1 Kg 19:1-18
21 January 2007
“Under a Broom Tree”
There are times in human history when the power of death seems to have finally won its ever-recurring battle with those in the land of the living. There’s a sense in which history is little more than a continual struggle with death. We use wars and plagues as markers of historical periods.
The battle between life and death is as old as the human race itself. And it’s a theme that continually resurfaces in the biblical tradition.
Our scripture reading, which tells the story of Elijah’s flight from Jezebel and his encounter with the Lord in the wilderness, is a key example of the struggle against death. In fact, the entire Elijah narrative, which begins in chapter 17 of 1 Kings, is a story of the fight with the power of death.
This theme of life against death is especially appropriate to the Elijah story when we consider the religious and political situation of his day. Ahab, the king of Israel in the mid-ninth century B.C., is concerned about the increasing power of the Arameans—the Syrians. In an effort to prevent attack from them, Ahab forges a military alliance with the king of Sidon in Phoenicia (that’s modern day Lebanon). Ahab marries his daughter, Jezebel. She, in turn, promotes a policy of Baal worship in Israel.
In chapter 18, we have a quite bloody scene following the showdown on Mount Carmel. Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh, the God of Israel, challenges the prophets of Baal to see which god can burn up the sacrificial offering. (I’ll say more about Baal in a moment.) When Elijah is proven right, in an over-zealous moment, he has the other prophets put to death.
But before all the butchery begins, there is a note of comic relief! While the prophets of Baal are crying out to their god, Elijah decides to be funny. He says, “Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened” (v. 27). Some versions, instead of “he has wandered away,” have he “is relieving himself,” or he “is on the toilet”! (New Living Translation, Living Bible)
Elijah encounters death in many forms. A devastating drought has afflicted the land, drying up the brook where he’s been fed by ravens. Death threatens the widow in Zarephath and seizes her son, whom the prophet raises up again. Death in the form of hostility from the king and queen, Ahab and Jezebel, forces Elijah into the role of fugitive.
It’s the flight of Elijah that probably demonstrates the greatest struggle he faces. It’s the inner struggle, the struggle of fear within. Verse 3 says, “Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life.” The power of death, which the Lord’s prophet has been busy conquering, has laid its icy grip on his heart.
To understand what’s going on, I need to say a little something about the religion of the Phoenicians. Jezebel’s father, besides being king, is also a priest of Astarte. She’s the consort of Baal, while he’s the god of fertility and storms. The setting of this whole story is the ongoing drought.
Baal is the one who brings the life-giving rain, who waters the land so that it can produce fruit. However, Baal’s archenemy is Mot, the god of death. Every year, Mot sends the blistering summer heat to dry up the vegetation. As powerful is Baal is, he must bow to the might of the dry season. That is, until the coming of the autumn rains, when his consort, Astarte, defeats Mot and permits the return of Baal. This religion is an ever-recurring cycle of the birth, death, and resurrection of Baal.
So, maybe we can imagine the outrage when Elijah says in chapter 17 that the drought will end only when he gives the word. The priests of Baal can call on their god all they want. Only the prophet of the Lord will have the word that the rains are returning. Only the God that Israel now half-heartedly serves has power over Mot, the power over death.
And all this only makes the events in today’s reading more amazing. On the heels of his greatest victory, Elijah takes to his heels. And when he arrives at his destination, “a solitary broom tree,” a single juniper tree out in the desert, he longs for death to take him (v. 4).
Instead, he’s visited by what we’re told is “an angel” (v. 5). The Hebrew word here (&a;l]m', male’ak) is the word for “messenger.” Maybe Elijah is visited by some supernatural being. Then again, maybe some kind soul is doing God’s work by showing compassion to this weary stranger.
Whatever the case, Elijah’s visitor gives him nourishment. After all, he’s out in the middle of nowhere, and he’ll need strength for the journey. Elijah makes the trek all the way to Mount Horeb, also known as Sinai. That seems to be a good place to hear from God. And what he hears is the question, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (v. 9).
Elijah expresses his despair, his feeling that he is the only true worshipper of the Lord left. He waits to hear from God. And the prophet who has done so many spectacular deeds does indeed hear from God—though not in a spectacular way. There come a storm, an earthquake, and a fire, but none of them bear a message. It is in the silence that the question is repeated, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
That can be a somewhat disconcerting question. Fill in the blank with your own name. What are you doing here…James? Have you ever posed that one to yourself?
As I’ve looked at this story, I’ve wondered, “What was it that caused Elijah to take off in the first place?” We know that Jezebel threatened his life—we see that in verse 2. But he’d been a marked man for quite some time. After all, it had been a very long drought. On the other hand, this was the first time he’d dared to anger a queen!
We who are in Christ follow the one who has won the greatest triumph over death. And yet the threats we face, both extremely serious and incredibly trivial, often have us forgetting the scope of that victory. We forget the power of the one we follow, and we wind up under a broom tree. Maybe we long for death to take us, or maybe we just want to hide from the world, with all of its demands.
It can be a scary thing to do battle with the gods and with the ones who serve them. Even a prophet of the God of Abraham and Sarah can sense the daunting challenge of facing down the power of death.
Fortunately, Christ doesn’t leave us alone, any more than Yahweh leaves Elijah alone. The call from God remains. We’ve been called into a community of faith, the church. That’s a community which goes beyond boundaries of race, class, and gender—and amazingly enough, political perspectives!
In John 1, Jesus sees Nathanael under a fig tree before he calls him. So be it from under a fig tree, broom tree, whatever kind of tree…we are called by God in Christ to enter into the struggle of life against death.
We look within ourselves and we likely don’t see the heroism needed to do battle with death and hatred. At least, I don’t. If we hear from God, it isn’t in the storm, the earthquake, or the fire. It’s not in all the bells and whistles we seem to think that life requires.
If we hear from God, it’s in the silence—if we’re ever silent long enough to listen. And what the silence tells us is that our God can be believed; our God can be trusted. It is the silence that gives us our voice, with which we may dare to speak words for God. It is the stillness that enables us to do the acts of faith and belief.
I want us to consider some comments by one of my favorite people, Thomas Merton. He speaks of the importance of silence.[1] “We are perhaps too talkative, too activistic, in our conception of the Christian life,” he says. “Our service of God and of the church does not consist only in talking and doing. It…also [consists] in periods of silence, listening, waiting.” Jesus did plenty of listening, and he taught his disciples to listen.
When we avoid silence, when we avoid getting to know the “I” inside, “we live superficially,” Merton says. “We are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions…we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need…
“The psychologist Erich Fromm has pointed out that this inner contradiction [resulting] from the…frustration in American life is one of the roots of violence in our society. We are at odds with ourselves, and we seek release by fantasies and dramas of violence.” We even export our violence to other countries! We find ourselves on the wrong side in the struggle of life against death.
Another of my favorites, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis, said “that the church itself engaged in too much empty talk. The church, in fighting to preserve and assert its position, seemed to him to make self-preservation an end in itself. The church talked more and more about itself, and more and more for itself, less and less for the kingdom.”
He predicted that this would lead the church “into a realm of silence, confusion, and apparent helplessness.” Bonhoeffer said that this would lead to “deepening of prayer, a return to the roots of our being, in order that out of silence, prayer, and hope we might once more receive from God new words and a new way of stating, not our message, but [God’s message].”
Many people, including your co-pastors, believe that that time is at hand. Some speak of the emerging, or emergent, church. Whatever you call it, when you’ve spent some time under a broom tree, and then heard the sound of silence, it starts to make sense.
Maybe we’re being called to lose control. Maybe we’re being asked to take another step of faith and trust. It’s hard to do that—we like to maintain control of our lives. It’s hard to trust God with all that.
Maybe Elijah felt like he was losing control—that things were spinning out of control. Maybe he felt like it was all up to him. But God had this message: “I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him” (v. 18). I don’t think Elijah saw that coming! That’s the funny thing about silence. We can’t dictate what it does. We can’t control what it does, because then it ceases to be silence.
Maybe we’re being called to a little more silence—and the discoveries that await us there.