1 Kings 19: 1-21 (links validated 1/30/24)

In high school and college, on my list of career options that I was considering pursuing was a career in journalism. I wasn’t sure if it would be print journalism (like newspapers or magazines) or mass media because I enjoyed my experiences in both forms. I had done everything for our High School and College newspapers, from writing stories, designing layouts, creating opinion pieces, and holding various editor positions. I had a stint on our college radio that attracted tens of listeners. And I was able to take some introductory classes in journalism. One of the lessons that came up in all those experiences and have stuck with me ever since was the journalistic cliche “If it bleeds, it leads.” It’s a crude saying that’s been around for generations pointing out the reality that the bigger the scandal, the crisis, or the tragedy, the more people would be talking about it and looking for more information about it...

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were playing a trivia game online. One of the questions that came up asked “This company since the year 2000 has used the tagline ‘What’s in your wallet?” We both got the question right – Capital One. I was surprised that this motto has been around that long and how quickly we were able to identify it. The marketing professionals who came up with the “What’s in your wallet” campaign explain that the question invites the viewer or listener to think about things like financial security, purchase power, and prosperity. At the same time, it is a clever way of planting doubt in minds about whether or not they have the right stuff to get all the satisfaction they are looking for in life. Of course, the intent of the ad campaign is to make people think that only this particular bank and credit card will make them satisfied, secure, and significant. And if they don’t feel secure about having the right things in their wallets, perhaps they need to reevaluate its contents...But to paraphrase that campaign, I kept hearing the Lord asking a deeper question in today’s scriptures: “What’s in your heart?”...

Mother Teresa (1910–1997) is rightly honored for how she embraced the material poverty of the poor. But that was only part of her call, and perhaps not even the most important part. She also entered into the spiritual darkness of the poor. That's the theme of her controversial book Come Be My Light that shocked both her admirers and critics. Published in 2007 to coincide with the tenth anniversary of her death, in letter after letter Mother Teresa describes in excruciating detail the spiritual darkness that plagued her for fifty years. She begged that these letters never be published. She describes her interior struggles as an absence of God's presence — an emptiness, loneliness, pain, spiritual dryness, or lack of consolation. "There is so much contradiction in my soul, no faith, no love, no zeal… I find no words to express the depths of the darkness… My heart is so empty… so full of darkness… I don't pray any longer. The work holds no joy, no attraction, no zeal… I have no faith, I don't believe." And what about her famously calm demeanor? "The smile is a big cloak that covers a multitude of pains… my cheerfulness is a cloak by which I cover the emptiness and misery… I deceive people with this weapon."...

I once read a story about Tommy, a little six-year-old boy in Kindergarten. For a couple of weeks before Christmas all the children in the class worked on a very special present for their parents and on the final day of school before the Christmas holiday vacation, each child, including Tommy, took the special present home, all wrapped up in pretty paper. Tommy’s father and mother waited for him outside the school, and when Tommy saw them, he eagerly began to run to them, carrying the special present in front of him. But in his excitement he tripped and he fell and the special present went flying through the air and landed with a sickening ceramic crash. Tommy began to weep and to cry so hard. His father tried to be strong. “It doesn’t matter, son” the father said, “it just doesn’t matter.” But Tommy’s mother was wiser. She knelt down next to her brokenhearted child and said, “Oh but it does matter—it matters very much” and she began to weep with her son...

Martin Marty is the dean of American church historians, a longtime professor at the University of Chicago. A group from our church went to hear him speak at Drake together with Bill Moyers – this was 22 years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11. He was already long retired even then, and today he is 95. Years ago, after the death of his wife, he wrote a moving book reflecting on the Psalms. He said that there is a summery kind of spirituality, a spirituality of joy and praise and thanksgiving. But Marty wrote about those times when God seems silent. Roughly half of the Psalms reflect a wintry sort of spirituality. The title of that book is A Cry of Absence. Marty wrote, Winterless climates there may be, but winterless souls are hard to picture. A person can count on winter in January in intemperate northern climates, or in July in their southern counterparts. Near the equator, winter is unfelt. As for the heart, however, where can one escape the chill? When death comes, when absence creates pain – then anyone can anticipate the season of cold. Winter can also blow into surprising regions of the heart when it is least expected. Such frigid assaults can overtake the spirit with the persistence of an ice age, the chronic cutting of an Arctic wind...

In search of another home or merely to escape precarious local conditions, persons who attempt to cross boundaries often meet horrific and fatal ends. A medical examiner in Pima County Arizona, has catalogued the remains of 2615 human bodies (between 2001 and 2016), individuals who probably died in attempting boundary crossings. At the time of this writing, Scott Daniel Warren is being tried (facing up to 20 years in prison) for exercising his religious freedom to provide water, food, and clothing to Kristen Perez-Villanueva and José Arnaldo Sacaria-Goday who were trying to cross the desert...

