The Darkness of GodA sermon preached at All Hallows by Sheena McMain on 24 June 2007
Elijah. In last week’s exciting instalment, Elijah orchestrates, with heady confidence and in a moment of stunning drama, a shattering explosion of God’s power in an amazing public spectacle of fire from heaven, having boldly challenged and taunted the prophets of Baal to a death or glory contest. Elijah wins, God is vindicated, Elijah executes the false prophets and flees to safety over the border from the wrath of Queen Jezebel who seeks revenge. Exhilarating stuff. Now read on. Here, we meet him alone under a broom tree, discontented, disillusioned and dissatisfied. He is in a state of physical, emotional and spiritual exhaustion. Burned out and bone-tired, he is in such a bad state he wants to give up altogether, and urges God to ‘take away my life’. Was it the violence, the death threat, or the shattering anticlimax, dissatisfaction with the high-intensity high-profile lifestyle, or a gnawing awareness of something lacking in his activist life, that took him into the wilderness, at the pinnacle of his prophetic career? Who knows. But it is pretty clear that Elijah is a man at the end of himself. Those of us who have been there recognise it only too well. We arrive by many paths. Bereavement, illness, debt, failure, broken relationships, addiction, abuse, loss of reputation, even success and comfort. But once we are there, there is no mistaking it. The end of yourself. A place of utter affliction. The psalmist describes with searing eloquence in Psalm 22 the sheer physical and mental agony:
Where is God when you reach the end of yourself? The poet T S Eliot tells us the end ‘is where we start from …’ This was certainly true for Elijah. While he is contemplating suicide, God affirms his life. He doesn’t demand the impossible. He tells Elijah to take care of himself. God meets his basic human needs. He looks after him and gives him food and rest. He tells him he has a long journey to recovery ahead, and that it will not be easy. Then, he gives him time and space. He lets him journey 40 days and 40 nights, into the desert, a whole uncharted landscape, a very biblical amount of time. 40 days for Noah, trapped in the ark with his known world destroyed; 40 days for Jesus, alone without props and tested to his limit; 40 days bereft and abandoned for the disciples before the Holy Spirit came. 40 days and 40 nights to Mount Horeb. I wonder what happened to Elijah on that journey. If he was anything like me, what he thought was the end was only the beginning. There was a lot more end to come. My guess is he went through that place the psalmist describes. Like the psalmist, I imagine he cried out to God in a scalding torrent of pain and confusion, rage, terror and bewilderment. Like the psalmist, somewhere deep inside, he held on, through shock, through anger, through uncertainty, through longing, through hoping, held on even beyond the end of hope itself. Mount Horeb was where Moses met God. And somewhere, in that place beyond feelings, beyond belief and beyond himself, Elijah met God, too. It’s probably no coincidence that there was drama. Elijah recognised drama when he saw it. There was a cave, it was night. There was a wind so severe it shattered mountains, an earthquake, fire, all the places a good Old Testament prophet might expect to meet God. But God was not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. There was instead ‘sheer silence’. And Elijah covered his face. Where is God when we reach the end of ourselves? Almost certainly not how or where or when we expect him, almost certainly challenging our old ways of seeing, our old ways of knowing, our old ways of being. Almost certainly beyond our feelings, our understanding and even the limits of our faith. If we look beyond the images of God our feelings and our understanding and our longings create, helpful and comforting though looking through those lenses may be, who is the God that is left? A shadow holding a mirror to our human vulnerability. And as we recognise ourselves and each other — the man with the withered hand, the woman with a haemorrhage, the tax collector up a tree — we come face to face with the truth of our own shattering need and vulnerability. And we shall find that, as Nicola Slee writes,
And in facing our frailty, and our demons, we come face to face with God — God who is closer to us than bone or blood or breathing. More earthed, more human than any one of us, God with us, Emmanuel. So where is God, when you reach the end of yourself? God with us and in us, certainly, closer than bone or blood or breathing. But beyond us just as surely, as other from us as diamond or stardust, whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts. The one before whom we cover our faces and fall silent. I Am. The Holy One of Israel. It is in the darkness that the Christian mystic Simone Weil tells us we know ourselves nailed to the very centre of the universe: ‘It is the true centre, it is beyond space and time, it is God. It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the arms of the cross.’ That place where Jesus holds the intolerable tension of our broken universe, our broken selves, in love. Where is God when we reach the end of yourself? More deeply within us and more deeply beyond us than can be imagined. Beyond abandonment, beyond judgement, we are engraved in love on the palms of his hands. Elijah, the psalmist, the man possessed by demons. For all of us in our journeys of faith, I pray that we may each know that ‘… in the darkness of faith stripped down to the bone, and in the unknowing that is the other side of the illusion of control, I may learn that I do not own my life, but that it is gift, that I am worth more than all my achievements or failures, and that I am not saved through anything I may make or do or know, but by the unconditional, incommensurate love of God.’
Amen. AudioThis sermon was recorded. If you wish, you can listen to the sermon online. Just click on the appropriate link below:
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