A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Stephen K. Nash

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So you get to that point in your life where you’ve got to make a hard decision about something terribly important to you, or you’ve reached the end of the rope in your life and you’re hanging on by mere threads, or a crisis broadsides you out of nowhere and it appears you’re running out of options.  Maybe it’s an illness, or a separation, or an empty bank account, or a wayward child.

Whatever it is, you get to that point where you need some help because it’s something you either can’t do alone or are afraid to do alone.  So when the time is right, and the words finally come to you, you sit down in an empty room, or on a quiet hilltop, or on the lakeshore, or in the sublime solitude of your car, and you say something like, “Okay, God, I’m here.  I’m listening.  I’m looking.  I’m waiting.  Show me a sign.”  And then you wait.

You’ve heard that this kind of thing works for religious people, right?  Moses had a burning bush.  Noah had a rainbow.  The disciples had loaves and fishes.  Paul had a bolt of lightening and the temporary blindness issue.  Old Zechariah went mute.  You’ll take any one of those right now, right?  Anything that will give you hope and a reason to believe.  Show me a sign, you say.  Speak up, I’m all ears.

I’ve been there, just like you’ve been there, I know.

Fredrick Buechner, a wonderful author, writes about being there many years ago.  His anorexic daughter was dying, her body slowly wasting away.  She refused treatment.  And the doctors told him that she would die without serious intervention.  But Buechner, after so many failed attempts to break through to her, was powerless to change the situation.  He writes:

I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed to see exactly then.  The word was TRUST.  What do you call a moment like that?  Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while?  The Word of God?  I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany.  The owner of the car turned out to be, as I suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day.  It is rusty around the edges and  little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.

 Maybe God has a sense of humor, or maybe this is the way God so often chooses to talk to us.  It’s not the kind of communication we’ve come to expect from God.  We look for the big stuff, the seemingly impossible stuff, like burning bushes and miraculous healings and thunderous voices and neon lights.  Instead, we most often get the painful, awful silence from God.  It’s not our preferred method of divine communication; but in it there is, when we have ears to hear, considerable grace.

I want you to look carefully at the way God chooses to deal with Elijah, because it doesn’t require a stretch of the imagination to see our selves in his story.  Elijah is locked deep in a cave in the highlands of Israel.  He’s having one of those Maalox moments in his life; the queen wants him dead for going postal on her cronies.  Elijah is a prophet; and more than that, he is to the world of the prophets what Elvis Presley was to the world of rock and roll.  He is the king of prophecy, with a king-sized mission.  His nation has sold out; His people are worshipping clay gods.  Ever since King David breathed his last a hundred years before things haven’t been the same.  People don’t know God anymore; faith has eroded into agnostic, benign superstition.  Israel is dying a slow, terrible death, and Elijah is the last remnant of the way things used to be.

So he finally snaps one day.  Makes the gory, Oscar-winning movie Gladiator look like a bike ride with E.T.  He kills four hundred prophets of the clay gods in a heartbeat, right in front of old King Ahab.  So Ahab runs home with his tail between his legs, reports the news to his dreaded wife Jezebel, and everybody knows you don’t mess with Jezz.  Elijah did. Jezebel rages.  And the king of prophecy runs for cover with a bull’s-eye on his back and a bounty on his head.

So here he sits, deep in the protective womb of a dark cave.  He wants to die; more than Jezebel wants him dead, Elijah wants to die.  He knows the headhunters are already on the way.  He knows that he’s won the battle but he’s lost the war; he’s toasted and buttered, done.  So he’s despairing; hopeless; thinking seriously about giving the assisted suicide hotline a try because he doesn’t want to live, because the way he sees it, there’s nothing left to live for.  Elijah has failed at his mission; his mission was is life.  He hides in the darkness, his tomb, and waits to die.

But God is in the business of giving people like Elijah a sign.  The plot, the pacing, the promise of the text cries out for a sign, right?  So we look for it, wait for it.  And it comes, but not as we expected.

“Now there was a great wind,” goes the story, “so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD.”  And we say to ourselves, there it is, there’s the sign.  “But,” says the story, “The LORD was not in the wind.”  Then “after the wind there was a great earthquake,” goes the story, and again we think this must be it. “But the LORD was not in the earthquake.”  And suddenly things aren’t looking too good for old Elijah. “And after the earthquake a fire,” and we say all right, there it is, at last, “But the LORD was not in the fire,” goes the story, and like Elijah we wonder if the Lord is anywhere in the story.  But “after the fire,” says the story, “a sound of sheer silence.”

Nothing.  Nada.  It’s as if time had just stopped, as if the world had just shut down and all of life just held its breath, even God.  Silence.  Nothing.

It’s bad enough when our spouses give us the silent treatment; when God gives it, it’s almost more than we can take.  Silence.  We don’t do well with silence.  We assume that when God is silent, God is absent.  So we go where the noise is. We play music in elevators and shopping malls to fill the silence; we fill the gaps in our conversations with aimless chatter just to avoid silence.  We’ll leave a TV or radio on in the other room just to avoid the staggering silence of our lives.  We wrap noise around us like a blanket just to insulate us from the sound of sheer silence.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner wrote a book called God Was in This Place and I, I Did Not Know.  In it he makes reference to Solomon’s temple, the place that the ancient Hebrews believed to be God’s original dwelling place on earth.  First Kings says that the room was empty except for a single throne, which was also empty.  On either side were two gold cherubim spreading their wings over it.  The room was completely silent, undisturbed, except for one day out of the year, the Day of Atonement, when the high priest came in to make amends for the people.  He had a single purpose for his visit to the temple room: to utter the holy name of God, which posed a bit of a problem because no one quite knew how to pronounce the name of God; Hebrew at that time was written only with consonants–no vowels—so pronunciations were understood through usage and the holy name of God was never pronounced, and no one dared even try to pronounce the name, nor were they permitted to.  As the high priest inhaled and exhaled, he could begin to hear the sound of God’s name—Yah-weh—on his lips.  God’s holy name, uttered with each breath, could be heard and spoken only in the silence of that sacred place.  And just in case the high priest got the name wrong and was struck dead, the other priests would tie a rope around his leg so that they could pull him out without risking their own lives. Such was their misunderstanding of the nature of God’s holiness.  But it was their understanding.  And it was Elijah’s.

