June 20, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

The Sound of Silence

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 29
Isaiah 65:1–9
1 Kings 19:1–15a

“Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

1 Kings 19:11b–12 (NRSV)

For Christians, silence is part of the discipline of waiting patiently for the kingdom of God. Silence is pregnant with expectation.

Stephen H. Webb
The Divine Voice

Soon after the volcanic eruption in Iceland, the Economist published a lead article observing “the charms of powerlessness in the face of nature.” This volcanic eruption was, the author observed, “a peculiar” and “blessed sort of natural disaster” in which nobody was killed and yet everybody was thrilled and terrified. The whole world witnessed a demonstration of nature’s force so powerful that human beings everywhere responded with awe and a recognition that we are indeed powerless in the face of nature.

Just in case we found ourselves charmed into passivity by this sense of powerlessness, the article rang a warning against the strangely satisfying and even thrilling sense of being put in our place by nature.

Even through the limited windows of television screens and cropped photographs in newspapers, people everywhere were able to experience the volcanic eruption as a sublime event. Upon hearing about the immense cloud cover of volcanic ash and the cancellation of innumerable flights, I remember feeling simultaneously awed and humbled, just as some of you may have felt.

Though we live in an era more technologically and scientifically sophisticated than ever before, we still, from time to time, witness such sublime demonstrations of the sheer force of nature that the biblical stories in which God’s self-revelations are associated with the forces of nature can still resonate with us. We can still imagine, as Psalm 29 depicts, the God of glory thundering so mightily that its sound breaks the cedars, flashes forth flames of fire, shakes the wilderness, and strips the forest bare and to which the whole world cries, “Glory!”

In a book entitled The Great Poems of the Bible, biblical scholar James Kugel writes that for the ancient Israelites in the land of Canaan, the sound of thunder and the sight of large, foreboding clouds rolling in must have been both a thrill and a relief. For in the ancient world, the gods were thought to be responsible for all the movements in the world. Gods were the movers and shakers, driving, pushing, and causing the movements of the sun, the moon, wind, and rain.

At the time Psalm 29 was composed, Israel had begun to imagine its God, Yahweh, in a new way. To be sure, Yahweh was still the God of Israel. No longer, however, were the Israelites a nomadic people wandering through the wilderness. Ever since the Israelites settled in the land of Canaan, they found themselves in the territory of Baal, the Phoenician storm god worshiped by Canaan’s current inhabitants. Yahweh, whom the Israelites had understood to be a God of the wilderness, began to take on new dimensions. His powers expanded over all the realms of life, including the agricultural realm that required life-giving rain. So the Israelites began to depict Yahweh, who in the past they had understood as a God of the wilderness, now with language the Phoenicians used to depict Baal.

Of course, none of this happened overnight. It took centuries for the Israelites to expand their conception of Yahweh—his realm of power and his role in relation to the gods of other peoples. Over time the Israelites came to develop a strictly monotheistic faith—a faith not only in their one God, but a belief that there is only one God.

On the road to a strictly monotheistic faith, as full of detours as the road was, we can situate the prophet Elijah. As writer of religious history Karen Armstrong explains, the prophet Elijah lived during a period of Israel’s history in which scholars have identified a pivotal movement called the “Yahweh-alone movement” (Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, p. 75). Armstrong describes the movement as carried out by a small group of prophets who wanted Israel to worship Yahweh alone and who were convinced that Yahweh could provide for all the wants of his people (p. 74). Elijah was the epitome of such prophets. Even his name meant “Yahweh is my God.”

The most famous story about Elijah is one that demonstrates his zeal for Israel’s exclusive allegiance to Yahweh. It is the story of Elijah’s showdown with the prophets of Baal, in which Elijah asks the Israelites, “How long will you keep hopping from one opinion to the other? If the Lord is God, follow him, and if it is Baal, then follow him.” When the people hesitate and make no response to Elijah, he proposes a contest between Baal and Yahweh. The prophets of Baal are to select and prepare a bull to offer Baal, while Elijah himself will do the same to prepare an offering for Yahweh. Neither will light the altar. Instead they will call on the name of their gods, and whichever god answers by fire is indeed God. Elijah famously wins this challenge when Yahweh sends down lightning on his own offering.

While the story is remarkable for its outcome, it is even more remarkable for the witness it bears to “one risky moment in humanity’s thinking about divinity” (James L. Kugel, The Great Poems of the Bible, p. 70). That Baal loses this contest has inevitable consequences: it marks the death of Baal in the ancient world. At the same time, the ascendance of Yahweh sets the stage for a new conception of God: a God who is no longer tied down to natural phenomena, no matter how great or terrifying they are.

This is precisely what we find in the lectionary passage we read today. The story in chapter 19 goes so far as to reveal a God who does not dwell in natural phenomena. You can imagine the surprise Elijah experiences when, after such a dramatic showcase of his power to control lightning, God now makes a point of revealing himself to Elijah not in the strong wind, not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that Elijah witnesses. These are the three natural phenomena with which divine revelation was typically associated in the ancient Near East. In this revelation, however, it is as if God intends to make a point—the point that God refuses to be identified with or defined as these things. As powerfully consequential as wind, earthquake, and fire are in the universe, God is even more so.

If it is a mistake to identify God with these things, it is also a mistake to think that God can be known in these things. There are times when modern-day persons exercising prophetic muscles claim that certain natural disasters are the work of God and that those who suffer from the natural disasters must have sinned and therefore are being punished by God through them. This kind of prophecy ignores and violates the remarkable lesson learned by Elijah: that God was not in the strong wind, not in the earthquake, and not in the fire, but that God was in “a sound of sheer silence.” Resisting even the conclusion of his last remaining prophet, Elijah, who understandably came to identify Yahweh with the most powerful forces of nature, God now insists upon his supernatural status. In the most nondefinable and intangible of ways, in the sound of silence, God reveals himself.

That God reveals himself in the sound of silence may seem to lead us down a path of mysticism. That is, in fact, what we find to be the case in what theologians call apophatic, or negative, theology. Negative theology is the attempt to describe God by way of negation, that is, by way of what cannot be said about God, and it usually is associated with a kind of mysticism.

This does not have to be the case, however. Prophets, like Elijah, have always been called to public life. They have been called to pay attention to moral, social, economic, political, and religious realities of their day. And from them, the church has learned that prophetic strength depends not upon being able to read into world events and natural phenomena how God is acting in the world, but rather upon questioning the certainty with which such claims are made. Every time we think we have pinned God down, God eludes us to show us what more he is and what more is possible. For this truth, let all the world cry out “Glory!”