Rest Stop Revelations--August 12, 2024
"But Elijah himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: ‘It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.’ Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, ‘Get up and eat.’ He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’ He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God." [1 Kings 19:4-8]
When you are on a quest to find God face to face, God is already there on the journey. In fact, God is often the One behind the scenes making it possible for you to keep going on your way to see God, nourishing you so you can keep going.
The issue, it would seem, then, is not how we get to some particular location on the map in order to get where God is... but rather the question is whether our eyes will recognize the God who is present there already on the journey, even being revealed to us at the rest stops along the way.
This is one of the things I find so comforting--and also challenging--about these stories from Elijah's life. This is one of those scenes after Elijah has had a big confrontation with the king and queen and all their official administration-endorsed religious-spokespersons (they are usually called "the 400 prophets of Ba'al), who were all employed by the palace as Spiritual Advisors for King Ahab and Queen Jezebel to show off how publicly sympathetic to religion they were. After getting himself into big trouble by exposing those official court prophets as frauds who were just there to prop up public support for the king and queen, Elijah became a fugitive. The royal family was furious at him, and they made Elijah into Public Enemy Number One (of course they did--the emperor always despises the one who is brave enough to say he's not wearing any clothes). So Elijah runs... and runs... and runs... to go find God.
That's an important detail in the story. Elijah isn't just running "away," but he is looking for a face-to-face conversation with God. He needs someone to comfort him, to defend him, to explain to him why he's running for his life after having been the good guy speaking up for the one true God against the powers of the day. So he heads due south, until he can get to Mount Horeb--the other name for the mountain sometimes called "Sinai" in the Bible, the same mountain where Moses had met God face to face and been given the commandments. Elijah feels like he's all alone in the world--he says a bit later in the story that he thinks he's the only one left who is faithful to God and hasn't sold out to the king for a cushy position endorsing the government and the government's gods. So Elijah goes to the place he figured you could go if you wanted to meet God. He goes to Mount Horeb hoping for his own one-on-one conference with God.
But here's the thing: God is already with him on the journey. And God not only sees his desperation, but helps him along the way. God sends angels to feed him, messengers to speak to him, and directions to get him to the end of his journey. Could God have just spoken to him right there in the wilderness on the way, instead of waiting for Elijah to make it to the mountain? Of course. The living God isn't tethered to shrines or steeples, and you don't have to go to the right mountain or hillside or valley to meet God. Everywhere is a "thin place," for the God of the Scriptures--you don't have to go find a certain spot where the boundary between heaven and earth is a little easier to breach. That's just not how it works. But when we are convinced we have to go Somewhere Else to meet God, God just might show up at the rest stop along the highway to feed us so we make it to our destination.
It's Elijah who has the need to meet God in a certain spot. It's Elijah who has some expectation that he has to go to "the mountain of God" to hear from the divine. It's Elijah who isn't ready to hear what God will have to say. God goes with Elijah--sending angels all along the way--but God knows Elijah isn't ready to talk yet. So God just walks along the way with Elijah on the journey, making sure he gets to the place Elijah thinks he needs to go, and feeding him with divinely-appointed picnic to refresh him.
But it was never God who needed the conversation to happen on a particular mountaintop. It was Elijah.
That's us, too, of course. So often, we have these expectations of when or where we'll have "access" to God, when in reality, God's already been with us all the journey long so far. We assume that we'll have time for God later--you know, "once the kids' fall sports are over." Or we figure we can best communicate with God "in the quiet of a nature walk," or "once I get to church on Sunday," or "when the house is tidy and everything else is quiet." Or we say, "I'm feeling really stressed right now, but once I get all the things I'm worrying over resolved, then I'll be able to reconnect with God and make some time to work on my faith." And indeed, it may feel like any of those distractions keep us from connecting with God--but that's not because God isn't right there in the midst of the mess with us now. It's because we, like Elijah, have told ourselves we can't connect with God here--we have to wait until we get "there," wherever "there" might be.
That's our hang-up, not God's. But the thing about the God we see in this story is that God is willing to both go with us silently, even invisibly, on the journey now, and also to make sure we get to that spot in the future where we are finally ready for reconnecting with God. We may think it's only once the kids' schedule calms down, or once your social life is in order, or once you get past the third-quarter earnings report, that you can get back in touch with God... but God is there sending angels and bread along the way to make sure our souls don't starve in the mean time.
That might just mean that you and I can glimpse the presence of Christ with us today--even if all the other "stuff" of life isn't resolved yet, or still feels like a mess, or has lots of loose ends--if we will simply dare to open our eyes and ask honestly how we've been getting by so far. Where have there been messengers from God sent our way already--even if, at the time, maybe we didn't recognize the people who showed up in our lives as people God had put there? Where have we been given just the thing we needed to get along for a little while, to keep us going for a season until we reached a clearing and we could speak with God again? Where have we been helped along the way without seeing it in the moment--and might we recognize that today, even if we feel like we are in the middle of a crisis, or alone and brokenhearted like Elijah, or busy with a million things on the to-do list, or just unsure of what to do next, even in the midst of all that, the living God is there among us right now, and right here?
And even if we still feel we need to get to some future space or time where, like Mount Horeb, we can see God more clearly, maybe we'll spot Christ with us on the way too.
It was never God who needed to wait for an appointment at a special time and place. It was Elijah. But we can open our eyes to see Christ's presence among us right now, like a flash of light out of the corner of your eye.
Lord Jesus in the midst of our messes, let us glimpse your presence and know you are with us, making us able to keep going on the journey.
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