The Gentle Whisper

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
June 24, 2007

The Gentle Whisper
1 Kings 19:1-13
Luke 8:26-39

Have you ever try to imagine what a person
you were reading about in the Bible might have looked like?
Scholars debate over how we think Jesus might have looked.
We typically picture him with fair skin, light hair;
it isn’t uncommon for him to have radiant blue eyes
in Sunday school books and pictures.
We picture Jesus as a product of our own culture,
forgetting that Jesus was born in the Middle East
and in that part of the world,
a man was not likely to have the features
that European artists gave him in paintings 500 years ago,
features that we have copied over the centuries.

Let’s think about Elijah for a moment.
How do we think he might have looked
as he served the Lord
more than 800 years before the birth of Christ?
I picture him as shorter than other men,
about 5’6’,
but rock solid;
salt and pepper hair, probably more salt than pepper
given his age and the stress of his vocation,
thinning on top, giving him an aura of wisdom.
His skin burnt by the sun,
dry, even leathery from the wind.
I imagine his eyes as dark,
with a piercing fierceness to them,
their look like lasers --
intense, as though his very gaze
might burn right through you.

When we last read about Elijah on Confirmation Sunday
he had challenged the prophets of Baal, the pagan god.
He had taken them all on, all 450 of them
as he challenged the people of Israel to make a choice:
“If you’re going to follow God, then follow him;
if you’re going to follow Baal, then follow him,
but stop limping along, waffling,
bouncing back and forth.”

He humiliated the prophets of Baal, of course,
and then subsequently killed them.
In the process he made an enemy of the wife of the King,
Jezebel, a woman who was Phoenician by birth,
a woman who didn’t limp along or waffle,
but followed Baal and the pagan god Asherah
just as Elijah said she should:
with energy and conviction.

She was incensed that Elijah had made
a fool of her god and her god’s priests.
so she sought to avenge herself by having Elijah killed.
As the Queen she had the power
to make it happen,
and Elijah knew it.
So he ran away, ran away into the wilderness
south into the arid, remote country of Beer-Sheba.
to a place where no one could find him.

And when he found himself alone,
he sat down under a broom tree,
a tree that was really more of a shrub than a tree,
sat down under it and said to God,
“That’s it. I’ve had it. You called me to serve you,
and I did, and look at what’s happened:
I am threatened with death by the Queen herself.
No has one listened to me,
the louder I talked, the more intensely I spoke,
the more they laughed, the more they ignored me.
I am done.
The Queen wants me dead.
So Lord, take my life here and now.
I am worn out and burned out,
and I want out.”

God listened and God heard.
And then, as God always does, God answered.
But as God often does with our prayers,
God did not answer Elijah the way Elijah
wanted him to.
God didn’t take his life.
It was not yet time for the chariot and the whirlwind.
God still had work for Elijah to do.

But God saw that his prophet was exhausted, spent,
deflated, dispirited.
God saw that his prophet needed to be fed,
fed physically and spiritually.
And so God fed his prophet,
and then gave him a respite.
God sent Elijah further south,
into the Sinai desert to Mount Horeb,
the mountain we also know as Mount Sinai,
sent him there where he would be safe,
sent him there for renewal and refreshment.

But then God called Elijah back to work.
And that’s where we usually pick up the story,
where we usually have our focus,
because that’s where we find that verse
that we have come to know as the
“still small voice” verse.
God did not speak to Elijah in the wind,
nor did God speak to Elijah in the earthquake,
nor did God speak to Elijah in the fire,
but in the “sound of sheer silence”,
or, in a more literal translation,
in a “gentle whisper”.

That’s how God called his prophet back to work
after his Sabbath, after his respite:
not with a howling gale or thunder and lightning,
as we often think the God of the Old Testament
spoke to his children.
No, God spoke to Elijah in a gentle whisper.

