Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 20, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As some of you know, I serve on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. One of the many responsibilities of that committee is overseeing the process by which people gain approval for ordination in the UCC. The first time that the committee becomes involved with a person who believes that she has a call to ordained ministry is when that person applies to the Committee to be granted the official status of a person engaged in the ordination process. And one of my objections to the process as it is currently constituted is what we now call that official status. We used to call it “in care.” A person pursuing ordination was taken “in care.” Back when I was in seminary I was “in care” of this Conference. But a few years ago the UCC at the national level changed the terminology for this status from “in care” to “Member in Discernment.” They were going to call is “Person in Discernment”—PiD—but someone pointed out that in the medical world PID means pelvic inflammatory disease, so they changed it to Member in Discernment.

I wish they’d stuck with in care. I wish they’d stuck with in care not so much because I like that term but because I don’t like the implications of calling people who are pursuing ordination Members in Discernment. It’s not that they aren’t actually members of the church engaged in a process of discernment. They are. My objection has to do not with what the term Member in Discernment says about them. Rather, it has to do with what giving them the status Member in Discernment says about the rest of us. Calling these folks Members in Discernment suggests that discerning God’s call is an activity unique to these people, that the rest of us aren’t and don’t need to be engaged in discernment. Yet I am convinced that all of God’s people should constantly be engaged in a process of discernment, in an effort to discern God’s call to them.

We see an example of what I mean by being engaged in a process of discernment in the story we heard this morning about Elijah. In that story Elijah is on the run. He is the greatest of the Hebrew prophets. Earlier in his life he had discerned a call from Yahweh his God to preach against the sins of King Ahab of Israel—one of the Old Testament’s real villains—and of his Canaanite wife Jezebel—depicted in 1 Kings as an even bigger villain than her husband Ahab. So he went and preached against them, and he met with considerable success. He defeated the prophets of Baal, the chief god of the Canaanites, in a sort of Miracle Battle of the Prophets. Then he killed all the prophets of Baal, something I have a hard time calling good but which the Biblical authors found quite acceptable. Elijah’s triumph over and slaughter of the prophets of Baal provoked Queen Jezebel. She was Canaanite nor Hebrew, and Baal was her god. So she vowed to kill Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh, as surely as he had killed the prophets of Baal.

And Elijah runs. He’s afraid—with good reason. Jezebel is a pretty nasty piece of work; and when she set out to kill someone that someone pretty reliably ended up dead. Elijah has had enough. He had done what he thought was Yahweh’s will, Yahweh’s call to him, and now it looks like answering that call is going to cost him his life. So when we meet him in this story he is running for his life. And he’s running from his prophetic vocation, his prophetic calling. He flees into the wilderness far to the south of Jezebel’s Samaria. He ends up in a cave on Mt. Horeb, also known as Mr. Sinai, where Moses had received the law from Yahweh.

That’s when he hears the voice of Yahweh asking: What are you doing here? In the story Yahweh asks the question twice, and twice Elijah gives exactly the same answer. Basically he says: I’ve had it. I’ve failed, and now the people to whom you sent me are trying to kill me. Enough already! I’m outta here! And not surprisingly God will have none of Elijah’s excuses. God gives Elijah another prophetic commission and sends him back into the fray.

There are, I think, a few different ways that we can hear God’s repeated question to Elijah What are you doing here? Perhaps God is just seeking information. We’d figure that God would already know what Elijah was doing there, what with God being God and all; but in the Hebrew Bible God doesn’t always know everything about people. Recall God questioning Adam in the Garden of Eden. Or maybe God’s question “What are you doing here?” is a reproof, with the implied meaning that Elijah really ought to be somewhere else.

But I think that there is a different way to understand God’s question to Elijah. I think that God is calling Elijah to discernment. Up to this point in the story Elijah has been reacting out of emotion. He’s running from Jezebel out of fear. He’s not thinking clearly. He gets melodramatic: Take me now, Lord! Woe is me! It’s all just too much! By asking Elijah what he’s doing there in the desert of Sinai, so far from the place where God had sent him to speak truth to power, God is asking Elijah to stop and think. God is trying to get him to stop reacting and start discerning. To stop listening to his own fear and listen for the still small voice of God instead. To listen for what God was calling him to do at that point in his life.

After Elijah hears God’s question “What are you doing here?” he does actually discern a different path than fearful flight and longed-for death. The Biblical language is “Then the LORD said to him, ‘Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus.’” I would say in the language of our time that when he stopped running, when he spent some time in silence, when he slowed down enough to listen, Elijah discerned that God has a different will for him than flight and death. Elijah discerned that God had more work for him to do. And when he had discerned what God’s call to him actually was, he went and did it.

On the surface this story sounds like it is about something that happened to someone else a long time ago in a place far away. But when we see this story as being about God’s call to Elijah to engage in a process of discerning God’s call we see that the story isn’t just about something that happened to someone else a long time ago in a place far away. We see that this story is about us. God’s question to Elijah “What are you doing here?” is God’s question to each one of us. God’s call to Elijah to be in discernment is God’s call to each of us to be in discernment too. God calls in this way not just to Marci, who will soon begin the process of becoming a “Member in Discernment” in the Pacific Northwest Conference. God’s call to be in discernment is God’s call to each one of us. And it is God’s call to us together as a church. What are we doing here? What does God want us to be doing here? What is getting in the way of our hearing God’s call and in the way of our answering it?

These are not easy questions to answer. God’s question “What are you doing here” calls us into the sound of sheer silence. It calls us out of our fear, our of our inertia, out of our complacency with the way things are, out of whatever it is that is keeping us from hearing God’s call and responding to it. Discernment isn’t easy. Requires a lot of silence, a lot of reflection, a lot of prayer. It requires the support of a community. That’s why the process of becoming a Member in Discernment begins in the person’s local church, in the community that knows her best and can help her to do true discernment.

Discernment of God’s call isn’t easy; but I am convinced that God does ask every one of us, all the time, What are you doing here? And so I ask you, and I ask myself: What are you doing here? What are we doing here? Are we ready to answer God’s question? Are we ready to enter into the process of discernment? Are we ready to listen to each other? Are we ready to challenge each other? May we have the wisdom and the courage to answer God’s question: What are you doing here? Amen.