Church on Morgan
When It’s All Too Much
I wonder who in this room, this isn't a test, you're not getting any points for this, but I'm just kind of curious, who in the room here this morning has ever participated in a kind of reading of scripture called Lectio Divina, if you have, will you raise your hand? So we've got a few folks, that's great. So let me introduce you to one of my favorite ways to read the Bible. And it will sort of challenge all of your preconceived kind of notions. But the underlying belief here is that the scripture that has been cared for and lovingly passed down for centuries, even millennia, we believe has done so by God's loving presence by the Spirit of God at work among those who wrote it and those who brought it together. And then every single time that someone sits down and opens themselves up to be read in many ways, by this book, we believe that's an invitation for God to show up and do something. So most of the time we read, we read for comprehension, we read a sentence, what does it mean, what do I understand, how do I apply it, whatever, that's a great way to read the Bible. But there's this kind of sacred reading, that's what Lectio Divina means, it's a sacred reading, which is where you read scripture almost as a prayer. And what I mean by that is, it actually sometimes helps to do this in community, but somebody would read a short passage of scripture kind of out loud and you would kind of prayerfully just listen to the passage. Now trying to understand it, just letting the words kind of wash over you. And there's this conviction that somehow whatever phrase or word that is in that text that God might most directly want to speak to you about will kind of emerge from the page, right? We're already getting a little woo for some of us, right? But you would just listen and you would listen for a phrase or a word. You would listen waiting for something to kind of float above the rest. And then somebody will read the passage again. And this time kind of a little bit more centered in that word or that phrase, you might kind of in kind of a gentle way, say, what is it about this word or this phrase that you want me to hear? What is it you're trying to say to me here, right? So you can imagine this will take you pretty quickly off the path of exactly what this text means and who it was written to and why, right? Like the word that might pop up to you is this morning rest, right? And you might hear the word rest and it might really grab you and you might the second time go, "God, why is it that rest is the word that's coming up?" And it might be that in that quiet sort of contemplative space, you hear that I just want to remind you, I just want to remind you what a gift the great rest that you've been receiving is this summer. What a joy it is to be alive. Another thing to give thanks for, right? It also might be rest is popping up because you are burnt out, you're fried. And I want to remind you of who I am as God and how you were made, right? This is sort of very gentle, open, mysterious way of reading the scripture that I didn't make this up, this is centuries old and much more spiritually mature people have passed this on. So you can trust this, I promise. And for those of us who are a little bit right-brained, I kind of invite you into it. And this morning, I couldn't help when I read this text, I just thought this would be such a great Lectio Divina text. Like I feel like I don't even need to preach a sermon. We could just read this passage and you could prayerfully listen and I could read it again and again, and I think we would do well. He himself, when a day's journey into the wilderness, and he came and sat down under a solitary broom tree, and he asked that he might die. It's enough now, Lord, take away my life from no better than my ancestors. And then he lay down under the broom tree and he fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, "Get up and eat." He looked and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He ate and drank and laid down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time and touched him and said, "Get up and eat." Otherwise the journey will be too much for you. He got up and ate and drank and then he went in the strength of that food for 40 days and 40 nights to horom the mount of God. Friends, this is the Word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God. Kind of bring you up to speed, need a little bit of context for this passage. Elijah is like the goat of prophets. There have been a lot of prophets, both within the Jewish-Christian tradition and prophets outside of it. But from within our perspective, our canon, our tradition, there were no prophets better than Elijah. He is the gold standard. He is the goat of prophets. He was such an influential and impressive human being that when Jesus showed up and people were trying to make sense out of like, "We have never seen anyone do anything like this." They were like, "Actually, is this Elijah, right? That the best they could come up with, the closest thing they'd ever seen to the kind of witness and power and miraculous stuff falling out of Jesus was that they had heard stories about a guy named Elijah who had a very similar experience on this earth. I mean, he has got some impressive stuff on his resume. Just to kind of like fill you in, you need to go read more about Elijah all throughout the Hebrew scriptures, but in just the two chapters right before here, in 17 and 18, you need to go back and read it. This is like epic stuff, especially kind of like Lord of the Rings trilogy, this kind of vibes. There are some massive battles and stuff going on here. But here's what happens. We're told in 1 Kings 17 that there is a king over Israel and his name is Ahab. The writer tells us that Ahab, that there had never been a king who angered God more than Ahab. It's like quite the superlative to have, right? You would not want that bullseye on your back. God is like, I have seen some wicked kings in my day, none more wicked than Ahab. This