The Still, Small Voice of Calm
Written by Gary E. Smith Saturday, 17 March 2001 19:00
If you’ve been around here long enough, you know that from time to time I dream my way to a sermon, this from one who once denied even dreaming, this from one who then admitted to having dreams but hating them, this from one who now can remember many dreams and loves exploring their meaning. I won’t go all mystical on you now, but let me say that I pay attention more these days to wherever those places are that dreams take me.
Elizabeth and I had a wonderful vacation last month in the state of Arizona, first up north among the red rocks of Sedona, then south to the Sonora Desert around Tucson. One night in Tucson, I dreamt an Elijah dream. I dreamt of the wind and the earthquake and the fire. In my sleep, I actually felt the earthquake, but there was no earthquake. There between sleeping and waking, I did wonder. And as I awoke, this line from John Greenleaf Whittier, “through the earthquake, wind, and fire, the still, small voice of calm.” Only preachers worry about poetic attribution, waking up on vacation.
This line, “through the earthquake, wind and fire, the still small voice of calm,” is a line I knew well, from a hymn I sung often in my Congregational boyhood and my United Church of Christ ministry. “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” was the title, and with that opening line, small wonder the title did not find its way into the Unitarian Universalist hymnbook. The next line is “forgive our foolish ways,” which makes you glad they left it in.
So Jan read you earlier the source of this Whittier poem, the story from the Hebrew scripture, First Kings, the story of Elijah the prophet and how he ends up meeting God there on the mountain. There’s an interesting story that takes place just before where Jan began, and it is one of my favorite stories here in this record of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, a jealous and angry God if ever there was one. Elijah spent his ministry afflicting the comfortable, shall we say, and I have always imagined him to be a small and wiry man who set up a soapbox on the corner and just let anyone have it that was passing by.
Elijah can’t keep the Israelites in line, that much is clear. The Israelite people have forsaken the covenant their ancestors had made, they have turned from the God that had led them out of Egypt, and they now have little patience with the prophets who are promising gloom and doom. The critics of the prophets are an early variation on those in these days who condemn the preaching of politics from the pulpit. “What does that have to do with religion?” they might have shouted at Elijah, as if the way we act and the decisions we make about how we live together are somehow separate from the essence of religion. But that is another sermon.
Let’s simply say that the prophets are getting slaughtered. Killing the messenger, we would say. And Elijah is left. And in the story just before Jan began to read, Elijah is taking on the people who have turned from the God of Israel to the gods of Baal. It sounds like Elijah is at the end of his rope. He’s been fighting for so long, he’s losing it. And in desperation he proposes a contest. This is another one of those “fatted calf” stories you’ll find at this point in the Hebrew scriptures.
Elijah challenges his accusers to prepare a fatted calf, kill it, dress it, lay it on the wood, even pour gasoline on the wood if they want, but they are told not to light it yet. And he does the same with his own fatted calf: kills it, prepares it, lays it on the pile of wood, pours lots of lighter fluid on it, but does not light it. And then he says to the people, “Okay, now you pray to your god to ignite the fire and receive your sacrifice, and then I’ll do the same. I’ll pray to my god, and we’ll see which god is listening.” I’m not making this up.
Of course, the people who are out to get Elijah think they have him this time, and they pray fervently to Baal. I can imagine them with their eyes all shut and their faces all scrunched up and their fists tight, praying as hard as they can, and-- nothing. The meat and the wood just sit there-- cold. And Elijah waits and gives them a second chance and a third, but nothing. And the people are furious. Now it’s Elijah’s turn, and he prays to God, “God, you know I’m about the only prophet left here, and I’m in a mess, and I really need you to come through. If ever I needed you to stick up for me, this would be the moment.” And, of course, because this is the Hebrew scripture, and there probably wouldn’t be a Hebrew scripture without this ending, sure enough, the wood explodes into flame.
What happens next? Is Elijah a hero? Does everyone renounce Baal and follow Elijah and the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob? Absolutely not. Elijah has to run for his life, literally. And that’s where the story Jan read earlier now begins. Elijah is running for his life. He is feeling unappreciated. He is burned out, if you’ll pardon the pun. Everything he believes in has been challenged. He is alone. He is out on a limb. He has had his life planned in a certain way, and things have not turned out that way at all. He has been ridiculed and rejected. He needs a day off.
