Peaceful God in a Noisy World
Our world is filled with a tremendous amount of noise. Obviously, there are countless cars on the road, each with rumbling engines, many with blaring radios. People talk, laugh, sing, scream and make all other kinds of weird noises. TVs display movies, shows, and news broadcasts. And that doesn’t even count the natural sounds: birds singing and squirrels chittering, wind whistling through the trees, distant thunder rolling. But there is another, more metaphorical, kind of noise that fills our lives as well. We are constantly bombarded by information. News alerts, social media gossip, celebrity controversies, stories of conflicts and horrible disasters all over the world, personal stories from our friends and family, and our own internal thoughts over all of it.
This wash of information, all simultaneously demanding our attention, can result in strange experiences. We may experience emotional whiplash as we pass from joy, to sorrow, to laughter, to worry all over the course of a single thirty-minute local news broadcast. Wholesome stories delight us and family tragedies bring us down. We laugh at a comedy we watch on Netflix and then get a breaking news alert about children lost in a flood. After all this emotional whiplash, we may grow numb, feeling an inhuman, soulless lack of concern in the face of disasters. “As long as it isn’t happening here, I don’t need to worry about it.”
We may try to block out the more troubling news and focus on a life of temporary happiness, but there are limits to this strategy. Of course, some bad news will always break in, and one can only avoid disaster in one’s personal life for so long. Furthermore, the knowledge that you are keeping out the flood by simply blinding yourself to the troubles of the world may lead to feelings of guilt. Is it really right for us to ignore the stories of tragic deaths and terrible injustice in preventable tragedies just so we can feel happy? Certainly, the victims of these circumstances would like to feel happy too, but they can’t now. How can we just ignore them? And as if all that weren’t enough, there’s a larger problem. If we ignore the news to keep ourselves content, we relinquish whatever ability we had to join together to seek change to the underlying problems. If we ever want the world to be a better place, we need to let the noise in, and yet, we need to find a way to not be overwhelmed by it.
By the time we get to 1 Kings 19:9-18, our Old Testament reading for this week, Elijah has already encountered quite a bit of noise. He stood up to the corrupt monarchy of the northern kingdom, where king Ahab had rejected God’s commandments to worship the Canaanite storm god, Baal. After a successful competition against the prophets of Baal, proving that God had power while Baal did not, Elijah killed the false prophets, ending a catastrophic drought that had plagued the land. Despite ending the drought, Elijah didn’t find favor with Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, who had favored the prophets that Elijah destroyed. She vowed to put him to death, so he fled. After being fed by an angel, Elijah traveled to mount Horeb to speak with God. There was a lot going on for Elijah at this point: he survived a drought, criticized the most powerful people in the country, displayed God’s power through a miraculous offering, destroyed hundreds of people from a rival religious institution, ended a drought, received a death threat, fled to the wilderness, ate miraculous bread, drank miraculous water, and then walked forty days and nights to Horeb. This is a lot to take in, a lot of noise.
Elijah waits in a cave for God to appear, as “the LORD is about to pass by.” First, he hears a wind that is strong enough to break rocks to pieces, but we are told that the LORD is not in the wind. Then he hears an earthquake, but the LORD isn’t in the earthquake either. Next is a fire, but again, God isn’t there. Finally, the sound of absolute silence. The noise of the world is gone as the entire cosmos takes a breath. In the silence, Elijah knew that God was present.
Christians have a hard time justifying natural disasters. While a very popular theology in America says that free will is the reason people suffer, natural disasters upset that principle. Generally, the idea is that suffering is the natural consequence of our own sin. If we do something that makes other people not trust us, we deal with the consequence of being isolated from others. That is the suffering that directly results from our sin, but there is a problem when it comes to natural disasters. Who sinned so bad that it caused an earthquake or tsunami to kill thousands of people? How did free will affect tectonic plates? But the other popular explanation is perhaps even more troubling. Some people would say that God intentionally sends these disasters to hurt people. I don’t want to pretend that I have a satisfactory answer to why natural disasters happen under the watch of a powerful and benevolent God, but I do want to suggest that maybe we are looking at them the wrong way. At least in 1 Kings 19, God isn’t in the earthquake or the hurricane force wind or the fire. God is in the silence that follows, the recovery as the earth stands still and listens to the command of its creator to return to peace.
But what can God’s presence in silence tell us about the noise of information impacting our lives? We should note that the rest of the story isn’t silence. Silence is how God’s presence is initially made known, but then God speaks. God gives Elijah specific commands with regard to how he should proceed, not just spiritually, but in addressing the noise in his life. God speaks of meaningful political change and selecting a successor for himself in Elisha. God directly addresses the chaos that makes Elijah feel that his life is coming apart, and promises that he isn’t alone. A faithful remnant remains in Israel. He shouldn’t fall into despair or inaction.
The bombardment of information in our lives can leave us feeling overwhelmed and frantic. Fortunately, we don’t have a queen who has personally promised to have us murdered, so we are better off than Elijah in this story. However, the temptations to shut the world out and give up, be overwhelmed by the noise of it all and keep ourselves busy without doing anything meaningful, or simply to give into despair still impact us today. We can see in this story that God can and does directly address the problems we face, but God first comes to us in silence. This isn’t shutting out the noise of the world, rather this is the moment when the entire world takes a breath, bracing to hear God speak. While we shouldn’t shut out the noise forever, we can learn to take a breath with the world, find a moment of peace in the noise, and prepare our minds and hearts to hear how God calls us into action.
