“Listening: The Mystery of Miracles” 1 Kings 19: 11-21

Have you ever found yourself in a conversation that completely helped you change how you look at things? I often say that these are God-moment conversations, where God is blessing you with a moment to examine what you are thinking in a profound way. 

I found myself in one of these conversations a few months ago, by accident, as it often happens. I was attending a class about prayer. The teacher was talking about a very particular type of prayer, called centering prayer, and was explaining that in this type of prayer you simply pass by or put aside any thoughts you may be having so that God can speak to you.

And friends, it just wasn’t working for me.

As I was thinking about why I was struggling so much, it occurred to me that I was expecting God to show up in one way in this form of prayer, but often God would show up in my prayer life by bringing thoughts of people and things to mind, so I can pray about them. If I was putting those things to the side during prayer I felt like I was missing a holy opportunity. 

Here’s the truth - we are all different. As we look around this place, we all communicate in different ways. So why would we expect that God would communicate with each of, who God created to be so different, in the same way? 

Yet that’s exactly how we pray, right?

We hear about someone else who had a profound experience with God in a particular place, so we go there as well. Or someone talks about how they listen to God in prayer, so we quickly go to try that as well. 

When really God meets us where we are at. 

Elijah has just been through the ringer. He is living a prophet in a land where the King and Queen think that they have the final word - not God. He has predicted hardship to come upon the land, in the form of a drought. Then in the third year of that drought, God sends Elijah the prophet to that hostile King, Ahab, promising rain. However, there were some hard words that were exchanged first - that Ahab has troubled Israel because he has forsaken the Lord in order to follow Baal. 

Which led to a showdown of sorts between the prophets of Baal and Elijah around fire and rain and sacrafices, which ultimately led to the killing of the prophets of Baal, and Elijah fleeing from the wrath of Queen Jezebel.

In today’s passage of scripture we find Elijah in hiding, absolutely distressed. Angels come to minister to him, and tell Elijah to go and stand on the mountain before the Lord because God is about to pass by. And all sorts of awesome things started to happen - a great wind that could split the mountain. An earthquake. A fire. 

These are all places where one would expect God to be, right? The prophet was told that God was going to show up and yet God wasn’t in any of these great acts of might. God wasn’t in the things that even God could do. God wasn’t where Elijah expected him to be.

And then God showed up in the sheer silence. 

When Elijah heard the silence - that is when he recognized that God was drawing near so he went out to be in the presence of God.

How many times have we been there, friends? How many times have we asked where God was in the midst of a situation only to realize later that God was there the entire time? How many times have we completely missed God’s presence because we expected God to show up the way we wanted or in our timing?

So often we let expectations, what we think or want or hope is going to happen, block us from seeing that which is right in front of us. Church, God is not beholden to our expectations. God is going to show up how God is going to show up and it is our responsibility to catch the movement of the Spirit and follow. 

More than a few times I have had folks tell me that they wish that God would just show up and speak like God did in the times of the Bible. But when we step back and look at the stories found in the Bible, time and again its about God showing up, not in the expected ways but in the unexpected ways. Moses was not expecting God to be in the burning bush. Noah did not expect God to tell him to build an ark. Abram didn’t expect to be told to leave everything behind and go to a land that God was going to reveal to him along the way. Sarah didn’t expect to be pregnant in her 90s. Joshua didn’t expect to be the leader tapped to take the Israelites into the promised land. And when you fast forward to the new testament, folks certainly didn’t expect the Messiah to show up as a tiny, helpless baby who was born in a stable.

We need to set aside our expectation in order to embrace what God is doing right, here right now.

Another expectation trap that we can fall into is thinking that what other folks made of their God moments, what came out of being in the presence of God, listening to the call of God, has to be our path as well. After Elijah’s experience on the mountain he set out and found Elisha and he passed on his mantle to Elisha.

One of the things we used to do at the celebration of ministry service at Annual Conference is pass on the mantle. Someone from the retiring class would do something to symbolize passing on their mantle of ministry to the incoming ordination class. Sometimes it was in the form o wisdom through spoken word. One year it was by the washing of feet. Another year was by a stole. 

And they would quote this piece of scripture of Elijah passing on his mantle to Elishia. 

But what sometimes failed to be said to that incoming ordination class and those present at Annual Conference is passing on the mantle does not mean that Elijah and Elishia had identical experiences. 

It was not Elijah finding Elishia and then saying - okay I experienced God in this way so it needs to be the same for you. Or these were my experiences as a prophet now you are going to have them as well.

Not at all.

Yet, how often do we act like that as churches? Say well the church down the street is doing this particular ministry so I guess we need to do something similar? Or we did this one thing before and it seemed to work so let’s just do that again? 

No. We also need set aside our expectations that we need to be like any other church in any other time. Instead, we need to be looking for the God who shows up in unexpected ways to call us to unexpected things. 

The question is are we really listening? Or is there something in our heart that is blocking us from hearing and responding to the call of God in this time and in this place? What does God want to do in and through us if we only set aside our own expectations and instead embrace the movement of God? Amen.