So what does Elijah do? He goes off by himself-- “a day’s journey into the wilderness,” we are told. And he sits under a tree. And he is as low as he can be. The storyteller says he wants to die. And Elijah calls on the same God that he called on for fire earlier, and says, “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” And he falls asleep. And he has a dream, a remarkable dream. An angel comes and invites him to eat. There by his head is a freshly baked cake and a jar of water. And Elijah eats and drinks. Is he awake or asleep? And the angel comes again, and again the angel invites him to eat and to drink a second time, this time telling him he is about to go on a journey.
So Elijah eats and drinks, and we are told that on the strength of that nourishment he is able to travel for forty days and forty nights to Horeb, known as the Mount of God. And there he finds a cave and falls asleep. And he has a second dream, and in this dream, it is no angel, but the voice of God itself: “Elijah, what are you doing here?” And Elijah pours out the whole story. “I’ve been your defender. The people have rejected you. They’ve torn down your altars. They’ve killed your prophets. I’m the only one left. And they’re after me.”
And do we know if Elijah is asleep or awake, it does not matter. God invites Elijah to go to the mouth of the cave that God might pass by. And Elijah goes to the mouth of the cave, and we are told that a great wind, a ferocious wind whips around him, a wind so strong it breaks rocks to bits, but Elijah does not see God in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake, but Elijah does not see God in the earthquake, and after the earthquake, the fire, and still Elijah does not see God. After the fire, a still, small voice of calm.
I believe this is a transforming moment, for the storyteller, for the listener, for God, for Elijah, and for us. It seems to me that God is telling Elijah, “Let’s not do the fire thing again.” Up until this point, the Israelites have depended heavily upon the wind, the earthquake, and the fire to prove the power and the might of the one they hold most holy. What if instead the God of our forebears is to be found in the power of silence, found not in this booming anthropomorphic bellow of an angry father, but in a “small voice of calm?” This is a radical theological change and not one with which the storyteller necessarily lingers.
I mention Elijah today, because I think we often find ourselves in Elijah’s place: overworked, overstressed, burned out, tired of trying to prove ourselves, under-appreciated, at the end of our rope, alone, and tired. We can get into this in our jobs, working long hours, making more money, spending more money. We call it “a rat race.” We can get into this situation in our homes and with our families--as mothers and fathers, as sons and daughters. “Nothing I do is ever good enough.” We can find ourselves in Elijah’s place here at First Parish-- “I’ve given all this time, I’ve worked hard. Why don’t more people see it my way? Why am I not appreciated more? I didn’t come to church in the first place to feel this way.” We can find ourselves in Elijah’s place in the wider world, particularly in our passion for politics and change. It all sometimes seems so hopeless. What difference can one person make?
Elijah is a caricature for all of this, it seems to me, to the point that he is reduced to challenging his detractors to a fire ignition contest. Better that he had skipped that and gone directly to what he does next. He heads for the wilderness. He rests. He dreams. Better yet, he listens to his dreams. And because he does, he eats and he drinks. He eats and drinks something that enables him to travel forty days and forty nights, to some place where he can come almost face to face with God.
When I have in the past sat with groups and have asked, in one form or another this question, “What is the most powerful spiritual experience you have ever had?” many, if not most, of the answers do not include worship on a Sunday morning in church. More often than not, I hear about some place where the person has been alone or has been with a group of strangers in a shared experience, has been outside at a place of great beauty. More often than not, the person has been outside of the usual.
Our earlier celebration of Ferry Beach’s 100th anniversary is not unrelated to all of this. Here is this rather simple spot on the not-so-simple Maine coast, a place set apart as a retreat, a metaphorical wilderness, sometimes taking forty days and forty nights to reach on a Memorial Day weekend on the Maine Turnpike. And if it is not Ferry Beach for you, maybe it is Star Island, six miles off Portsmouth, on a boat called the Oceanic which takes you from a crowded parking lot back a century in time to a piece of rock the people of Gosport once called home.
And if it is not Star Island, it may be a place you have chosen for a retreat, a place not home that you treasure, a place away, that tree out in the wilderness under which you can lie down and sleep and dream, and who knows what angels will come there and offer you food and drink? You may have places from your memories, from your childhood, special places your family went. Maybe you are making those memories for your own children now. Maybe you do not go to these places any more, but they are there for you when you close your eyes and need to get away from all that which pulls you down.
We have spoken through this year of our need, each of us, for our own spiritual disciplines, something there is that can take us deeper, something there is that can take us from the surface of simply living and of going through the motions, something there is that can shake us by the collar and change our way of looking for a moment in time. Elijah has always led the way for me, this Type A guy, so impatient, so unwilling to suffer fools gladly, reduced to absurdity, off to the wilderness, off to the mouth of a cave, there to listen for the voice of God, there to listen for the still, small voice of calm.