““Life-Giving Swirlies or This Is God’s Swirl””
1st Kings 19:9-18
Matthew 14:22-33
Self-Introduction at the Beginning of the Service:
I try to be as transparent as possible in terms of what I do, so I want to tell you why I took off my shoes just now. I rarely preach or lead worship without taking off my shoes. I could sneak that by you and you might never realize it, but I think it’s important to let people know why I do that.
About 18 years ago I went to India.
A year after I went to India, one Sunday I was doing a children’s message in worship. Telling about my trip, I mentioned that we took off our shoes when we went to holy places, because they take off their shoes.
So now, when I take my shoes off in worship, it helps remind us New England United Church of Christ folks that people around the world worship in different ways, and we are all God’s people
Introduction to Scripture
When I first thought about this morning’s scripture I realized it had so much backstory that you may or may not remember.
I remembered the part that came right before this reading. Then I thought, How did we get to that point? So I went back and looked at the section before that.
OK (I wondered) How did we get to that point? So I kept going back.
Then I thought, If I’m having trouble remembering how these things come together, chances some others will, too.
The backstory:
The people of God were enslaved in Egypt. God raised up Moses
to lead them out of slavery.
That was about 1250 years before the birth of Jesus.
Israel was comprised of 12 tribes. Ten of them were named for sons of Jacob (who became known as Israel after wrestling with an angel, or perhaps it was God the night before he was going back to meet his brother Esau). Jacob’s 11th son was Joseph, but there was no tribe of Joseph. Rather, the remaining two tribes were named after two of Joseph’s sons.
Each tribe got a territory in the Land of the Promise, except for the tribe of Levi. The tribe of Levi were the priests. Since every tribe needed priests, the Levites dispersed amongst all the other tribes.
For about 200 years, each tribe had its own “state”, sort of like in the early United States where each state had its own autonomy.
Eventually the people asked for a king.
God said, “No.” But the people kept asking.
Eventually God said, “All right.
You will get what you ask for.”
God anointed Saul as king, but Saul lost God’s favor. So God anointed David. David became King about 1000 years before Jesus. He served as king for about 30 years.
When he died his son Solomon became king sitting on the throne even longer.
When Solomon died, the kingdom split in two. Nine of the tribes kept the name Israel while the two that surrounded Jerusalem kept it as their capital and took the name Judah.
Until about 590 years before Jesus, when Jerusalem was destroyed by Babylon, Judah always had a descendent of King David on their throne. The kings of Israel were not descended from David.
So now we find ourselves about 870 years before Jesus. Ahab takes the throne over Israel in the north after his father died. Biblical historians called all the northern kings evil, because they did not worship God.
In the southern kingdom some kings were called good, while some were called evil depending upon whether they worshiped God or not.
Ahab married a woman from the northern neighbor Kingdom of Sidon. Her name essentially means Princess. She becomes Queen Princess, (ie, Queen Jezebel).
A devout follower of the fertility gods of the region, she wanted Israel to do the same. Ahab was fine with that.
During this time, the prophet Eliyahu or Elijah appeared. His name literally means “God is Yahu,” or “Yahu is God.”
Yahu is a Hebrew variant of the name of God. So, bearing the name of God, Elijah goes to Ahab and says, “You are not following God and you should be.”
Elijah provokes a confrontation. He gets Ahab to gather all the fertility god prophets living in Israel. The whole region is in the midst a three year drought, so, apparently, the fertility gods aren’t working very well. They are sleeping or perhaps they went away.
Elijah says, “Let’s find out who really is God, who really controls the rain.”
850 prophets of the fertility gods from all over Israel gather on Mount Carmel in northern Israel. Elijah says, “Sacrifice a bull. Put that bull on your altar. Surround the altar with wood for the fire. Pray to your gods and get the fire of heaven to come down, to strike the fire and consume the offering.”
So they pray all morning long, and nothing happens. They start doing sacred dances. Nothing happens. They start beating themselves because they aren’t doing a good enough job. Nothing happens. Finally exhausted, they give up.
