8/10/20087                                                                       I Kings 19:9-13

“Please Be Quiet—God Is Speaking!”

Introduction

            Bernie Krause is an American bioacoustician.  He coined the term, “biophony” which is the sound at a given location absent of humans and human-made machines.

            Krause records nature sounds for film and television, and said that in 1968, in order to get one hour of natural sound—no airplanes, no cars, no humans or human-made machines it would take him roughly fifteen hours of recording time.  Today, however, to get that same one hour of undistributed sound it takes him more than two thousand hours of recording time.

            That’s our world isn’t it?  Never a quite moment to be found.  And really, that’s how we want it, isn’t it?

            We have cell phones, iPods, cd players, and little transistor radios that we keep in our office so we can listen to the Indians week day day games. 

            How many of us have a television?  More than one television?  How many of us can’t go to sleep unless the television is on? 

            How many cd’s does your car hold at one time?  Mine can hold six so that as soon as one cd ends, another begins.  But no worries about that because I have my iPod, that has room on it for thousands of hours of music, videos, and podcasts.  So if I run out of cd’s to listen to, I got my entire library on this thing.  (Which I truly love by the way.)  And when I’m at home I have two iPod docking stations, and believe that I “need” a third one for the garage.

            We surround ourselves with noise.  We fill our ears and heads with noise.

            The Environmental Protection Agency reports that one hundred and eighty three million people are regularly exposed to noise levels that are labeled as excessive.

            If we surround ourselves with noise, fill our ears and heads with excessive amounts of noise, how do we ever hear God speaking?

Move 1

            In many churches, scripture readings are often prefaced with the invitation to listen for the Word of God, to hear the Word of God.  That invitation is especially poignant given our text for today— the story of the prophet Elijah listening for the Word of God.

            To set the stage, Elijah has fled to this cave after a contest with the prophets of Baal.  It was a contest to prove whose God is for real, a contest for prophetic authenticity.  

            The contest was that both sides would build an altar of wood, and then without a spark or flame set by human hand, the prophets would call upon their god/God to bring down fire to ignite the alter.

            As you can figure, when the prophets of Baal called for their god to light fire to their altar, nothing happened.  

            Then it was Elijah’s turn.  But before he prayed to God to light the alter, in an over confident manner, Elijah first poured bucket after bucket of water all over his alter.  Only then did Elijah pray, and fire came down from heaven and ignited his altar.  

            Afterwards, in an overzealous moment of triumph, Elijah led the prophets of Baal down to a nearby riverside, drew his sword, and slew them all.
            When Queen Jezebel, who was a devotee of Baal worship, heard what Elijah had done to her prophets, she took an oath to do the same thing to him.  The text says, “She sent a message to Elijah saying, ‘So may the gods do to me and more also if I do not make your life like one of my prophets, by this time tomorrow.’”

            Then the text says one of the greatest understatements in the Bible, “Elijah was afraid.”  He was in trouble and he knew it.

            This is where our text for today begins.

*******

            Elijah had fled for his life and has now sought refuge in this cave atop a mountain.  We know Elijah had been praying to God for some kind of intervention, some kind of response to the life threatening situation he was in.  And we can be certain that Elijah was waiting for, looking for, and listening for God’s response.

            Now God had responded to Elijah— God sent angels to tend to him prior to this— but it was when Elijah got to this secluded cave atop a mountain, when God really showed up to Elijah.

            God asked, “What are you doing here Elijah?”

            I love Elijah’s response.  “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts.” 

            Elijah spurs into a diatribe about how fervently he has worked in the name of God, and how everyone else has abandoned this ministry or been killed because of it.  His rant becomes a prayer that boils down to “Why is this happening to me God!?!?”  (Sound like a familiar prayer?)

            It’s after this prayer that Elijah hears the response that we all hate to hear.  He’s told to go out before the Lord.  Essentially, he is told to be quite, and wait.
            Then came a great wind so strong that it was splitting the mountains and breaking rocks into pieces, but God wasn’t in the wind.

            After the wind, an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake.

            And after the earthquake a fire, but God wasn’t in the fire.

            And after the fire, a sound of sheer silence.

            It was when Elijah heard this silence, when Elijah was immersed in this silence, that he heard, that he felt God’s response in this time of great need and uncertainty.
            God wasn’t in the noise and commotion that surrounded Elijah.  God was in the silence, the solitude.  

            The word, the presence of God, that Elijah was searching for, crying out for wasn’t in the noise and commotion of the earthquake, the wind, or the fire.  God’s word, God’s presence came to him in the sheer silence that followed.

            The King James Version of this text is the most familiar, saying that Elijah heard the “still small voice of God.”  This has become treasured language in terms of how we understand God speaking to us, but the original Hebrew says sheer silence, utter silence.

            Do you feel God is distant?  Do you wish God’s voice would be louder in your life?  Do you think that God only answers, responds, or shows up in grand, miraculous, or over powering ways?

            Could it be that silence, sheer silence, is often the necessary prerequisite for hearing the still, small voice of God?  Could it be that silence, sheer silence is the secret to drawing closer to God?

