Homilies

Back to Homilies menu

Today’s first lesson (1 Kings 19:1-18) tells of Elijah’s mysterious encounter with the Lord in a cave on Mount Horeb.  This encounter is preceded by the low point in Elijah’s career: pursued by Jezebel for having murdered the prophets of Baal, Elijah sits under a broom tree and asks the Lord to take away his life.

Just at this moment of blackest despair, divine assistance appears in the form of an angel, who gives the prophet food and drink, to prepare him for his journey to the mountain of God.  God’s  appearance is preceded by a wind, an earthquake, and a fire, but the Lord, we are told, was not present in any of these.  John Greenleaf Whittier alludes to this famous scene in the concluding words of his hymn:

Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire
O still, small voice of calm.

But the Hebrew words which the Revised Standard Version still renders as “a still, small voice” are more accurately translated: “the sound of absolute silence.”

Christianity is a religion of the word, and Christian worship includes a great deal of talk.  Some churches have introduced the practice of maintaining a few moments of silence after each scripture reading, but it’s not easy: we feel that we are wasting time, and we want to get on with it.

But silence is the spontaneous reaction to the divine presence, to the experience of ineffable mystery.  If God is at the centre of our worship, then a place must be found for silence.

The mystery of the divine presence which Elijah experienced in the silence leads to a response of faith: “Elijah wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave”  (verse 13).  Faith has come to mean “accepting something as true on the word of another,”  either the Bible or the church.  But that is not what faith meant for Paul or for Paul’s great expositor, Martin Luther.

Faith, for Luther, is what love is for the German mystics; it is something which cannot be expressed in rational concepts, but only through figures and images.  Faith is the centre of the soul, where union with God takes place.  Faith is what transforms us inwardly and brings us forth anew.

Elijah’s experience of the mysterious and uncanny on Mount Horeb is not easily distinguished from the experience of a disturbed personality, and such an experience is itself disturbing to those witnessing it, as in the case of those who witnessed Jesus’ cure of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:17).  Whatever we cannot explain is frightening, and even in the church we do our best to eliminate it.

All great religions, Christianity included, have undergone a process of moralization and rationalization, until religion has come to be called “morality touched with emotion.”  But the origin of religion is in the experience of ineffable mystery, which is both fearful and fascinating.

In the face of this mystery, silence is the only possible response.  Yet in this silence God’s spirit is at work, producing in us God’s new creation.      

July 23, 2006

back to top