Then Elijah says, “Now it’s my turn.”
He sacrifices a bull and puts it on the altar with the wood all around it. He says, “Pour water on the wood and on the sacrifice.” He tells them to do it once, twice, three times.
Then Elijah prays to the God of the Exodus. The Fire of Heaven comes down and consumes the offering.
Elijah gets filled with the fiery spirit, excitement and adrenaline.
The people are convinced that the God of the Exodus is the true God. He says to them, “Arrest all of those prophets!” They do so.
Then he says, “Kill them all.” They do so.
Once the blood lust and adrenaline leave him, he gasps, “What did I do? I killed the prophets of the King and Queen!”
He ran as far away as he could. He fled from Mount Carmel up in the north, down to Mount Sinai near Egypt where Moses had met God and received the Law.
That’s where we pick up the story…
[Scripture readings from 1st Kings and from Matthew are read]
The Message
Breathe —
Invite the Spirit to come and be with us — which (of course) is redundant
because the Spirit is already with us.
I know that the Spirit is here because of the number of ways things have unexpectedly come together. Some things I planned, but not others.
You may notice the title for this message: “Life-Giving Swirlies”
In my preparations for this morning I was I was thinking about the hymn “This Is My Father’s Swirl”. And then we had the opening hymn which is also the tune for “This Is My Father’s World”. I didn’t choose the hymn.
How cool is that?
Then I’ve noticed a few other places where little things have come together. I always know that the Spirit is present when things happen that we did not plan on, when they come together in a remarkable way.
Now in reality it doesn’t always happen that way, does it?
The reality is that we live in tumultuous times. The reality is that some people in our midst, people we care about, perhaps even ourselves, find that their lives are not going the way they would hope, the way they wanted. They may be difficult things. They may be times fraught with disease, or that are clouding the mind, or it may just be aging.
But not just individual lives get disrupted. The Church, in all its manifestations around the world, finds these are tumultuous times, as well. The Church at large finds that things are changing. old ways are not as effective or successful as the world has changed. I will point out that the church is very different now than it was when I was ordained 40 years ago.
Thank God! I am more excited and hopeful about The Church than I was then. Yes the church is smaller. A lot of churches are closing.
But The Church is not dying because The Church is the Body of Christ. So it is God’s Spirit who will keep The Church alive. It will change shape and form. It will be different.
And then of course there is this congregation. You are going through a time of transition, a challenging time as you look forward to what happens comes next — and as you grieve and say goodbye.
Then too, there is the politics of our nation, and our world — because we live in tumultuous times.
One thing I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that, as bad as things are, with so many things we thought secure getting undermined; with more and more people seeming to long for a White America; with more racism and sexism and genderism coming out of the closet and making itself well known —
As climate change threatens the whole of the environment It’s easy to lose hope. It is easy to stop believing.
As I read through scripture, and human history, I realize that as bad as things are now, this is not the first bad time nor is it necessarily the worst bad time in human history. This is not the bubonic plague of the 14th century when 25 to 30% of the population of Europe died.
All that death and destruction completely changed the way European society worked. It gave rise to a middle class because suddenly the old structures no longer worked.
We do not live in the time of the fall of the Roman empire Perhaps other empires are falling but…
We know the outcome of those things that happened in the past. We don’t know the outcome of what’s happening now.
It’s hard to live in the “I don’t know” time.
I’ve begun to consider that this is God’s swirl and tumult. God is in the midst of it. God may or not cause this storm, but God is here in it with us and making something of it.
You may have noticed in that first part of scripture that we share with our Jewish siblings, there are places where God is referred to by a word in upper case letters.
That happened because in the Jewish tradition they did not want to tread on the name of God. They did not want to take or even come close to taking the name of God in vain.
So they built a “fence around the law”.
Instead of driving at 55 miles an hour in a 55 mile an hour zone they would “drive” at 50 — or 45 — to make sure that they didn’t go faster than that “speed” limit.
