Test Your Hypothesis

Sermon Text: 1 Kings 19: 4-8 Sermon Title: Test Your Hypothesis “A hypothesis,” according to my high school biology teacher, “is an educated guess that should be either proven or disproven by an experiment.” To better integrate this lesson she announced that there would be a science fair, and that each student would form a hypothesis, utilize the scientific method to test it, and would then report his findings in a presentation, which sounded easy enough at the time, so I waited three weeks and didn’t start testing my hypothesis until a couple days before my assignment was due. My hypothesis was that exposing plant life to crude oil would be bad for the plant, but after only three days of watering one set of violets with water and the other set of violets with motor oil, interestingly enough there was no visible difference in plant growth or health. And that seemed really bad to me because one set of those plants needed to be dead, so I pulled off all the leaves to prove my hypothesis. Now that’s bad science and we know it. Coming to the truth takes time, but time is something we don’t always have – we need the answer now, so our second Scripture Lesson gives the account of Elijah alone in a cave convinced that he is a failure. Coming to this kind of conclusion should be predicated with discernment, tempered by time. If his hypothesis is that he’s failed than his hypothesis should be put to the test, but as you can see – he’s no longer wondering if he has failed he goes so far as to cry out to God saying, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” He is convinced already and it’s better to be convinced of a truth than to be convinced of an incorrect assumption, but it won’t take you long if you’re watching for it before you’ll see someone hold tightly to an untested hypotheses as though it were a fact. I guarantee that after watching television for 30 minutes you’ll see at least one person speak with baseless authority in favor of some untested hypothesis, forgetting how dangerous doing so can be. I was watching a survival show last week. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. These two people, a man and a woman, were in the jungle and they could only have one object of their choosing – everything else they had to come up with out of the jungle. They had no food, no clothes, no water, and while the woman started a fire with the matches she had with her the man went looking for something to eat. He chose to bring fishing line with him into the jungle, and now that I’ve seen this show I know that if you can only choose one thing to bring with you into a jungle that one thing should not be fishing line. They were hungry, so this man went off looking for food and he found a snake and killed it. The thing had black, red, white, and yellow stripes and you know that black, red, white, and yellow stripes are the tell-tale sign of what is probably a coral snake, a snake whose venom is a potent neurotoxin that paralyzes the breathing muscles, causing respiratory failure within hours. The man very confidently quoted a rhyme to the woman – red and yellow kill a fellow, red and black venom lack, which was supposed to illustrate the fact that he was bringing back, not a venomous coral snake, but a non-venomous snake that had a similar color pattern. So there they were – half-starved – and the thing that had the potential to save them looked so very much like the thing that had the potential to kill them. In such a situation, you must find a way to test your hypothesis, but these people didn’t have the time. They survived, but a good scientist will test that hypothesis, because assumptions need to be questioned. Theories put to the test or at the very least, before you despair, reaching the conclusion that you have failed, give it some time. After sleeping, eating and drinking, then sleeping again, Elijah can finally began to see the truth, and this is important because sometimes success looks so much like failure that the two are unmistakable. The only way to determine which is which is to put your assumption to the test by listening to God’s answer. Our faith could stand to learn a thing or two from my biology teacher, because even faithful people love making assumptions. We think we ought to know and if we don’t we’ll just act like we do. But sometimes being faithful is nothing more than accepting the rest and nourishment that the Lord provides. I heard a story on Friday night that illustrates such an idea. All of your church officers are required to give a statement of faith. When they join the Session or Diaconate they are required to talk about what they believe and how they have seen God at work in their lives, and one new deacon, Bo Holloway, told the story of receiving a phone call from Tom Price, a member of the nominating committee, who asked if he would be willing to serve as a church officer. Bo thought about it for a minute and realized that yes, it probably was about time that he started to give something back to the church that had given so much to him, but after deeper reflection he came to wonder if maybe what was going on was not that the church needed him so much as that he needed the church. He needed the church to call him away from a way of life with a demanding job that was taking time from his family and robbing his health, and towards a new way of life with redefined priorities. The Angel of God saved Elijah’s life with such a simple miracle – “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” Rest and nourishment saved him from despair, and if that sounds like too simple a solution to the problems that you face today, at the very least, put this hypothesis to the test. Amen.