What are you doing here?

1 Kings 19

Over the years I’ve heard many sermons on 1 Kings 19 and Elijah’s flight to the holy mountain. I have listened to Handel’s Elijah and the baritone solo It is enough!  I have sung hymns such as Dear lord and father of Mankind (vss. 5&6).  Like most people in church I have heard the story of ‘the still small voice’. 

I can’t remember hearing a sermon about what the still small voice actually said! Do you ever wonder about that?  Why are we more interested in the volume than the message?  Is it that religious faith is more concerned with style than content? Or do we find what the voice says difficult threatening or irrelevant?

In the preceding part of the story Elijah has had a great victory! He stood alone against the greatest thought system of his society, the seductive religion of the Baals. In a fierce demonstration he has humiliated the prophets of Baal, and killed them. He has ended the drought at the word of the Lord.

Jezebel takes a solemn oath to kill him!  I don’t know what the power of Jezebel was, but Elijah suddenly goes to water: THEN he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life.  It’s funny the things we fear, the things we run away from.

He fled beyond the reach of his kin and his servant, beyond even the limits of Jezebel’s authority, but he felt no safer. In despair he lay down in the desert to die: It is enough: now O Lord, take away my life – for I am no better than my ancestors!

Then comes the angel of the Lord: “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” Then, in the strength of that food Elijah traveled 40 days into the desert until he came to the mountain of God.

We sometimes think it is a simple thing to come and meet with God. The Christian tradition emphasizes the accessibility of God (and this is true). But it is also true turning to God, or re-turning to God is not easy. We don’t just do it ourselves. God does most of the work in getting us to the meeting place. The grace of God raises and sustains even the one ready to die to give up, to let go. In depression and despair, when the only prayer  that Elijah can make is “Kill me now”, God feeds him, and sustains him for the long journey until he meets with God. This the amazing power of grace – it sustains through the long days and even years that it takes us to finally come face to face with God.

The scene is set! The great prophet of Israel, the hero of Mt Carmel, a man who, at the same time, is afraid and lonely and longing for death, comes near the very presence of God.

The word of God comes to Elijah: “What are you doing here Elijah?”  Elijah rehearses his tale of woe: “I’ve been zealous, all the others have deserted, thrown down your altars, killed all your prophets. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life. I’m alone, depressed and longing for death.

“Go out on the mountain: for the Lord is going to pass by.”  Now remember what this means. One cannot look on God and live. The only other one who saw God on the Holy Mountain was Moses: This is astonishing stuff – God is going to going to take Elijah into the most holy place of Israel’s tradition. He is going to meet him, if not face to face, as close as one can get and still live to talk about it. 

Then follow the special effects that usually accompanied Old Testament epiphanies: There was a great storm, Earthquake ….. Fire.  (for avid theatre goers imagine The Perfect Storm, Earthquake and Inferno one after the other) – the sound of sheer silence, a “still small voice”, the sound of a gentle whisper (lit. the sound of a fine silence). Elijah hid his face and went out into the very presence of God and a voice spoke to him. And what, in this most holy moment, did that voice say to him?

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

At the heart of our encounter with God comes this profound question: What are you doing here? At the centre of every act of worship stands this question: what are you doing here?

We tend to dismiss the question – to not take it seriously. That’s why we don’t hear sermons on what the voice says. We push the question away and don’t let ourselves be addressed.

Have you ever sat in this church, or any other, and in the middle of some poor struggling sermon asked yourself: “What am I doing here? I could have been at the beach or the football or still in bed with my partner. What am I doing here?”  If you’re anything like me you push that question away: behave, be “good”. We rarely think that that may just have been the still, small voice of God meeting us in the most holy place.

If worship means anything at all – it means getting touch with what we are doing here! This has two senses:  our individual motivations, and our corporate activity.

When I speak of individual motivations I’m not talking about lofty spiritual purposes. The first thing that happens when we meet God is that he asks us what is really going on in our lives.

God takes us seriously – takes our stories seriously. God wants to hear, again and again, it would seem, the tales of our fears and failures, our snivelling lack of confidence, our boasting and talking up who we are and what we’ve done, all the surging needs and contradictions that drive us to wherever we are going to in life. God never tires of asking or of listening. There is an inexhaustible patience in God that we as mature adult people find almost embarrassing. G.K. Chesterton wrote of this patient and creative energy of God which is somewhat akin to the energy of children:

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that [the sun rises because] God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

(GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 106-107)

What are you doing here?  That questions stands time and again at the heart of worship. We must take the question and our answers seriously – for our answers will be very different.  “It’s just a habit”. “My family has always worshipped here”. “I am here because I am terrified of the future and wonder if life is worth living”. “I am here because I’m a stubborn old crock and if I don’t keep coming they might decide to change things!” Perhaps, like those disciples of Jesus long ago, you have to answer with a mixture of awe and resignation:  “Lord, where else can we go? You have the words of Life!”

