The
Sound of Sheer Silence
A Sermon
for liberatingchirstianity.blogspot.com
June
17, 2025
Scripture: 1 Kings 19:1-4, 7-15a
It really is a very strange story.
Elijah, supposedly the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, the one Jews expect to
return before the coming of the Messiah, the one for whom they leave an empty
chair at the Seder meal, is running for his life. He has good reason to be
fleeing. He has just spent a fair amount of time in Israel, the northern of the
two Hebrew kingdoms at the time, prophesying against the evil king Ahab and his
evil wife Jezebel. In the process he killed 450 prophets of Baal. She Jezebel
vowed to kill him, so he runs. He runs south and eventually ends up at Mount
Horeb, another name for Mount Sinai, in the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula.
He’s gotten some help on the way, but he is clearly still in despair or at least is still very frightened. When he
gets to the mountain, the Lord,
that is, Yahweh, asks him what he is doing there. So Elijah gives a little
speech. He says:
I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken
your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed the prophets with the sword.
I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away. 1 Kings 19:10.
I guess Elijah didn’t equate what
he did to the prophets of Baal to what the Israelites supposedly did to the
prophets of Yahweh but never mind. The Lord
doesn’t take Elijah’s life away. Instead, he tells him to go stand on the
mountain because he, God, is about to pass by.
Then we come to
the part of this story that is important for our purposes here. Three normally
natural phenomena take place. First there is a great wind, but the Lord was not in the wind. Then there was
an earthquake, but the Lord was
not in the earthquake. Then there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. All of these natural disasters were
followed by “a sound of sheer silence.” That phrase is more famously translated
as “a still, small voice,” but I’ll work with “a sound of sheer silence.”
Once again a
voice, presumably that of Yahweh, asks Elijah what he’s doing there. Elijah
replies:
I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken
your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed the prophets with the sword.
I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away. 1 Kings 19:14.
In other words, Elijah has no
other, no new, words. He answers God’s question the second time exactly as he
had answered God’s same question the first time. Word for word.
What can we learn
from this story? The key to the lesson for today is in the phrase “the sound of
sheer silence.” Now, that’s an oxymoron, or, perhaps better, a paradox, a
contradiction in terms, isn’t it? Our text says there was sound, but sheer
silence has no sound. That’s why it’s silence. So how can there be a “sound of
sheer silence?”
Well, I’ll say
first of all that all profound truth in faith comes from paradoxes, things that
can’t be true but are true. The Trinity is perhaps the main one. It says God is
Three and One at the same time, which doesn’t make a lick of sense. It is,
nonetheless, profoundly true. Moreover, I, and a great many other people, have
experienced the sound of sheer silence. I’ll share my story of hearing it with
you.
I used to be a
lawyer. I burned out on law pretty badly. I was convinced that there was
something else I was supposed to be doing, but I had no idea what it was. Then,
the Roman Catholic university near where I lived opened its School of Theology
and Ministry to Protestant students. That meant I could go there and earn a
fully accredited Master of Divinity degree, the degree my denomination required
for ordination at the time. (Don’t get me started on what it’s done since.) No
one told me to go do it. I didn’t hear a voice tell me to go do it. Yet somehow
I knew deep in my soul that doing it was what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t
have told you how I knew. I couldn’t have told you why I was supposed to do the
work and spend the money to get an MDiv. I just knew in the marrow of my bones
that that was what I was supposed to do, what I had to do.
So I did it. I
earned the degree, and in March of 2002 I got my first call as a parish pastor.
I was ordained in the United Church of Christ in June 2002. Here’s the strange
thing: The moment I walked into my church’s office as the church’s called
pastor, I just knew that I was already a better pastor than I had ever been a
lawyer, not that I was all that bad a lawyer. Tragically, my first wife was
dying of cancer at that time, but while she was still well enough to understand
and express ideas, she said to me: “I am so glad you finally are who you really
are.” It turned out that, indeed, what I truly am is a pastor. Somehow, God had
spoken to me in silence. My discernment around going to seminary had nothing to
do with anything audible, yet I know that God was speaking to me in silence. I
got it.
Elijah didn’t. In
the story we’re considering, God asks Elijah twice what he’s doing there on
Mount Horeb. God asks once before the natural phenomenon the story describes and
once after they had occurred. Then we get what the text calls a sound of sheer
silence. Elijah responds to God’s question of why he’s there exactly the same
way both times. His responses are word for word the same. He pretty clearly
didn’t get it. He didn’t discern God’s call, what God was trying to say to him,
in the sheer silence the way I discerned my call to parish ministry.
Why did Elijah
and I react so differently to God’s call? All I can do is speculate, but here’s
what seems to me to be the answer to that question. I was open to God’s call.
It’s not that it came at a quiet, peaceful time of my life. Far from it. But I
knew there was something other than practice law that I was supposed to be
doing. I was willing and able to hear a call in sheer silence. Elijah wasn’t,
but it’s not hard to understand why not. He was running for his life. The wife
of the king of Israel had sworn to kill him. He’d had to flee quite some
distance from Israel, and he probably still didn’t feel safe. He had asked God
essentially to kill him because he felt himself a failure. There was, it seems
to me, so much noise in Elijah’s mind and spirit that he couldn’t hear God
calling him. God has eventually to say something to Elijah out loud.
There’s a lesson
there for us today. God’s primary way of communicating with us is to
communicate in silence. To communicate in a way that is beyond human ability
and is beyond human understanding. It’s not surprising that that’s how God
prefers to communicate with us most of the time. After all, as Isaiah says, God’s
ways are not our ways. See Isaiah 55:8. Elijah’s mental and spiritual turmoil
shut out God speaking to him in sheer silence, and it’s horribly easy for us to
do the same.
To hear God
speaking to us in sheer silence two things must be true for us. The first is
that we must be open to hearing God in silence. It is so easy for us to shut
God out. Most of us do it most of the time. We go about our lives as though God
were not going through them with us, or at least I know that I do that far too
often; and I know that nearly everyone else does too. If you’re not one who
does it, count your blessings. But we won’t hear God say something to us in
silence if we don’t believe that God ever does that and if we’re not open to
hearing God speak in silence, and most people don’t and aren’t.
Second, we must
be silent. Silent both externally and internally. Nearly all Christian church
people I know don’t like silence. I used to build a couple of moments of
silence into my worship services, but I knew I had to keep them short because my
people really didn’t like them. Most other church services I’ve experienced don’t
put silence in them at all. We Americans are very bad at silence, and that is
most unfortunate. The great mystics of every faith tradition know the value of
silence. Practitioners of some eastern religions, and a few practitioners of
Christianity, spend a great deal of time in silence. If we want to hear God
talk, we’ve got to shut up. We have still our physical voices, and we have to
still that voice in our heads that, it seems, never goes still on its own.
Doing both
physical and mental silence well takes practice. That’s why practicing some
sort of meditation regularly is so important, for in meditation the whole point
is to silence one’s mind. Like with nearly anything else, the more one
practices silence, the better one becomes at it. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy,
for most of us, after all, when we meditate, are working to overcome a lifetime
of noise both external and internal. For some of us, the lifetime we’ve lived
has been very long by human standards. For others it is shorter, but for all of
us it has been filled with noise. God speaks in the sound of sheer silence. It
is so easy not to hear God, and it is so important to do so. So, let’s be silent
and listen for God, shall we? May it be so.
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