Proper 8, Year C--The Undeceiving of Elijah

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Proper 8, Year C

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty

One of the difficulties with the lectionary is that we can sometimes get so peppered with the various stories and narratives—chopped up into consumable chunks appropriate for Sundays—that we can forget the broader, over-all themes that recur again and again. It was George Bernard Shaw, who after reading a book of Japanese haiku, likened it to the experience of being “pecked to death by a bunch of chickens.” Sometimes our experience of scripture can feel like that too. This story from the Old Testament. Peck. These verses from a psalm. Peck. This passage from Paul. Peck. This story from one of the Gospels. Peck. Pretty soon we’re leaking oil and calling for a medic. Is there a doctor in the house?

So today I want to tease out one of the major themes we see recurring in Holy Scripture—in both the Hebrew bible and New Testament. It’s the theme of the undoing of violence, of Godly weaning from the sacrificial urge, the scapegoating impulse, the desire to secure a temporary peace on the backs of innocent victims whom we caricature and cast out. Call it the story of charting the peaceable kingdom, the fashioning of a people, or simply sketching out the way of love.

Let’s start with Elijah. By this point in the story the altars of Yahweh have been toppled. Ahab’s regime has signed up for Team Baal. So Elijah organizes a shamanistic show-down between himself and the prophets of Baal to see which of the competing Gods can barbecue the sacrificed bull with fire from heaven. The prophets of Baal can’t get the thing lit and Elijah taunts them suggesting that perhaps it’s because Baal is “away from his desk at the moment” or “powdering his nose” as the euphemisms goes. Who says the Bible isn’t funny?

Now it’s Elijah’s turn. Just to make things interesting he douses the whole thing in water. And sure enough—whoomp! The whole thing goes up in flames and Elijah’s God is declared the winner. Confident God is on his side, Elijah promptly declares that one hundred and fifty prophets should be put to death. Somehow, after ordering the deaths of a hundred and fifty people, Elijah starts to feel a little depressed and forlorn and retreats to the desert. God feeds him and tells him to go to Mount Horeb where he encounters God not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not but in the fire, but in the still, small voice of sheer silence.

Something very important is at work here. James Alison calls it, “the undeceiving of Elijah.” Similar to the way we saw Saul/Paul being disillusioned of his whole way of seeing according to who’s in and who’s out last week, Elijah undergoes a profound spiritual transformation that completely remakes his way of seeing and being in the world. So what is undone? What does this “undeceiving of Elijah” entail? Well, for starters, it’s revealed that Elijah was operating under the false assumption that Yahweh was just like Baal, only bigger, badder, and tougher. Elijah realizes that Yahweh is not a God of power and destruction, not a God of wind, earthquake, or fire, but a God of the still small voice, the God of sheer, vulnerable, silence. Elijah realizes that being zealous for the Lord is not about eliminating so-called enemies in a shamanistic contest of one-upmanship, but of listening to sheer silence in vulnerable receptivity.

Elijah realizes that God is not just one God among many Gods whom he must defend with sacred violence, but that Yahweh is the God above all Gods whose way is the way of peace, justice, mercy, and loving-kindness. The way of caring for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the alien in the land. God is the one in whom there is no over-against. God is the one in whom there is no darkness at all. And this is a good framework through which to see the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures—God is gradually, with stiff-necked people as his obstinate clay, trying to wean God’s people from the way of sacrifice and violence and usher in the way of peace, welcome, and radical hospitality.

In our reading from Second Kings this week, we hear of the passing of the mantle from Elijah to Elisha. And the key to understanding this passage is the fact that we have not one, but two reenactments of the Mosaic flight from Egypt—the parting of the Red Sea. The Israelites are freed from the prison of their identity as brick-makers for worldly power and the notion that who they are is defined by how much they can produce, but they are also freed and gradually weaned of a God who looks more like an Egyptian Pharaoh than the sure foundation of loving kindness. The journey into the freedom of the promised land is a journey into freedom from Pharaoh politically, but also into the freedom of a God who is God and not just another version of Pharaoh. Holy Scripture tells us the story of a people who are gradually weaned from taking their own violent projections onto God as the truth of who God is, and coming into deeper and deeper relationship with God as God is—peace, mercy, loving-kindness.

