WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE

I will begin by thanking my readers, all of who were, at one time, in one of my youth groups…Bill and Lissa (Edens) at this church and Roxanne (Miles) at North Shore Church in Fox Point. I did good, didn’t I? And so did they.

The lessons they read are from the lectionary, a table of scripture readings for every day of the year. Your ministers, two of whom are fiddling around in St. Petersburg, always preach the lectionary. I tried it once and I was reminded of the story of the young man who had seen the light and who had become, as is so often the case, insufferably pious. Every Sunday he was the first to arrive at church. He sat down in the front row, right under the pulpit, and when people came in late, he would turn around and stare at them, disapprovingly. One Sunday morning the Reverend preached a powerful sermon about Jesus walking on the water. The young man was so moved that as soon as the service was over, he ran down the hill to the pond. When he was pulled out a few minutes later and asked what had happened, he said, “I make three or four steps before I fell in.”

I made three or four weeks with the lectionary before I fell in, and I can always tell when a minister is grappling with a lesson about which he or she can think of absolutely nothing useful to say. There are, unfortunately, quite a few of those. But I knew that Steve Peay would be happy if I stuck to the routine, so I called him, and he gave me the lessons, and by golly, I was familiar with all four of them. And one of them, praise be to God, is one of my favorite passages in all of scripture. I Kings 19.

I call it the “rainmaking contest” on Mount Carmel. On one side were King Ahab and Queen Jezebel and the prophets of Ba’al. They were the bad guys. Jezebel was a most unpleasant lady. She was so obnoxious and hard to get along with that some of her subjects called her Billy Jean Queen. (I threw that in for you old tennis fans.) Ahab, as you might expect, with a wife like that, was not really a factor. On the other side was the Lord’s prophet, Elijah, all by himself. The prophets of Ba’al did all of their tricks, and nothing happened. Elijah did his…and it rained, which caused Jezebel to become very upset, especially after Elijah, who was a bad winner, had all of her prophets killed down by the brook Kishon. I love Old Testament stories. They give us lots of details.

One might think that Elijah, basking in his glory, would have stuck around to give interviews to the media, but something told him that Jezebel was not quite through with him, so he departed the premises. He decided that he should explain what was going on to God, who probably knew, being God, what was going on. Out into the desert Elijah ran, pausing from time-to-time to sleep. When he did that, the Lord provided him with food and drink. Elijah finally arrived at the mountain where God lived and he said, “It’s me Lord. Here I am.” And the Lord said, “What are you doing here?”

Elijah was ready. He told the Lord about what had happened on Mount Carmel. He told him about Ahab and Jezebel and the prophets of Ba’al and, I hope, he thanked the Lord for bringing the rain, although the Bible doesn’t mention that, and he said, “Lord, they have killed all of your people, all of the people who believe in you, everybody who was on your side, and I am the only one left.”

And the Lord said, “Elijah, what are you doing here?”

He wasn’t listening, Elijah thought. So he went through the whole thing again, word-by-word, sigh-by-sigh, and when he had done that he said, “And I, even I only, and left, and they seek my life to take it away.”

If I had been the Lord, which is unlikely, I would have asked Elijah one more time, “What are you doing here?” But the Lord had had enough. He told Elijah to go back to where he had come from. He gave him some directions about whom to appoint kings over Syria and Israel, and whom to recruit to succeed himself in the prophet business. And then the Lord said, “Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Ba’al, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.”

About the time I first came to this church, I was introduced, by my boss Norman Ream, to the writings of a man named Albert J. Nock. Those writings have had a profound impact to my life and thinking, but few of them more than his comment on this story. “Every prophet,” Nock wrote, “underestimates the size of the Remnant, but nobody should miss it by seven thousand.”

The Remnant. It means that which is left. In this case it means the people whom God had left. The people upon whom God can rely. It is a recurrent theme in the Old Testament, when the Hebrews were often tempted, by some of their own and by their neighbors, to leave the fold, to follow other gods. They did often, but there were always some who stayed, who remained faithful, even in the worst of times. They were there, and they are here, because God put them there, and because God puts them here.

Nock says this of the Remnant. “You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them… You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor where they are, nor how many of them are, not what they are doing or will do. Two things you know, and no more: first, that they exist; second, that they will find you.” “You” in this context refers to the one who speaks the truth on God’s behalf, God’s prophet. Ministers, as you might suspect, find that very comforting. You should find it comforting, too, knowing that whatever happens, they are here.