The late Henri Nouwen, Catholic priest, author, spritual giant, and professor at Yale, told this story: "This afternoon at three o'clock, my sister called from Holland to tell me that my sister-in-law had given birth to a daughter who was diagnosed as suffering from Down Syndrome.... "I know that Laurent and Heiltjen's love is being tested.... I pray tonight for them that they will be able to grow in love because of Laura, and that they will discover in her the presence of God in their lives. "Laura is going to be important for all of us in the family. We have never had a "weak" person among us. We all are hardworking, ambitious, and successful people who seldom have had to experience powerlessness. Now Laura enters and tells us a totally new story, a story of weakness, brokenness, vulnerability, and total dependency. Laura, who always will be a child, will teach us the way of Christ as no one will ever be able to do"

("There is an old fable that is told about the advertisement that appeared in the newspaper indicating that the devil was putting all his tools up for sale. They would all be laid out for public inspection with the prices marked on them. Those who went there were able to see that some were very treacherous tools indeed...")

It was very late at night when the young Baptist minister answered the phone. The voice on the other end threatened him with death, then hung up. The young minister walked into his kitchen, and with trembling hands put on a pot of coffee, then sank into a chair at the kitchen table. Listen now to his own words. “I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. “The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’ “At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fear began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.” That young minister was Martin Luther King Jr...

(" it is so that more than once, I've found myself skimming the 'want ads' --- or today's equivalent --- and wondering what life would look like if I weren't doing this. And yes, it is so that in a very real way some time ago I wandered 'a day's journey into the wilderness'... not giving up on life, no, but trying to distance myself from the beating down exhaustion of pastoral ministry....")

As I read the story, the opening lines of a beloved old hymn came floating into my mind. “Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come? Why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home, When Jesus is my Savior? My constant friend is he: His Eye is on the Sparrow, and I know he watches me.”..

You may well have been asked this question yourself by a child, perhaps your own, who simply wanted to know how God could be reached. I remember trying to address this question in a children’s sermon one Sunday Morning. I was still in seminary at that time, serving as an intern student pastor in a nearby church. One duty that fell to me was the weekly delivery of children’s sermons. There was a lovely group of about twenty children, ages ranging from about seven on down to three years old, sitting upon the steps in the front of the chancel. The “adult” sermon that morning was going to be about reaching God in prayer, so my task was to teach these children all about prayer in three minutes or less. Now, mind you, only a seminarian would attempt an assignment like this, and actually believe it could be pulled off. I had decided to tell them how prayer with God is like a conversation with a friend: we talk to him and he talks to us. In fact, prayer can be an adventure just as wondrous as talking to someone on a telephone. We can’t see them, but they’re still there. I even went so far as to bring in a visual aid; a toy telephone that responded when dialed, (Dialed! That tells you how long ago this was!), “Hi there! I want to be your friend.” This sermon couldn’t miss. That’s what I had reasoned anyway. I was just getting to the end of my three minutes with the children when I mentioned how talking with God was like talking on a telephone. Suddenly, one bright-eyed little girl looked up at me with wonder on her face and asked, “So what’s God’s number?” The entire congregation fell into uproarious laughter, and that sermon was, for all practical purposes, over.

Henri Fuseli (1741-1825), a Romantic artist from Switzerland, painted a figure and called it Silence. The painting seems to be more of an opposite than an echo of the Biblical text. Fuseli's painting (below) shows a single figure sitting in the middle of dark and gloom.

"The story is told of the boy who came forward for a children’s moment one Sunday at his church and the pastor asked the question of the children, 'Where does God live?' Little Johnny’s hand went straight up, but from experience the pastor knew better than to call on Johnny. So he said, 'Suzie, where does God live?'..." and other quotes

When I was a little girl growing up in Boston, our family vacations involved long road trips. What I remember more clearly than the destinations, though, is the food we ate along the way. Before each trip, my mom would hole up in her kitchen with a few of my aunts, and prepare a spectacular assortment of snacks and meals for the road. Fried plantains and banana chips; rice-flour-based “breads” like appams and idlis; dosas stuffed with spicy potatoes; crispy lentil patties called “vadas;” chicken biryani wrapped in single-serving aluminum foil “pockets;” and sweet cardamom cake for dessert. These were our “journeying foods,” and they made up at least half the fun (and the mess!) of each summer adventure. Sometimes we’d eat in the van, passing brown paper bags of banana chips and vadas back and forth between the rows of seats. Sometimes, my father would pull over to a rest stop, my mother would spread a bedsheet out on the grass, and we’d feast right there by the highway...

About a decade ago, within the span of about two years, the poet and scholar Jennifer Michael Hecht lost two of her friends from graduate school to suicide. She was shocked and disheartened. To cope, she read about the history of suicide and the arguments against it. She was trying to understand why someone would want to kill themselves and to find out if there was anything anyone could say in order to prevent them from doing so. She decided to collect her thoughts into an essay that she addressed to anyone who might be thinking about suicide. Her message was simple: stay. Life can be really, really difficult, she told her readers, but ending it all hurts the people who love you and also deprives the person you could be of a chance. Hecht aimed not to condemn those who had already lost their lives to suicide, but to prevent those who were thinking about suicide from losing their lives as well. Hecht later expanded her essay into a book, which examines the history of suicide and argues vociferously against it...

The most interesting part of "Avengers: Endgame" is the theme of salvation...

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