So that’s Elijah. Now let’s look at Galatians. Where do we see this dynamic of weaning away from violence at work in Paul’s letter? Notice that theme of freedom again. “For freedom has Christ set us free.” The Israelite’s freedom, Elijah’s setting God free to be God and not just another violent projection of his tribal imagination, is the same freedom that Paul’s calling the Galatians into—the freedom most perfectly manifest in the person of Jesus. This isn’t mere willy-nilly freedom—a kind of self-indulgent, “I do what I want” kind of freedom where anything goes (if it feels good do it, follow your bliss). Paul is making the astounding claim that we are actually most free of the yoke of slavery when we are in service to our neighbor—loving our neighbor as yourself. We tend to equate freedom with choosing among the seventeen varieties of ketchup at the grocery. Paul equates freedom with the ability to love. We are free, we are fulfilling the end for which we were created when we are free for God’s love and freely, indiscriminately, prodigally spread it like the sower casting seeds every which way.

Paul reminds the church in Galatia that they are not be in competition with each other. “If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” Be careful, in other words, that you don’t become so addicted to competition and violence towards one another that it ultimately consumes you.  Paul is writing to free the Galatians from the same trap in which he himself found himself stuck. It’s the same trap Elijah was in as well—thinking that by killing people in God’s name he was doing God’s will. The Galatians aren’t killing each other (yet), but they are in rivalrous competition with each other in the name of God—it’s a matter of degree.

When we arrive at our Gospel for today, we can see this same theme of weaning from sacrificial violence at work with Jesus and the disciples. We might call it the “undeceiving of the disciples” echoing Elijah’s undeceiving. What, then, are the disciples undeceived of? Well of wanting to rain down fire on their perceived enemies. James and John have been sent ahead to a village of the Samaritans to make ready for Jesus. But the Samaritans aren’t all that interested. James and John respond by asking Jesus—their version of the bigger, badder, tougher God—whether they should incinerate the town. This is a story about the violence in the hearts of the disciples, not the Samaritans’ rejection, or Jesus’ decision to go to another village.

Notice that Jesus rebukes them. Any time you hear the word rebuke, it’s useful to remember that this is exorcism language. The disciples, in their addiction to violence, are in a way possessed by something that makes them less than human. Jesus exorcises them of their need for violence and tries to get them to see that peace, not violence, gathering not scattering, charcoal fires over which fish is baked and not fires raining down from heaven, is what Jesus is about. Jesus doesn’t come to destroy the lives of human beings, but to bring them to fulness of life, to draw them in union with him into the glory that is a human being fully alive.

Jesus is the one who breathes peace instead of vengence, who forgives instead of seeking revenge, who stands as the sacrifice to end all sacrifice in order to show us the dead-end nature of the cycle of violence. Jesus sets his face towards Jerusaalem and we set our face towards him—the one who is all beauty, goodness, and truth, the one who loves into loving, into making manifest in our lives the love of God for all of God’s precious children. Jesus asks us to look at him and him alone that our false Jersusalems that see drug-dealers and murderers in the face of a drowned migrant father and daughter might be undone. Looking towards Jesus, setting our face towards him, means that we see in face of Christ in the those who have nowhere to lay their heads and meet them as bread to feed, water to wash, oil to heal and wine to slake the thirst of the parched. Looking to Jesus we become a little more like the New Jerusalem—whose gates are always open and where everyone is welcomed to the banquet of divine love. Looking to Jesus and being transformed into the New Jerusalem individually and as a community we inch one step closer to that single summary statement of law—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Let’s keep looking to Jesus. Let’s let Him remake us right here, and right now in this very place, into the Jerusalem whose only light is the love, mercy, welcome that is the Glory of God.