Help Along the Way

Scripture Lessons: Galatians 3: 23-29 and 1 Kings 19: 1-15a Sermon title: Help Along the Way Preached on June 23, 2019 Being around kids during the summer reminds me of how obsessed with fairness they can be. Whether here at the church or out on the playground, it seems like, “it’s not fair!” is all I ever hear. Again, and again, it’s “but she got a bigger piece,” and “I had to sit in the back seat last time.” Kids can be obsessed with justice, and so often their paying more attention to what everyone else is doing than what’s really going on around them. I heard a radio show this week all about a preschool classroom where the teacher, so tiered of her class tattling on each other, placed an old red, rotary phone in the back of the room, and without plugging it in to anything, told her students that if they needed to tell on one of their friends they could go and tell it to “the tattle phone”. It was a revolutionary success, in that the kids used it instead of constantly streaming to her. Someone had the bright idea to plug this phone in to a recorder so that the radio audience could hear what kids were saying, and this is some of what they said: Romana wasn’t listening to the teacher and Eli hit Kevin. That when Vera was playing family with Tommy, he kept trying to wake her up when she was pretending to be asleep. Also, Sally pushed Billy, and Thomas passed gas right in Eugene’s face (and he didn’t even say excuse me). The funny thing about all this, is that as far as these kids knew, when they got upset, went and told on their friends into the tattle phone, there was no one on the other end listening who could do anything about it, but this segment of the radio show ended with one child who went home and told his father that the tattle phone was broken. I’m sure his dad was thinking, “What do you mean it’s broken. It never worked.” His son said, “Dad, the tattle phone is broken. I told the phone that my friend Nicky was pinching me but after I told the tattle phone he still didn’t stop.” Now some of us have learned this lesson already. We that’s a problem. The world isn’t fair and sometimes you go tell the tattle phone and no one is listening, or you go and tell your teacher, but she says something like, “Well, life’s not fair.” That being the case, parents have to teach their children that sometimes they must stand up for themselves. Grandfathers lecture their grandchildren about personal responsibility, for sometimes we go looking for someone to help and find out that we’re that someone. So, the Prophet Elijah stood up to do something about it. He’s a great hero in the Bible. The backstory to today’s Second Scripture Lesson is that there was an evil queen named Jezebel. She was married to the King of Israel, but he was kind of a joke, so there was no one else to stand up to her idolatry and oppression, therefore Elijah stood up to her. It was a great success too. There was a legendary contest between her god, Baal, and Elijah’s God. Two altars set up. The God who rained down fire and lit his respective altar won, and Elijah did it. He triumphed, only then Queen Jezebel decided not to give up and to just have Elijah killed instead. That’s where the unfairness of the situation gets to him. The prophet Elijah runs for his life. He went a day’s journey into the wilderness, because after standing up against Queen Jezebel and all her priests, still unrighteousness and idolatry ruled Israel. He sat down under a solitary broom tree and asked that he might die saying, “It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he fell asleep. An angel of the Lord woke him and fed him that he might go 40 more days, making it all the way to Horeb, the mount of God. Then the word of the Lord came to him saying, “What are you doing here Elijah?” He answered, “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.” None of this is very fair, and Elijah was right to tell God all about it. He was right to tattle on Jezebel and to defend his own righteousness, for among all the great villains of Scripture, she’s one of the worst. And among all heroes of our faith, Elijah is among the most faithful. However, seeing his words in print, the part of his speeches that seems funny to me, is how often he uses the pronoun “I.” “I am no better than my ancestors,” he said. “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts.” Then, while they “have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left.” Even though there comes a time when we must stand up for ourselves and can no longer spend all our time tattling to our teacher, this kind of self-centeredness will cloud our vision of reality. Once we’ve learned to stand up for ourselves, we’re not yet out of danger, for if we live into a lie that it’s all up to us, we’re exactly where the Evil One wants us, because this way of thinking and being blinds us to God and holds us far from the truth of how things actually are. Thinking again of the radio show from the preschool, the journalist who set up and listened to the tattle phone asked the preschool teacher, “about how much of their time is spent concerned with tattling.” She said, “This isn’t scientific, but I’d say most of it.” The journalist responded to this statement by saying, “It’s amazing that in a world where they can’t feed themselves, dress themselves, or take themselves anywhere, literally able to do nothing on their own, they become so obsessed with fairness.” Maybe we laugh about that irony when thinking of little kids, but I can’t help but assume that God feels the same way about us. I can’t help but imagine God feeling the same way about Elijah “I, I, I,” Elijah said to God, but it doesn’t matter whether we’re down on ourselves, defending ourselves, or trying to show the world that someone else is really the problem, so long as we are the focus, we can’t see God at work, feeding us, dressing us, and watching over us by night. So, to get Elijah’s focus away from himself, a voice calls him out to the edge of a cliff on top of a mountain. You can imagine what this was like, for maybe you know already that sometimes clarity comes when we stand on the peak to see the great wide world around us. That was the case with a friend of mine named Jim Hodges. Jim was a member of the first church I served, and he was diagnosed with lung cancer. For a while, things were OK. He just had to walk around with an oxygen pump, but then he was hospitalized and I remember well the day he called to tell me that the doctor said it wouldn’t be long. That he didn’t have much time left. We were close, so it was hard for me to see him like that. When I got to his hospital room his wife Carol excused herself and I sat down by his bed. The first thing I asked was if he was afraid. Jim paused. Then he said, “I’m afraid Carol doesn’t really understand the maintenance schedule for the HVAC contract.” After another pause, he said, “Joe, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I see him.” I wasn’t sure who him was at first, so I just listened as he continued talking. “When I see him, what will I do? Will I laugh? Will I cry? Will I sing? When I see Jesus, I’m not sure I’ll know what to do.” Now Jim was from Texas and this happened in a hospital over in Lilburn, but as far as I’m concerned, he could have been meditating on top of a mountain in Tibet for how enlightened he was. His mind wasn’t on cancer, because he could see so far beyond it. There’s no question in my mind that there is no more miserable person than the one who thinks only of himself. I believe that those who love their neighbors as themselves have unlocked the secret to happiness, and those who trust the Lord have a joy within them that no hardship can touch, for they see beyond temporary hardship to love and joy. That matters, because we’re the kind of people who will spend all our time tattling on our friends, instead of rejoicing in our blessings. I’ve caught myself complaining about writing a stack of thank-you notes rather than celebrating the gifts I’ve received. We rage at the dying of the night, forgetting the glory of our days or the promise of our future, but when we stand at the cliff, we see beyond the temporary to glimpse the eternal. Then, we are like David who defeated Goliath. Like Paul who changed the world. Like Jim, who defeated cancer, even though it took his life. Because when we focus away from ourselves, we see our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, our ever-present help in times of need. Amen.