How to Pay Attention to Your Life

I Kings 19:1-15a

Do you know how to listen to your own life?  Can you pay attention to your own experience?  Are you able to discern the gentle movements of God’s Spirit down in the deep places of your life?  Most of us have a hard time doing this.  There are plenty of distractions.  

 

We cannot listen for the centering wisdom of God's voice in our lives if we are always distracted by what is loud, urgent, and dramatic.  We will have to cultivate the ability to pay attention to the "gentle whisper" of God's Spirit.  What does that mean?  And how do we do it? 

Every single one of us here faces some challenging set of issues, some lack of clarity about what the next week or month or year might bring.  I don’t care whether you’re eight or forty eight (like me) or eighty-eight.  Life always comes to us as an open question, as a maze of possible pathways.  Not only is the path through the forest sometimes difficult to see.  It’s also the case that external circumstances create stress, anxiety, pain, and frustration for us.  The question we posed for last week’s “Theology on Tap” went like this: “What’s the next thing in life you have to figure out?  And how does your life experience help you move forward?”  We talked about all kinds of stuff: how to be engaged in local politics, how to make a difference in your community, how to retire or change jobs, how to deal with the challenges of family life. 

The prophet Elijah reminds us that we’re not alone.  Elijah found himself in a predicament so stressful that he wanted his life to end.  Elijah was God’s prophet.  His job was to speak clearly in ways that would call Israel to faithfulness to the God who loved them.  His job was to point out what God wanted for them and from them.

Here was the problem for Elijah.  Israel’s king Ahab and his wife Jezebel were the worst leaders Israel had ever known.  Israel had some wicked kings, but Ahab surpassed them all.  Here’s how I Kings 16:30 puts it: “Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him.”  In an attempt to forge a political alliance with a neighboring people, Ahab took as his queen a woman named Jezebel, who was the daughter of the King of the Sidonians.  So King Ahab and the people of Israel began to worship a different God, named Baal.  Their entire lives were to be an offering of gratitude and praise to the one true God who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt.  And yet here they were, building altars and temples to a different god. 

This rivalry between the worship of Israel’s God and the worship of Baal turned violent, especially for the prophets and priests.  Queen Jezebel used her power to begin an extermination campaign.  She was rounding up and killing all of Israel’s prophets.  Elijah, in a counter-move, murdered 450 priests of Baal.  And it was at that point that Jezebel put out a hit on Elijah.  She wanted him dead within a day. 

So Elijah runs away as fast as he can.  Exhausted from stress and anxiety, he falls asleep.  And it is while he is asleep that we first see the depth of God’s care for him.  Twice an angel wakes him, encouraging him to eat and drink and rest.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is to go to bed, or to get some food or drink some water or take a shower.  Put differently, don’t waste your time praying to God for guidance and wisdom in your life if you’re not taking care of yourself in basic ways.  Don’t try to get by on five hours sleep a night and then wonder why you’re so stressed and irritable.  Don’t fill your body with processed food and sugar all week and then wonder why you don’t have more energy.  Sometimes God’s angel speaks to us in very simple terms.  Are you facing some challenges in life?  Do you need some clarity about how to invest your energy and make difficult choices?  Ok, first get some rest, drink some water, and eat.  Take care of your wonderful body that is God’s gift to you.  And then we’ll sort out the rest.

During the night, the Lord speaks to Elijah.  “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  You might want to insert your own name here.  “What are you doing here, Jared?”  Like many of us, Elijah complains about his life.  Then he is commanded to wait on the mountain for God to “pass by.”  The best Elijah is going to get is a flash of God in his peripheral vision.  A glimpse of God slipping past him; a blur of motion that he cannot quite name.  This is a reminder for all of us that you don’t get a direct look at God.  And in terms of our questions about life, you don’t get loudspeakers clearly saying what you should do next. 

Now of course many of us pray about the specific challenges we face and we pray for guidance about decisions we have to make.  So just a quick note about that kind of praying: it’s possible that God doesn’t care.  Let me explain.  One of my good friends changes jobs frequently.  And he’s a spiritual person so he is always asking several of us to be praying about his various job opportunities.  I suggested to him recently that God doesn’t care that much about his job.  He got defensive.  He said, “If God loves us, then God cares about the things that stress us out.”  True, I said.  But I’m not sure if God cares whether you’re working for this or that corporation.  I’m not sure that God cares whether you’re making X or X plus 10 percent.  In the end, it probably doesn’t matter.  What matters is whether your whole life is a form of faithful service to God and others.  I did pray for him.  But I think we had to agree to disagree regarding how much God cares about such things.    

