Good morning everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Reed Carlson and I am a student at Luther Seminary. I’ve been attending St. Matthew’s since the end of last year and I’ve recently been hired to help lead the new College Campus Ministry that we’re launching this fall.
I’m going to be talking about the Prophet Elijah, who, I think, is one of the most remarkable people in all of Scripture. Elijah embodies the phrase “living legend.” In the book of 1 Kings, Elijah prays and God raises people from the dead. He prays, and it stops raining in Israel for three years. Elijah confronts the most evil, ruthless King in all of Israel’s history, King Ahab. In the chapter immediately before our reading today, Elijah prays and calls down fire from heaven, showing up 850 false prophets in the process.
He’s fascinating—not because he does all this cool stuff—but because of what we read today. You see, in 1 Kings 19 we find Elijah burnt out. Jezebel, the ruthless Queen of Israel has put a price on Elijah’s head and he’s had to skip the country, running all the way from the top of Israel, to the bottom of Judah—where Jezebel can’t get to him. The scene opens with Elijah exhausted, sitting under a lone tree in the desert. He is alone, depressed, confused and suicidal. We’re granted this portrait of a great man of God—the man who outran the King’s chariot in a seventeen-mile race—now at one of the most vulnerable moments of his life. He tells God, “It is enough; now, take away my life.”
We’ve caught Elijah in one of those fundamental human experiences. It’s a moment I can recognize and probably many of you can too. Elijah is experiencing one those times when we realize the circumstances of life can be disappointing. Where we work hard for something, where we did the right thing, where maybe even scored some major victories—yet life didn’t quite work out how we planned. It’s a time that can be triggered by a lot of things, an unexpected sickness, financial hardship, the loss of someone close, or just the vague, creeping feeling that your soul is not your own and your life is running away, dragging you along.
One ancient Christian way of referring to this period is the Dark Night of the Soul—a journey both inward and outward, confronting all the doubts and confusions that life has the tendency to stir up. Now I’m not necessarily talking about the clinical designation of “depression” though I think it can become manifested in this way, but the very intimate search for meaning in the midst of chaos. It’s the thirst for a naked confrontation with God and the self, a desperate dive into depths of where we fit into the strange place we find ourselves.
I can remember one such time in my life. It was my freshmen year at a little private college that I attended downtown Minneapolis. I lived with three other guys in a room smaller than the chapel over here on a floor with about fifty people. However, I honestly think it was the loneliest time of my life. I think a college dorm has the potential to be one of the loneliest places on the planet.
In the period of just a few months, I had broken up with my high school girlfriend, I had lost my job, I had seen many of my friends leave me for other schools in other parts of the country, I took a bunch of classes I had no interest in, and I started seriously doubting the calling I'd felt on my life since I was twelve years old. I can remember nights where I got so sick of sitting in the dorm doing nothing and feeling lonely that I would get on my bike and ride around downtown Minneapolis for hours—not getting home until 1 or 2 in the morning
I would go out on rides and make oaths to myself like "God I'm not going home until you give me a sign that I should transfer" or "God I'm going to ride around this block over and over again until you send someone to talk to me.” It didn't help that I would listen to Radiohead on my discman on those rides. I can remember one night in particular when it was late and I rode around in circles around the Metrodome on the ramps probably twenty or thirty times, just waiting for something—literally anything—to happen to me.
Returning back to Elijah, it’s at this lowest moment when an angel of God appears to him, which sounds pretty cool until you realize what really takes place. The angel gives him something to eat. Maybe he pats him on the back a bit. Tells him he’s got a long journey ahead of ‘em. Then he disappears. You’d think, if God went to the trouble of sending angels all over the place, it would’ve been nothing to make a rock fall on Ahab’s head or something, right?
Sometimes, in the Dark Night of the Soul, just the daily tasks—eating and sleeping—are arduous. We look to God to provide us with the big cosmic answers but all we get is another day. We tell God, “either fix this or kill me, because I can’t take it anymore” and all we get is another day and another day and another day.
When I look back at that tough year when I was riding my bike a lot, I can remember all the little gestures, all the little conversations that sustained me. I hardly recognized them then, but these were the moments where God was sending people into my life to help me.
I can remember an older student who lived by himself down the hall from me who had a small little room to himself. I wasn't sleeping very well at night during this time so he would let me take naps on his couch during the day because my room was always full of people and too loud. I hardly knew this guy but I can remember what a refuge his room was during this time. It was a little getaway—and believe me it was little—a safe place away from a very difficult situation where I could rest.
After being fed at the stream, Elijah goes to the mountain. But this isn’t just any mountain—this is mount Sinai—or as the other name for it appears in this text, Mt. Horeb. This is the place where God appeared in the burning bush, this is the place where God first gave the ten commandments, this is the place where Moses saw—like actually saw God, yet did not die. If there is anywhere in the world where you should expect to see God, this was it.
