The Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

FIRST KINGS 19:1-15: Hardly had Elijah won his fiery victory over the prophets of Queen Jezebel when he was forced to flee from Israel. Jezebel's anger had been aroused over the destruction of her priests and prophets, and she vowed to destroy Elijah and all he stood for in Israel. The prophet travelled forty days and forty nights into the desert to the south. "Forty" is the traditional number of years that Israel journeyed into the wilderness, and Elijah was clearly retracing the steps of that journey. He wanted to stand where Moses had stood when he had established the covenant between God and Israel; Elijah was taking a pilgrimage back to the very sources of Israel's faith, back to the mountain of God, to discover and be discovered by the God who had sought out Moses.

Strange things began to occur as Elijah stood on that lonesome foreboding mountain side. First there was a strong wind. It was the high hot wind that comes off the desert, so powerful that it can powder rocks and blast open mountains. Moses had felt such a wind, and it had brought him a sense of the presence of God. Was God in this wind? Elijah felt only its howling, no presence of God, no revelation of the Almighty One. So Scripture says, "The Lord was not in the wind." But wait. After the wind, an earthquake: the whole world began to rock, gently at first, then violently, mightily. Elijah was overjoyed. There had been an earthquake when Moses stood on this mountain -- surely God was in the earthquake. But no. No! Scripture again: "God was not in the earthquake" -- how downcast Elijah's soul. After the earthquake, fire broke out, as it frequently does after an earthquake. Elijah was ecstatic once more. Had not the mountain roared and burned when Moses stood on it to receive the commandments of God? Surely God was coming now to this man of fire and storm, this Elijah, now, now! Again, it passed, the fire, and, Scripture again, "God was not in the fire." We can feel elation pour out of him, like air from a punctured balloon. Elijah was waiting for God. But God was not in the wind, God was not in the earthquake, God was not in the fire. God was not -- there!

So Elijah sat, and sat, and sat, in the silence of his cave. Who can tell what he heard then. After the roaring, howling, breaking, rending, what did he hear? One translation says, "A still small voice." Another reads: "The breath of a light whisper." A third says, "The sound of a gentle stillness." Maybe Elijah heard a bird singing in the distance, or the gentle movement in the breeze of a desert cactus, or maybe he experienced only the stillness, the vast silent stillness of the desert. Whatever it was, it was a stillness that resonated in Elijah's life. This volatile man of drama and confrontation, of storm and fire, began to suspect that God was not in the cataclysms of life after all, was not in its catastrophes and holocausts -- after the wind and the quake and the fire, the still small voice.

What happened to Elijah on that mountain needs to be seen in the light of what had happened to Moses four or more centuries before. Yahweh "passed by" Elijah, as God had "passed by" Moses. Moses had experienced the visitation of Yahweh in the wind and the earthquake and the fire. These were the traditional phenomena that linked Yahweh to this sacred mountain. But for Elijah, Yahweh was not in these. Elijah understood that Yahweh was not merely some god of nature like the baals of Canaan.

It was in the awesome silence that followed the storm that Yahweh came to Elijah, and with God's presence came a message. Elijah had complained bitterly to Yahweh, "I, I only am left, and I am no better than my fathers." Elijah felt that he alone of all Israelites was zealous for Yahweh, and that he, like his fathers in Israel before him, no longer had the strength to stand up to the paganizing forces surrounding him in his nation. Yahweh's reply permitted none of this self-pity. "Get off your knees," God told the prophet, "and go back to Israel. There are seven thousand left who have never bowed the knee to baal. Go with your message and uphold them in their faith." Elijah had come to the mountain of God to have his faith renewed by the God of the Covenant, and he had not come in vain.

PSALMS 42 and 43: These two psalms need to be taken as a unity (in some of the older versions of the psalter they were even printed as one psalm). They are tied together by the refrain three times given:

"Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope thou in God, for I shall again praise him,

My help and my God."