So they stopped saying the name of God when they saw it written. Then they decided not even to write it. They put another word in as a placeholder that people would recognize as The NAME.
They stopped saying the Name. They put in the word adonai, which means Lord.
Translators ever since have used their own language’s word for Lord. It’s usually printed in capital letters so you know that’s where the name of God goes.
Now names in the Bible have meaning, unlike my own name, Bruce, which has no meaning even within the family. There are no other Bruces.
My siblings have names that refer to people my parents knew. I have no idea where Bruce came from.
So my name doesn’t mean something until I live it.
But in the scripture, names mean something.
The name that God shared with Moses sounds in Hebrew something like I am who I am.
A colleague who is a much better scholar than I knows Hebrew and Greek in ways I do not.
He renders the divine name as I Will Be There.
So whenever I see the uppercase word LORD in scripture I replace it with I Will Be There.
In my younger years I thought that the presence of God was good but not as good as God doing something about it!
If you’re not going to do something about it, then, presence seems like a poor substitute.
In spite of the fact that Clinical Pastoral Education taught me about the ministry of presence, — that sometimes there is nothing that we can do. In those times all we can do is to be present, to say to people, “I see you. I do not want you to have to go through this alone. I will sit with you.”
In seminary my father, had a dear friend who became a medical missionary in what was then the Belgian Congo. His wife had a baby and the baby died.
When their child died, the people in the area sat with them. They didn’t say anything. They just sat with the couple in their grief. They were not alone.
It’s like the Jewish tradition, when someone dies people come and they sit shiva. They sit and their presence says, You are not alone in your grief.
As I’ve gotten older I still want God to be the Divine Butler, the one who runs all the errands and fixes things.
But I’ve also begun to understand that the divine presence matters. We are seen in the midst of our sorrow and grief and whatever we’re going through. God may not fix it, but being there matters.
In John’s gospel, Jesus prayed, saying, “I don’t pray that you take them out of this world. I pray for to you come and be with them in it.”
And so it is.
So as your face this world the calamity and tumult, the challenging, difficult situations, the question is Will the presence of God matter?
Elijah up on the mountain said, “I alone am the only one left.”
And God replied, “Come on. You’re not the only one. You are not alone. I am with you.
“Oh, and by the way, I wasn’t in that flashy Wind. I wasn’t in that dramatic Earthquake. And I sure as ———— wasn’t in that roaring Fire.”
(That makes me wonder : Was God in the fire that consumed Elijah’s sacrifice?)
God is in the quiet after the storm when everything is so quiet. That silence has a noise to it —
— in which you may hear the sheer silence in which God may speak.
And God says, “By the way, you’re not the only one either. So go back. I will be with you, along with the people I raise up They will be with you too.
And that will be enough.”
Walking on the water
Another colleague wrote a book about coping with life. In it he says, “You may be in the storm But don’t let the storm be in you.”
The disciples were in the storm and the storm was in them.
When Jesus walked across the water he was in the storm but the storm was not in him.
When Peter said, “Just say it and I’ll come to you.”
Jesus said, “Come to me.”
He steps out there [acting out: Trembling excitement. And then reality and fear strike.]
In that moment he thought he was alone. He reaches out his hand to Jesus and he says, “Don’t leave me alone!” Precious Jesus takes his hand.
The disciples were not alone. After the resurrection, Jesus said, “I will not leave you alone. I will pray to God to send the Spirit to comfort you; to be with you; to give you strength.”
But there’s one other little thing here.
I’ve always thought Jesus was criticizing them here. “Oh you a little faith.”
It always seemed to me he was saying, What’s wrong with you? Why is your faith so small?
Recently I have begun to understand that if you have faith as small as a mustard seed — which he declares is the smallest of seeds, that is enough.
So when Jesus says You of little faith, he’s really saying:
A little faith is enough.
As you face this time, A little faith is enough because God has got enough faith for all of us.
God is good
All the time
