About today’s guest minister: The Rev. Joanne M. Graves (pronouns she/her) is a familiar face to First Churches. A member since 2005, she sings in the choir and serves on the Member Care Committee. An authorized minister in the UCC, she has served churches in Hampshire and Franklin Counties since her ordination in 1995. She does homecare with elders, is an occasional guest preacher as well as a comedic and sacred storyteller; sometimes both at the same time! Her next story is at the Wendell Meeting House (wendellmeetinghouse.org) on August 15 and 16, as part of the Stories of Franklin County series.

"Still and Small"

Hiding in a cave-like crevice on Mt. Horeb, Elijah trembles. Around him the earth shakes as boulders fall, sparking fire that is whipped up by a great wind. All of Elijah’s senses are assaulted: dust and smoke fill his eyes and throat with soot, crashing rock and trees felled by wind reverberate their sounds in the mountain. Stinging winds and heat and debris pepper his body as he tries to shelter himself. All he can see around him is the earth in chaos. Earthquake, wind, fire. What was he doing there?

Elijah had been the last of the faithful prophets of the Lord. He had confronted King Ahab and his wife, Jezebel. Since Ahab’s marriage, Ahab had abandoned the God of Israel for the gods of his wife, the god Baal. Together Ahab and Jezebel had gone on a killing spree murdering the prophets of God. Squashing any defiance with them. 

Although he had been a wanted man Elijah came out of hiding, at the Lord’s command. Elijah challenged the 450 prophets of Baal to rain down fire on the carcass of a bull they had placed on their altar. Elijah would do the same to a bull placed on an altar to the Lord. Try as they might after hours of prayer, chanting, wailing, no fire consumed the offering to Baal. On his own, as one single man, Elijah summoned the fire of the Lord and the sacrifice burned.

The display had it’s desired effect; the people believed in the Lord again. The prophets of Baal were murdered. Ahab and Jezebel ran away. And it rained, ending the years’ long drought that had started all the prophesy business in the first place. Despite this defeat, Jezebel vowed she would have her vengeance. She promised that she would take Elijah’s life as he had taken the lives of her prophets.

With that threat on his life, Elijah ran away. He was tired. Exhausted in ways that made the hunger and thirst of the drought years seem like a feast, Elijah went far away from Ahab and Jezebel. And he was afraid for his life. He had seen the power of God come down and burn the sacrifice, the defeat of the Lord’s enemies the prophets of Baal, and he saw the rains return. He had seen miracles. And yet, he was afraid. 

Lead to a broom tree, he waited for God to answer his one last prayer. He asked to die. He had had enough. There was no way out. And God’s answer was to allow Elijah to sleep and eat. After taking care of his body, Elijah was told by the Lord to shelter in the cleft of the mountain.  So, like Moses before him, Elijah hid himself in a cave as the Lord came near.

“What are you doing here?” God asks. “They’re trying to kill me. No one believes anymore. I tried. I’m done with them.” Elijah says with a whine. Twice.

All of that led to this moment of noisy, sooty, assaultive chaos. But not a bit of the power of nature at its worst could help Elijah, for the Lord was not there. And because of that, Elijah was still alone. Still in danger. Still bereft.

Elijah expects to find God in loud expressions of power. Not unlike people expected Jesus to manifest in his own day. Not so farfetched an expectation for Elijah either. Remember the fire of God from heaven that Elijah calls down to defeat the prophets of Baal? He’s seen God work in fire.

Three of the most powerful, destructive, chaotic events in nature are earthquake, wind and fire. Elijah sees each one as a possible place from which God would speak to him. Each event as a possible revelation of God to him. He found, instead, that each event only masqueraded as the voice of God. Earthquake, wind and fire did not reveal God, but rather concealed the voice of God.