Did you hear our Call to Worship that Donna led us through?
It was from Psalm 29,
The Psalmist said that God’s voice
was in the thunder, the lightning,
the wind and the rain.
And it often is.
But more often than not God calls to us
in a gentle whisper,
a voice that we need to strain to hear,
a voice that we risk not hearing
if we aren’t paying attention.

We all risk getting burned out working for God
just like Elijah did,
even if we don’t have a Queen who’s after our head.
Serving the Lord can often be wonderfully fulfilling,
enriching, and rewarding;
but it can also be thankless and frustrating,
exhausting, and even at times frightening and dangerous.
Serving the Lord can be hard, frustrating, exhausting work
out in the world all around us,
and it can be hard, frustrating and exhausting
even in the setting of the church,
where we’d like to think that we always get along.

We make things worse for ourselves when we don’t listen,
when we stop listening for God’s gentle whisper
that comes to us through one another.
God speaks to us in a thousand different ways,
in a thousand different voices,
and we risk missing God’s voice if we aren’t listening.

The reality is, however, that we humans are poor listeners,
Here we are, with two ears and only one mouth,
yet we put far more energy and effort into talking
than we do into listening.
Every one of us.
It isn’t a new problem.
There is a wonderful story told of how Franklin Roosevelt,
when he was president,
loved to see whether anyone was listening to him
by introducing himself by saying,
“How do you do? I’ve just murdered my grandmother.”
Rarely did anyone respond with anything more than,
“And it’s a pleasure to meet you too Mr. President.”

The man healed by Jesus in our gospel lesson
was a poor listener.
Jesus told him very simply and directly,
“declare how much God has done for you.”
What did he do?
he went around telling everyone
how much Jesus had done for him.
Jesus wanted the man to give glory to God,
but the man didn’t listen.

Listening is hard work.
It requires attention.
It requires an open mind, as well as open ears.
Deborah Tannen, a linguistics expert at Georgetown
has written a number of books and articles
on how we communicate,
and especially the different ways in which men and
women communicate.

Two of her earliest and best works have titles
that illuminate the problem:
One book was entitled, “That’s Not What I said”,
and another, “You Don’t Understand”.
How many times have you tried to express yourself,
in any setting, but especially in a church,
and after hearing a person’s reaction,
thought to yourself, “that’s not what I said!
You don’t understand!”?

We have to listen,
listen carefully, listen to one another,
precisely because the voice we are listening to
may well be God’s voice speaking to us.
When you stop listening to another person,
when you dismiss what he or she has to say
when you think you know better,
you may well be dismissing God’s voice,
God’s will,
God’s way.
If we think that God is speaking to us
only through the voice of someone we like,
someone whose opinion matches our own,
someone who we know will agree with us,
we risk nothing less than faithlessness.
That’s the hard truth,
the hard reality.

Yesterday our Session began a conversation about the future,
We looked back on where we have come over the past 10 years,
the things we have accomplished under the Vision 2010 plan
and what projects that were part of the plan
have not been done.

We know we have new priorities,
different from what was talked about
and prayed about 10 years ago.
We talked about needing a full time staff person,
probably an Associate Pastor,
who has among his or her responsibilities our Youth.
We know this is important because we have been listening,
listening to parents and young people alike
who want some stability in the program.

No decisions were made.
Yesterday was only the beginning of our conversation,
but what made yesterday very successful from my perspective,
was the fact that we listened carefully to one another.
We didn’t always agree, but we all listened.
Listened and understood that God’s gentle whisper was
in that room, and that we needed to listen for it.

In the weeks and months ahead
we will continue to talk:
talk about priorities, needs,
hopes, wishes.
Everyone will be involved in the conversations.
Everyone will have things to say, ideas to share,
but more important,
every one of us will have things to listen to
for it won’t be me, or the Session,
who will tell us what path to take;
It will be God.

“Be still and know that I am”:
That’s what God says to us through the Psalmist.
Be still.
Listen.
For God speaks to us in the wind and the rain
but God also speaks to us through the still small voice,
the sound of sheer silence.
the gentle whisper.
Are you listening?
AMEN