Rector's Corner July 2007
I don’t think that it is an accident that the great leaders of the Bible were those who came from or essentially lived in the wilderness. Think about it. John the Baptist lived in the desert. Moses was keeping sheep in the wilderness when God called him to the burning bush. The prophets were men of the wilderness. Jesus Himself went into the wilderness from time to time and most significantly, spent most of His ministry time in the marginalized lands of the Galilee region. After Christ, some of the most interesting and spirit filled writings come from the Desert Fathers.
What is interesting about such figures is that they all lived their lives outside the margins. Elijah, in particular, was a man who never spent a great deal of time working the system or seeking to effect change from within. He went to the mountain to meet with God and lived away from the things of man. And when God told him, he wandered into the city to challenge the bankrupted King Ahab and his queen Jezebel. He visits for a quick prophesy about the coming drought. He stayed with the widow of Zarephath long enough to show her a bottomless cup and a resurrected son. He encountered the prophets of Baal in a showdown of God force. Otherwise, Elijah is a man outside the margins of city life, of protocol, and or ordinary things. He did not keep a date book. He did not have a My Space page. His newspaper was daily encounters with God and the kind of prayer time you and I strive for. He did not allow the trends of the day to alter his disposition or his way of life. He did not go to seminars to learn how to be better organized or better understood.
And Elijah was a man after God’s heart. He made a difference in his day.
I think about this when I think about the kind of Christian family we are becoming. We have in one sense gone outside the margins by exiting an organized body called TEC. This was an act of incredible courage which by necessity took us outside the realm of the organized and hurled us into the wilderness. Some of the rules that bounded our life before no longer apply now. We don’t send a delegation off to convention every year or struggle to do the parochial report by February. Our assessment is no longer demanded but our tithes given.
The challenge in these times is that of staying together in a wilderness place. As a body of different personality types we are moving together to be the best Christian Church we can be. Often we disagree about organizational ways and this is standard for a human group. But we have the Scriptures and we have examples of how it is we can move and make a difference. I am thinking of Elijah today.
Elijah was passionate about God and he was passionate about God’s kingdom. He called Israel to cast away its Baal worship and to return to God’s commandments. But mostly he sought God in the mountains and he sought God’s will. One encounter between God and Elijah bears note.
The showdown between Elijah, the prophet of God, and the prophets of Baal on Mt Carmel is found in 1 Kings 18. What strikes me about this is that the false prophets of the city worship Baal in a style in contrast to that of Elijah. The Baal worshippers danced about the altar they made in a display designed to manipulate the god they worship into answering them. They created a show which was designed for emotionalism and religious feeling and which depended on human competence.
It fit the style of Baal worship to a “T”. In Baal worship sexual orgies were used to get Baal’s attention and to arouse it to the action of anointing good crops. At its human
