I wonder how you feel at this stage in the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of us have been unwell. Many of us know people who have died. Many of us, understandably, feel anxious about the extent to which Covid continues to circulate. Many of us have concerns about the impact the pandemic has had on the Church, the extent to which people have come back since we were able to reopen and the underlying financial challenges that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Our feelings in this situation are not so dissimilar to those experienced by Elijah in our Old Testament reading (1 Kings 19:1-15). Elijah was depressed, disheartened, isolated and on the run. He felt as though the whole world had turned against him and that he was left bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders alone.
He had gone from a great triumph in which he alone had stood up for God against King Ahab, Queen Jezebel, and all their priests. He had called down fire from God on the altar he had erected on Mount Carmel. The priests of Baal had been unable to do the same, but by undermining them, he had incurred the wrath of Queen Jezebel, in particular, who had put a price on his head and sent death squads to seek him out and kill him. He had fled, taking nothing with him and needing God to provide for his basic needs.
In today's reading, he reaches Mount Horeb expecting God to reveal himself in fire and thunder and lightning, as had been the case when God gave Moses the 10 commandments. Elijah knew the story of the 10 Commandments and had experienced fire from heaven on Mount Carmel. That was the way God acts. When God wasn’t visible through fire and brimstone, he wasn’t there. That, in essence, was the problem Elijah had been experiencing, God had not smitten his pursuers, therefore God must have abandoned him.
But God was about to open up a new paradigm for Elijah and reveal a new dimension to relationship with him, as well as a new way of revealing himself within Israel. The question was not, where was God, but was Elijah up for receiving from God in new ways that were outside his current frame of reference.
To help Elijah, God took him through a process of new understanding. First, he experiences all the old phenomena – wind, earthquake, fire – that he associates with God’s presence or revelation. Yet God’s voice is not heard in any of these ways. Once again, as Elijah experienced these phenomena without hearing from God, he must have been thinking that he had been abandoned and was on his own. Then, the dramatic signs stop, there is quiet, sheer silence, complete absence of speech or gesture, and yet this becomes the moment of revelation, the moment in which Elijah hears God speak in a new way; in a whisper, in gentleness, in presence, within and with Elijah; not through external phenomena but instead an internal conversation – Spirit speaking to spirit.
Not only is the means of transmission new but what God says is new, too. Elijah had come to believe that it was all about him; that he could stand in the breach between God and a world gone wrong and by calling down fire from heaven reveal God in his actions. His sense was that he, and no one else, could do this and that, anyway, he was on his own in standing up for God.
Not so, says God, in reality there are thousands of others quietly making their own stand for God where they are and there is Elisha, ready and waiting to take on Elijah’s mantle and lead the ongoing resistance, which ultimately does not depend on Elijah, or any other human being, because it is all about God and God’s purposes being fulfilled in God’s ways. Elijah has to learn that it is not all about him but instead about God, that God’s purposes are fulfilled in God’s ways, that God always has new ways of acting in human history and speaking into human lives, and that God’s people are more diverse than he, or we, are usually prepared to acknowledge or recognise.
God wants to speak into our worries and fears at this time in similar ways. Just as Elijah needed to realise that God’s purposes in his day and time were not solely reliant on him, it is also fatal for us to think God’s purposes for Wickford and Runwell rely solely on us. Equally, it is fatal to think that God’s purposes for Wickford and Runwell rely on the existing churches in the Town, or even the Church of England churches. Were they no longer to be there, God’s purposes for this place would still be able to be fulfilled.
The most fundamental element to relationship with God and to God’s mission is God. It is God who first reached out to us, it is God who equips and leads, it is God who will bring the kingdom of heaven. Each of us has a part to play, a contribution to make, is loved individually and absolutely, while being equipped for the roles we are called to play. But does it all depend on us? Well, the answer to that question is, ‘No’. This understanding is vitally important because it means we can relax – not in the sense of doing nothing, but in the sense of acting from a place of confidence rather than anxiety. It better to fail in an enterprise that will ultimately succeed than to succeed in an enterprise that will ultimately fail. That is our situation and when we understand it and take it to heart, we will act with confidence in God, rather than from our own anxiety.
Just as Elijah needed to hear God speak in a new way, so we need to realise that God is always doing a new thing because the Gospel always needs to be presented afresh in a new generation. Our job is to look for and discern the new thing that God is doing in our time and our community. That means asking who are the people of peace where we are? Where are those who are creatively reaching out across divides and dismantling barriers in order to bring divided people together? Who are they that stand with those on the margins, who are they that are with the dispossessed, who is it that hears the voice of the voiceless?
It is as we ask ourselves these questions and look for such people, that we will see the new thing God is doing in our area and can get involved. Now is always the right time to look for the new thing that God is doing because God is always doing a new thing.
Asking those questions and looking for those people will also lead us to new partnerships because God’s people are always more varied and diverse that we tend to perceive. Just as Elijah needed to understand that the deaths of the other prophets did not mean that God had no followers left, so we need to look outside our congregations and those of other churches to find those in the wider community who are God’s people, just not aligned with a particular church.
The pandemic has changed us and the Church. The changes that have occurred are not all negative and not all reversible. Change is inevitable – despite the Church sometimes appearing to be the one place where change does not occur – because God is always doing a new thing. The pandemic necessitated changes that we are only just understanding and to which we are only just getting used. As just one example, livestreaming services has meant that people who are housebound have been able to join churches again in ways that they couldn’t previously. It has also meant that people who are not used to church and are reluctant to cross the physical threshold of a building because they don’t know what they will encounter can now check out church from the comfort of their homes before deciding whether to come in person. These are good reasons for continuing to livestream services, even when those who can come to the building no longer need that themselves.
Just as our experience and understanding of God can never define God because God is always deeper and fuller, broader and wider, than we can ever experience or understand, so it is also true that our experience of church can never define God for exactly the same reasons. We constrain God and bring God down to our size when, like Elijah, we come to view our understandings, practices, approaches as definitive. Not only so, but, like Elijah, we become anxious, depressed and defensive, so we think we have to defend what we believe has always been.
Instead, there is freedom and release in coming to the place that Elijah eventually reaches of understanding that God is sovereign, is endlessly creative, is entirely trustworthy, indeed, knows exactly what he or she is doing, and will, in his or her time, bring the kingdom in full on earth as in heaven when all will be well and all manner of thing be well.
So, like Elijah, let us let go of our tendencies to seek to control, and instead let go and let God. It is from just such a change of heart and mind that our revival and renewal will come. Amen.
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Gungor - Dry Bones.
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