In a mysterious way this refrain speaks to us today. Its opening describes the inner state of many a person: cast down, disquieted. I was reading just the other day that one in seven people suffer from depression. What is depression but the soul cast down, disquieted, asking if not articulating the words, "Where is your God, what has happened to God?" The psalmist's response is our best answer to the condition described: "Hope in God. I shall again praise him, my help and my God."

The psalm is organized into an opening illustration and three scenes. Each of the scenes is divided by the response. An outline of the psalm would look like this:

Illustration: 42:1-3

First scene: 42:4

First response: 42:5

Second scene: 42:6-10

Second response: 42:11

Third scene: 43:1-4

Final response: 43:5

The opening illustration pictures a deer (not a "hart" as some translations say, but a female deer) fleeing from its hunters, dashing this way and that, becoming more and more thirsty, longing for cooling water before she takes up her escape again. Just like that, says the psalmist, my soul longs for you. Thirst cannot be put off. The body must get water, or it dies a stifling death. This thirst so deep that it cannot be filled is the thirst that the psalmist feels toward God. It is not living water that has been his drink. It is only his own tears that have been his food. There comes to mind the picture of the old Jew in the holocaust, who had witnessed the birth of a child to an emaciated mother. "Is the Messiah to be borne in a grave?" he asked. Then, as he watched, the mother had no milk for the baby; she could only feed him her own tears, until he died. This is the condition of the psalmist as the poem begins: "My tears have been my food day and night, while people ask me, Where is your God?"

Scene One pictures the psalmist in procession with neighbors and friends from his home in Galilee to the temple in Jerusalem. He remembers how he went with the throng from his home to the house of God. There were glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving. There was a whole multitude keeping festival. There were . . . but that was long ago. Now there is only the refrain: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope thou in God, for I shall again praise him, My help and my God."

Scene Two shows the psalmist as he tries to recover his God. He pictures his present exile in the north country, the land of Mount Hermon and the sources of the Jordan River. He envisions the spring sun melting the snows of the mountain and the brimming streams flowing lavishly down the mountain side. It falls from rock to rock, from ledge to ledge. He hears its cataracts booming, and he hears the echoes sounding back. "Deep calls to deep," he cries out. "The deep in my soul cries out to the deeps in the soul of God." Is the voice of my cry answered only by the "waves and billows" that roll over me. Or is "the Lord filling my life with his steadfast love in the morning and his song of praise at night, prayers to the God of my life"?

The psalmist is not yet ready to answer this in a positive way. He remembers instead those times that he walks mournfully all the day long and seems to carry such a deadly wound in his body that he says "My God has forgotten me." And his enemies reply, "Where is your God?" His refrain fills his poem a second time: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope thou in God, for I shall again praise him, My help and my God."

In Scene Three the psalmist cries directly to God: "Vindicate me, defend me, deliver me." He is asking that God fill a three-fold office in his life. You are the judge, "vindicate me. You are my advocate, my defense attorney, "defend me." You are the bailiff, you can "deliver me" from this judgement. You are my refuge; do not cast me off. You are my deliverer, why must I walk about mournfully. Then he cries, "Send out thy light and thy truth, let them lead me. Let them bring me to thy holy hill." He pictures himself worshiping once more in God's temple. "I will go to your altar, to my God, with exceeding joy. I will praise you with the harp." He sings his song again, but this time the emphasis is the hope expressed in the latter part of the refrain: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope thou in God, for I shall again praise him, My help and my God."

I am told that this 42nd-43rd psalm was read in church on the day in 387 that Augustine was baptized into the Christian faith. "My soul longs for you, O God," he heard Bishop Ambrose of Milan say that day. Those words provided the theme song that spoke to Augustine's own agitated spirit. He remembered the psalm when years later he wrote the autobiography of his inner conflicts in the book we know as "The Confessions of Saint Augustine." The opening line of his book recalls the line of the psalm and recaptures the struggles of his own soul: "Thou hast made us for thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee."

GALATIANS 3:23-29: These words constitute one of the many climaxes in the Letter to the Galatians. Paul has been talking about the place of the Law in Christian life. Three things come quickly to his attention in these closing words.