Second Sunday after Pentecost
June 22, 2025

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Senior Associate Pastor

Psalm 42
1 Kings 19:1–15a

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Our second scripture today is from the book of 1 Kings, chapter 19, the first 15 verses. First Kings is one of the six “history” books in the Old Testament that narrate the establishment of the kingdom of Israel and its dissolution into civil war and eventual exile.

The prophet Elijah appears in the seventeenth chapter. His calling is to resist the king and, especially, the queen of Israel — the northern half of the divided kingdom — as she attempts to wipe out the worship of God from Israel’s religious life and to kill all the Lord’s prophets, including Elijah.

It’s religious war, because Jezebel has prophets of her own, and in the story right before ours for today, Elijah has killed 450 of them.

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I learned, through a friend’s social media post, that the U.S. had attacked Iran last night. All it said was “Oh look: another war I’m already against.”

Jesus taught — and we have learned often enough — that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. And I think we know that that bill comes due while we are still very much alive.

War takes more than it gives, and that is true whether the war is one we sought or one that found us while we were otherwise going about our lives.

For Elijah, it’s a little bit of both. Indeed, a theologian reading this story observes that Jezebel’s actions — namely the expressed intent to kill Elijah inside twenty-four hours — aren’t really actions but reactions.

Elijah is the aggressor, and his aggression has been wildly successful.

But those who live by the sword will die by the sword, and Elijah is learning that lesson now as he runs for his life.

He runs and runs and runs, and in only a few words of the story, he’s gone.

Like, gone, gone. All the way to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah. And not only into Judah, but all the way through it and out the other side and into the area marked “wilderness” on the map.

He is as gone as gone gets. In fact, he’s more gone than he needs to be. He’s probably safe once he gets to Judah. After the initial threat, we don’t hear anything else from Jezebel, and there’s no part of the story about a bounty hunter tracking him across the countryside.

It seems his flight is from more than imminent danger.

After all, he leaves the last person in his life behind there in Beer-sheba to enter the desert, where he can be as solitary as a single shade tree and where he can conduct the business his journey is really about: quitting.

Elijah, the Lord’s prophet who has gone toe-to-toe with the powers that be and roused the faith of his people, is hanging up his mantle and leaving his life on the desert floor. He’s had enough, and anyway this calling of his doesn’t feel like something he can actually fulfill, at least not any better than any of the people who came before him could.

No. It’s enough now. Enough! Enough.

We reach a point of “enough!” the New Testament describes our life of faith as a race we run with perseverance and a good fight we fight to the end. And who of us can deny that there are stretches of that race and rounds of that fight when we want to quit, to say “Enough!” and throw in the towel.

Our struggle to cling to faith in the face of so much that makes faith feel futile — so much war and exploitation and just plain cruelty — can wear us down to the point of “enough!”

And the hardest moments may be the ones when we see ourselves clearly, as we try to do in our prayer of confession each Sunday, and come face-to-face with the reality that we’re not as good — not as faithful, not as peaceful, not as honest — as we know God wants us to be.

In fact, we may not be any better than all those who came before us whose mistakes we thought we were correcting.

Elijah was done. I think some of us know what that feels like.

God is not done with Elijah, though. And God is not done with us, and there are signs of that everywhere.

I endured a very challenging season back in school when I had some expenses piling up and no money with which to pay them. It was the paradox of the higher education lifestyle, where you borrow tens of thousands of dollars a year to pay for the privilege of having no money to live on. By which I mean I was fine. But I was broke. And I was ashamed. Friends would want to go to McDonald’s or to a movie and I would have to come up with an excuse to opt out, rather than to ask them to spot me the money. I certainly was not broadcasting my situation.

Then one afternoon I opened my campus mailbox to find an unmarked white envelope with a $50 bill tucked inside.

I never learned who it came from, and it wasn’t like I was going to ask around. What’s more, I couldn’t tell you what I used it for. But I’ve remembered it almost thirty years on as a kind of sign in that moment of my life.

Elijah looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. It’s a sign: God has not had enough with Elijah.

God is still providing for Elijah food and water, even as Elijah is professing his own inadequacy.

God is still calling Elijah to a way of life, even as Elijah is running for the hills.

God is still addressing Elijah by name — “What are you doing here, Elijah?” — even as Elijah talks only about everyone else and how terrible they are — to Elijah!

God is still appearing to Elijah with great signs of wind and earthquake and fire, even as Elijah hides in a cave and covers his ears.

God is not done with Elijah.

We may decide we’ve had enough of God — with faith and church. We may become unable to square the realities of this world and our own experience with faith’s claims about a loving God.

We may just want a break from caring so much about other people and the state of the world.

But even if we decide that we’re done, God will not be done.