In the Dark Night of the Soul we are often so thirsty for answers, we are willing to chase God anywhere. We often go to places where we expect God to be—maybe it’s church, maybe it’s a special place somewhere out in nature, maybe its our bedrooms with our journal and a cup of coffee. Often we go chasing after God where other people have told us God is. The world is full of easy answers like this—promises about God, rather than promises from God. Sometimes, I’m happy to say we find exactly what we’re looking for, but I think if we’re all honest, there are times in our lives when our prayers come back silent, the songs we sing sound hollow and all the spiritual methods that seem to work so great for everyone else seem like empty nonsense to us.
When Elijah was on the mountain there came a great wind. The text says that it split the mountains and broke the rocks into pieces. Elijah had to have known that it was in a great wind like this that God had formed the cosmos in creation way back in Genesis 1. But amazingly God was not in the wind.
Next there came an earthquake, a genuine seismic event. Then a fire—a scorching blast that lit up the sky and singed his clothes. It was a power that Elijah knew well, having prayed for fire at Mount Carmel in the chapter just before this one. But God was not in the earthquake or the fire either.
Just like me when I was on my bike, Elijah was looking for something monumental, something to mark when he saw God’s presence—that was where HE wanted to experience God. But as we’ll see, GOD had another plan for where God would be.
After the fire came nothing. It was a divine quiet that would make us shiver. The Hebrew is a little ambiguous here and I think that’s intentionally so. The text this morning says the “sound of sheer silence” but many of us probably grew up with the famous King James translation, "a still small voice." This is a mysterious moment that is not easily put into words. The stillness after a storm gets close but still can't capture how pregnant this moment was with God's presence. Whatever it was that Elijah heard or did not hear in the silence—it drew him out to speak with God. For whatever reason—and I hesitate to try to explain it too fully and risk oversimplifying it—Elijah was meant to be overwhelmed by the quietness of God.
We could go on in this passage to explore Elijah’s further mission but where I want linger this morning, is with this idea of the Dark Night of the Soul. I’d like to close with just two last, direct thoughts.
First, you could be here listening to me this morning and thinking you’re not be in the midst of one of these dark points in your life—but you can probably remember a time when you were. In that case, I want to challenge you with a call to action. Part of the reason I'm preaching this morning is because St. Matthew's has been given a great responsibility—launching a campus ministry to the thousands of college students that live in our neighborhood. Many of these students are at a high point right now—you've probably been to some of their graduation parties in the last couple of weeks—but in a few short months they'll be encountering some of the hardest questions life has to throw at them: what's going to be their career? who are they going to marry? do they believe in God? what kind of person will they be?
We have an opportunity to be a part of these students' lives as they go on this journey of discovery. We plan to start this fall by inviting these students to an Episcopal service geared towards folks in the early twenties once a week. It’ll be a simple invitation to worship together and eat together. It may be that you could donate a year of your worship to just simply attend this service instead of the Sunday morning service, and envelope these students in the loving, intergenerational community that I experienced when I first came here. It might be you have some space in your life to open up your home to just one student. This could be a student who you could invite over dinner, allow them to do laundry, or simply just provide a loving place off campus where they know they will be safe. Over the next few months we’re going to be asking you to consider helping with many opportunities and asking for lots of ideas on how to reach out to the students that God has placed in our neighborhood. There’s going to be a short 15 minute meeting after church next week where we’ll be sharing, some of these details so I hope you’ll leave your hearts open to what God might have for you in this ministry.
Second, if you’re here this morning and you can say right away that you’re struggling with one of these difficult times I’ve been talking about, I want to encourage you. You’re not alone, you’re not unusual and your difficulties are nothing to be embarrassed of. As Christians, we believe that its in dark times of our lives that we become more like Christ and become conformed to God’s plan for creation. Doubt, confusion and anger are normal—what matters is not what you’re feeling but what you do about it.
One of my favorite Anglicans, C. S. Lewis articulates it this way, [The cause of Christ is never more closer to awakening] "than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending, to do [God's] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of [God] seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys." Loneliness is a part of these vital, vulnerable times—but it doesn’t mean people have to go it alone. We live in a big impact culture that often demands fiery, earth-shaking experiences in order to prove to ourselves or to others that the world has meaning. However, we serve a cosmic, creator God who none-the-less sometimes chooses to speak to us in the divine quiet, whispering something more elemental, mysterious and hopeful.
This is my prayer for St. Matthew’s, that we can be a community that recognizes when God speaks to us in the divine quiet. If you are struggling this morning, I want to ask you to stay sensitive as our worship continues, and see what God could be saying to you. I think it’s OK for us to expect God to meet us when we’re listening. Our God is eager and able to speak to us, from both the whirlwind and the whisper.