Whatever our answer, God takes it seriously. God knows it already – but he invites us to get to know it too. As he invites us closer to the heart of the mystery of his own being he also invites us deeper into the mystery of our own being. There are layers and layers of reasons and motivations and feelings. God invites you to start to get into that, listen to it, peel back the mystery of it and find ourselves held in the loving heart of God, even in the midst of our own fears and problems and hopes and mixed motivations. 

If I’m here out of habit, what does that tell me about my life and how alive I really am? How did the habit start, and when did it cool from whatever it was into a dead routine? What lies at the heart of the habit that keeps it keeping on?

If I’m here because of family tradition what does that say about ‘my’ worship? Where  am I with God? Is Sunday just a time for anchoring self in the rituals and observances of family, some kind of eternal Father’s Day, or is it a journey of exploration with the God who calls us to leave our father’s house and our mother’s apron strings and discover who we are in faith?

If I am here because I am desperately frightened of the future or feel that I’ve failed in my work: why do I have those feelings, and what I am doing here? What is happening at deeper levels of my being to bring me to this place? In all the wind and fire of my world is there stillness I’m seeking – and do I think I’ll find it here?

If I am really a stubborn part of the furniture, wanting to keep an eye on things and resist change, what am I doing here? What am I doing to my brothers and sisters through my fear of change? What have I done to the sovereign God who is Lord of all the earth and who invites me to live by faith not control or domination?

Church is often about avoiding those questions: its about playing a role, rather than letting the still, small voice ask us “What are you doing here?” and then lead us deeper into ourselves, where God knows us as we truly are, and loves us more than we will ever know! Sometimes we get so focused on the outward game of playing church that we can’t allow our own motivations to be encountered. Otherwise we might begin to find ourselves and each other as real people: as bored and lustful and proud and lazy people, as sinners in need of the grace of God.

But that is only half of what the question means: “What are you doing here?” can also be asked with a different intonation. It can be asked of what is happening in the corporate event: what are we doing here?  Are we just singing hymns and being religious, giving our money, the whole song and dance act that is about being a successful church?

What happened on that mountain thousands of years ago happens in church every week: God draws near our failure and our fear and addresses us, and then commissions us to change the world.

Elijah was commissioned on that mountain to anoint two new kings and a new prophet to succeed him. The act of anointing in the Old Testament was a profoundly political act. It conferred the blessing of God and it legitimized somebody taking power. It announced, and encouraged a turning upside down of the existing order. When Elisha passed on this word to Hazael he murdered the king of Aram and took the throne. When he sent a prophet to anoint Jehu, Jehu immediately organized a coup. Worship announces beginnings and endings. It invokes the future. It calls a new world into being.

What are you doing here? Well, properly understood, worship transforms the world! That is the work we are doing. We don’t embrace violence and  military coups but we are announcing where the future lies and calling it into being.

Some years ago, in great distress and questioning my own preaching vocation, I consulted one of my mentors. I have never forgotten his words about what we are doing in worship: “It is because fools like you get up in pulpits and try to make sense of it all, and because even greater fools like me come along to listen, that the world does not spiral down into chaos and meaninglessness!”  What are you doing here? It is fair to answer, “We are helping to hold the world in being!  We are co-operating with the One who holds all things in being”.

We have such a limited sense of what we are about, and what is actually happening. The writer to the Hebrews had no doubts as to what was happening in the worship of God’s people. Looking back to Israel’s first encounter with God on the holy mountain he contrasted that experience with what is happening in the church:

You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. … But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven,  and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24

When we engage the little question fully, that’s what we’re really doing here!

The mystery of worship is embraced by both senses of this marvellous question: all our individual human motivations and fears and boasts are present, but worship leads us deeper into ourselves and God’s grace. And at the same time there is a deep mystical renewal of the universe that is occurring around us and within us and perhaps even through us. What we are doing here is part of the building of a new world.

What are you doing here? You’re a very ordinary bunch of sinners who struggle with strange motivations and many failings who are invited to get real with God and yourselves about what’s really going in your life and in your families and in your community.

You are the body of Christ, and what you are doing here is participating in Christ and his work - the redemption and rebuilding of this old world into the kingdom of our God and of his Son! Don’t ask me how those two realities fit together but they do!

You are the prophets of our God, called to go out into the world and anoint change:  in the world of politics and business and government and commerce. Next week we’ll be exploring the Micah challenge. We’re going to anoint the end of poverty in the world. Within the church we’re called to anoint change as well: to find the new leaders who will take over from this us. It’s up to us to seek out the Elisha’s of this world and commission a new generation of leadership for God’s people.

And in all of this, we are reminded that we are not alone. Far from being the last prophetic voice, far from it all being a lost cause, God has 7,000 who have not bent the knee to Baal nor kissed him! 7,000 is not a literal number of course: it’s the symbolic ‘7’ of perfection or completeness multiplied by a thousand! It means (in modern idiom) ‘heaps’, ‘bulk’, ‘lots’. It means, “Don’t worry, just get on with it!”

“What are you doing here?” God wants to know. And he wants each of us to know that whatever it is we’re doing here, it’s alright, that we have a life to live, and work to do, and we are never alone. Praise God!

James Barr - Canberra Baptist Church 4/9/2005