I Kings 19: 9-14; Galatians 2: 20,21

We are once more thrown into the chaotic world of Israel thousands of years ago.  Elijah has grown obsessed with the prophets of Baal and has killed them.  The revered prophet becomes a butcher.  What an intensely troubling situation!  He knows things aren’t right between him and God .  Elijah is sent to Mount Horeb, but Elijah finds only silence there.  Isaac Villegas writes: “God showed up not in fearsome spectacles but in the sound of silence, of faint silence of invisible silence.  The stillness of God hushed Ejilah’s passion for sensational acts of authority. In the end God deposed Elijah from his prophetic office:’You shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah,’ God told Elijah,’ as prophet in your place.’”

What is going through Elijah’s mind?  His defense has been that has been zealous for God.  How profound his despair must be: he is a killer and he is pushed aside by the God he did the killing for.  “No,” says God, “I don’t believe in religious terrorism.”  Elijah is looking for God in all the wrong places. In the earthquake, in the fire, in the wind.  He the warrior for God is looking for God in devastating quakes,  mindnumbing tornadoes and sweeping hurricanes.  But God is in the silence.  Friends, I have also loved that song “God of the Sparrow,” but I have always had trouble with the line “God of the earthquake.”  I see it as God being present with those in the midst of an earthquake rather than as God causing the earthquake or willing it.  God does not own the earthquake.  Tell that to leaders of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.  The son of the pastor there has openly come out saying that the recent Moore, Oklahoma tornado was the direct result of an Oklahoma Thunder basketball player supporting a fellow player who came out as gay.  I took a look at the Westboro Baptist Church website while I was working on this reflection and I don’t recommend it.  Their vitriol is quite shocking.  They obviously haven’t spent much time studying this passage in I Kings.   It raises the question: where do we find God?  That of course is a complicated question with, for humans at least, a less than perfect answer.

Elijah learns that it is not in the causing of natural disasters.  Actually we may be causing many of the natural disasters that are going to take place in the years to come.  These include floods and tornadoes and hurricanes and fires.  We are making things worse.  And all the regions of the world are connected.  How could Hawaii be impacted by natural events far away we may think, but in the last forty years the activity of the trade winds has reduced by 28 percent.  Can you imagine Hawaii without tradewinds?  So you could say: to a certain extent we are in the tornado and the hurricane, and the flood.  Still where is God?

Friends, I usually don’t buy the New York Times-they’re expensive- but the other day I couldn’t help it.  I was just drawn to a picture on the front page of the June 12 paper.  It showed a woman and her daughter in a tearful reunion through the border fence in Nogales, Arizona.  They have names, because names matter: Renata Teodoro is the daughter and Gorete Borges Teodoro is the mother. Teodoro come from the Latin and means “given by God.”  Now we are not always comfortable embracing all our family members, but these two people, these gifts of and from God, are touching, because the bars of the fence keep them from fully embracing each other which it makes the need to hold the other even more powerful and poignant.   Friends, it is my profound belief that God is nowhere more present than in the encounter between people. Perhaps this is what God is saying to Elijah:”Those people you killed, they may be on the wrong path, but they are my “teodoro,” my divine gift.  How dare you mow them down like that! I wasn’t done working on them!”  As Jesus says:” where one or two are gathered in my name, I will be there with you.”  God is present between people.  In that encounter God’s grace is at work.  This is the message in Galatians.  Paul says:” I do not nullify God’s grace.”  He makes it clear that without God’s grace the church and human society collapses.  God’s grace bursts, or flows, or trickles through where we allow it to go, to heal, to reconcile, to comfort, to strengthen, to empower.  It work its magic between one gift of God to another, through fences, by way of satellites, over landlines, in the words we write whether we write them hurriedly or after we give them much thought.   So, friends, where is God?  Where we least expect God is the other answer. Elijah looked for God in all the wrong places.  God was in the silence, the silence in the air, the silence of the night, the silence of our breaths, the silence between people.  God is there, waiting.  We have seen that according to our DNA and culture we experience God differently, but whoever we are, the silence is key.  If we keep running away from the silence to ceaseless activity and the noise of the world, we will block the way for God’s grace to reach us. May God open us up to the silence.