“Nowhere to Hide!”

1 Kings 19:1-15a
June 24, 2007

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming, Pastor

I don’t know about you, but for me some of the best things on television are the

commercials. It might just be a commentary on television these days that some of the best stuff can be found in the advertisements. When the Super Bowl is being played, I am interested in the big game, but I also like to see who is willing to spend a million dollars on a sixty second spot of advertising. I also want to see how good the commercial is. Unfortunately some of the best commercials advertise things that good preachers warn you to stay away from.

There is one commercial that sticks in my mind. For some reason I remember it. I am pretty sure it wasn’t one of the ones played during the Super Bowl. This commercial advertised an insurance agency, the Aetna Insurance Agency, I think. The commercial tugs at your heart strings. In it a father and his son are going through the five year olds bedtime ritual. The father makes sure that his son has gone to the bathroom and gotten a drink of water. He has read him a story and has tucked him into bed. They have said their prayers together. But before he can leave the room, the father has to check his son’s room for monsters. He first looks under the bed and then behind the curtain and finally in the closet. My dad, I am sure, did that. When the coast is clear, when it is safe and sound, the father turns off the lights in the room and heads toward the door. That is when he hears his five year old’s trembling voice asking the question my own daughter has asked me, “Daddy, could you leave the hall light on?” What father would say no to that?

I guess we can all relate to the little boy in the commercial. But us big folks are afraid of things, too. One of my favorite authors, as you know, is Max Lucado. In his book on the twenty-third Psalm, Traveling Light, Max observes, “Fear is worry’s big brother. If worry is a burlap bag, then fear is like a concrete suitcase. It’s hard to budge!” Church can I ask you this morning, what are you afraid of?

I think I have shared with you that at Susie’s brother’s first graduation (as it turns out he had to live a little before he really knew what he wanted to do), the graduation speaker was a preacher from Atlanta. In his sermon he told of what happened one Halloween evening at his house. His family ran out of candy, so the preacher’s wife mad a mad dash for the convenience store for reinforcements. While she was gone, it was her husband’s job to hand out, well, something. He wasn’t usually in charge of Halloween candy. When there was none and there were knocks at the door, he did the best he could. For a while, he handed out canned good. His house was not a popular stop after he did that.

But still the door bell rang and one of the times he answered it, there stood his next door neighbor, Sarah. Her mom and dad were standing at the street. Sarah said the magical Halloween words, “Trick or treat!”

She had a marvelous costume. She was dressed as a ghost. A sheet covered her shoulders, but her mask was missing. The preacher greeted Sarah with a can of green beans. She looked up at him with a strange look in her eyes. He looked down at her and asked, “Sarah, who are you supposed to be?” She answered, “I’m a mean old ghost!” He asked, “Where’s your mask?” “I guess I will always remember what Sarah said,” the preacher offered. I remember it too. After all, Sam graduated from college several years ago. Sarah stood in front of the preacher and said of her mask, “I’m afraid of it.”

The preacher at the graduation service used that to talk about the things to be fearful of in a graduated world. I guess I should ask his question, too, what, friends, are we afraid of?

Well maybe that is a nice lead in to our scripture lesson for this morning taken from what may be the most famous passage about the prophet Elijah. It seems Elijah had plenty to be afraid of. Flip back a few verses and you will see that there was another god that was threatening who we have come to worship. Elijah was the one who stood up for God. He had, after all, been called to do just that. Scholars tell us that Elijah prophesied in the most difficult of times.

So Elijah stood up for God and killed four hundred and fifty priests of the god Baal. When the word reached the capital city that he had done that, Queen Jezebel, who really had the power in the kingdom, said, “May the gods strike me and kill me if by this time tomorrow I have not killed you ion the same way you killed them.”

So Elijah ran. I would have run, too. A bounty had been placed on his head. He had twenty-four hours to get out of dodge. And he did. Elijah headed out to the wilderness. In one moment he was as successful as he could be. In one moment, he knew what he was doing. In the next, he’s running as fast as he can, looking behind his shoulder, hoping that Jezebel’s troops aren’t in hot pursuit!