Often we pretend to be helpless because can’t quite find the courage or the energy to move forward in ways that are healthy.  We aren’t sure about our own abilities and strengths, and so we search for some sign or clue from God that we should do [A] rather than [B].  Elijah’s story reminds us that most of life will have to be lived without any clear picture of God, without any distinct sound of God’s voice directing us this way and that.  The “gentle whisper” in the story may be for us the quiet strength of God’s Spirit which has been given to us – shaping our desires, fashioning our dreams, energizing our vision, connecting us with others and nature, and crafting our values and our character.  Because you have God’s Spirit as a gift from the risen Christ, you cannot underestimate the profound wisdom that God has already placed within you.  You do not need to learn something.  You already know it.  You just need to be reminded that you already have what you need. 

As readers of this story, we are to imagine the terror caused by the wind, the earthquake, the fire – the sheer destructive power, the majestic forces of nature – “but the Lord was not in” these events, we’re told.  What might be the wind, earthquake, and fire that draw our attention because of their noise?

 

Sometimes we’re distracted by the large questions of life: where will I live?  will I marry and have children?  what kind of work will I do?

Sometimes we focus too much on the major developments of life: childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, career and family life, retirement.  We can become too focused on outside expectations for where we are in life and what we should be doing. 

Sometimes we are too caught up in the polarized politics that stir our worst instincts – both on news programs and on social media.  Partisan news sources will make it difficult for you to follow Jesus.  You can’t gorge yourself on hours of partisan news and social media – whether it’s right-wing or left-wing – and then come to church for one hour a week and expect that you are a disciple of Jesus being shaped by God’s Spirit.  If we tune our lives to the noisy, clamoring, urgent sounds around us, we will never hear the soft and beautiful guidance of God’s Spirit.

For Elijah – after the noisy ruckus of the wind, the earthquake, and the fire - came a “gentle whisper.”  Because God was not “in” the wind, quake, fire, we are left to assume that this “gentle whisper” was God’s way of being present with Elijah.  And Elijah’s reaction confirms this: he covers his face with his cloak.  He knows he is in the presence of overwhelming mystery.

This time, Elijah hears the same question, and gives the same answer.  Has he grown?  Has he learned anything?  We’re not sure.  But since God was able to get his attention in the “gentle whisper,” God continues to give direction: Go back the way you came.  Now Elijah finally has a sense of how to put one foot in front of the other.  He is no longer stuck and confused.  He has listened to his own life.  He has listened to the gentle whisper of God’s Spirit.  And now he is finally ready to leave the cave in which he’s been hiding and move back into his life.

What might be the easy to miss “gentle whisper” that may contain our guidance for the journey ahead?  We often overlook what is simple and small, what is quiet and hard to notice.  So much beauty and compassion in our midst is overlooked.  So much that ought to dazzle us is missed, simply because we’re too busy or distracted.

A walk.

A flower.

Music that moves us or calms us or inspires us.

A book that enlarges our vision of life.

A lovely building or an especially cozy room in our home.

A prayer that gives voice to something deep in us.

The unhurried pleasure of preparing a meal.

Conversations with friends.

Several hours of uninterrupted work or accomplishment.

Making something: a poem, a meal, a painting, a quilt.

Helping someone: a neighbor, a child, an elderly person.

Remembering, reflecting, dreaming, sleeping, and waking.

All these activities are so ordinary, so small, so everyday, that we tend to dismiss the richness of their possibilities.  We devalue what is little and ordinary, as if God’s voice, God’s guidance, God’s way of being with us will always have to arrive in some dramatic and unusual way.

Your life is a spacious home for God’s Spirit.  That Spirit is God’s gift to you.  It calls you to a life that is beautiful, joyful, faithful, and generous.  It connects you to the world around you – to the trees and rocks and rivers and fields.  And it connects you to all the people with whom you share your life.  This is a source of wisdom and direction that is available to you at all times.  But it is not loud and brash.  It is not noisy and dramatic.  It is often small and quiet, as gentle as a whisper.  And so you will have to slow down.  And so you will have to turn down the noise of your life.  You will have to give your best attention to the goodness and love that is already yours because of the way God loves you.