Take My Life, Please
1 Kings 19:1-18
This passage comes up in the Lectionary pretty often, sliced and diced in different ways. About a year ago we read verses one through eight, which tell of how the Lord provides for Elijah even in the harshness of the wilderness. Sometimes verses nine through eighteen are carved out separately, telling a related story of the Lord appearing to Elijah not in any grand gesture, like a great wind, earthquake, or fire, but in the sound of sheer silence.
However, I wanted us to hear the full story, and so we’ve read the entire passage. But actually, I’d like to zoom out even further to chapter 18, so we can learn why Elijah feels so desperately alone and ready to die.
Elijah is the preeminent prophet in Israel’s history. Not only is he a mouthpiece for God’s word, he is associated with miraculous deeds. He raises a poor widow’s dead son, and he himself is said not to have died but rather to have ascended to heaven on a chariot of fire (yes, as in the 1981 Oscar-winning movie). Given his importance, it might seem odd that there is no book of Elijah as there is with many other prophets. Rather, Elijah’s story is told in the books of 1 and 2 Kings.
Elijah’s first act as the Lord’s prophet is to predict a drought. The drought is a sign of God’s judgment against Ahab, the king of Israel. Ahab is married to Jezebel who comes from Sidon, a coastal region to the north of Israel. She has introduced to Ahab, and through Ahab to all of Israel, the worship of the god Baal. Among the detestable worship practices associated with Baal were human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, as well as temple prostitution.
To bring an end to the drought, Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest. It’s not exactly what you’d call an even match. Versus the 450 prophets of Baal Elijah stands alone. The rules are that each side will build an altar, prepare a sacrifice, and call upon their god to set it afire. Elijah watches with amusement as the prophets of Baal raise a racket, but nothing happens. Their sacrifice sits upon the altar with nary a spark, not even a flicker.
Elijah, for his part, is not above mocking the prophets of Baal. “Cry aloud!” he says. “Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” The prophets of Baal then take to cutting themselves and whip themselves into an ecstatic frenzy to draw the attention of their god but to no avail.
When it comes Elijah’s turn, he builds an altar with twelve stones, representing the twelve tribes of Israel. He then digs a trench around the altar and orders water to be poured upon the altar and into the trench once, twice, and then a third time. After the altar has been prepared, Elijah prays to the Lord to answer him, so that the people may know that the Lord is their God and may turn back to him. With a flash, the altar catches fire, consuming the sacrifice and even the water in the trench.
Having witnessed the scene with their own eyes, the people of Israel fall on their faces saying, “The Lord is indeed God.” With the people now newly zealous for the Lord, Elijah, showing no mercy whatsoever, orders them to kill every single one of the prophets of Baal, all 450 of them. It is a gruesome, terrifying scene. Soon rain begins to fall, bringing an end to the drought, but it will take another flood the likes of Noah’s to wash all the blood from the land.
When word of what Elijah has done reaches the ear of Jezebel, she sends a messenger to him saying, in effect, “You’re a dead man.” She vows to do to him what he did to the prophets of her god. This is no idle threat. Jezebel, as queen, and with a compliant king, has the power of the state behind her. She can order the army to do her personal bidding. She can take them from their role of defending the nation and align them against her personal adversary. And that is what she does. She orders them to pursue the prophet who has stood in her way and frustrated her plans.
Terrified, Elijah flees south into the desert, trying to put as much distance as he can between himself and the soldiers sent by Jezebel. He leaves the northern kingdom of Israel altogether and comes to Beersheba, a town deep in the southern kingdom of Judah. But even there Elijah doesn’t feel safe. The arm of Jezebel is long, and so Elijah leaves behind his servant and heads by himself into the wilderness. After a full day’s journey, he slumps under a solitary broom tree and prays for death to come and take him. “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.” Having prayed for death, he then falls asleep.
Let’s pause a moment and take in all that Elijah has experienced. Just days earlier he had stood triumphant upon the mountaintop, having bested the 450 prophets of the pagan god Baal. He was the Lord’s instrument, the means through which the God of Israel chose to be revealed to the people. What a rush that must have been! How significant that must have made him feel!
Now contrast that with his current position. Rather than standing tall upon a mountain, he’s slumped against a tree praying to die. “It is enough; now, O Lord, take my life.” Take my life. I’m done. I can go no further.
