Elijah and the Angel
Elijah - Everybody Has an Angel
Sermon on 1 Kings 19: 5-13
“We are all angels with a broken wing, if we want to fly, we must hold each other…”
A hospital chaplain tells of seeing this motto on a poster on the wall in the office of one of her colleagues. With the sentence was the photo of a beautiful baroque angel who’d lost one of its wings. She thought that there was something true about this. Somehow each and everyone of us is “broken” – worn out – wounded – marked by life… and so the more, the older we get. Angels with a broken wing…
You may conjure up different images of angels. One of those beautiful angels which the old Italian painters painted for The Annunciation to Mary. Remember? Gabriel coming to Mary announcing the child to be born? Often in these paintings Gabriel has his hand held up as if he was asking for special attention…
I guess in our Protestant tradition, there are not as many mentions of angels… nor are there too many references to any Marys. Such things are considered catholic and only accepted at Christmas time.
But as my life has gone by, I’ve begun to understood angels in a rather more sophisticated way than mere decorations for Christmas trees and heavenly beings hanging from the rafters of old churches, and that they were more than useful guardian angels – whether people believed it or not … I’ve discovered angels in a vast number of biblical stories. I preached here on Trinity Sunday on the three persons (angels?) made famous in the Rublev icon of the Trinity, reflecting on the Genesis story of Abraham at the oaks of Mamre.
The reading today may have given you a foretaste of what I have to say, in the story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19 . We may read it as a story of an angel who awakens the prophet with its touch.
In his book “Everyone has an angel”, Anselm Gruen looks at biblical stories of angels who come to the support of people and show them the right way to go. In his book he’s chosen 24 fascinating images of angels who intervene in hopeless situations, who watch over people and protect them, who open people’s eyes and lead them to life. And each of us may be able to identify with one or the other of those stories, with one or the other person or angel. If it is not the Christmas angels heralding joyous news, it may be the surprising visitor to Mary announcing new life, or the deliverer of water and bread in Elijah’s story.
My hope for us today is that we can gain something for our own life story by
thinking about this angel who awakens the prophet with its touch. Elijah, a man full of fire and perhaps the greatest prophet of the OT, is going through a crisis. In a mighty struggle he’d triumphed over the priests of Baal and wiped them all out. He seems to be at the highpoint of his success. But then Queen Jezebel is after his blood. And Elijah, the fighter for God and his
people, is suddenly full of fear.
· He loses his will for life, his energy to carry on.
· He flees to the desert to save his life.
And there in the loneliness of the desert all, the burdens and painful moments of his life catch up with him and paralyse him.
· He’d fled to the desert to save his life, but he no longer has got the will for or the
· joy of life.
· He simply wants to die.
· He has had enough of fighting. He cannot go on any longer.
He had fought against the priests of Baal in the knowledge that he was fulfilling the will of God … But then he has the feeling that his sacrifice for God was all in vain. He sees no way out but death. He lies under a broom tree and falls asleep.
Desperate, depressed, deep down and disappointed – with the world as well as
with himself.
Elijah’s whole concept of life has fallen apart, his ideals and all he’d believed in.
In this hopeless situation he is unable to go any further. He has no path to follow.
He has lost his strength and aim in life. And at the moment when he is unable to help himself any longer, when he sees no way out, an angel comes to him and touches him. The angel wakes Elijah up, and shows him the water and bread he’d brought along. It reveals to Elijah a power that doesn’t come from within himself.
The bread is an image for all that we really need to live. It is an image for what
truly nourishes us – even when our plans have failed and our dreams have died.
And the water is not only there to quench the thirst of the desperate; but it
contains a promise that in Elijah life will flow again, that his paralysis will break
and his inner dryness will be filled with new life.
Bread and water in this story are the signs of the transformation that takes place
in Elijah, when the angel touches him in his hopelessness and wakes him up.
However this is not the happy ending yet. Although Elijah understands the message of the angel, - he eats and drinks – he still lies down and goes back to sleep again. Obviously in such a crisis as this it is not enough that the angel only touches us once…
I am sure, many of us can recognize ourselves in Elijah under the broom tree. We
all have experienced times when we were sick and tired of everything, when we
reached our limit, came to a dead end and faced times of darkness from which we
did not find a way out through our own power.
Life stories destroyed. Families fallen apart. Children go their own way. Partners
leave. We have exhausted our energies and are now left alone… and clutch at thin air. Somehow we all know this. And we know only too well, how it can then be high time for an angel to come and wake us up.
Sometimes it is a person who stirs us up and opens our eyes. A person who gives
us what we really need to recover and recuperate.
It can be the attention given, the friendship, the understanding, the mere
interest in us, that is the bread to nourish us. And still it often happens to us as
it did to Elijah: one time of smiling, touching, comforting, encouraging is not
enough… We need the angel again. And again.
And believe me: there are angels who come once, and twice – some as often as we need them… for weeks and months!
They touch us and raise us up. They open our eyes to resources that we may
already have in our lives. They do this as long as we need it, until we really see again, what we are living for, what life holds in store for us, who we are meant to be, and where God wants us to go.
The angel that wakes me up, can actually also come in the form of an inner sense
of peace that all of a sudden surrounds me, or my re-gained joy for life, my sense
of beauty… and the angel can be inside me: possibilities that we discover deep
within, wisdom and clarity which we find. And all of a sudden the world is all
right and as good as it is, and we can get up and set off.
If I look at my life, past and present, against the background of the Elijah story, I
discover all over again angels who have touched and awakened me, who have
rescued me and helped many wounds to heal at critical times in my life!
Angels can make us free. Angels can love. Angels do care. Angels bring us into
contact with the place where we like ourselves – just as we are. With all we’ve
gone through, and all that is still to come.
They come in the form of thoughts from God and the messengers he sends to comfort and sustain us in times of difficulty.
After 40 days Elijah reaches the mountain of God: Horeb. There he goes into a
cave to spend the night. The cave offers protection and shelter. After all the
fleeing and running away, finally a place to stay for Elijah, a place in which he
hopes to meet God.
But God is not where Elijah finds it cosy and good. God calls Elijah out of the just
entered security… up on the mountain, where the wind blows roughly in his face.
And then Elijah discovers that God is so different from all that he’d ever
imagined.
God is not in the storm that breaks the rock from the mountains. God is not in
the earthquake that leaves no stone unturned, nor in the fire that erases
everything… No.
God is in the “quiet gentle murmur”, as Martin Luther translates, or much more
poetically in the translation of the Jewish scholar Martin Buber: “God is in the
voice of drifting stillness”, the “voice of soft silence”.
That’s almost too beautiful to understand!
Silence is not enough for God. It must be a soft silence.
And what is the message to me?
After all this reflecting on angels and being touched by them?
That God comes to us in a gentle way, softly and quietly. God as a soft stillness, a gentle living breath… sometimes hard to sense.
Elijah’s angel, from the beginning of our story all the way through to the soft and
tender experience of God, would also like to lead us to the God whom we can above all meet in silence.
Every crisis we go through will also shake our image of God. Some images break
away. New ones come. And then at such times we need an angel to accompany us and introduce us to the secret of the totally different God. This God whom we can only sense, when we listen to the quiet and soft sounds within us, when we, like Elijah, go deep into ourselves and even cover our faces with a cloak.
Thus shielded, touched and awakened we can then find God who approaches us in silence, - and who is silently waiting for us too.
So let us keep some moments of silence in God’s presence as he touches us.
