FACEBOOK 2007:         
A PROPHET'S BLOG

Rev. Kip Gilts

I Kings 19:1-18

         Last week I confessed to many of you that I was a novice at Facebook – an online community established three years ago for college students.  One year ago, Facebook became available to anyone.  Last week I started my own page because I could.  I thought I ought to give you an update on the progress made so far.  I have a friend’s list of 55 friends.  My goal was to have as many friends as my age - 51.  On Wednesday I received a request from number 51.  I was so excited that I clicked my response button too quickly.  The little arrow on my computer was on “ignore”, rather than “confirm”, leaving me stuck at 50 for quite some time.  But I made it over that hurdle.   Now I am trying to learn how to use this social network device.

          One of the things I discovered in navigating through Facebook is the option to post and read “notes”.  This seems to be a modification of something that has been around almost as long as the computer – blogging.  Blog is a contracted word for Web Log – it is an on-line journal and apparently still quite popular with about 71 million blogs out there.  I wonder what a Prophet’s Blog would look like.  What was Elijah feeling through all the events of I Kings 17, 18, and 19?

          The year was around 800 B.C.  Elijah, a Tishbite, from Tishbe (of course) was called by God to confront King Ahab about the despicable behavior of the people of Israel.  The first thing the prophet did was to tell the king that it would not rain until he said so, then he left – for three years.  First, he went to a brook on the other side of the Jordan River, the east boundary of Israel.  He stayed there, drank from the brook, and ate what birds brought to him until the brook dried up.  Then he went north of Israel to Lebanon and asked a widow and her one young son for some food.  They were on their last meal, but he promised them if they fed the preacher first, they would not run out of food.  They never had too much, but they always had enough.  One day the boy got sick and died, but Elijah prayed for God to bring life back to the boy and God honored the request of the prophet.  Finally, Elijah went back to the king and asked if he was ready to listen.  He challenged the false prophets to a duel on Mount Carmel, near Haifa in Israel.  They would each pray to their God and the God who answered by fire would be worshipped.  The prophets of Baal went first and prayed all day – not a spark fell from their powerless, non-existent god.  Elijah prayed for 17-seconds and fire came from heaven, burning the sacrifice laid on the altar and even boiling up all the water that had been used to fill a trench around the sacrifice.  The people realized they had been duped, eliminated the false prophets, and worshipped the one true God.  Elijah then said to the king, “It looks like rain.” And the rains came.

Can you imagine the kind of blog this guy would have had?  Prayer and power were so closely connected.  The king raced home to tell his wife about the rain and the fire, about the contest and demonstration of God’s presence and power, and he may have mentioned something about 850 prophets being eliminated.  That’s where we pick up the story in I Kings 19:1-6.  Hear now the Word of the Lord:

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. ²Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” ³Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there. ⁴But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” ⁵Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” ⁶He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again.

          The Word of God for the people of God.  Thanks be to God. In this passage the author of I Kings exposed to his audience the vulnerable side of a powerful man of God.  This brief scripture lets me know that blogging is not all that new.  Certainly the way in which one expresses feelings may have changed, but the feelings haven’t.  Reading a prophet’s blog one would discover feelings of fear, futility, and frailty.

Fear is something even the most powerful people feel.

No one knows exactly what happened to Elijah, but most people believe he just snapped.  This prophet who confronted kings, ate what birds brought him, made bold promises and gave even bolder prayers-just snapped.  When he heard of the Queen’s vow to have him killed he was afraid and ran for his life.  He ran a long way – about 150 miles all the way from Northern Israel to Beersheba and beyond.

When he got to the lonely place of the wilderness, he found one solitary straggly broom tree that must have reminded the prophet of himself.  He sat down under that tree and prayed again.  Now the last prayer that Elijah prayed brought some powerful results.  Let’s listen in to this prophet of prayer and hear what he has to say.  He prays, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”

          Sounds like a classic case of burnout and while it may look rather comical 2,800 years away that a man who ran for his life for days, now wants to die, believe me, it’s no laughing matter.  Millions of people have been where Elijah is.  Tired, stressed to the point of brokenness, alone and afraid.  One thing you discover in this prophet’s blog is fear.  Elijah is scared. 

          I run into fear every week.  Last year at a leadership conference one of the speakers spoke of a common fear that if we stop for just a moment we will be exposed as incompetent.  So we run faster and faster, doing more and more – out of fear.  At the break, I shared with a friend that I sometimes fear that failure is just around the corner.  My friend, a powerful man in my life and in many others, looked at me and said, “It is never that far away from me.  Its hand is always on my shoulder.”

We are quite familiar with Elijah’s running and his fear.  If we could read this prophet’s blog, we would read about fear.  We would also read about a sense of futility, because…

Futility is something that even the most successful person feels.

          The good news for Elijah is that once he expressed his fears to God, the Lord gave him some comfort food.  An angel cooked him breakfast and served him hot bread and cold water.  He was served two helpings and then was sent on another long walk – this time over 200 miles.  He could have gone the distance in about a week to a week and a half.  Instead he took forty days.  He had lots to time to think.

