The Stillness

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
6.24.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Readings: Galatians 3:23-29; 1 Kings 19:1-15a

Over the past year, there’s been a striking new trend in American publishing.

There are always new books sweeping across the barren wasteland of American popular literature, but they usually fall into familiar genres. Like, for instance, high on this week’s New York Times Bestseller list is a book rather effusively entitled THE MILLIONAIRE MAKER’S GUIDE TO CREATING A CASH MACHINE FOR LIFE, by someone with the equally effusive name of Loral Langemeier. She is, apparently, a Millionaire Maker, which would not be difficult if you have the secret to making a machine that would crank out the cash for the rest of your life. I’d always been told that printing up your own money was illegal, so I guess she’s not talking about that kind of machine. One wonders what her marvelous machine might look like, and I have this crazy hunch that it probably looks a whole bunch like a book entitled THE MILLIONAIRE MAKER’S GUIDE TO CREATING A CASH MACHINE FOR LIFE.

Then there are books about people who have contributed in unusual and exciting ways to the world stage. There’s the recent book on Albert Einstein, which explored his peculiar genius and insights into the structure of the universe. Then there’s the another book compiling and heavily editing the diaries of Ronald Reagan, in which the former president shares insights like “Getting shot hurts.” There’s always so much to learn from biographies.

But into this pattern of bestselling books has come a new type of book...the atheist diatribe. Several times in the past year, these books have surfaced, and they’re increasingly spending time at the top of the publishing charts. Their authors claim that not only can you not prove the existence of God, but that the very act of faith is the source of all evil in the world.

This week, the number three bestselling hardback nonfiction book in America is God is Not Great, written by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens writes columns for several magazines, and is perhaps best described as a professional polemicist. That means...and this is his self description, not mine...that his career involves getting drunk and then writing bitingly cruel things about people. Back in 1995, for example, he wrote a book entirely devoted to attacking the life and works of Mother Teresa. Devoting your life to selflessly caring for orphans instead of being a professional character assassin? How pathetic. His book, which is mostly devoted to taking verses from the Bible and saying creatively rude things about them, is probably not worth reading.

Earlier this year, the book in question was Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion. Dawkins is a genetic biologist by profession, who has a deservedly stellar reputation within his field for advancing our understanding of how genes propagate themselves. He’s convinced that faith is a bad thing, because it requires us to believe in things that can’t be seen and touched and rationally verified. Dawkin’s book...as difficult as it is supposed to be...may well be worth reading, although I personally am waiting until it can be gotten at my local library. I don’t particularly feel like spending money on it, for some reason.

One of the primary things that the new militant atheism shouts at people of faith is that you can’t point to one place in the universe that is empirically provable to be God. They demand that we be able to prove God’s existence in the same way that you prove the existence of a rock or a tree stump. They demand that we use the tools of human reason to prove God, in the same way that you prove a particularly complicated equation. In other words, they insist that you should be able to know God without faith.

Taken together, today’s scripture readings show us that expecting that shows no understanding of what God is and how we are to relate to God. The first of the stories comes to us from 1 Kings, which is part of the great historical narrative that includes first and second Samuel and first and second Kings. Our narrator takes us to a moment of trial for the great ancient prophet Elijah. Elijah lived and proclaimed in the northern kingdom of Israel sometime between 870 BCE and 850 BCE. It was a strange time in the Northern Kingdom. The Southern Kingdom of Judah was weak, even though it contained the city of Jerusalem. Israel was at the height of it’s power as a nation, after King Omri established it as a real military force in the region. Elijah preached against the sins of the dynasty that Omri established, and particularly made himself unpopular with Omri’s son Ahab and his wife Jezebel. After routing the prophets of Ba’al, Elijah hears from Jezebel that his life is forfeit, and he flees into the wilderness.

There, after being opened to God’s presence and word, Elijah hears that God is going to pass by. He hides himself in a cave, and there are a series of tremendously powerful events. There’s a devastating wind that smashes rocks...easily an F-5 on the Fujita scale. But that isn’t God. There’s a temblor, but we don’t hear enough to know where that stands on the Richter scale. But God isn’t that, either. There’s a raging wildfire...but that isn’t God. Then, there’s something else. In many bibles, what follows is called “a still, small voice.”

That’s a beautiful way to express the Hebrew, but it doesn’t really capture the strangeness of what Elijah experiences. The oldest texts of the bible tell us that what comes after the fire is kol demamah dakkah, which literally means “the sound of absolute silence.” It’s the sound of no sound, which is a kind of strange thing to say...a bit like one of those peculiar paradoxical zen teachings like “show me your original face before your mother and father were born” or “what’s the sound of one Presbyterian clapping.”

But Elijah knows enough about God to know that God approaches us in those moments of stillness, those moments when all else seems absent and our world grows hushed with anticipation. So he wraps his face in his mantle as a sign of humility and respect, and goes out into the presence.

Someone who knew less about the nature of God..or who thought that God acts in ways that we can measure like everything else in creation...with scales and yardsticks...would probably have rushed out at that first moment. But they wouldn’t have experienced anything other than wind and earth and fire.

That’s because God is not experienced in the same way that we experience the rest of creation. Atheism...which rejects anything that you can’t see or touch or smell...just can’t wrap it’s head around the idea that there are things that must be *trusted.* As todays passage from Galatians indicates, it is faith that is the first and most essential way that we bring ourselves to know and understand God.

Our rational minds are a gift from God. They are a blessing and an essential part of the way we were created. The insights and benefits of science and the other fruits of reason are things to be valued and respected. But we can’t use reason and science to find our way to God, any more than we can use our hands and our feet to climb our way to heaven.

Instead of hopelessly digging for God in the rocks or poking around for God in the deep glories of the heavens, we’re better off learning the lesson that Elijah knew so well. Wait, and find a place and a moment when the storm and rumbling and fires of this life have passed. Wait for those moments of stillness that are filled with the sound of silence.

Then listen.