1 Kings 19.1-16
2 Peter 1.16-21

 And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Lines written by Paul Simon on 19th February 1964, allegedly as a result of his penchant for playing the guitar in an echoing, dark bathroom with the tap running:  ‘Hello darkness, my old friend’.  He once summed up the meaning of his song The Sound of Silence as ‘[T]he inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly intentionally, but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other.’

Well, it makes a change from hearts and flowers.  Happy Valentine’s Day.

I’m going to suggest that for a more uplifting Valentine’s message, we might turn to the First Book of Kings, in which we find the same line about the sound of silence, but without the darkened bathroom. 

Elijah is fleeing for his life, in the latest twist of an ongoing struggle between competing religious forces:  the prophets of Yahweh, and the prophets of Baal.  Jezebel, with her husband Ahab, has instigated a purge of the prophets of Yahweh, and Elijah has just done the same for the prophets of Baal, so Jezebel has issued a dire threat.  It’s unclear why, given the times, she and not her husband should be the chief antagonist in this drama, but it shouldn’t be a surprise: she is a force to be reckoned with.  It’s a shame that our translation is missing a verse which can be found in the Septuagint: Jezebel responds to the killing of the prophets by saying, ‘If you are Elijah, I am Jezebel!’ before announcing her intention of killing him.  ‘Then,’ says our account, ‘he was afraid.’

So his subsequent journey is not a dignified one:  he runs away.  And then, he gives up.  He has done what has been asked of him thus far, challenging the cult of Baal, the god of storms and fertility, by proclaiming a drought;  winning the people over, at least to some extent, by showing the mighty power of Yahweh as he descends in fire; and then by rounding up and killing the priests of the cult.  And now, he has had enough.  ‘Take away my life,’ he says to the Lord.  After the mighty signs of God’s dominance and all-consuming power, comes this quiet resignation.  Solitary under the broom tree, he sleeps.

But the Lord is not only the God of rain and fire.  He is also the God of nourishment. How often have we, when life gets too much, been revived by a combination of cake and sleep.  This is a glorious precedent.  Just as the Israelites are fed with bread from heaven, so here, in the wilderness, the angel of the Lord provides cake and a drink.  And Elijah eats and drinks and sleeps, and is prompted to eat and drink again, as the angel of the Lord subtly

turns the prophet’s fleeing into a pilgrimage.  ‘Get up and eat,’ he says, ‘otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’  And thus fortified, Elijah keeps going through the wilderness for forty days and forty nights until he reaches the mountain of God we might more commonly know as Sinai, but which is called by these historians, Horeb.

Here, he might expect, like Moses before him, to meet God in a spectacular way. 

But the first thing that happens is a question.  ‘What are you doing here?’ says the Lord.  And the response from Elijah is a mixture of self-justification and complaint:  I’ve done all these things, the people have been thoroughly wayward, and now, they’re after me. 

The answer he gets is simply a command:  the command to get back to serving the Lord.  Stand on the mountain, says God.  But Elijah doesn’t do it.  At least not to start with.  As someone who always rushes to the window at home if anything exciting is happening outside, I find this passage particularly striking.  The wind comes, the earthquake comes, the fire comes, and yet Elijah, who has even been told to go outside by God himself, stays in his cave.

What is it that moves him to go outside, to cover his face, to know that he is in the presence of the Lord?  None other than the sound of sheer silence. 

On the other side of the silence, the previous interaction between the Lord and Elijah is replicated, word for word:  again, there is the question – what are you doing here?  And again, there is the self-justification and the complaint.

But on this side of the God-laden silence, things are different.  Out of the silence comes both an answer and a commission.  Our lectionary cuts the account off rather suddenly at this point, but in response to Elijah’s wish to stop, and his sense of defeat, the Lord names his successor, shows how the violence of Israel can be overcome, and promises to leave thousands of faithful people in the land.  So Elijah is sent out with a renewed sense of purpose – one which lasts even beyond his earthly life, as Elisha goes on to assume his mantle.

For us right now, the sound of silence can, in the Simon and Garfunkel sense, be deafening.  Speaking and listening have taken on new layers of difficulty as each of us stays in our cave, our voices unable to share songs.  And we are fleeing an enemy and a situation which can all too easily push us towards despair, to that deadly sense of resignation which pressed down on Elijah under the broom tree. 

So in these days before Lent, we too need to allow the angel of the Lord to turn our flight into pilgrimage.  We need to allow ourselves to eat and drink and sleep and eat and drink again, and so to be strengthened for forty days and nights, not of despair or resignation, but of the opposite:  of tough, purposeful journeying.

And then, we will know the transfiguration of our silence from despair to answer;  from resignation to commission.  ‘You will do well to be attentive to this,’ says the author of the Second letter of Peter.  He writes as one who has seen Elijah appear with Moses alongside the dazzling form of Jesus, and who has also experienced first-hand the voice of God on a mountain, and who knows that this shining light is but the precursor to the dawning of the endless day.  You will do well to be attentive to this. 

And as we allow God to make us attentive, as we know his presence and trust his strength, we will become more and more the people he calls us to be:  people who speak, who listen, who sing his love into the world. 

Amen