The Still, Small Voice: Story and Moral. June 20, 2010

I want to continue our discussion from last week on story and moral, as we continue to look at the Elijah cycle of stories from First Kings. 

There are, as I count them, six chapters in the Elijah cycle, all in five chapters beginning with the 17^th chapter of First Kings and ending with the first chapter of second Kings.   Most scholars believe these stories existed separately, perhaps for centuries before  they were brought together. As I divide the story, the six chapters are: 1) Elijah begins telling  and his pagan wife Jezebel that, because of their idolatry, there will be a drought. 2) The Lord sends Elijah into the desert to wait out the drought, where he is fed first by ravens, and then by a widow from Zarephath, whose son Elijah raises from the dead. 3) He then challenges the priests of Baal to a fire-staring contest, which he wins, thus ending the drought. 4) He then flees from Jezebel’s wrath to Mt. Horeb where he hears the voice of God, not in the wind or the fire or the earthquake, but  in the silence. 5) He then chastises Ahab for letting Jezebel steal Naboth’s vineyard and murdering Naboth. 6) In the last chapter, Elijah passes his mantle to Elisha and is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind.  Because he did not die, he can come back (a point we didn’t get to make last time), which is why Jews set a place for him at their Seder meal and why when John the Baptist comes in from the desert wearing camel skins, people think it is Elijah. 

The point I tried to make last week was that these stories are examples of high narrative art—they are full of drama and color and humor and pathos. My point again, is that Christians need to read the Bible and it’s a lot easier to do that if we take some of the pressure off ourselves by responding first at the level of story. We need to  let the story come in the front door and the moral in the window or even the back door. There are different ways to do that. One is by reading whole books at one time but allowing yourself to skip from one good story to another. Another is by using some sort of scheme that highlights the stories, such as the Daily Office (Insert shameless plug.) 

But having let the story in the front door, let us attend to the moral  which is coming in the window. The story of Elijah and the still small voice is almost too easy to moralize.  Many of you remember a 1976 movie called Network, in which an actor named Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, an anchorman whose rating skyrocket when he urges people to to the window, stick their head out and yell, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” That key scene is available on Utube, and it’s as compelling now as it was 35 years ago. The movie turned out to be almost chillingly prophetic. Now it seems as if every commentator on TV news is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. 

We live in the age of the wind, the earthquake and the fire, and we have a huge broadcast industry with a lot invested in keeping us there. If First Kings were being written today, it would say that he first heard Fox and MSNBC but God was not in Fox or MSNBC. Then Facebook came by, but God was not in Facebook. Then Twitter came by, but God was not in Twitter. We have witnessed the “crisificatioin” of every event.  What used to be a situation is now a problem, what used to be a problem is now a crisis, what used to be a crisis is now a catastrophe.   Many broadcast commentators (on the right and left)  have made outrage their default response.  They interpret news events in ways that deliberately and unnecessarily  divide one group from another.  Analysts now commonly  use the word “hate” to describe positions and public figures with whom they disagree. News is now likely to  comes seasoned with ridicule and  delivered with an arrogant sneer and a generous dose of words like “insane,”  “stupid,” and “absurd.”  Commentators seem to delight in the bad news  that they report, using it to ridicule public officials, somehow managing to imply that they could be doing a much  better job themselves if only they had not gotten somehow trapped behind their microphones in their comfortable studios.   We find it harder to accept Samuel Johnson’s observation “Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.” We seem to have lost the ability to enter into  what used the Spanish philosopher Unamuno to called The tragic sense of life. We find it harder and harder to believe that much brokenness is simply part of the way things are, that many problems in life are not anyone’s fault, but just the way things are, or the result of human sin, for which the greatest need is for forgiveness, which, the gospel teaches  has already been given.   

In such an atmosphere of public discourse, we need silence, and we need to listen for the still small voice. We need to listen for, and watch for, and be grateful simple acts of virtue offered by ordinary people, what Wordsworth called the “little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” For every hour we spend watching inflammatory and  divisive, 

news broadcasts about the Gulf Oil Spill, we need to spend an equal amount of time being grateful that a lady working in the Laundromat keeps it clean and is nice to the people washing their clothes at 10:00 at night. We need to listen for the still, small, voice, but even more important, we need to BE the still, small voice. For every hour we spend relieving ourselves of our not-so-humble opinions about this or that intractable economic or geopolitical problem about which we cannot do much, we need to hand write a thank-you note who would have done what they did even without being thanked. 

 Lord, give us silence, help us to hear and to be the still, small voice of kindness, patience, forbearance, charity. Most of all, give us grateful hearts for the wonderful stories in the Bible, for the way they enrich and enlarge our lives, and for what they teach us about hearing and being the still, small voice of God. Amen