Sermon: 1 Kings 19
In today’s reading, Elijah was in a hard place, alone.
In the previous chapter, Elijah killed four hundred and fifty prophets of the Canaanite/Phoenician Storm God, Baal, right after he successfully led an ingenious demonstration of the power of Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, over Baal, proving that Yahweh is the true God.
Elijah ordered the Israelites to slaughter the defeated prophets of Baal, right at the scene, before they escaped.
Elijah intended to overthrow the corrupt regime of King Ahab, who was misled by his foreign queen, Jezebel. However, it became apparent that the job was too big for Elijah. The demonstration of Yahweh’s power might have been successful, but the following acts of killing, hatred and violence were not effective. Jezebel, the Phoenician princess, became furious, killed many prophets of Yahweh and now was seeking Elijah’s death. Elijah’s greatest success turned into his most profound failure. He fled southward, aided by God, to arrive at Mount Horeb, where Yahweh had given the law to Moses. There he found a cave, and entered it to spend the night.
I wonder what feelings Elijah must have had as he laid down in his rocky shelter for the night. Fearful, angry, resentful, lonely, tired, … With the adrenaline of the pursued still surging through him - this shelter is remote and comfortless, yet he could die without it.
In this very hard place, the Word of God comes and asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Last week I was in Toronto, attending the DUIM (Deepening Understanding of Intercultural Ministry) program, and “What are you doing, here, Ha Na?” was exactly the question I asked myself when I was walking among all the Torontonians on Bay street in downtown Toronto. The program, which lasted five days, was on the campus of the University of Toronto, a beautiful place! At the time, flowers were blooming in the gardens of antique, historic buildings. I absorbed downtown Toronto’s air, energy and environment like hikers breathe in the refreshing, pure air of a forest.
However, the question “What are you doing, Ha Na?” was not “What you are feeling, enjoying your reflection in the shop windows, walking like the business people on Bay Street?” As a different Bible translation offers an alternative way to ask the same question, my “What are you doing?” was really, “Why are you here?”
I had registered for the program and spent several hundred dollars to attend DUIM because I was aware that I faced some limitations in my ministry. I understood that I would have to know more in order to to lead a successful ministry and life in all intercultural contexts, and I was eager to accept whatever I must go through in order to experience the transformation I would need to truly be authentic, to be empowered (rather than to feel limited), and true to myself and all I serve.
I am very blessed to tell you that the Deepening Understanding of Intercultural Ministry (DUIM) program in Toronto was an enormously transformative experience for me, beyond my expectation, just as I wished it to be. I have so many things to share with you, but I will not hurry to tell them all in one sermon, except for one lesson that might be relevant to today’s reading, the one lesson that had made it possible for me to move to the next level of self-awareness. This lesson became obvious on the third day of the programme; I reached a point of self-awareness that I had not really acknowledged or embraced before. There was something that I had carried for a long time, unacknowledged: anger. I hadn’t had a chance to acknowledge it or to see that anger was a big portion of the spiritual and emotional journey that actually moved me forward. DUIM offered me a wonderful opportunity to let my anger surface to a conscious level so that I could begin to deal with it and think about how I could engage with it. My friend shared a reflection with me that he is concerned “About the intense effort to deal with being a Korean, woman, young and all those things in ministry. Certainly others can throw up barriers and in not such subtle ways let you know that they see you as “other”. True. That can hurt me badly.
My anger about Korean patriarchy and hierarchy. My anger about many disappointments I experience in Canada when I see that white privileges rule, even in a conference or context which claims that it strives to be intercultural, or progressive. My gender, my age, my ethnicity, all those factors that contributed to me being treated as “other”, that led to my being sidelined and excluded, in both Korea and Canada - worth getting angry about! However, I had always named these negative feelings and energies as “distressed, or frustrated, or unhappy” not “angry”, UNTIL the DUIM participants were introduced to the following quote from Brene Brown and invited to discuss “How can these works - difficult work of exploring issues -such as power, privilege, racism - be an act of joy?”
Here are Brene Brown’s beautiful words. They really are lovely reflection on joy.
“The Greek word for joy is chairo. Chairo was described by the ancient Greeks as the ‘culmination of being’ and ‘the good mood of the soul’. The ancient Greeks tell us that Chairo is something that is found only in God and comes with virtue and wisdom. It isn’t a beginner’s virtue, it comes as the culmination. They say its opposite is not sadness but fear.”
On reflection, I shared that for me, joy’s opposite is not fear (or being sad) but anger. How challenging a task it would be to live and work with joy, while the waves of hard situations keep coming in. Sometimes they get me in an angry place! I shared that I really should ask how we can be resilient enough to not be caught up or consumed by a negative energy like anger but wisely employ it to build a better world and creatively express it to lead to change. But also, can we truly give ourselves the compassion and patience and understanding needed to allow anger and joy to work together in companionship?
Beverley Harrison says, in The Power of Anger in the Work of Love, “Anger is not the opposite of love. It is better understood as a feeling-signal that all is not well in our relation to other persons or groups or to the world around us. Anger is a mode of connectedness to others and is always a vivid form of caring. The important point is that where feeling is evaded, where anger is hidden or goes unattended, masking itself, there the power of love, the power to act, to deepen relation, atrophies and dies.”
My father has now become a saint, but when I was young, he was an angry person, often, immersed in his business, with little time or patience for anything else. He was like a volcano sometimes, to my family, especially to my younger brother. We would never know when his lava would explode. The personality type which I least like to engage with is those who are easily angered, or those whose way of expressing any feeling inside is just one: getting angry. But I now embrace the truth that I have been angry, that I have been in many angry places, being unhappy about a lot of things especially the system, culture, relationships that have treated me or others unfairly because of our gender differences, and otherness.
I will accept God’s asking, “What are you doing, Elijah? What are you doing, Ha Na?” I will be ready to respond. In some relevant places, only when I am in the right and proper places, I would answer, “I am angry.”
I was thinking, I am one of the last persons to get angry. I hate being angry. I have built up a great deal of the sense and inner capacity of self-control. I am (pretty much) a gentle person. Polite. Highly self-aware. Reflective. I am! That’s how I have been or have trained myself to be! I can confidently say I have always tried not to misdirect any negative feeling inside of me toward anybody without purpose or clear self-awareness. I have not. However, how to harness the energy of anger guided by self-reflection and wisdom would be my next goal. As my wise friend told me, “You don’t need to defend your being - who you are with your great sensitivity to things in this world and in relationships. There are things which we suppress but about which we should be very angry - being sad is an escape. Anger is the proper response to many situations, but it must lead to change.” (At this point, I embrace and remember the victims - most of whom wereLlatino LGBT - and all whose hearts and whole beings were hit by the shooting at Pulse, the gay nightclub in Orlando).
In today’s reading, the word of God says, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” God is about to pass by. The church is young, and God is not in a hurry! But God will pass me, you, us, if not now, then soon! Again! Not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire - God speaks in the sound of sheer silence: when we cultivate true patience and compassion toward our failures; when we have no words left to defend our failure.
To Elijah who stands at the entrance of the cave, God asks, “Why are you here?” “What are you doing here, Elijah?” God’s meaning, Don’t be here. Don’t be in the angry place, alone. Don’t be in the fearful place alone. Don’t seek only for your life, your single life. Don’t be here, alone. We must not be alone, as God tells us and Elijah in the last verse of today’s reading: “Go back by way of the wilderness of Damascus, enter the city, and anoint” the people whom God calls.
God doesn’t tell Elijah not to be angry, not to feel the true burden of his situation - he tells Elijah to act, to return, to keep working, to keep turning others to justice, to anoint and bless.
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