For Elijah, something’s not right.  It’s too quiet, spooky, like a Stephen King or Dean Koontz novel.  Nothing but the sound of sheer silence outside the cave.  The silence, however, is the sign.

He could handle the whistle of the winds and the rumble of the earth and the crackling of the fire, but the sound of sheer silence put a lump in his throat and sent his heart racing.  He raises his wizened frame, wraps his face in his coat to keep from seeing whatever it is he might run into out there, and stumbles to the entrance to the cave to greet the silence.  And standing there, God finally speaks.  “Elijah, what are you doing in there?”  And as if God didn’t already know, Elijah tells the story: “Your people have sold out; your altars have been destroyed; nobody gives a damn about you anymore.  So I got a little carried away, wiped out Jezebel’s secret service, and now I’m a dead man.  It’s over, Lord.  It’s all over. I don’t have a prayer.”  “Elijah,” says the Lord, “the story’s not over; it’s just beginning.  Get up, stop wasting time, and get back to work.  I’ll cover your . . . back on this one.”

Why are we so afraid of the silence these days?  Could it be that the noise we work so hard to create in our lives, and the noise with which we surround ourselves, actually conceals that which lies within us—the needs, the pains, the passions, and the joys?  Could it be that the silence we try so hard to avoid is actually the doorway into discovering who we are and whose we are and how we are and why we are?  Could it be that God is not to be found out above us and that waiting for that sign from above is futile, but that God is to be discovered down in the depths of our existence, a place to which we can only journey in silence.  Noise is concealing; silence is revealing.  And it just might be that the only sure way of hearing God is in the silence, where you’ve got to literally strain to hear what God might be saying.  And it very well may be the only sure way of hearing what those around us are saying.  What is spoken in the gaps, in the silence, in the unspoken moments of our lives might hold more truth than any spoken words could possibly bear.

Back a number of years ago, after a series of natural disasters and bloody violence in Southern California, culminating with the Northridge earthquake, NBC News aired a weeklong series on whether or not God was trying to tell us something through that tragic series of events—“acts of God,” as we’ve come to call them.  They interviewed pastors and priests and rabbis and theologians on the matter, each of whom concluded that God was using these events to convince people to get their act together; these are all warnings, they said over and over again, God’s notice that if we don’t straighten up pretty soon, we’ll be next.  Not one of them dared say that they didn’t know if God had anything at all to do with any of those events.  Not one of them dared to say nothing at all, for fear, perhaps, that no one would listen to their silence.

We have to embarrass God with all that noise and senseless chatter; we sound more like a noisy gong and clanging cymbal than anything remotely resembling the people of God.  When Jesus calms the storm for his disciples, who are frantic with senseless prattle, what does he say?  “Shut up!”  I’ve often wondered if it was the storm or the disciples he was commanding; both were silenced.

I want to air my own weeklong series for the evening news.  I don’t want to interview pastors or theologians; we enjoy too much the sound of our own voice – especially the more arrogant and self-righteous types.  I won’t name names, but you know the type.  Instead, I want to interview Sunday school teachers and Little League coaches and accountants and custodians; I want to ask them if they think God is trying to tell us something when they see the sun first kiss the sky in the silent dawn of a new day, or when they peek over their child’s or grandchild’s bed in the quiet darkness of the night and watch in all the wonder and hush of that moment, or when the power goes out and the TV shuts off and the phone can no longer ring and the clock stops ticking and there’s nothing to do but sit in stillness and think, or when the rattle in the car for some mysterious reason just doesn’t rattle anymore.  I don’t know what they’d say, but I know what Elijah would say.  Get ready, because the Lord, the God of hosts, is about to say something really big if you can bear the silence long enough to hear it.

There is a very moving scene in one of my favorite movie of all time, Shawshank Redemption, in which the main character, Andrew Dufresne, who is serving a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit, locks himself inside the warden’s office and plays Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro over the PA system for the entire prison and prison yard to hear, and for a moment mesmerizes the entire prison population.  He was given two weeks in solitary confinement for that daring act.  On his first day out of the hole, he is talking to his friends in the mess hall.  “Was it worth it,” one of them asks?”  “Piece of cake,” he says, “easiest time I ever did.”  “One week in the hole is like a year,” somebody says.  Andy replies, “I had Mr. Mozart down there with me.”  You mean they let you tote that record player down there with you?”  “No,” he replies, “I had it in here,” as he points to his head, “and in here,” as he taps his heart.  “That’s the beauty of it.  They can’t take that from you.  You need it down there so you don’t forget . . . that there are places in this world that aren’t made out of stone, that there’s something inside that they can’t get to, that they can’t touch, that’s yours.”  “What are you talking about?” his friend Red asks.

“Hope. Hope.”

It is out of the silence that God’s word is revealed and God’s hope is born and it is into the silence that we are called to return, away from the noise, in the gaps, where we strain to hear the music that God plays deep within us, the music that sends us forward, the sign in which a new mission is revealed, in an unstilled world.

Amen.