God will still be God with us, even if we decide we’d rather be us without God. God will continue to provide for us in ways we may not want to acknowledge. God’s call on our life will endure.

Our name will not be lost to God, and God will never not already be reaching toward us to speak to us, to guide us, and to protect us.

There is nothing we can do to make God give up on us.

I spent about two-and-a-half weeks helping to run the Montreat Youth Conference in North Carolina earlier this month, where the conference preacher, the Reverend CeCe Armstrong (who is also the Co-Moderator of our denomination) ended worship every evening with this benediction: “Remember, I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”

With each successive service, the congregation would join her in reciting it, so by the last night we were all saying it together, to one another: “I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”

That seems to me to contain what God is saying to Elijah as the prophet runs and lies down and then runs some more and then complains and then hides: “Elijah, I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”

Which is good news, because we are inclined to say “enough!” before we know the whole story. There are factors in play that we don’t know about — that we can’t know about.

Think about Juneteenth, the national celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reaching populations still under Confederate control over two years after it went into effect.

On June 19, 1865, Union Army troops came to Galveston Bay, Texas, and announced that the 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state were free by executive decree.

If you lived in Galveston Bay, Texas, on June 18 of 1865, you may have had no idea the next day would become Juneteenth.

If your body and soul were being crushed by the institution of chattel slavery in the United States and you had no reason to believe it was ever going to be otherwise; if you had been fighting the good fight for abolition your entire life and on June 18 you were ready to lie down and die in despair that you were no better than your ancestors, there was a pretty important part of your story waiting to be written the very next day that you had no way of knowing about.

History teaches us to be cautious about rendering ultimate judgments about the fate of the world from our very limited perspective in place and time.

And our faith, I believe, inspires us to “run with perseverance the race set before us,” trusting that God is writing a bigger, better story for the world than the one we can see from where we’re standing today.

Jesus called that story the kingdom of God, and he said that it was coming near to us even now if we only know how to perceive it.

We surely will not perceive it if we lie down in despair.

God asks — demands, really — an account from Elijah about why he is where he is, and the account God gets back is, shall we say, incomplete.

Because while it is certainly true that Elijah’s contemporary Israelites have forsaken the covenant God made with their ancestors; while we know altars were torn down; while it’s clear prophets were being targeted, it’s also not the case that everybody was equally responsible for all of that.

In fact, Elijah seems to be laying at the peoples’ feet things the king and queen are doing themselves.

In fact, in the story right before this one, the people all fall on their faces and say, “The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God.”

So to say — twice! — that the Israelites as a whole are lost is missing an important part of the story.

Another important part of the story that Elijah’s reporting leaves out is that there are other prophets.

It’s just not right that he alone is left. Again, in the preceding chapter of the story, we learn about Obadiah, who, when Jezebel was killing off the prophets of the Lord, took a hundred prophets, hid them fifty to a cave, and provided them with bread and water.

So there is a community at least hundred strong that is missing from Elijah’s assessment of the situation he and the nation are facing.

Even the way the prophet appeals to God is missing something important. “God of hosts” is a royal and militaristic title for God that means “God of the heavenly armies.”

What calling God “God of hosts” implies, says one biblical scholar, is that Israel’s situation is a “full-scale battle; no quarter can be asked, and none given.”

Yet when God appears in the story, it is not in a powerful wind or a devastating earthquake or a raging fire but in a sound of sheer silence.

There is more to whatever it is that we are facing, and there is more to God, than we know or can grasp.

So what are we to do with that knowledge?

Go. Walk the way we’ve been given, which is a way of (in the words of our hymn) struggling, blessing, and praying.

Go. Get out of our cave. Stop wordsmithing our description of all that’s wrong. Go. On the way. There is work to do.

The struggle continues to see the kingdom of God come near, to see swords beaten into plowshares, to see justice roll down like waters, to see the hungry filled with good things. We won’t see that if we don’t go.

There is more to the instruction God gives Elijah here in the cave, more that was not included in the story as I told it.

It gets into some detail about a successor he is to anoint and a future king he is to coronate. All of it adds up to a future Elijah has a role in bringing about, even if he won’t be involved in it directly.

And all of that requires him to go and get back to the way. He has to come back down this mountain and rejoin the people God originally sent him to.

God has not had enough of Elijah. God still has a purpose and a calling for him. This is what the bread and water in the wilderness were for, to sustain him for the journey God still had for him, a journey Elijah couldn’t envision as he lay on the desert floor wanting to be done.

I hope that when we gather for worship, in this space and online, you are fed as by bread in the wilderness.

I hope that we are nourished by Word and sacrament, by the communion of one another, in the midst of whatever we are facing individually and collectively.

And I hope that not simply for our own benefit but for the benefit of the world God is still calling us to. I hope our common life and our worship is strengthening all of us for the way we return to when we leave this hour each Sunday.

May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church