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by Joan Gray A sermon preached at the Office of the General Assembly Fall Polity and Leadership Conference, Tucson, Arizona, October 30, 2006 Mark 15:15–32 1 Kings 19:1–18Well, I was thinking about poor old Elijah, and what came to my mind was a play I saw some years ago in Atlanta. It was about three sisters who had come back to their home place somewhere in the South to take care of some family business. And as Southerners are wont to do when we get together, they were spending some time talking about the faults of their relatives. And the main relative they were talking about was their mother, who was a rather bizarre character. This woman earned her fifteen minutes of fame by hanging herself—but not only herself, also the family cat. And the sisters sat there trying to figure out why their mother would do such a bizarre thing. Finally, one of them summed it all up by saying, “Mama was having a real bad day. A real bad day.” We all know about bad days, don’t we? We know something about bad days. You wake up in the morning and you have a sick child. Instead of going to work, you go and you sit in the doctor’s office. Or, you call the washing machine repairman because yours is broken and the laundry is up to here, and he says, “I’ll be there at 2:00 p.m.” So, you get off work and you go home and you wait, and you wait. And then two and half hours later, he calls and says, “Oh, I’m sorry, can’t get there today. How about tomorrow?” And it’s a bad day. The copier at church breaks down just as you’re getting ready to do the bulletin. Your husband, wife, or significant other makes an unflattering remark about your figure; the dog bites the mailman; you lose your keys. It’s a bad day. And we all know about bad days. But then there are the real bad days. These are the days when something happens that leaves you breathless, hits you in the head, and your world starts to crumble. Like the day you get fired. Like the day they tell you your mother has Alzheimers. The day somebody you love tells you they don’t love you. These are really bad days. That’s the kind of day Elijah was having. His world had crumbled. As I meditate on this story, the first thing that comes to my mind is, “Why is Elijah having a bad day?” The day before, he had faced off against 400 pagan prophets on Mt. Carmel—just Elijah facing the hordes of Baal in a contest. The first one whose god sent down fire to burn up the sacrifice would be considered the true god. Elijah had played the part of a prophet, absolutely. He prayed to God, fire fell on the sacrifice and burned it up—burned up the rocks at the altar and licked up the water in the trench. Everyone knew who was God in Israel that day. And here we have Elijah one day later, hiding in a cave and sniveling, whining. “Take my life, Lord, I’m ready to go!” Elijah has crumpled; he’s turned into a wimp. And you have to wonder why. Well, there’s a one-word answer to that question, in this story at least, and that word is Jezebel—the woman we love to hate in the Bible. Jezebel comes along after Elijah’s triumph and tells him he’s going to pay the price. And she has the power to make every day in his life a bad day. And Elijah crumbles. He comes up against the hard truth that in this life, on this earth, for the servants of God there are no final victories. Here he has just given his all, he’s poured it all out on the top of the mountain. Some of you may know that feeling. You’ve preached that sermon that just takes it all out of you and you feel like you’ve said the last word and you’re ready to just sort of lay back and cruise. And then, seven days later, here it comes again. There are no final victories in this life for the people of God. There will always be Jezebels. There will always be one more trial or trouble. And we will have, as long as we live, good days and bad days. One of my worst days—in fact, I was having a whole string of bad days—was when my husband and I got out of school. We made the mistake of buying a house. We were young and idealistic and we thought, “Well, you know, we have a little nest egg here. Let’s buy a house!” I had gotten a call to a church and we bought a house to move on to the field where I was to serve. But before that house was built, that call evaporated. And we were paying the mortgage on one salary—one puny salary, may I add—and it always seemed that the money was running out. We never had enough. I’m the kind of person who wakes up in the middle of the night and worries. My husband seems to sleep through all of this. He sleeps like a rock and it’s really irritating. But one particular night, I was worried. I was lying in bed going over and over in my mind, “What are we going to do, what are we going to do, what are we going to do?” I was about twenty-four years old at the time. In the midst of that fear, wrestling almost with despair, a friend came along beside me. It was a hymn [“How Firm a Foundation”] I had learned as a child in the Baptist church. As I lay there in the dark, the words that came to my mind were these: When through the deep waters I call you to go, The rivers of sorrow will not overflow. For I will be with thee, your troubles to bless, And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress. That hymn reminded me in that dark moment of the truth that Elijah found out in the cave. God will never, ever, let us go. It doesn’t matter how bad the day is. Even on our very worst days, God will never let us go. But it’s easy to forget that, isn’t it? I don’t know where you all are these days, but my experience in my thirty years of ministry has been that often, when people are going through bad days, all they can see—all that is right in front of their face—is discouragement, and pain, and struggle, and the world seems to narrow down to our little piece of problem. And we forget that the constant message of Scripture is that God never leaves us alone, that God is bigger than all of our problems, that God’s hand is upon our world for good, and on our lives. I think about the cross of Jesus, the story that we heard. I think it’s a shame that we don’t read that story more often than just in Holy Week. It is a powerful story of a really bad day. That was a really bad day. It was a terrible day for Jesus. Stripped naked, spat upon, nails in his flesh—it was a terrible day. His friends had deserted him, and people were laughing at him, holding him up to public ridicule. It was a terrible day. And it was a bad day for the human race. On that day we took God’s purest, finest gift and spat on it, threw it back in God’s face, and said, in effect, “Get out of our business.” It was a bad day. It was a really bad day for God, too. But, thank goodness, we were not the only actors in that drama. We were not the only players in that story. God still had plans and purposes that were much bigger than we were. No matter how rebellious and hateful we were, the God of Elijah would not let us go. I hope you noticed in that story that God does not explain anything to Elijah. God doesn’t give Elijah any answers. God doesn’t explain why there’s a Jezebel, for instance. It doesn’t do any good to sit around asking “Why?” God does not give Elijah any answers. Instead, God says to Elijah, “I have plans and purposes. You don’t understand them. But I want you to go.” And so, Elijah goes out. We are not the only actors in our life’s drama. Elijah had a place in God’s plan, and Elijah had work to do for God. Now, we Presbyterians are in some difficult times right now as a church. My gut says things are a little better than they were a few months ago. But who knows what’s ahead? We are in some troubled times. But we are not the only actors in this drama. The people we’re dealing with, some of whom are very angry, are not the only actors in this drama. I did an interim a while back in a church, a very small church, that was really on its last legs. The members were struggling, trying to decide if they could become a new thing. After I’d been there two weeks, I had some serious questions. I mean serious questions. You know they don’t tell you much before you go in as an interim. You find it out afterwards. It’s sort of like getting married. Only temporary. But I had gotten to the place where I was wondering why I was there. I sat down with one of the elders and I was telling her how I was feeling. And she listened. She was a good listener. She looked me in the face after I had poured all this out, and she said, “You know, I don’t think God is finished with us yet.” I took that as a word straight from God to me. I was not the only actor in the drama that was going on in the life of that church. I don’t know exactly where we are as a church right now. These are early days yet. But I think we can safely bet that we will have in the future some good days. And we will also have some bad days. But in the midst of the bad days, I want you to remember this: In the midst of even the really bad days, God is with us. We are not alone. God has plans and purposes that are greater than the little slice of things that we can see. I want you to remember that the God who baked bread for Elijah will provide for us. And the God who holds the destiny of kings and queens in strong hands will be strong for us. Good days and bad days. They will come and go. Here is the good news: God is with us. God is at work. And in all things, God works for good for those who love God and are called according to God’s purpose. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Copyright Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). All Rights Reserved.
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