Fate, Choice, Chance

Moirai, by Lilith Darkmoon

Semicontinuous Reading: 1 Kings 19:1-15

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Ah, poor Elijah. He really saw things playing out differently in his head.

The thing you have to know about Elijah is that everything about him is larger than life. He is the greatest prophet of the Hebrew Bible, certainly the greatest prophet of the north, second only to Moses of whom he is a type. Elijah is a wonderworker, a thaumaturge, able to control the weather, command beasts, call down fire, and even raise up the dead! Of course, none of these are done by his own power, but by the spirit granted unto him by God.

As every great hero needs a great villain with whom to contend, so Elijah finds himself pitted against Ahab and Jezebel, the very worst of the many terrible kings and queens who rule in the northern kingdom of Israel. When Ahab refuses to relent from his abominable practices of worship and of rule, Elijah rescinds the protection of God, holding back the rain in the clouds until the king would acquiesce. But they are stubborn, these two, and the drought goes on for years.

Such wanton defiance of royalty guarantees a target on Elijah’s back, so he goes on the lam, dodging death, exiled from the Promised Land for his faithfulness to God. Then at long last he returns for a great and mystical duel: Elijah, the prophet of God, against all the assembled prophets of the pagan deity Baal. Down comes the fire, up goes the roar, and the people of Israel fall upon the prophets of Baal, slaughtering them to a man. What a climax! What a finish!

Yet even if Ahab might yet cede defeat, Jezebel’s made of sterner stuff. Not only does she swear to slay Elijah, she also sends a messenger so he knows his death is nigh. And note this—Elijah is afraid. This rather speaks volumes for Jezebel’s rage. Here’s a man whose God has just called down fire from heaven, proving to all His undisputed superiority over the false god Baal. Yet Elijah is afraid of the queen. If nothing else, she must be one formidable woman.

This is not how things were meant to go for Elijah. He had the great and final showdown. He won the battle of the wonderworkers, and handily to boot. Yet he’s right back to where he started: exiled, on the run, under threat of death. This isn’t how it ought to be for heroes. So he heads off into the wilderness, crawls under a broom tree—reminiscent here of Hagar—and says, “Enough is enough. Take away my life, O Lord, for I am no better than my ancestors.”

Here he’d thought he was hot stuff, a second Moses. But in the end, for all his struggle, all the years of fight and flight, Israel is no closer to God than when he’d started off. And seeing no-one left, no faithful steward of religion, he’s ready to give in and die. And this makes him, I think, eminently relatable. I mean, we’ve all been there, right? We’ve all been frustrated, defeated, had the rug pulled out from under us. We all act like we’re the only decent person left. And we just want to lay down and die.

But of course the angel of the Lord has neither understanding nor sympathy for mortal melodrama. He strikes Elijah—kicks him in the head, perhaps—and says, “Eat. Drink. Rest. Then get back up.” And Elijah, like a stubborn teenager, rolls over and goes back to sleep; to which the angel responds by trying again: “Eat. Drink. Rest. And get back up.” Your basic needs have been met, human. I’ve rebooted you twice. Now get up and do your job.

And what comes next is the climax of Elijah’s prophetic career: he gets to see God. Like Moses, he ascends the holy mountain. Like Moses, he is hidden in a cleft. And he is overwhelmed by fire and whirlwind, earthquake and noise. But God is not in these. God is in the silence. God is in the still, small voice that follows. Soon thereafter Elijah appoints his successor, Elisha, literally passing on the mantle. And then he is taken up bodily into heaven with chariots of fire.

But here’s what I want to focus on today: the path to God was not at all what Elijah would expect. It led through hardship, frustration, humiliation, and defeat. It was not some straight line to glory, to fortune and fame and success. Ultimately it would not be Elijah who would bring his people home. Like Moses, he got to glimpse the Promised Land before his heavenly reward. But it fell to his successor, as it had to Moses’ own, to lead God’s people safely to their goal. Elijah wasn’t the savior. He was just the messenger, one faithful servant amongst many.

We often pray for God’s guidance, but I wonder if maybe God doesn’t have just one path planned for every life. It’s not a single way that leads us to God, though often we might imagine it as such. Rather God is with us on the way; He is the Way itself. And He leads us out: out to the edges, out to the fringes; out to the little, the lost, and the lonely; the poor, the humble, the sick. So long as we walk the Way of Jesus’ love, we never need to worry whether God is with us. He never left us.

In quantum physics there’s this notion called superposition. It basically means that something isn’t necessarily one way or the other. It’s both. If we look at a photon, for example, expecting to see a wave, then we see a wave. If we look for it as a particle, we find a particle. The photon hasn’t changed, mind you, but our frame of reference has.

It’s like the marble busts in Disney’s Haunted Mansion. The eyes are carved backward, into the statue, so that no matter where you stand in the room, they seem to be looking at you. It’s an old stage trick. The statue doesn’t move; you do. Yet no matter where you stand, there it is staring right back. What if life is like that?

What if God doesn’t have one set path for you, one set plan, but is with us wheresoever we go in love—so that looking back on life, it always appears as though this is how it had to be, a thousand decisions and happenstances bringing us to now? And so we do shape our own destinies; while at the same time, this is what God had always intended, had always meant for us. It is fate and choice and chance in one.

Maybe life has not taken you where you’d expected. Maybe you’ve encountered frustrations, disappointments, failures, and betrayals, all conspiring to bar your way. Maybe you’d never imagined that you’d end up as you are. But the truth is that God is with you, no matter what. I can’t imagine that God causes us hardships, causes us sorrows. But I know that He’s here with us in it. And I know that no situation, no life, is so broken or twisted or off the beaten path that He cannot redeem it, cannot bring it to beauty and glory and everlasting life.

He heals the sick. He raises the dead. He takes the mess of your life and transforms it into your destiny; so that when we look back we can see how everything led us to here, everything led us to Him, everything led us to home. As it had to. Fate, choice, chance—in the end, it’s really the same, really all one. Have faith that God is with you, that He can work with whatever it is that you give Him. And trust that today’s frustrations, today’s defeats, are tomorrow’s victories.

We have but to look to the Cross, O Christians: there could be no greater defeat; there could be no greater triumph. If that’s what God can do with death—imagine what He’ll do with you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.