To extend the scriptural metaphor, earthquake, wind and fire hide the voices of God today too. Earthquake voices show up first and loudest. They are voices of anxiety. The voices of what if and worry. A dialogue something like this: “If I get a new job, what if it doesn’t work out? Then what will I do? I’ll be out of work! I can’t have that happen. Jobs are hard to find. There’s no guarantee that I’ll get another job quickly. And a good paying job is rarer. And I need health insurance. No benefits with the new job. What will I do for health insurance? Can I make more money and still qualify for ConnectorCare? What if congress eliminates Obamacare?...You know what? It’s just better to stay with the job I’ve got.” We all know these voices, and if we let them, they can lead to inaction, and, even to despair. Despair being one of the voices of the wind. 

Wind voices, like the terrestrial winds of hurricanes, gales and thunderstorms block the voices of God with maximum damage in mind. These voices get their power from within us. Voices like these: “You’re no good. You’re not welcome here. You are a disappointment to me” said in your own voice, the voice of your parents, or worse yet, God’s voice. You ----.” Fill in the blank with the slur de jour. You know the ones. They’re based upon race, gender, identity, immigration status, body size, health, and more. These winds destroy our true identities as beloveds of God, created for good, instructed by and forgiven by the man of God, Jesus of Nazareth, held for eternity by the rising from death by that same man, the Son of God.

Winds are sneaky—especially tornadic winds. Winds that spiral in upon themselves. These are winds that don’t last long. They may destroy all houses on this street and a block away all remains standing. There is no rhyme nor reason to it. The voices of these types of winds bring up our past and our mistakes indiscriminately granting no grace. They remind us that we failed. That our marriage broke up, that we didn’t eat healthfully yesterday, that we didn’t graduate, that we couldn’t do fill in the blank” and on and on. These winds from the past speak the worst that we’ve ever been or done. They make it impossible to hear of God’s visions and possibilities for our todays and tomorrows. Like that constant spinning tornado, the same record over and over.

We have become very familiar with wildfire these past few years. Only this summer, fires in the northwestern Canada and the United States have destroyed homes, livelihoods, communities causing human death and the destruction of the natural world in it wake. Even over the 4^th of July our air in New England, 3,000 miles away, was barely breathable. Like all fire, those fires were all consuming. The more fire consumes the more power it has and the more destructive it becomes. The same is true of the fire voices within us. 

Fire voices are those of everyone and everything else. They are voices that compete for our love and loyalty, time and devotion. These voices have expectations of us. And often are competing expectations at that. They include our parents, spouses and partners, children and family; church, school, work, our American culture, the causes we support, the pursuit of justice, our friends, our ethnic heritage, electronics of all screen types and a new and powerful 21^st century voice: social media. All these voices compete with the voice of God telling us who we are and what to believe and do. Even our own voice can consume God’s voice. 

Elijah experienced earthquakes, wind and fire but God wasn’t there. We experience those things too. It’s all noise and chaos. When those things stopped, only then could Elijah experience the true voice of God. And to Elijah’s surprise, and ours too, God’s voice, God’s strength, God’s power was in stillness, quiet, calm. It was a voice like a heartbeat, steady, rhythmical, life-filled. Hard to hear and feel in chaos.

Elijah only could hear God’s question “What are you doing here?” and God’s instructions to return to his work fighting Jezebel and Ahab when the chaos of earthquake, wind and fire were over. Only in the still and the small could Elijah fully hear God’s promise of “I am with you.”

You know what I’m going to say next, the same still and small voice is within each of us. The voices of earthquake, wind and fire conceal the still and the small. God seeks us. God speaks to us. God desires us. God implores us to see past the voices of anxiety, destruction, the past, others’ expectations, even our own voices at times to find the voice of God.

Only when the earthquake wind and fire stopped was there the still and the small, not the mighty and powerful, just the still, small voice—of God. Only when the chaos stopped could Elijah speak the words of Samuel, another of Israel’s prophets. Only in the calm could Elijah say “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” The same is true for you and I. The voice of God is still and the voice of God is small. Repeat with me. “Speak Lord for your servant is listening.” Shh, let’s listen.