Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Wednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Earth and air, fire and water
Our bathtub faucet has sprung a leak. The water drips and a bucket underneath the spout is filling up. Our plumber buddy Mark and his crew will be here this week sometime to fix it. I should fix it myself, but … you know how that goes, I do this once every ten years, and Mark does it every day. I might mess it up; he won’t. And I’m just a little lazy. Right?
Elijah appealed to all the people and said, “How long will you straddle the issue?”
Yes, it did take me a few days to decide to call Mark. I like seeing him, visiting with him, caring for each other as we have done for 20 years or more. Elijah took awhile to make up his mind too. There are so many spaces in the story, as there always are in the Bible. I wonder if the insecurity and hopelessness Elijah showed us in the next chapter bothered him at other times too.
Of course it did! Elijah seems like a classic manic depressive, or bi-polar, personality. God kept on working through him, of course. All of God’s people have some kind of disorder. Our ancestors are Adam and Eve. We can’t help it.
Elijah said, “I am the only surviving prophet of the Lord, and there are four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal.”
But numbers don’t mean nothin’ if God is whispering in your ear. Elijah the prophet set up a simple experimental sacrifice to see whether the Lord Yahweh or Baal “is God.” He gave Yahweh several handicaps, but none of them mattered. And Elijah would not let the Baal people forget it.
Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal. “Call louder, for Baal is a god and may be meditating, or may have retired, or may be on a journey. Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.”
Nothing could rouse Baal, so after several hours the priests gave up. Someone told me today we should seek a place to kneel and say to God, “I am so tired of managing my own life.” We should say that again and again until we believe it.
Elijah created just such a place to kneel.
He repaired the altar of the Lord that had been destroyed. He took twelve stones for the number of tribes of Israel and honored the Lord with these stones.
I think without this initial homage that nothing would have happened on Elijah’s side of the sacrifice either. There would have been 451 prophets with nothing to show for their efforts.
Like a good magician, Elijah made his effort look more and more impossible.
Fill four jars of water and pour it over the burnt offering and the wood. Do it again, he said, and they did it again. Do it a third time, he said, and they did it a third time. And the water filled the trench and flowed around the altar.
This was at a time when there had been no rain for three years. I thought about all of this yesterday when I watched our bathtub faucet drip, and drip, and drip. I have taken running water for granted almost all my life. Drip, drip. Drip, drip, drip. Lean my face back and let the water wash me, cover my face, fill my throat. In the earth I’ve been given to inhabit, I’ve always had enough air and water to grow and be happy.
In Israel in those days, people were turning to Baal in hopes of the water they were desperate for and did not have. But now Elijah seems to be pushing away their hopes for water yet again. It won’t be long before he prays for rain and receives it, but right now he is calling down fire.
The Lord’s fire came down and consumed the burnt offering, wood, stones, and dust, and it lapped up the water in the trench. The people fell down on their faces and called out, “The Lord is God!”
There is more to this story. Elijah is overjoyed, of course, but he gets a little carried away and massacres the prophets of Baal. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel are very unhappy with the result of his simple experiment, and with the murder of their proprietary prophets. Life is about to get very complicated for the man of God.
But right now, on the mountain where Jacob once made his altar and Elijah now restores it, standing beside those sacred stones, Elijah is happy.
(1 Kings 18, Psalm 16, Psalm 25, Matthew 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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