When he got to the mountain, in verse 11, the Lord asked him a question that the Lord has asked many people many times, “What are you doing here?”

Elijah was depressed, he was scared, he was stressed out, burned out, bummed out and God asked him, “What are you doing here?”  That was the question Elijah had been waiting for.  I can imagine him walking through the Sinai Desert and up Mount Horeb talking to himself all the way, “I’m tired of this job, the pay is terrible.  I get no perks, no popularity that’s for sure.  I work all the time and for what.  Oh sure, Mount Carmel was great, but it won’t last.  Next year the false prophets will be back, the altars to false gods will be reconstructed and all my work will be forgotten.  What’s the use?  I’m tired of this job.  I can’t wait for God to ask me how I like it.  I’m going to give it to him with both barrels!”

And he did.  Listen to the second emotion that would have been expressed in the prophet’s blog – an expression of futility, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”   In other words, “I have worked my fingers to the bone to no avail.  What difference does it make?  Can’t you see? I can’t do it all.”  This is the expression of futility.

Don’t you ever get that feeling of futility where your soul wonders what difference does it make?  This past Thursday I was speaking to a group of United Methodist pastors about the “Nothing but Nets” effort going on at A&M UMC and other places.  I spoke with excitement about Coach Blair and both men and women from the Aggie Basketball program visiting us next Sunday from 4 p.m. – 7 p.m.  I reminded those pastors that the Texas Annual Conference wants to raise one million dollars for nets to protect the lives of children and their families in Cote d’Ivoire.  After the meeting one of the retired pastors said, “We have lots of money in a fund designated for Burundi.  I helped raise the funds and we had hoped to start a wonderful ministry in that tiny country - until they started killing each other.” 

His words pierced my soul.  I remember Sam working tirelessly to help a country that had captured his heart.  The work seemed to be all for nothing when the newly elected President of that country was assassinated in 1993 and over 300,000 people (5% of the country’s total population) were killed in the next two years in the massacre referred to as a Civil War.

          It is easy to be overwhelmed with a sense of futility and shout, “What difference does it make.  I simply can’t do it all!”

          And to the shouts of the weary prophet, God responds with a whisper.  But first look at how he prefaced it.  Elijah was instructed to stand on the mountain peak and wait for God to come.  First, a powerful wind came, but God was not there.  Next an incredible earthquake, like the one at Jericho, but God was not there.  Next a raging inferno and a mighty fire perhaps like the fire Moses saw nearly 400 years earlier on that same mountain when he was called to liberate Israel, only this time the Lord wasn’t in that fire.  After all the pyrotechnics were over, then “sheer silence” is what verse 12 describes.  The Revised Standard Version reads, “a still small voice.”  The New International Version says, “a gentle whisper.”  “A gentle whisper.”  God responds with a whisper, “You don’t have to do it all.  Just do what I’ve called you to do.  Be faithful.”

          Elijah was re-commissioned.  He was to find Hazael, Jehu and Elisha and anoint them to carry on God’s work.  The work was God’s.  Richard Nelson wrote in his commentary on First Kings, “God’s therapy for prophetic burnout includes both the assignment of new tasks and the certain promise of a future that transcends the prophet’s own success or lack of it.  In the light of such a future, life is worth living after all.”

If we could read this prophet’s blog, we would read about fear.  We would read about a sense of futility, and we would read about a feeling of frailty, because…

Frailty is something even the most independent person feels.

Elijah told God twice.  “I am the only one left.  I’m all alone and they want to kill me.  I’m just one and I can’t do it.”

To this confession of frailty God’s whisper comes to the prophet.  “You’re not alone.  You’re never alone.  There are 7,000 people who have remained faithful to me,” God said.

Several years ago I read the book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom.  It is not exactly a theological treatise about the after life, but it is a pretty good commentary on this life.  The key character was Eddie, a maintenance man at Ruby Pier, where he spent his entire life.  Eddie reflects on his life with sadness, “I was sad because I didn’t do anything with my life.  I was nothing.  I accomplished nothing.  I was lost.”

To this sadness the first person he meets declares, “No life is a waste…the only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

          Elijah was never alone.  He left his friend, Gehazi in Beersheba, his buddy Obadiah had assured him that there were 1,000 prophets that he had hid, and now the whisper of God mentioned 7,000 faithful members of Elijah’s community.  Oh, if he had only had Facebook, he would have known he wasn’t alone.

          I’m not sure that is true.  My daughter, Chelsea, wrote a paper about these cyber-communities a couple of years ago.  In it she noted, “A catastrophic loss is incurred through addiction to blogging as users are cheated of true interaction, suffer from a lack of intimacy in relationships, and cannot give what their souls long to contribute to fellow beings.  The blue glow of computer screens everywhere serves as a tragic barrier to experiencing real community universally craved.”

          Maybe we need to leave the blogging to someone else and like Elijah come out of the cave and be honest with God about our feelings of fear, futility, and frailty.  Perhaps we should tell God when we feel afraid, angry, and alone.  Then and only then will our souls be able to be quiet enough to hear the whisper of God assuring us that his eye is on the sparrow, of course he watches you.  Amen.