Zealous Again
1 Kings 19:1-15a; Luke 8:26-39

June 20, 2004

An almost quiet intersection bordering the town reservoir was the point I had reached walking by 7:45 a.m. The road by the reservoir made nearly a right angle turn, and at the turn the other lane had a stop sign before going up a steep hill. I looked to my left and saw a car approaching at a high rate of speed, fishtailing its way towards me. I did what you are supposed to do at such moments and jumped into the ditch and looked apprehensively to the turn at my right. The speeding car did not negotiate the turn, plowing into the first car stopped at the stop sign. The stopped car was flipped over a couple of times before it came to a rest upside down on its roof.

There was a silence I had never heard before once the metal had quieted down. The woman in the flipped over car was hanging upside down held in by her seat belt, a bruised knee and a sore back, but otherwise OK.

I was later called into court as a witness, but I did not mention that “sound of sheer silence” (NRSV). I didn’t know how to express it. Besides, the silence was legally relevant.

Elijah stands in front of his cave on Mount Horeb, the other name for Sinai, and after the storm and thunder, that “nothing fuller than anything” engulfed Elijah. Was God present at that reservoir corner in the silence that could have been life or death? there was life, thank God!

The attempted encounters of religious faith with divinity are often noisy: bombastic preachers, congregational shouting, thunder and lightning on holy mountains, loud music and pomp, and a man full of demons screaming at a man full of God. It is hard to be zealous quietly.

The Gospel tale follows the calming of the storm, the disciples sailing on to the opposite shore. Instead of adulating crowds, Jesus is met by a man possessed, a madman, whose many demons know who Jesus is better than his disciples do. We no longer understand what this demon-possession means. The man was not really the one talking, but the many demons inside him, like so many of our horror and science fiction movies. What is your name, Jesus asks, and the answer is multiple - Legion in the original dialect, Mob is a modern translation that catches the chaos of the demons a little better.

What the demons see and hear in Jesus is his zealousness for God, his uncompromising allegiance to the one and only God. They cannot stand it, for each demon expects a lot of respect and adoration and obedience. We may not call them demons, but there are legions of ultimate concerns that are not ultimate and mob our minds and souls. Call them little gods, false gods of materiality, of fame and ego, of power and control, but they do crowd us demanding attention and allegiance. The greatest dilemma you and I face is having some clue how to be absolutely committed to the One God, and how do we actually live in this material world as a consequence of that commitment? Being zealous for God resulted in getting Jesus escorted to the edge of town and commanded never to return for all the economic havoc he had caused.

Elijah had just defeated and wiped out the prophets of Ba’al, those phony holy men who provided the backbone for Ahab and Jezebel’s new regime in Israel. Elijah had won, but he was exhausted and now Jezebel made it clear that she would brutally slaughter him. Elijah had challenged her demons and rendered them harmless and ridiculous. Elijah was no fool, so he fled into the lonely wilderness where no human support for life lay. He was deeply depressed and appeared to want to lay down and die, just get it over with.

Angels or messengers were sent to him to make sure it wasn’t over yet. Food and water are supplied to him and he regains his strength. He has been very zealous for God, not allowing any other god or demon to think it had a legitimate word. Dispatched to Horeb, he travels 40 days in obvious imitation of Moses’ sojourn on the Mountain of God. There he hunkers down in a cave and the word of the Lord comes to him. That does not happen very often, by the way. What are you doing? God asks. I have been very zealous for the Lord and now I alone am left, Elijah whines. Get outside and I will show you something, commands God.

So Elijah stood in front of the cave and all the loud manifestations of religion passed around him. A great wind, certainly cyclone strength, came through splitting the mountain, a sure sign of the power of God. But God was not in the wind.

The wind wasn’t enough, for now there was an earthquake in which the very foundations of our earthly security became unhinged. The terror we hear from earthquake survivors is that the very basis of life became undone. Surely, it is only God who has the control and authority over such elemental things. But God was not in the earthquake.

Then a fire scorched its way through, cleansing and consuming all in its path without any hint of ethical discrimination. Only God is so all powerful, only God is so good that all else in the universe pales in comparison. Yet, God was not in the fire.

After the fire came that untranslatable thing: “a still small voice” in the King James Version, a “sound of sheer silence” in the NRSV, a “nothing fuller than anything.” Elijah knew and covered his head in his coat that he would eventually leave to Elisha as the instrument of his prophetic power and authority. What are you doing here? God asks again, and again Elijah whines that he is all alone.

You are not alone, God answers, get up and join that 7000 strong group of supporters of the true way of the Lord. Elijah had been listening only to the loud stuff, and his zealousness had captured his ego. Only he could save Israel, only he really worshipped God. He wasn’t aware how many other people there were who believed like him and could help in the cause. Perhaps he had been listening too long to his own grand words of judgment and thought perhaps he had become a god. Ah, the danger of being a prophet in all generations.

God is seldom to be found or heard in the worldly occasions of pomp and circumstance. God finds you and me in between our expectations and our ordered institutions. Sermons and political speeches almost never speak the clear word of divinity. It’s those moments we cannot produce on our own, where the sound of sheer silence invades us, and there is a timeless instant inside of time that speaks. It’s life and death, and you and I can choose what it is we have heard.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan