Preacher: Dana Cassell

Scripture Readings:1 Kings 19:4-8

I love this story about Elijah. 

Elijah is a huge, looming figure all over scripture. He’s a big-time prophet in the Hebrew Bible, and an explicit reference point for who Jesus is and what he’ll do in the New Testament. Elijah’s life is filled with drama:

He brings a widow’s dead son back to life. 

He dares to speak against King Ahab and his wife Jezebel.

He challenges the prophets of Baal to a big, showy duel, and wins spectacularly. 

Later on, he’s the guy who meets God not in the whirlwind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in the sound of sheer silence.

He mentored a protege and handed over prophetic duties to Elisha, and at the end of his life, he ascended into heaven in a chariot of fire.

Elijah’s story is epic. The stuff of summer movie theater blockbusters. He’s a hero of the faith, and his life follows the trajectory of that kind of icon.

But the story we get today is not exactly a hero story. 

Elijah is DONE. He has just defeated all the prophets of Baal – challenged them, bested them and then, we hear, killed them all. And Queen Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab, the one who brought the Baal worshipping to the kingdom in the first place, is ANGRY with him. She sends a messenger to Elijah and tells him that she’s so angry that he has killed her prophets that she plans to have him killed, too, by this time tomorrow.

So what does Elijah do? He straight up runs away.

Not exactly the hero move, is it?

We hear in the text that Elijah was AFRAID, and got up and fled for his life. He went to Beersheba, outside of Jezebel’s authority, where she had no jurisdiction to have him arrested or killed.

And then, Elijah kept going. Being out of Jezebel’s reach wasn’t enough; Elijah went a whole day’s journey farther, into the desert, and fell down under a broom tree.

Elijah wasn’t just seeking safety or temporary refuge; he was in the midst of a pretty major crisis. He took himself out to the desert, where there was very little chance of survival. In fact, once he falls down under the broom tree, he yells at God that he is so done that he’s ready to DIE. “ENOUGH!” he says. “Take away my life.” And then he collapses into sleep.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this kind of despair. Or burnout. Or fear, or guilt. We don’t actually know what it was that Elijah was feeling. He had just killed 450 prophets of Baal, escaped their murderous Queen, and had no real sense of what God would ask him to do, next. I can imagine all manner of emotions, all kinds of mental gymnastics.

Whatever Elijah was wrestling with, it was no joke. It was not the stoic, strong front of a hero. It was a real, human, vulnerable, collapse. Elijah flees out to the desert, alone, and asks God to just let him die, already.

But God does not grant Elijah that wish.

Instead, someone comes to wake Elijah up from his deep, exhausted sleep. This someone, which is named a “messenger” in the text, says to Elijah “here, get up and eat.” And lo and behold, there is a bit of cake and water. Elijah gets up, eats, and promptly lays back down and goes back to sleep.

But the tap on his shoulder comes again, and the second time, it’s clear – to us and to Elijah – that this messenger is really an angel, sent from God. Again, the angel points to food and water, and again tells Elijah to get up and eat. But this time, the angel adds more instruction:

“Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.”

Okay, so there IS more for Elijah to do. God is not finished with him, yet.

I love this story about Elijah because it’s just so pedestrian and relatable. This is not a scene from a hero movie. It’s not a training montage or an epic battle, it’s not even the main character pushing past defeat and exhaustion to finally win the day.

This is a burnt out prophet who is so exhausted and demoralized that he is ready to die. It’s someone who has fled all civilization in order to lay down in the desert and end it all. It is a lonely, traumatized, over-extended man who simply cannot go on.

And when he cries out to God, out there in the desert, God doesn’t shame him or chide him or tell him to suck it up. God does not get angry with him for shirking his duties. God doesn’t even blink. Just sends an angel with a snack. Lets Elijah sleep as long as he needs to. Sends another snack cake, and waits patiently.

So simple. So NOT heroic. What hero, in all of myth or animation, needs naps? And snacks? 

The story of Elijah’s snack break makes me think about all the times that I have received God’s provision and not even noticed it for what it was. 

There’s this line in J.D. Salinger’s classic novel, Franny and Zooey that comes to mind. Franny, the younger sister, has had something of a spiritual crisis and leaves school to come home and regroup. She starts to get annoyed with her family and her situation, casting around for spiritual enlightenment while refusing her parents’ acts of care, including her mother’s chicken soup. Franny’s brother Zooey gets annoyed with her:

“You don’t even have sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup – which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse. So just tell me, just tell me, buddy. […] How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?”

It makes me wonder how many angelic snack cakes or cups of consecrated chicken soup I have overlooked in my life because of the very unexciting nature of such simple, everyday sustenance. How much provision, care, salvation have I ignored because it wasn’t flashy or heroic enough? How many meals, nights of good sleep, interactions, relationships, opportunities, healings, exorcisms, resurrections have I missed while I was focused on wanting something flashier, more dramatic, something worthy of being shouted from the hilltops?

Like, the friend who calls at precisely the right moment. The freelance work that fills an unexpected income gap. The dinner invitation that arrives on the very lonely day. The extra zucchini my neighbor leaves at my doorstep. 

And I wonder what angelic snack cakes you might have missed, too. What cups of consecrated chicken soup are showing up in your life, right now?

Do you know what happens after Elijah eats and sleeps out there in the desert? He gets up and travels for forty days and forty nights to a cave on Mt. Horeb – the same place that Moses received the ten commandments. And that’s where the whirlwind, earthquake and fire occur, where Elijah meets God not in any of those bombastic moments, but instead in the sound of sheer silence that follows them all.

And in that silence, God tells Elijah what is next: a new king. A new day. More work, yes, but also some company. When Elijah leaves the cave, Elisha finds him and becomes his friend, companion and protege. Elijah doesn’t have to do it all on his own, anymore. He’s no longer the hero of the story, just a guy who has his limits and needs, like all of us do, help.

This wasn’t the first time Elijah had been fed angelic snack cakes, either. If we read the whole story, we’re reminded that when God first called Elijah to be a prophet, he sent him out to the wilderness and told him not to worry, that the ravens would bring him food. And THEY DID. And then, when the water dried up there, God sent Elijah onward to find sustenance from a widow who was running out of food, and even though she and her young son were about to die of starvation, the widow shared her last cake. Everyone ate, and everyone survived.

It turns out, Elijah was never the hero of the story. He was always just a guy who relied on the help of others to get by – even if those others were sometimes ravens and sometimes angels.

Elijah did some incredible things. But he was also just a person who got tired, hungry, frustrated, depressed, demoralized and burnt out. He survived thanks to the friendship of Elisha, the generosity of a widow at Zarepath, and God’s mercy out in the desert.

I wonder what kind of boring, everyday, vulnerable salvation you might need right now. Or what kind of simple things are literally saving your life right this moment. I wonder if we could all shift our focus and learn to see the ways that God is showing up in our lives, even as we speak, the sometimes small, often overlooked, incredibly powerful sustenance and salvation happening all around us. 

I’d love to know what you notice.