The Second Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg
2nd
Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7C
June 22, 2025
“Why are you so full of heaviness, O my
soul? *
and
why are you so disquieted within me?”
In our two psalms assigned for today, we
read this verse three different times.
“Why are you so full of heaviness, O my
soul? *
and
why are you so disquieted within me?”
It could easily be the refrain for our
modern times.
“Why are you so full of heaviness, O my
soul? *
and
why are you so disquieted within me?”
There is so much noise in our lives and
in our world. And our souls just seem to
soak it up. Even in our hyper-connected
society, we find ourselves lonely, our souls burdened and disquieted, cut off
from God, our source of life and light and oppressed/overloaded with so much
noise.
And you know what’s crazy? We choose this noise all the time! The 24 hour news cycle. The text-threads. The endless doom scrolling on social media. The to-do lists. And don’t even get me started on the
leaf-blowers! (Oh, how I hate the leaf
blowers!)
Take a minute and think about how you
often choose noise in your life? Think about how you have done it just this
week? Just last night, as we were going
to bed, we heard the news that the US had dropped bombs on Iran, and instead of
saying a prayer for all those affected and going on to bed, what do you think I
did? I picked up my phone and started
reading as much news about it as I could.
Also, I can’t help but notice that we do it here, too. Just about every week, we fill up the silence
before worship with talking.
Why do we do this? Why do we choose the very things that are
making us disquieted and restless? And
even more importantly, how do we stop it?
How do we stop choosing for our souls to be disquieted?
Let’s look at our Old Testament reading
for today to gain some insight into all of this. Our portion from First Kings
picks up right in the middle of things with the prophet Elijah. Now, Elijah has gotten himself sideways with
the king and queen of his day, Ahab and Jezebel, who were quite corrupt. God has used Elijah as God’s mouthpiece to
tell Ahab and Jezebel to return to following Yahweh, but they have upped the
ante, worshipping the false god Baal and killing off the prophets of
Yahweh. So Elijah puts on a show where
he goes against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. He prophesies how God
will end the drought, and Elijah calls down God’s fire from heaven (while doing
some epic taunting of Baal’s prophets), to demonstrate the sovereignty of
Yahweh over all other gods. And then,
Elijah encourages the gathered witnesses to round up all the prophets of Baal,
and Elijah kills them all. That’s when
our story for today picks up.
After his tremendous victory, Elijah
goes on the run as Queen Jezebel threatens to kill him. We see God sending an angel to Elijah to tend
to him in the wilderness. The angel
provides him with food and encouragement to rest and to continue. Elijah runs all the way to a cave at Mount
Horeb (where God had given the 10 commandments to Moses), and at this point,
Elijah is feeling persecuted and quite self-righteous. When God asks him what he’s doing there, he
replies (quite full of himself), “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the
God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your
altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are
seeking my life, to take it away." God, tells Elijah to stand out on the
mountainside and God will pass by. And
then, comes the noise of several cataclysmic events: wind, earthquake, fire. But Elijah knows that God is not in
those. It is when Elijah hears the sound
of sheer silence that he knows that God is approaching, so he goes out of the
cave, and he encounters God in the silence.
And in the silence, God speaks to Elijah and reveals what Elijah is to
do next.
Where Elijah feels like he is the only
one left who is faithful to God, God reminds Elijah that there is a whole
community of people who remain faithful, and there is still work for Elijah to
do among them. God tells Elijah to
anoint two new kings, and to anoint his prophetic successor, and God reminds
Elijah that there are 7,000 people who are still faithful to God.
So Elijah leaves that encounter with God
in the silence with renewed mission and purpose. He finds courage in knowing that he is not
alone after having received God’s care for him in the form of food and rest. And he becomes renewed by a sense of a new
call-- that he is called to be an important part of the community of those who
remain faithful to God, and he leaves Mount Horeb and gets back to work.
So, what does this all have to teach us
about our own disquieted souls and how to stop choosing the noise in our lives
but instead making space for God to speak in the silence?
The Episcopal priest and spiritual
director Margaret Guenther writes about this encounter between God and Elijah
in her book My Soul in Silence Waits.
Here is what she writes:
“The
voice of God was not in the powerful, potentially devastating phenomena, but in
the silence. I try to imagine the
clarity and expansiveness of that silence.
Looking within myself, I am baffled and chagrined by my simultaneous
yearning and resistance. I am drawn to
the intimacy of that prayerful silence, and at the same time I am genius at
avoiding it. The silence of God… is
living, active, and filled with the Holy Spirit….The silence of God demands our
surrender. It demands that we shut up
and listen, abandoning our defenses and taking off our masks. [She continues,] Elijah, standing outside the
cave on Mt Horeb, must have felt helplessly open, as vulnerable and exposed as
a mortal can be. He must have wondered
if the wind and the fire would destroy him, if the earthquake would swallow him
up. When we let ourselves wait upon God
in God’s silence, we too become receptive and open. We rid ourselves of non-essentials… [She concludes] To wait for God in silence
demands that we pay attention. It
demands our awareness of subtlety and smallness. In the silence we become mindful of what
might otherwise be dismissed or ignored.”[i]
Where in your life is God inviting you
to surrender, to be vulnerable, to be open to how God speaks to you in the
silence? How are you being called to
choose the silence of God over the noise of your life or the world? Where is God inviting you to lean into
uncertainty, to relationship, to trust in God?
Consider ending each day of this coming week in intentional silence. You might consider using the Psalmist’s
refrain as a mantra:
“Why are you so full of heaviness, O my
soul? *
and
why are you so disquieted within me?”
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