06/19/22 - A Fine Silence - Rev. Chip Roland - Westminster Presbyterian Church Westminster Presbyterian Church | Serving God and others with open mind, hands and heart - 06/19/22 – A Fine Silence

06/19/22 – A Fine Silence – Rev. Chip Roland

A FINE SILENCE

June 19, 2022
2^nd Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 19: 1-15a | Luke 8: 26-39
Rev. Charles ‘Chip’ Roland
Chaplain, OSF St. Francis Hospital

I’ll admit that it’s hard for me to see Elijah as a sympathetic figure. Yes, he is a prophet of God. His zeal for God in a time when it is profoundly hard, deeply dangerous to have zeal for God is without question. But Elijah is also a man of violence. Or, at least he is a man who has adapted to a violent time. Elijah had just orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of prophets of Baal. Baal was an important Canaanite deity and Jezebel, the queen of Israel, was a devout worshiper. Indeed, Elijah’s violence was an echo of her violence in killing the prophets of the Lord. So, in a world defined by this reciprocal violence, in a world where people find themselves trapped in a destructive cycle, Jezebel’s oath to kill Elijah more than makes sense. It’s essentially the only thing that could happen.

Elijah, who up to then had been bold to the point of lunacy, the way prophets tend to be bold to the point of lunacy, had had enough. He cuts and runs. Maybe it’s the fact that he and Jezebel are a lot alike when you get right down to it. With everybody else, including her husband, king Ahab, trying to find a balance between YHWH and Baal, she’s the only one with zeal for her god that matches Elijah’s zeal for God. It might have made her threat seem more personal. No matter why, something seems to break in Elijah. He’s overwhelmed, afraid, he seems traumatized, perhaps by both what he’s witnessed and what he’s done. His heart and mind are chaotic and he’s even found a way to catastrophize in a catastrophic situation. Many of us have been there. We’ve known what it’s like when the stress of our lives, the stress we’ve been ignoring, finally catches up to us and we just—hit a wall. It’s in this state that Elijah cries out to God. And God feeds him. God leads him to Mt Horeb, a mountain associated with Moses receiving the ten commandments. God, you see, is about to pass by!

Then comes a cacophony of nature’s power we could only describe as biblical in scope. Wind, shaking earth, and fire are enough to overwhelm the senses. But God was not in the wind. God was not in the earthquake. God was not in the fire. But I think Elijah’s heart was. I think this was very much like a representation of what drove him to his wall, his burnout, in both his inner life and the violent political world that he moved in. But then came a silence that Elijah seemed to know intuitively that within this silence, a sheer silence, a fine silence in some translations, was the presence of God. It was a silence so unlike the silence that answered Baal’s prophets in the previous chapter when they tried to call fire down on their alter. And it was in this silence, this silence Elijah could finally be present in, that God spoke to him. And God send him on his way—changed, rejuvenated somehow, continuing his work.

I think it’s a comfort to know that underneath the clatter and cacophony of our lives, the silence of God, the silence too deep for noise, waits. But, doesn’t it seem hard to listen to the silence of God? The world around us, the rhythms of our lives are noisy, distracting. And maybe that’s by design. I was a nervous kid. I mean, really anxious. And I remember when I prayed, my prayers had a frantic quality to them. I’d never stop talking. I’d never stop my constant litany of the things I wanted and the things I didn’t want. I never took a pause because I had read enough of the bible to know that in that pause, in that silence, God might speak to my heart. And God seemed like the kind of God who just might call you out of your comfort zone, just might rearrange your perspective, just might change you in some significant way and I was afraid.

The Gerasenes were afraid too. *how about that transition there?*. They also encountered a quiet that showed the presence of God. This was the quiet of their demoniac, now clothed and in his right mind, now indistinguishable from them. At first glance, their reaction might seem counterintuitive. Wouldn’t it be a cause for joy that someone they knew, someone they had been managing, maybe for as long as anybody can remember, was now just like them? But I think that’s just the problem! God was their demoniac! God was their outsider! The anthropologist, Rene Girard would call him their scapegoat. And now that he was just like them in the silence that followed his healing, this would be what Girard would call a mimetic crisis. Too many people trying to be like each other, now without a person to dump all their anxiety on to, their hostility, their fears of inadequacy. You see, as long as the demonic was the demonic, as long as he was the outcast howling among the tombs, all the other townsfolk could be secure in their knowledge that they were not that, that their friends and neighbors were not that.

Think of it this way. Every job I’ve ever worked has had a designated “incompetent employee”. You know, the one everybody has stories about, ways you laugh at, their failures. That person, that incompetent person is the most important employee on the job! How else are the other employees supposed to be confident in their roles as the good ones? How else are they supposed to keep from tearing each other apart in competition to be the good one? In that same way, the demoniac was the most important part of his community. The silence of his healing, of him being clothed and in his right mind, calling his community to change, to renewal, just as the silence Elijah encountered called him to renewal. In this case, the challenge within that silence was to be a community not dependent on outcasts for their stability. Jesus’s healing pointed to another way, because in the silence of the demoniac’s healing was the abundant love of God, the abundant care of God. A community that needs a scapegoat, an outcast, is implicitly operating on a logic of scarcity. There’s not enough love, esteem, validation, whatever to go around. Someone needs to be on the outs. Jesus came with a logic of abundance, and in the silence of the healed demoniac, it called the townsfolk to reevaluate how their society works. And they were afraid. Wouldn’t you be?

The presence of God is often in silence. It’s in the calm after a storm. It’s in the peace after a healing. It can be frightening to be calm, be present, and listen in those times. Because, who knows what the Lord could say to you? Who knows the newness the Lord could call you to participate in. But in that silence, in all times, the Lord loves you and calls you to be renewed, healed, and changed.

Amen.

My Story

“Throughout the week, there are many worldly things pulling me away from my commitment to God. I come to church on Sunday at Westminster to reconnect and renew my relationship with Him. Part of my worship is to ask him for forgiveness for my lack of faithfulness. I leave, reminded that he loves me, forgives me, and walks beside me every day. What a profound blessing that is!”