Last Sunday after the Epiphany - March 2, 2003
1 Kings 19:9-18
Psalm 27 or 27:5-11
2 Peter 1:16-19(20-21)
Mark 9:2-9
Elijah was running for his life. Queen Jezebel had threatened him and he believed she was intent on carrying out her threats. In his flight he comes to a solitary broom tree in the desert wadies of the south and there he sits down under it famished, without food or water and prepares to die. He falls asleep and is visited by an angel who instructs him to get up and to eat and he finds there food and water. He eats and drinks and then lies down a second time to sleep. The angel arouses him once again, suggests that he eat and drink again for he has a long journey ahead, so Elijah complies and begins what is a 40-day journey to Mt. Horeb, the mount of God. He requires no more food or water for that long journey. He comes to a cave and he spends the night there and it is here that our lesson begins.
Notice that it is God, not the angel who approaches Elijah in his cave. When God asks him what he is doing there, Elijah begins to pour out his complaints of his enemies in vitriolic profusion. Oh he was discouraged and disillusioned. When we feel like that magnanimity is rather rare. Heine, the poet, was only half in jest when in describing his notion of happiness, He said: “My wishes are a humble dwelling with a thatched roof, a good bed, good food, flowers at my windows, and some fine tall trees before my door. And if the good god wants to make me completely happy he will grant me the joy of seeing six or seven of my enemies hanging from trees.” IB 3:162. Elijah would have been in complete agreement. Now all of this complaining has come after he, following one meal given by the messenger of God, has been able to travel the wastelands of the Negeb for 40 days. Unimpressed, the angel of God tells him to get out of his cave and go out on the mountain for the Lord is about to pass by.
My image of Elijah’s response is to see him crouching in the opening to the cave and suddenly there is a great wind, so great that rocks are breaking in pieces. But, says the scriptures, the Lord was not in the wind. Then there is an earthquake, which makes the entire mountain quiver and begin to move, but the Lord is not in the earthquake. Following that comes a great firestorm sweeping over the slopes of the mountain scouring everything in its path, but the Lord is not in the fire. Finally, there comes a sound of sheer silence. It could be translated a “a sound of a gentle stillness.” And I see Elijah peering out of his cave and in wonderment beginning to make his way out on the mountain. But he goes out in awe with fear and trembling, wrapping his face in his mantle for suddenly he knows that God is in this remarkable silence. There in the silence he finally hears the voice of God, the silent unmistakable voice of God.
We observe some silence in our liturgies. Would that it were much greater for in it we too might begin to hear the voice of God.
It was in such a place and such an hour, a place and time of silence, that Jesus had taken Peter, James and John. They were on the mountain and there as Jesus was transfigured before their very eyes, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus speaking with him. Do you think Peter, James and John were aware of being in the presence of God? Oh yes. Other than suggesting that they be able to stay there, Peter doesn’t know how to respond. And Peter is one who always knows how to respond. But he and the others are like Elijah, terrified in the presence of God. Today we have so tamed our conception of God that we cannot imagine being terrified of God. We have convinced ourselves that he is sweet and kind, a dear daddy, Santa Claus, always bearing gifts and never fearful. We forget Jesus in the temple scourging the moneychangers. We forget the horror of the cross. We forget….. Perhaps Peter is trying to respond, perhaps he is within himself so concerned to figure out what is happening, to do something that the voice of God comes out of the heavens to him and to James and to John, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” Peter get out of yourself. Stop being so self-absorbed. Moses and Elijah and Jesus are three figures who are in the center of my plans for you and the world around you. Listen to Jesus.
Many years later Peter writes about this event in his life. Said he, “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the majestic Glory, saying, “this is my son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain. So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. We were eyewitnesses. It is this that has changed our lives. “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”
If you have ever gone through a tollbooth, you know that your relationship to the person in the booth is not the most intimate you’ll ever have. It is one of life’s frequent non-encounters: You hand over the money; you might get change; you drive off. Dr. Charles Garfield says, “I have been through every one of the 17 tollbooths on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge on thousands of occasions, and never had an exchange worth remembering with anybody.”
Late one morning in 1984, headed for lunch in San Francisco, I drove toward one of the booths. I heard loud music. It sounded like a party, or a Michael Jackson concert. I looked around. No other cars with their windows open. No sound trucks. I looked at the tollbooth. Inside it, the man was dancing.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m having a party,” he said.
“What about the rest of these people?” I looked over at the other booths, nothing moving there.
“They’re not invited.”
I had a dozen other questions for him, but somebody in a big hurry to get somewhere started punching his horn behind me and I drove off. But I made a note to myself. ” Find this guy again. There’s something in his eye that says there’s magic in his tollbooth.
Months later I did find him again, still with the loud music, still having a party.
Again I asked, “What are you doing?”
He said, “I remember you from the last time. “I’m still dancing. I’m having the same party.”
I said, “Look. What about the rest of the people….”
He said, ”Stop. What do those look like to you?” He pointed down the row of tollbooths.
“They look like…tollbooths.”
“Noooo imagination!”
I said, “Okay, I give up. What do they look like to you?”
He said, “Vertical coffins.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can prove it. At 8:30 every morning, live people get in. Then they die for eight hours. At 4:30, like Lazarus from the dead, they reemerge and go home. For eight hours, brain is on hold, dead on the job. Going through the motions.”
I was amazed. The guy had developed a philosophy, a mythology about his job. I could not help asking the next question: “Why is it different for you? You’re having a good time.”
He looked at me. “I knew you were going to ask that,” he said. “I’m going to be a dancer someday.” He pointed to the administration building. “My bosses are in there, and they’re paying for my training.”
Sixteen people dead on the job, and the seventeenth, in precisely the same situation, figures out a way to live. That man was having a party where you and I would probably not last three days. The boredom! He and I did have lunch later, and he said, “I don’t understand why anybody would think my job is boring. I have a corner office, glass on all sides, I can see the Golden Gate, San Francisco, the Berkeley hills; half the Western world vacations here…and I just stroll in every day and practice dancing.”
Finally, Peter, points us to the Scriptures. It is they that help define us as Christians, not in some idiosyncratic interpretation, but as the Holy Spirit leads. We know what happened on the holy mountain, he is saying, we were there. Elijah knew God that day in the sound of sheer silence. Will you find a place to stand with God in the silence.
Please God, let it be.