Even in the middle of a vast wilderness, Elijah has not outrun the care and concern of the Lord.
Elijah has run as far as he can from the arm of Jezebel, but even in the middle of a vast wilderness he has not outrun the care and concern of the Lord. When Elijah wakes from sleep, he finds lying at his head some bread and a jar of water. He eats, drinks, and falls back to sleep.
He wakes again and hears a voice telling him to eat and drink, for he has a long journey ahead. But how can this be? How much further must he travel?
A 40 days’ journey, it turns out. Elijah travels to Mount Horeb, also known as Mount Sinai, the holy mountain of God, the place where God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses to give to the people. In a cave within the mountain the voice of the Lord again speaks, but not with the words of the law but rather with a question. “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Maybe at some point you’ve found yourself asking the same question, not of Elijah but of yourself. What am I doing here? This is not a place I ever thought I’d find myself. Divorced. Bankrupt. Unemployed. Infirm. Estranged from family. Or just plain lonely. Wherever it is, it’s a place that leads you to say, “It is enough.” I can go no further.
Of late I’ve been watching a British sitcom called Rev that aired in the UK about 15 years ago. It’s about a pastor, or vicar, as they’re called in the Church of England, who leads a small parish in a rundown part of London. The Reverend Adam Smallbone is his name. With a congregation few in number, an old church building in disrepair, a neighborhood struggling with poverty and addiction, and with an archdeacon who does not hide his disdain for him, Adam is beset on all sides. His only true ally is his remarkably understanding wife Alex.
In the season-one finale, Adam reads a humorously but harshly critical online review of one of his sermons. This, combined with all the other travails of church leadership, sends him spiraling downward into a crisis of faith. He makes a determined effort to stop caring, spending his days eating junk food, watching reality TV, gambling online, and foregoing all manner of propriety. Adam is at the point where he says, in effect, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life”…or at least my life as a religious leader. I’m done.
When the church-school headmistress approaches Adam’s wife, Alex, to expresses concern about him, Alex says, “Oh, don’t worry. He still believes in God. He’s just not sure whether God believes in him.”
Speaking as the pastor of a small congregation with an old building in a neighborhood that has some rough edges, although thankfully without an archdeacon supervising me, there is much in Rev that I can relate to. I wouldn’t call it a crisis of faith, but a few weeks ago, feeling overwhelmed by events in the life of the church, I felt like saying, “It is enough.” The thrift store had been ordered to close, we had received a letter of warning from the building inspector regarding the cars parked at the bottom of our hill, and the greenhouse project was seeming much more daunting than I had anticipated, to the point that I considered returning the unopened boxes, pallet and all.
I didn’t take shelter in a cave, but late one evening I did come and lie down right here in the first pew determined to feel sorry for myself. How I would have welcomed a sign from God that I was not alone. A mighty wind. An earthquake. A consuming fire. I would have settled for just a flickering of the lights! Something! Anything! But all there was, was silence.
But for Elijah, it is in the silence that God speaks. Not in the wind so strong that it breaks rocks. Not in the earthquake that shakes the mountain’s foundation. Not in the fire that burns like a sunrise. But in the silence. In the sheer silence.
It’s that kind of silence that Jesus heard when, hanging from the cross, he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Silence.
And it was in the silence of the tomb in which Christ was buried that God spoke the loudest, for in the silence that accompanied that first Easter dawn God raised Christ from the dead. God speaks in the silence.
Just as God’s wisdom appears to the world as foolishness, and God’s strength looks to the world like weakness, so God’s voice sounds to the world like silence. But it is in the silence that God says to Elijah, I’m not done with you. You have important work to do. People are waiting for you. What are you doing here, Elijah? Get a move on! That’s a paraphrase.
Do you see what has happened? God has transformed Elijah’s lament—“Take away my life”—into a prayer… “Take my life, please.” Or as the hymn that we will sing later goes, “Take my life and let it be, consecrated, Lord, to thee.” Take all of it. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. The mountaintop experience and the hiding in a cave. Take my hands, my feet, my voice, my lips, my intellect, my will, my love. “Take my life and I will be ever, only, all for thee.”