Stillness in the Heart of God (Proper 14A)

  

Elijah in the Wilderness, Raphael or Raphael’s school

 

Stillness in the Heart of God

Proper 14A 

Homily delivered at

Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin OR

By the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

9 August 2026; 10 a.m. Sung Mass

1 Kings 19:9-18; Psalm 85:8-13; Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

One of my favorite Bible stories as a boy was the story in 1 Kings 18 about Elijah’s conflict with Ba’al worshipers. He challenges Ba’al’s priests to a great “Who hears our prayers?” contest on Mount Carmel.   He dares them to go face to face with him and build competing altars:  whichever god sends down fire from heaven and consumes the sacrifice, that one is the true God.  The Ba’al worshippers, favorites of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, and all the rich and powerful, build their altar, put all sorts of dry tinder around it, and begin praying. Their noisy, self-flagellating prayers don’t seem to work.  Mendelsohn pictures the scene well in his great Oratorio the Elijah: the Ba’al worshippers work themselves into a frenzy, chanting “Ba’al, We Cry to Thee,” and then more frantically “Hear our prayer O Ba’al,” only to be met with four complete measures of absolute silence. “Is your God sleeping?” taunts Elijah, “or perhaps gone to the restroom?”  The priests of Ba’al pray all the louder: again, nothing.  Then Elijah builds his altar, sacrifices a bull, and even pours water all over the wood (I’ve always wondered if it was lighting fluid!) He prays, “Show ‘em what’s what, Lord!”  His prayer is immediately answered by a flash of lightning and fire from heaven that consumes his sacrifice.  Elijah wins, and the outraged crowd of spectators chase and kill the priests of Ba’al. 

 

I think I liked the story so much because it is dramatic, at points funny, with all the color of a Hollywood Western.  Elijah beats the priests of Ba’al just like Sherriff Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday beat the Clantons and McLauries at the O.K. Corral.  Law prevails; the bullies are defeated.  Heady stuff for an 8-year-old boy.  

 

It was only later, when I was 10 or so, that I learned the sequel to the Mt. Carmel story, today’s Hebrew Scriptures lesson.  And I was an adult before I learned that unlike in the film, the OK Corral did not solve anything, but only deepened and aggravated the conflict in Tombstone.  

 

In the Elijah story, Ahab and Jezebel retaliate for the murder of their priests, sending soldiers to massacre the prophets of YHWH. Elijah flees for his life.  He hides in a cave on Mt. Horeb or Sinai, where Moses had received the Law.   And there, in one last great epiphany before he prepares to end his ministry and turn it over to Elisha, he learns that maybe he had misunderstood things on Mt. Carmel. 

 

Archaeological digs have turned up dozens of small representations of Ba’al, as well as texts with prayers and liturgies from his cult. The picture we get from these sounds strangely contemporary and familiar.  One scholar summarizes it thus:

 

“[For Ba’al worshippers, the] supreme good, the good life, consists in satisfaction of human material needs.  This is all we ask of the gods, and this is all they can give us.  They bless us in full when we they satisfy these needs not only in the minimum necessary for survival, but in abundance, so that we enjoy not only the simple life, but also the material comforts of life.  We ask of the gods more than meat and drink; we ask wealth, to that degree which will enable a man to purchase every satisfaction which he craves.  The highest of pleasures is the pleasure of sex: life offers nothing finer, nothing which raises a man to the level of the divine.  Consequently, the difference of the sexes exists only that the male may have this supreme satisfaction; woman is his possession, and her noblest function is to satisfy his sexual appetite.  When she does this, she is a goddess; otherwise, she is a high-grade domestic animal, a drudge, not fully a human being.  Society exists, under the patronage of the gods, to create the conditions in which this good life may be attained.  We must have law, order, restraint, but only to that degree which will prevent human crime from corrupting the good life of the group; the important thing is that law and government should protect wealth, material goods, and should make it possible for every man, within the limits of his capacity, to enjoy himself as he desires.  But the power which puts these good things within a man’s reach should not be restrained, and law and order should not protect the weak; for ultimately it is power that makes the good life possible.  Such is the life of the gods, and such, when the gods are well disposed, is the life they offer to men.”  (John L. McKenzie, SJ, The Two Edged Sword: And Interpretation of the Old Testament [Milwaukee: Bruce, 1956], p. 54). 

