gender, distinctions of sexual orientation and distinctions of class, ability, ethnic origin, and so many other distinctions, we always have new fears to face as we try to accommodate to the changes which come with accommodating people of difference.
We find no tolerance and no accommodation for the man possessed of demons in our Gospel lesson today. But we can sure identify with the fear of the townspeople. It’s bad enough that there are lots of normal people in the world who are not like us, but people who are way outside our categories of “normal” will always provoke our fear. Ironically this story of the man plagued by demons shows us as much about our own demons as it does about his. Did you think it cruel that the demoniac is stripped naked and chained to a tomb? This is no different from the news story we heard last week about mentally challenged children who were rescued from a Baghdad school. American soldiers found them naked, chained to their beds and sleeping in their own urine on concrete floors. Now why do we do that? Why do we remove mentally and physically challenged people from society and place them in institutions. And why do we treat them like this. Why? Because they scare us. It’s not a matter of tolerating or accommodating them; we don’t know how to deal with them. Their lives don’t come close to our levels of acceptability.
And yet, I wonder how acceptable we would be to each other if people could know us for who we really are. What kinds of demons would people find in us if they could look into our head and heart? Perhaps we would find ourselves shackled and removed from polite society. C.S. Lewis tells the story of the time when he was just beginning to face his resistance to becoming a Christian. Much like Elijah, he found himself in sheer silence listening to God convict him with some awful truth about himself. Lewis thought he was a happy, reasonably good pagan, but this is what he said about what he saw in that moment: “For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me: a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was Legion.”
It seems to me that the assortment of characters who greet us in today’s scripture have a lot to show us about ourselves. And their stories leave us with a lot of good questions we need to ask ourselves. Often, and preferably in silence. Or with one like a therapist or a religious who can be with us in our silence. We need to ask what it is we fear when we find ourselves running from something. What is the fear that causes us to become angry or hateful; isolated, or depressed. What fear keeps us bound to a life which is causing us to die slowly, a life which keeps us from living fully into the life God would have us live? What fear keeps us from doing what we must to change our life for the good purpose God intends for it?
But perhaps the problem is not so much WHAT we fear as it is THAT we fear. I am reminded of famous quote of Franklin Roosevelt spoken at his First Inaugural Address during the Great Depression. It is a message Jesus conveys to us throughout scripture every time he tells us, “Do not fear,” “The only thing we have to fear,” says Roosevelt, “is fear, itself.”