guy is a total piece of work and his wife Jezebel is often referred to as a queen witch. They were matching each other's energy apparently. King Ahab is just about as evil as they come. God says to Elijah, his prophet, his spokesperson, here's what I want you to do. This evil king has turned the hearts of my people away from me to false gods and terrible destructive ways of living. So I want you to go tell Ahab that I'm watching and I'm involved and I'm engaged and it's not okay. In fact, I'm going to turn the rain off until you and your people turn it around. And Elijah is like, well, how do I turn the rain off? He's like, no, no, you just tell him I'm going to do it. Great. And Elijah goes to the king Ahab and he says, because of the destructive way you're leading and God's people away from God's heart, it will not rain again until these people repent and come back, right? That's how troubling this is. So Elijah says it and sure enough, it stops raining and it doesn't rain for days, weeks, months. And God tells Elijah, you know, I understand this is a difficult assignment to tell a guy this wicked who has no problem killing people. And so here's what you're going to do. You're going to tell him a drought's going to start. He's not going to believe you. That'll give you enough time to get away and hide. God sort of knows Elijah is in a vulnerable position. And so he says, hey, I got this little stream that people don't know about. I want you to go to hide over there and you can drink from that water every day and God even brings ravens who bring him food, meat, I don't know what a raven meat doesn't sound, but he brings a meat and bread every morning, right? So Elijah has just said, there's a drought and it's because you're so wicked and I'm going to go hide for a minute and the ravens are going to feed me and I'm going to drink out of the stream. Well, one day the stream, the drought is so bad that the stream that God have provided him dries up. And now Elijah's like, well, you know, now what? And he goes, well, I want you to go to this widow's house in Xerafeth, right? Okay. So he goes to this widow's house in Xerafeth and says, hey, God sent me here to hide out with you. Do you have any water? She says, I do have some water. She's like, great. And you got some bread and stuff I understand too. And she goes, well, it's a bit of a depressing story, but I'm out here collecting sticks right now so that I can prepare our last loaf of bread. And then my son and I are just going to lay down and die. This is dark, right? We've come to the end of it. There's nothing left. We have enough left for one meal. There's no food anywhere in this place. Everybody's dying a famine, this drought that you were kind of instrumental in apparently, right? But go ahead. Come on in. And he says to her, well, listen, God sent me here. And so you go and you make that bread. And I promise that as long as it doesn't rain that meal, that bread, it will never run out. And so she does. She prepares him a meal and day after day after day, there's always somehow magically more bread and more water. And they sort of sustain themselves off of this. It's not much later that she calls out to Elijah, this woman, this widow who's providing him hospitality and cries out for him to come help her because she's discovered her son and he has no breath. He's not breathing. Maybe he's having some profound asthma attack, whatever, but he is dying. And she says, you've brought this into my house. Is it not enough of the inconvenience of having to host you? But now somehow he's always been fine and now he's not. And this is your fault. And at this point, Elijah's kind of had it. He's like, God, are you freaking kidding me? Like I got to go tell this guy there's a drought. I got to live off of Raven's food. I'm like doing Airbnb with a widow. We have the same little bread every day. And now are you serious of all the people? Her son is about to die. But this is ridiculous and he goes, can I have the child? He goes up to the upstairs of this home, lays the kid out on the bed and lays on top of this child three times. He says, God, would you please bring life back to this boy now? And this boy is revived. Life seeps back in. And at this point, God says, all right, I want you to go back and tell the king. I'm thinking about turning the rain back on. But tell them to gather all of Israel and all of the prophets of Baal, right? And so Elijah, who's been on the run, shows up this king who very much wants to kill him in all these prophets. And he walks into town with 450 of these prophets of Baal staring him down and he looks at the people of God and he goes, how long are you going to limp along? One foot in one direction and one foot in the other. At some point, you got to decide whether our Lord is God or whether Baal is God. You need to call it today, right? He says, so here's what I'm proposing. How about the 450 of you prophets of Baal? You set up a little altar, we'll bring two bulls into the middle. You slaughter one, we'll also slaughter one. You put your bull on this offering and you pray for your God, Baal, to send down fire on this offering that you're offering. And then I'll do the same. And so everyone's, they're like, yeah, heck of a deal, let's go. So these 450 prophets, they slaughter this bull, they put it on the altar, they cry out to their God for hours and nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Elijah at this point, he's a little bit raw and he goes, I don't know, maybe your God's meditating or something. I mean, perhaps he went on vacation. This is like literally what he's saying. Maybe he's on vacation. You know what? He could be just napping. Maybe you need to yell louder, right? He starts taunting them. They become so sort of distraught that it says that they begin to cut themselves as a sign of their commitment to the God. Like, look what we will do to ourselves. Look how we'll injure ourselves just for you to respond, will you please do something? Nothing. Then Elijah butchers his