The first thing Elijah wants to do out there is to die and to quit. Do you remember his words? He asked God to strike him down. These are his words: “It is enough, now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” I guess he’s like anyone. You don’t have to work for God, you don’t have to be a prophet or a preacher to experience burnout and to be afraid when things get tough.

I ran across some troubling statistics this week about preachers and their spouses. I don’t know anyone who talks about quitting anything more than preachers do. Here are the statistics. Eighty percent of pastors feel unqualified in their role as pastors. Fifty percent say that they would leave the ministry if they could, but aren’t qualified to do anything else to earn a living. That’s me, not the discouraged part, but the not knowing how to do anything else part. As for their spouses, well, eighty percent of them wished their preacher wives and preacher husbands would do anything but what they do.

And now hear this. It isn’t just preachers who feel discouraged. We all feel discouraged. This morning, though, we’ve got a church worker running out into the wilderness, fleeing for his life, running for cover. We are discouraged, too. Some of us are discouraged in our jobs. Something is not right, but we can’t put our fingers on it. Sometimes we are discouraged in our marriages and we’re not sure what to do.

I want you to see this. I want you to notice what God is doing while Elijah is running and while Elijah is fretting and while Elijah is asking to die. God is sticking close to Elijah while all of this is going on. I want you to notice this, God doesn’t change the prophet’s circumstances. Jezebel is still looking for him. God doesn’t move a mountain. God doesn’t strike down Jezebel. What God does do is to be with Elijah in what seems like the worse of times.

God does more than just that and those are the things I would like for us to notice in the rest of our sermon for this morning. Here is the first one. God provides for Elijah’s needs out there in the wilderness. Elijah is all alone. He has sent his servant away. He’s sitting under a broom tree, which is no shade at all, and not once, but two different times, an angel of the Lord appears, wakes the prophet up and says, “Get up and eat.” That’s what the angel says the first time. The second time the angel lets Elijah know that the journey will be too much for him if he doesn’t eat. And so what God offers him is food and rest and exercise. And we all know that we feel better when we have had those things.

God offers him something else. As it turns out, the journey that Elijah took led him to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. The same mountain where God appeared to Moses. God is about to appear again. He lets Elijah know that when he says, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Do you see what God is about to do? God is about to show Elijah his presence.

And this is the most famous of the stories about Elijah. I’ve referred to it several of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever preached from it. Do you remember what God did? Elijah was on that mountain and there was a great wind. The wind was so strong that it split mountains and it broke rocks but as it turns out God was not in that wind. Next came an earthquake. I can only imagine the rumbling that was happening under Elijah’s feet. But church, you’ll remember this, God was not in the earthquake. Then there was a fire. Perhaps it was a huge blaze. I don’t know. Maybe Elijah had to stand back from the heat of it. You will remember that God was not in the blaze, either. Our Bibles tell us that what came next was the sound of sheer silence. I like the way the King James Version of the Bible puts this. It’s much better. The King James Version says that there was a sound of a still, small voice. Elijah was smart enough to know that God was in that voice and in that silence. I would like to suggest that that is usually the place we meet God. We usually don’t meet God in burning bushes or blinding lights or noisy crowds. We’re usually not quiet enough to listen. When we are still enough to hear God is when God tends to speak. It was the Psalmist who wrote, “Be still and know that I am God.”

So God offers us food and rest. God offers us His presence, a great gift. But God also offers direction. I want you to see that it wasn’t a new direction. God sent Elijah back exactly where he came from, back to the ministry, back to speaking for him, but this time refreshed and at rest. And God asks, not once but twice, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Now it’s not recorded in the Bible. I’ve looked. But what God is really saying here is, “Don’t you think you ought to be somewhere else?” Let us pray.

(Special thanks to the writers of Homiletics Magazine for the statistics about preachers and their spouses).