Move 2

            While in college I served as the youth minister at First Christian Church of Washington Pennsylvania.  When I was hired two things were asked of me from the senior minister.  The first was that he wanted me to never again allow the youth to play a game they called “Death Ball.”  The second was to help these students become a bit more, shall we say, “well mannered.”

            There were probably fifteen to twenty students who made up this group.  It was your typical youth group of amped up, hormone enraged high school students who liked hanging out together, and if they hung out together at church, just as well.  I was lucky— from the beginning they were receptive to me and to my ministry.  It didn’t take long to become friends with this group.

            But while we were all were friends, I soon discovered that one of their favorite things to say to one another was anything but friendly.  As I alluded to, it was a rather rambunctious group who always had a hard time getting quite and paying attention.  And their favorite manner in which to get others to be quite and pay attention was, as you can probably guess, was to tell one another to “shut up.”

            Now I knew what my senior minister meant when he said he wanted me to help them become a bit more “well mannered.”

            It took some time, but, long story short, I eventually got these students to stop saying “shut up” and instead say “please be quite.”  And while I was pleased that their language and word choice had changed for the better, there still was the matter of tone.

            One Sunday evening during youth group I was trying to get the group’s attention for that evening’s lesson, but because they were even more rambunctious than normal my efforts were failing miserably.  That is until one of the students reached a breaking point himself, stood up in the middle of the room, and at the top of his lungs screamed, “HEY WE’RE GOING TO LEARN ABOUT GOD SO PLEASE BE QUITE!!!”

            There are times when you work with youth that you want to pull your hair out.  Then there are times that you get that warm fuzzy feeling of pride that surges through you.  And then there are times that you just want to burst out in uncontrollable hysterical laughter for the things they say and do.  This was the only time I wanted to do all three at the same time.

*******

            The young man who screamed that statement; “We’re going to learn about God so please be quite” can teach us all a lesson.  It was almost as if the voice of God itself had come into the room and said,

            “What are you doing here?  If you’re not going to take the time to be still and listen to me—listen to me respond to your prayers, then what are you doing here?”

            We do that, don’t we?  We pray morning and night, we worship week after week, we call upon God, we put our faith in God, but how often are we simply quite before God?  How often do we immerse ourselves in silence and solitude and listen to God?

            If the answer to those questions is “rarely” or “never” then hear God’s question to Elijah as it’s directed to you:  “What are you doing here?”

Move 3

            As you might remember I belong to a group called the Bethany Fellowship.  It is a group of recently ordained ministers who are in the first few years of their ministries.  The group is designed to help us keep from getting burned out by having retreats twice a year that included continuing education and spiritual direction.

            When the director of the program contacted me about becoming a part of this group he told me that part of our five day retreats included a thirty six hour period of silence.  He asked me if I would be ok with this.

            My response was—“Thirty six hours where I don’t have to talk to anyone and no one can talk to me?!  Where do I sign up?!”

            I have been on seven retreats with the Bethany Fellowship, which means in total I have spent about two hundred and fifty two hours in silence.  I have cherished and embraced each moment, and every time I do it I always tell myself that I should do more, when I am home in Wadsworth. 

            In the three plus years I have been telling myself to do this, I have yet to extend this practice here at home.

            Singing, hearing sermons, listening to the praise team or Chancel Choir, hearing scripture read, or praying aloud are all good and faithful ways to draw closer to God.  But they should not be the only way.  We need to be quiet because God is speaking.

            Immersing ourselves in silence and solitude is a spiritual discipline, but it’s a hard one to do.  It’s hard because of our already busy schedules.  But it’s especially hard because we are uncomfortable with silence.  We feel we have to fill every second with some kind of noise or chatter.  We cannot allow ourselves to simply be still and quite.  We have to constantly be moving, be doing, be hearing some kind of noise.  But what all that often does is create a barrier from hearing the still small voice of God in the silence.

Conclusion

            Poet John Ciardi said, “We are what we do with our attention.”  We are what we do with our attention.  Silence is pregnant with the presence of God.  Silence and solitude is where we can encounter God, when we can draw closer to God.

            What are we doing here?  What are we doing here in church, at home, at work or school?  What are we doing when the things in life make us want to run off to a dark cave on a mountain and hide from the world?  What are we doing?

            Are we giving all our attention to the noise that surrounds us?  Are we filling our heads and ears, even our spirits, with noise, trying to block out that which is threatening us?

            Do we pray our prayers of “why is this happening to me!?!” and then “wait before the Lord” or just run off before God even has a chance to respond?

            Have we spent the same amount of time, or even a fraction of the time we’ve spent worrying and talking about our difficult, confusing, threatening situations, as we have spent in silence listening to what God might have to say?

            If we haven’t, then what are we doing here?

            God hears our cries.  God knows when life is threatening us with uncertainty.  And God is trying to respond.  But we need to do our part and turn off the TV, the cell phone, the cd player, the ipod, the Indians game—we need to turn off the noise and listen for the still small voice of God in the sound of sheer silence.

            So let us this day, Please Be Quiet—God Is Speaking.  Amen.