Dear Friends,
Many years ago, shortly after a significant earthquake struck in southern California, Richard Mouw, then president of Fuller Theological Seminary, was asked to preach at a religiously conservative church in the earthquake area. The church leaders specifically asked him to help them understand God’s place in that catastrophe. They wanted to hear that the quake was God’s response to the rampant secularization around them in southern California. Who, they assumed, would be better at aligning with their world view than the president of Fuller Seminary, the conservative, evangelical center of their denomination?
Dr. Mouw, however, had no interest in equating the quake with God’s wrath or judgment; nor did he presume to frame questions for God in the face of devastation. With conviction and courage, he chose to preach on the story about Elijah in 1 Kings 19: 9-18. This story recounts utter desolation as Elijah waits on the mountaintop: first, catastrophic wind, then devastating earthquake, and finally the ruin of fire. God is not in the earthquake, Dr. Mouw told the gathered congregation. Nor was God in the wind or the fire. “And after the fire,” he reminded them as he read from 1 Kings, was “a still small voice.” That’s where God is. I don’t know how the congregation responded, but I hope his choice of text and his words inspired them to delve deeper into their understanding of God.
Please take a moment to read 1 Kings 19: 9-18, but first, please turn to Matthew 17: 1-8. This is the story of the Transfiguration, which we observe on the Sunday just before Lent begins. If I may remind you of our sermon on Transfiguration Sunday, the story describes another mountaintop experience, this one Jesus’s. He asks his three disciples, Peter, James, and John, to travel with him to the peak of the mountain, where they are miraculously joined by Moses and Elijah. Peter wanted to build three dwellings, one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; perhaps he wanted to hold onto them forever in that miraculous place.
I remind you of this essential story of our faith because it reminds us of the mountaintop experience that Elijah, and Moses before him, had with God on Mt. Sinai (also known as Mt. Horeb in 1 Kings 19: 8). Moses’s sojourn in the desert lasted forty years; Elijah’s journey to the holy mountain of God took forty days and forty nights. The echoes here are not serendipitous; they are a forewarning of the mountaintop experience recounted in the Gospels. (And they are echoed in our forty days of Lent.)
The stories served to further legitimize Jesus as a man of God to his disciples, who would have known them well enough to see the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures in Jesus. And then in Matthew, the astonishing final confirmation comes when God speaks from a bright cloud, saying “This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (verse 5). And Peter and the disciples did indeed listen to him, just as we do to this day. As you think about these passages, remember that we are a Lenten people. We are always seeking to understand how the ills of the world – including earthquakes and pandemics – fit into the concept of God’s limitless umbrella of grace. As a Lenten people, we are assured that we are not alone; God is always with us and with every single one of our brothers and sisters in both our sinfulness and our grace. We are not separate from God, nor are we separate from the rest of God’s creation.
How unhelpful, counterproductive, indeed sinful and essentially unChristian it is for any group, Christian or other, to think not only that we stand alone, but that we’re somehow exceptional, protected from all ills by a unique and special relationship with God. None of us stands in a magical bubble of protection from the harshness of the world. We do not live on a small, eternally tranquil island in the midst of a sea of suffering and dying humanity.
God’s love, God’s grace, cannot be hoarded as a private cache of righteousness. There is no piety in believing that an earthquake years ago in southern California or the current calamity of coronavirus are God’s judgment from which our special faith and devotion will protect us. Dr. Mouw heard that from the church that invited him to speak, and we hear too many similar rumblings these days. As this crisis gets worse and global devastation grows, such self-righteous rumblings grow louder and more insistent. How will we hear the still small voice of God in all that noise?
Others might instead seek to assign blame, not to God, of course, but to the “other.” We’ve already begun to see this in the reprehensible attacks on Asians being reported almost daily. Those in this camp are so busy blaming the “other” that they also fail to listen for the still small voice of God in the clamor of misplaced blame and false accusations.
There are no easy answers. The world is left in silence. It is in that silence that we must listen for God’s word whispered in a still small voice.
Be assured: God’s love and grace are always with us, even in the worst of times. We have only to open our eyes and hearts to find them. We have only to listen for the still small voice that resounds in the silence after the catastrophes of wind, earthquake, fire, and now, a vicious disease. If we just listen for it, that voice speaks to each of us from a bright cloud on a mountaintop today and eternally.
The sun is setting as I send this. Even in our different locations and at different times, may we pray this evening prayer together?
Lord Jesus, you call us to be faithful disciples. Enable us to hear your voice above the distractions and rumblings of this day, to see each challenge as an opportunity for faithful witness, and to offer ourselves in obedient service in all that we do. Amen.