bull by himself puts it on this altar and then he asks those around him to go get as much water as they can and to come back and soak it all. The bull, the wood, he builds a whole kind of trench around it. They soak it with water like this man crazy, he says, do it again and he says, do it a third time. So much so that the whole trench is just floating full of water. Then he cries out to God and says, so that they might know who the true God is, would you send down your fire on this altar and immediately the whole thing is burn up and all the water with it? At which point the crowd is like, I think I'm going to go with this one, right? They gather up those 450 false prophets. They take them down to the river and they kill them. Elijah just had like when it comes to prophets, like he just got the gold medal, like this was a bit of a show. This is pretty epic. This is mountain top experience. This is vocational winning, right? And so that's why what comes next is so surprising. We're told that Ahab tells his wife Jezebel, who's often referred to as like a witch queen, right? If Ahab was like the most wicked king of all time, apparently his wife was a match. So he, Ahab tells his wife Jezebel, you're not going to believe it, but we just have a little showdown and that guy Elijah like set the place on fire and knows 450 prophets are all goners. They're done. He killed them all. And she is so mad that she says, I promise, may it be to me what happened to those prophets if it doesn't happen to him first? Basically, you're dead. You got to death warrant on your head. What you would imagine at this point, Elijah's like, bring it. What is this queen which got? Nothing. I'll just pray down another thing of fire and yet that's not what happens. He's terrified and he runs away, even leaving kind of his servant, the guy who had walked with him all of this time. We're told in this text that he went a day's journey into the desert, into the wilderness. And he came and he sat down under a solitary broom tree. I was like, what is a broom tree? Googled it. It's just like a big shrub. It's kind of what you imagine in the desert, right? It's like desert forever in one little like stick tree with a little bit of like stick branches. And the reason they called it a broom tree is they think that people used to rip those branches off and use them as a broom. It's just that spindly kind of sticky, barely leaf kind of tree in the middle of the wilderness. It says that he wandered for a whole day by himself in the desert till he found the single tree. He sat underneath it and he asked God that he might die. He said, it's enough. It's enough. I've had enough. Take my life. I mean, I've been thinking about this week. Is there any image if you have any sense of the kind of experience that Elijah kind of moment he might have found himself in, right? Is there any image that's more potent than an image of a single person sitting under a single tree that's barely providing shade in the middle of a desert, right? In fact, this week when I was googling what is a broom tree, it came up that there's actually a Christian retreat center called the broom tree retreat center, which I was like, figure out it, like that's it, right? But this is like the most powerful image I can imagine of what it feels like of just futility of like, it's just, this is it. This is how hopeless it has all become. Here we have Elijah, one of the greatest of all time, who finds himself completely at the end of his rope. It's just been one thing too many, one battle too many. And all he can see anymore in his life is the dark side. It doesn't matter that he just had like the most epic win yesterday. I mean, this many of us know this experience. So you can be like winning and you are dying, right? He is killing it, but it is killing him. He has been killing it for a while and it has been killing him for a while. He all he can think about is death. He's lost interest in the things that used to excite him. He's exhausted, fatigued, hopeless. This is friends, what we call depression. And on top of it all, he has this line that just stings. He says, it's enough, God, I've had enough. Take my life. And then he says, for I am no better than my ancestors. We don't know exactly what he meant, why he said that. But what's clear is he's not only is he depressed, but he's feeling a lot of shame about it. Like, as much of the profound miraculous acts as he's committed, he feels like he's a total failure. And part of the failure that I can imagine and one commentator pointed out, as part of why he might say, I'm no better than the ancestors, is he can tell in himself, in that moment, sitting in the desert, under a tree, feeling sorry for himself, that this is the same crap that the Israelites that he's been taught about, his whole life growing up did, the moment they were delivered from Pharaoh, got in the desert and said, we wish you had killed us back in Egypt, right? He's like, I know I'm being a drama queen, I'm no better than them. I understand on the moment that I've been delivered, the next moment I still just want out, just ashamed. So this week is I've been sitting with a story, I just, and I know this isn't true for all of us. Unfortunately, it seems that it's becoming true for more and more of us, but it's important that you hear from a person like myself, that if you are somebody who suffers with depression, if you know what it's like to walk through and experience some PTSD in your life, to experience some real trauma, to find yourself at the end of your rope, that like your story is represented in the scripture by one of the greatest of all time. And it turns out it wasn't just Elijah, that Moses had the same exact experience. After leading these people out of the wilderness, he cries out to God with the same prayer, just take my life. These are like the two goats of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah both found themselves at some moment brought to their end. So God sends Elijah a messenger, catches him under that