Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

I'm in way over my head!  Where is God in all of this?

Imagine, if you will, that you have been sent by God to your people to demonstrate God’s power over and against 450 false prophets before the kingdom.  In a mighty display of God’s power, you call down fire from heaven completely obliterating the false prophets.  There is a giant pause as this object lesson settles in. People are amazed; they are frightened and break out into astonished applause. Then the crowd turns and walks away as you begin your well-rehearsed speech about being the true prophet of God. Then, the queen of the kingdom, out of fear, turns against you and forces you to flee to a cave in humiliated retreat. What went wrong?  Where is God in all of this?  Such is the situation Elijah finds himself in in today’s Old Testament reading from Kings.

After the great spectacle of God’s almighty power, the demise of the prophets of Ba’al, God appears now to Elijah, not in a way he appeared to Moses: wind, earthquake, and fire; God was not in the great wind, not in a mighty earthquake, and not again in fire, but only in a “tiny whispering sound”. Elijah hears the sound, but if Israel won’t pay attention to fire raining down from heaven, what will a whisper do? God tells Elijah that he is to go and anoint another leader and that a remnant of Israel will be faithful. So, the whisper leads to a renewal of a remnant of Israel (7,000) who reestablish God’s covenant with the faithful, the faithful who found God in a whisper.

With such great and grand injustices in the world, who doesn’t long for God as spectacle? Fireballs raining down on false prophets (or at least on ISIS!). Fireballs against our enemies, bread for the hungry, hope for the poor. What we get is a whisper that lies below the din of talk shows, political speeches, and mob violence; the whisper speaking to all who listen, who quietly and with great faith assert God’s presence in the whisper of individual acts of love well on the sidelines of social media.

Jesus, responding to the fear of his disciples in a boat on rough waters, accepts Peter’s rather glib challenge, and calls him from the boat. Peter’s salvation comes not by being successful at walking on water but succeeds in having his faith deepened in Christ’s saving him from his own fears and doubts. In this case, again, God was not in the storm, not in the spectacle of turmoil, but in quieting the storm and allaying fears. “Lord if it is really you, command me to come to you on the water” was Peter’s rather dim-witted proof of trust (If it wasn’t Jesus, but perhaps Satan, why not fool Peter?). Somehow, deep in Peter’s consciousness, he knew Jesus—present or absent-- would protect him, and he stepped out of the boat.

Faith didn’t save Peter, but Christ’s unconditional love; you don’t need to have great faith to be saved by Christ, but you’ve got to step out of the boat. You’ve got to be willing to fail at walking on water, at having your spectacular plans fail so that you can fall into the arms of the living God whose call is a whisper no one seems to hear.