Scripture: Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

“Then the Lord Himself went by. There came a mighty wind, so strong it tore the mountains and shattered the rocks before the Lord. But the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake. But the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire. But the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came the sound of a gentle breeze. And when Elijah heard this, he covered his face with his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then a voice came to him, which said, ‘What are you doing here Elijah?”

-- 1 Kings 19:11-14

Last week we saw Michaiah-ben-Imlah challenge the mob of 400 ecstatic shamans, and like the little child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the “Emperor’s new Clothes,” tell the two kings that there was less going on than met the eye, that it was all a show of smoke and mirrors.  The point, which I mention again here because it is central to our reflection, is that the true message of God begins to be heard when criticism begins, from the mouth of the child, the prophet, the one who for reasons of innocence or inspiration does not moo along with the herd. In biblical terms, the Word of the Lord comes first as judgment. This raises the question of the source of this perspicacity; why does the child see the nakedness of pretence, how does the prophet know the mob is wrong? The prophet hears something that our texts call the “Word of God” and this is what I want to think about today.

There are two kinds of religious knowledge, natural and revealed. The natural knowledge of God comes from the interpretation of natural phenomena as signs of a spiritual hinterland behind the appearances. I once heard an expert on primitive cave paintings say that these marvelous esthetic objects from Paleolithic times emerge from an invisible reservoir of spiritual meaning. Traditional paganism is a religion of nature; it celebrates the awe of great forests, wild winds, alarming earthquakes and raging fires. These phenomena arouse such shock and awe in the pagan that they convince him of the existence of a great power beyond all apparent things, and that he depends on this great power for survival and so had better placate it with gifts and gestures of honor and submission.

The revealed knowledge of God, on the other hand, comes through human not natural channels, although since humans are embedded in nature revelation cannot be utterly separate from it. The human channel through which it comes is, of course, the word.  This is not surprising when we remember that biologists now agree that the first sign of the human presence in the natural world is the moment of language, and that human being is verbal being. The Word was literally the beginning of the human world, as the Gospel of John tells us (John 1:1). The Word created the world. The word is the heart of humanity, and for that reason it is appropriate that from the very beginning of our faith we have believed that God made Himself known to us by words, which under certain circumstances become the Word.

So Genesis is right, communication is the medium of creation. God spoke the world into being and that means that communication is the secret truth of all existing things. Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, / the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork; /day discourses of it to day, / night to night hands on the knowledge. / No utterance at all, no speech, / no sound that anyone can hear;/ yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their message to the ends of the world (Ps 19:1-4). Thus the Psalmist shows that he knows that even nature is created by communication. I am told that the cells of our body communicate with each other in a language that can be decoded, and that a disease like Alzheimer’s might be the result of a breakdown in communication among the cells of the brain. So we have not only the music of the spheres but also the speaking of the cells. From the smallest to the largest creatures, one constant conversation goes on throughout the universe. How important then that it be true and not false! The Word of God not the words of greed and fear.

We certainly know the terrible costs of miscommunication among people and groups, and the spiritual damage inflicted by the deliberate manipulation of words for utilitarian purposes. I mentioned Mohammed Sahaf last week the new ironic saint of public relations because of his stalwart efforts as Saddam’s information minister. Our human world is full of verbal violence inflicted so early in life that many children could not now recognize that the Emperor is naked. If failed communication causes disease in the body it certainly also does so in community.

So traditionally, there is nature and there are words, through which we believe we come to know God. Let me suggest, however, that the tradition is wrong and that nature is not an independent way to God. We have already heard the poet say that creation speaks within itself, day to day, night to night, and in any case nature can only disclose God when it is interpreted, when someone says, “That wind, that earthquake indicates that God is here in divine power.” When the Christians first confronted European paganism, the worship of the forests and the storms, what they said demystified nature. “A storm is just a storm, “ they said, “ and a forest is good for wood! God is someone else. Let us tell you the story.” And then they told the story of Jesus, the narrative that becomes for us the Word of God when we have ears to hear it.

Elijah was active in the reign of the same Ahab of Israel (874-853) whom we saw last Sunday defy the prophet Micaiah and go to his death in the war against Ben Hadad II the king of Aram at Ramoth Gilead. (1 Kings 22:29-38). Elijah criticized Ahab severely for taking to wife the daughter of the King of Tyre, Jezebel. She turned up with hundreds of her own prophets, devotees of the Baal of Tyre, and displaced the prophets of Yahweh, of whom Elijah was the leader. We are still in the time when prophets lived together as members of large groups and prophesied by working themselves up to a frenzy by group activities of the “raving” kind, and then in ecstasy gave advice channeled from the God. The theory was that where human consciousness ends divine consciousness begins. There was a famous contest between Elijah and these prophets of Baal on mount Carmel, won by Elijah, whose God was willing to set fire to the offerings while the Baal could not even strike a spark. Elijah then incited the crowd to murder the prophets of Baal, Jezebel the queen’s favorites, and so found himself on the run in the wilderness (1 Kings 18:20-40).

He goes all the way to the mountain where Moses received the Law from God, Mount Horeb (or Sinai) and on the summit holes up in a cave. This is the place where in the biblical tradition man had come closest to God in the person of Moses. Elijah has returned for a Word from God. It is not the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, that heralds the coming of the divine communication, and thus pagan reliance on the shock and awe of nature is rejected. The Word of God comes on a “gentle breeze” as the JB translates, or as a “still small voice” as KJV translates. My teacher Samuel Terrien translated “as the sound of a crushed silence,” a paradoxical, oxymoronic idea, which may nevertheless be nearest the true meaning. The text is telling us that God’s Word is a quiet and internal communication, easily missed by those who believe that everything important must be loud, violent and vulgar. It is also telling us that the Word sounds not at the end of our rationality but at the end of our self-sufficiency, when crushed by the burden of our own haplessness we stop at last and really listen. So many of us are so convinced that we know it all already and need not hear anything really new that we live a self-fulfilling prophecy: we never hear anything other than what we have heard before because we have closed to possibility of hearing something radically different.

We listen to these few chosen prophets represented in the Bible because millions of us down thousands of years have heard in their words something radically new, something that saved us from the crushing boredom of naturalistic existence, namely, the Word of God. The Word of God is the term for the self-revelation to us of the eternal God. We hear the prophetic word and believe it, and down that channel of hearing and believing comes the life of the living God to us. So let us listen for the Word in these words of the Bible and in the preaching, and when we hear it let us believe and obey.

Elijah heard the Word and passed it on. That’s what all the prophets did, and our NT reading shows that even in the time of Jesus the memory of Elijah was alive and well; some even thought that John the Baptist was a re-incarnation of Elijah. In any case as Elijah was the first of the great hearers and proclaimers of the Word of God so John was thought of as the last.

Next week we shall look at Elijah’s successor, Elisha, and the developing role of the prophet in the society of that time.