tree, feeling sorry for himself in the middle of the desert, and he wakes him up and says, "I told you, this is what happens when you don't exercise regularly." You've been eating like crap, and maybe if you'd kept that quiet time up in the mornings, you wouldn't feel so disconnected from me. Let's be honest, you haven't been a great friend, so I'm not surprised you don't have any out here with you. Are we surprised that this is where we find ourselves when you spent 12 hours on your screen this week? Elijah, I warned you, this is what it looks like when your character doesn't keep up with your competency. That's my mortgage. That's not at all what God does, right? Sends an angel, an angel, not once does this angel minimize his pain, doesn't ever dismiss the difficulty of this moment, also doesn't tell Elijah, "Listen, it's all going to work out, doesn't give him a spiritual pep talk," or say, "What the text tells us is this angel gently touches him to wake him up, it says, "Get up, I made you something, I want you to eat." What a beautiful scene to imagine laying out there in the wilderness under a tree by yourself, an angel is standing by making you a snack, right? And not just any snack, but a hot cake, which I so love, right? This was none of that vegan nonsense. He made him a hot cake with a cool glass of water, I love everything about this. I'll be honest with you, I've had a moment or two in my life that felt like Elijah. I've had a moment or two where I couldn't get up out of the bed, and this sounds amazing. This sort of care sounds incredible, like I don't know what you think about angels, believe about angels, I don't know what I really believe about angels, but if this is what they're up to, like, sign me up, right? Like I think I solidly believe in angels now, I am pro angel, right? I mean the closest I don't, this is over share, but like listening to this feeling, I'm like, what does this remind me of? You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of going and getting the massage, being laid down gently in a cool dark room and somebody ministering to you with touch, and then gently waking you up and going here's a cool glass of water, there's a little snack waiting for you in the lounge, if you've never had this experience you need to. This is what angels are up to, I'm into it. Here's what happens to Elijah, and I love this too, we're told in all these one word sentences, he looked, he ate, he drank, he laid down, it's all he had, no big conversation, no giant thank you, no wow, this is amazing, just like, wow, angels, bread, all right, I'm going back to bed, right? And the angel stands by and then waits a moment, lets them sleep a little longer and wakes them up again, it doesn't want you to eat again, I want you to have another drink. This journey is too much, you're not going to make it if you don't, if you don't eat. This is the part that I think some of us just really need to hear, I love the parody of what's happening here, that Elijah who shows up into a widow's home, who's at her wit's end and without food and bread miraculously provides bread and sustenance for her. And it's in this moment that the very thing Elijah's been doing for others, pouring himself out for others, he gets to be on the receiving end of it. And that boy whose life had completely drained out of him that he lays on top of and prays that life would come back in, that that same God begins to breathe that life back into Elijah, that there's this kind of like parallelism here that's happening, the caretaker is being cared for, the person who's been carrying the burden is having their burden lifted. So this morning I've really just two simple questions for you and mostly I just wanted you to hear the story of what God's voice sounds like in the midst of despair. First question is if you find yourself there, do you recognize the angels that God's sending your way and will you receive the gift they're offering? More often than not there's been people in my life in those moments who've shown up friends, parents, children, therapists, psychiatrists who've said I think you need to take a nap. I think you need to clear that schedule. I think it would be really good time to go on vacation. What if we set up a meal train for you? Are you open to being cared for by angels? Can you see the gift in that? And then for the rest of us who for whatever reason don't find ourselves in that moment right now, by God's grace maybe never, do we have the imagination to be those angels? And I'll be on it, this is tough. I've got dear people in my life who suffer from clinical depression and it is hard not to get into the weeds of and I'm not saying that those things don't matter and can't help and get outside and take a walk and exercise in journal and eat better, that's fine. But there are moments when that is not my role, that is not my invitation or my call. But just to gently come alongside people and not minimize it, not dismiss the difficulty of it, not promise that it's all going to work out, but just gently care for and love and make space like God has here for Elijah. I just want to remind you this morning that this is the kind of care that God brings to the burned out and the depressed and those suffering from PTSD. This is the same God who years later would come and join us, would show up among a crowd that was overwhelmed, hurting and exhausted and would say, "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest, I will give you rest." I'm going to pray for us before I step down. This is one of my favorite prayers, comes from Compine, the book of evening prayer. This is kind of the last prayer you pray at the end of a day. We'll pray it here at the beginning, maybe we need it sooner than we thought. Now keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep and give your angels charge over those who sleep, tend the sick, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted and shield the joyous, all for your love's sake. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]