By Rev. Adam Anderson
I am not a quiet person. You may have noticed this by now.
Somewhere down in me, the atoms are humming, vibrating, leaning me forward like a clock that is wound tight. Movement after movement after movement, already onto the next thing. And after all, there are always next things, aren’t there? Another interesting story, another interesting moment, another unique conversation. The world keeps moving, and my body, for some reason, cannot stop moving either.
Here’s what I’ve learned, though slowly and, admittedly, mostly against my will. The thing I crave most is not actually the next thing. The thing I crave most almost always is the quiet. It’s God in the quiet. Turns out I often avoid it anyway.
And why would the thing we most want be the thing we most avoid? I think it’s because we know something is waiting in there. The quiet, if you’re there long enough, is never empty. Sit in it long enough, and a question will come.
Elijah knew this. He had just had the biggest day of his ministry. Think of the Super Bowl and the World Series and three Michelin stars all wrapped up into one. He threw fire down from heaven on Mount Carmel, made fun of all the prophets, dumped water on the altar, and there it all happened. The prophets of Baal had been removed, destroyed, undone. And then came one message from Jezebel: by this time tomorrow.
And this great prophet bolts a day’s journey into the wilderness. He sits down under a scraggly broom tree and asks to die. It is enough, Lord. I am no better than my ancestors. Some of you have sat under that tree.
Now watch what God does. God does not ask him a single question. An angel touches him instead, and there is cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water by his head. Eat. Sleep. And then a second touch. Get up and eat, Elijah, or the journey will be too much for you. Before God asks Elijah anything, God makes breakfast.
On the strength of that bread, Elijah travels forty days to Horeb, the mountain of God, and then he crawls into a cave. And the word of the Lord comes: What are you doing here, Elijah?
He already has an answer ready. You can tell he’s rehearsed it. It’s so particular. I have been very zealous for the Lord. The people have torn down your altars and killed your prophets, and I alone am left, and now they are seeking my life. It’s a pretty good answer. Certainly a well-rehearsed one. It is also an exhausted answer, the answer of a man who is convinced that everything depends solely on him, and who is losing it all.
Then the response comes. Go out and stand on the mountain, for the Lord is about to pass by.
This is one of my favorite passages in all of scripture, because of what we find there. There is a wind strong enough to split rocks, and the Lord was not in the wind. There is an earthquake that shatters the land, and the Lord was not in the earthquake. There is fire, burning all around, and in that heat the Lord was still not there.
These are old signs. This is how God showed up at Sinai. This is how God showed up on Carmel with the prophets just days ago. And now, somehow, God is no longer there.
Boy, do we know the sound of that wind lately, don’t we? We know the feeling of the earth shaking underneath us. We scroll or read or watch for thirty seconds, and the whole world is shaking, and it is on fire, and it is so loud, and it will not stop. We believe that if we just keep up with all of it, if we stay informed and stay outraged and stay busy, we will find God somewhere in that roar.
The Lord was not in the fire.
But after the fire came a sound of sheer silence. The Hebrew is hardly able to be translated. It is a voice of thin quiet, a crushed, small stillness, a sound that is almost not a sound. And you don’t even need to translate it, because you know that feeling too. Some things do not need to be translated to be understood.
When Elijah hears that sound, he wraps his face in his cloak and walks to the mouth of the cave. And the voice asks again: What are you doing here, Elijah?
And Elijah says exactly the same thing. Word for word. I have been zealous. Altars are being torn down. Prophets are killed, and woe is me. I am the only one left.
Do you notice how strange that is? We tell the story as if the silence fixed him, as if he walked out of the quiet calm and centered and clear about his calling. He did not. He gave the same tired, rehearsed answer. The quiet did not make Elijah a better answerer.
I think that’s freeing. If we avoid the quiet, we may be avoiding it the way we would avoid an exam we haven’t studied for. We may think God’s question, What are you doing here?, is a test, and we may be afraid of what the answer would be. But Elijah doesn’t change his answer, and God doesn’t grade it.
God says to Elijah instead: Go, return the way you came. There is work to do. Anoint the kings, and anoint a prophet to stand beside you. And then comes a phrase almost tucked away within the text: I have kept seven thousand in Israel. Because, Elijah, you were never the only one.
The question was never a test. It was the door God opened to tell him the truth. Elijah, my child, my prophet, you are fed and you are sent, and you are not alone.
Mark tells it about Jesus in almost the same way. Up out of the water, a voice from heaven: my Son, the Beloved. And immediately the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness. Mark uses the same verb he’ll use when Jesus is casting out demons. Jesus doesn’t get to gently wander into the woods. Jesus is thrown into the wilderness. We know the story from the other gospel writers too. There, among the wild beasts, the angels attend him. Like Elijah, he is beloved first and then fed.
Then, if you dig into Mark, who loves to say and then, and then, and then, and then, the din of the noise of the world rushes in. For Mark it is a chapter’s worth of noise. It is Capernaum, and a man screaming in the synagogue. It is Simon’s mother-in-law burning with fever. By sundown, the whole city is at his doorstep. The man just got out of the wilderness.
But in the morning, while it is still very dark, Jesus gets up and goes out to a deserted place, and he prays. It is the same wilderness word, but this time Jesus walks there on his own.
And then, wouldn’t you know it, Simon decides to hunt him down. Everyone is searching for you, Jesus. You know that sentence? If any of you have been parents for more than thirty seconds, you know that sentiment.
Everyone is searching for you, Simon says, and Jesus answers, Let us go on to the neighboring towns. Not back to the crowd at the door. Let’s keep moving. The quiet was not a pit stop so he could do more of the same. It turned him.
And friends, as someone who continues to love to sit in the firmament of the noise, I will say this next part to myself first and then to each of you. We are not short on noise. We are not short on wind and earthquake and fire. What we are short on is a few minutes of thin silence where God can ask us God’s question.
And we might be a little afraid of it. I am a little afraid of it from time to time, because we think that question audits our calling. My friends, it does not. Before that question is ever spoken in silence, there is bread on hot stones and a jar of water by your head. Before the wilderness, there is a voice that says to you that you are beloved. The question in the silence never comes to catch you. It comes to feed you, to turn you, and to tell you who will stand beside you.
So as we continue through this season, keep in mind that liturgy is nothing more than the people’s work. This service is a chance for us to practice in real time. Here, my friends, we can gather at the mouth of the cave in silence and be ready for the question God may ask, with God already attending to our needs before we even ask.
So throughout the rest of today, wrap your face if you need to, and go to the mouth of the cave. You are more than welcome in the silence to give the same tired answer twice. One of the mightiest prophets there ever was, Elijah, did the same to God. So it is okay. The bread is already set out for you.
Listen, friends. Listen for a voice that is barely a voice, one that asks each of you, What are you doing here?