Nock continues: “The certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much in the dark as ever, as helpless as ever in the matter of putting any estimate of any kind upon the Remnant, for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he remains ignorant of who they are that have found him or where they are or how many. They do not write it and tell him about it… nor do they seek him out and attach themselves to his person. They are not that kind. They take his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard…that is with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but with very serious thought about the directions.”

Hardly anyone writes like that anymore.

That’s the first point of this sermon. Most ministers have three points. I think it has something to do with the Trinity. You only get two today, but I think it’s likely that next week you’ll get four and then you’ll be even.

My second point has to do with the Lord’s repeated question to Elijah. “What are you doing here?” From time-to-time I have been asked by people who read the Gospels a little bit differently from the way in which I read them, “Have you ever had a mountaintop experience?” What they mean is a moment of ecstasy, of great joy, of feeling the presence of God in one’s life very strongly. Those of you who have gone to church camp know what I’m talking about. My answer has always been, “No, I have not.” Nor have I felt deprived, because throughout my life I have been aware of the presence of God in my life every day, in bad times as well as in good times. On what was probably the worst day of my life, the day my father died just three weeks before my seventeenth birthday, I went to our church, as soon as I was convinced that my mother and sister were surrounded by comforters, and I sat in the pew in which I sat with my father almost every Sunday, and I looked up at the pulpit from which Dr. Ferris used to scare the you-know-what out of me and I said to myself, “All is well!” I was not angry. I did not feel betrayed. I did not feel alone, nor have I since.

Elijah decided that he needed a mountaintop experience, in this case literally as well as spiritually. He was sure that God would be happy to see him and would be sympathetic to his concern, and ready to shower his head with many blessings. When he got there, he was given quite a show. God produced a great strong wind, and then an earthquake, and then a fire, but the Lord was in none of those things. Think about that. And then Elijah heard a still, small voice and the question which he probably did not want to hear: “What are you doing here?” Just five words, but I think they implied a lot more.

“You did not have to come here to find me, Elijah. I have been with you since the day you were born. I was with you the day I appointed you my prophet. I was with you on Mount Carmel, when you did battle with the prophets of Ba’al. I was with you every step of your long journey to this mountain, as you may have noticed. And I will be with you until the end of your days.

“I gave you a job to do, Elijah, and you cannot do that job here. You need to be back where you belong, with the people to whom you belong, and whom I have left, the people who will hear you if you speak the truth on my behalf. So, go home, Elijah. You did not have to come here to find me.”

In the Psalm with which Lissa opened the service, we heard the anguished words of someone who had become separated from him home, from his people and, in his own mind, from his God. He longs for what he used to have, as a deer in its thirst longs for a rushing mountain stream. He recalls better days, days filled with joy, when he and his friends went to the temple, singing and praising God. But now, far away, in a strange land, he is taunted by those who ask him, “Where is your God?” He did not come to where he is to find God, as Elijah went to the mountaintop, but he needs the same words of assurance from God, that no matter where he is, and no matter what is happening, and no matter how alienated or separated from God he feels, he is not. He is not alone. As the psalm progresses, he seems to begin to understand this.

Last Sunday, Steve Peay said that he was looking forward to preaching these same lessons this morning at the Annual Meeting of our National Association. And he said that he couldn’t wait to hear what I would say about these lessons because they all fit together so well. I was tempted to say, “You can wait, Steve.” I am sure he is having a wonderful time dealing with the Gadarene demoniac. That’s his kind of thing. All I can figure out is that after the demoniac had been healed, he wanted to stay with Jesus, but Jesus said, “No. Go home. Go home and tell the people about what you have seen and what I have done.” Which is pretty close to what God told Elijah.

And there is the lesson from the Letter to the Galatians. I have seldom been able to understand what Paul is talking about, particularly with regard to justification by faith alone, which, to the best of my knowledge, Jesus mentioned rarely, if at all. I have confessed that sin to Dr. Peay and he has forgiven me.

Jesus was a Jew. I had to remind my congregation often of that. Most of them thought he was a Congregationalist and probably a Republican. As a Jew, Jesus frequently repeated the “Great Commandment”: “Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and Thou shalt love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus talked about “works” all the time. About doing unto others. About feeding and clothing and sheltering, and of doing these things even…no, especially, to the least of his brethren.

Which is why the Lord’s question to Elijah, with just a slight change of emphasis, is a more important question for all of us. What are we doing here, where the Lord has put us, with the people with whom we belong, with the people whom He has given us to love.

What are we doing…here? Amen.

Richard P. Buchman
First Congregational Church, Wauwatosa
June 24, 2007