 

Ba’al was a god of wealth, power, and pleasure.  He was seen as backing the winners and abandoning losers.  With Ba’al in charge, you had to suck up and kick down: be a toady to the powerful and then treat subordinates with impunity, cheat those with whom you did business, take advantage of the poor and downtrodden, treat the objects of your sexual desire as mere things to be graded and scored, use bullying and force to have your way with others.  You could enjoy unjust privilege with impunity and not a whiff of shame or guilt.  Ba’al devotees were “quality,” winners,” and the “best, smartest, and strongest” of all.  Ba’al is described as a thrower of lightning and thunder, an earth shaker, and sender of whirlwinds and wild fires.  His name, Ba’al, means “Master” or “husband,” and so he was often confused and conflated with YHWH, whose regular use name was Adonai, or “Lord” or “master.”  We have idols labeled as Ba’al and his bedmate Asherah.  Sometimes these are also labeled Yahweh and his Asherah. 

 

But YHWH was the God of all, not just the powerful.  YHWH took care of the widow and orphan, the alien and sojourner, and raised the poor from the ashes.   YHWH was also seen as the source of blessing and prosperity as well as woe, but this was not based on partisanship or support of privilege.  Things that displease YHWH included oppressing the poor, cheating others, dissembling and lying, and practicing malice against the powerless.  YHWH demanded trust and ethical behavior from his people, and ethics meant first and foremost fairness, honesty, compassion, and integrity.  And these things were constraints upon how you enjoyed the blessings, how you took your pleasure.     

 

Elijah does not want anyone to confuse Canaan’s petty fertility fetish, enabler and supporter of the powerful, the rich, and the lustful, with the Holy One of Israel, who demands justice and compassion from all.  That’s why on Mt. Carmel, he Elijah dares his opponents to a contest to see who is the true storm god who can throw thunderbolts, YHWH or Ba’al.  The flash, fire, and fury vindicates Elijah and his supporters massacre the priests of Ba’al.  As satisfying as this story is as a Western, it does not end here.  Elijah’s opponents turn the tables, and kill Yahweh’s prophets too, and begin pursuing Elijah.  Thus Elijah learns, as Jesus later teaches, that those who live by the sword can also die by the sword.   Apparently, all that fury and fire on Carmel didn’t really give Elijah what he needed to truly defeat the great bully god.  That’s how he ends up hiding in a cave on Mount Horeb. 

 

The text in Hebrew of this story is subtle in its use of verbal forms, and when you render these in English it becomes clear that the point of this story is that YHWH and Ba’al are not at all alike.

 

“A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing the rocks, before the Lord, but the Lord was no longer in the whirlwind.  Then an earthquake, but the Lord was no longer in the earthquake.  And then a fire, but God was no longer in the fire.  Finally, there was a still breeze, and the sound of sheer silence.  And when Elijah heard this, he hid his face in his cloak” because he knew that this is where God was.

 

The power and love of God are not found in God’s ability to give us what we want.  God is not a supporter of privilege and abuse of the down-trodden.  God is not in the flash, the fire, and fury.  We sully God by putting him on par with the petty idols of all those about us. 

 

“God blesses us materially when we do what’s right and curses us materially when we do not”—this is the great heresy of the “Prosperity Gospel” taught in many of America’s evangelical churches today.  It is, simply, Ba’al worship, idolatry.  

 

Many whites who call themselves Christians in the last few elections have voted for a candidate who models bullying behavior toward women, the poor, and aliens, boasts his wealth as a sign of his competence to rule, and declares without a whiff of irony that he has nothing of which he should repent, confess, or regret. In him, the golden calf has become a golden toilet bowl.  In the degree that white Evangelicals and Roman Catholics support him because of these misdoings rather despite them, they all fall down at the altar of Ba’al.

 

But God is in utter silence, not the sound and fury.  Listening to silence, contemplating quietness, waiting for subtlety—these are the hallmarks of a life devoted to pursuit of the true spirit.  Noise and flash might on occasion happen, but usually God speaks to us in the silence of our stumbling hearts, seeking coherent expression and understanding, in what the King James Bible translates as “a still, small voice.”

St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “In the silence of the heart, God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.”

As today’s Epistle says, the justice that comes from trusting God is not far away, high in the heaven or low in the abyss, but is at hand, in our very heart.  God does not favor one race, nation, class, or tribe over another.  As the Gospel says, the the flash and awe of seeing Jesus walking on the stormy sea is not enough to keep us on top of the waves.  Flash and awe do not drive out the fear that sinks Peter.  To walk, we must fully trust Jesus.  Trust comes in moments of silent reflection, not in noise and fury. 

 

May we cast away our idols and our worship of Ba’al with all his flash and fury. May we learn to sit in the darkened Holy of Holies, before the empty throne of God, and simply listen to the silence.   May we learn in that silence to hear the voice of the God who is love itself.  Amen.