The Sound of Sheer Silence

Recently I ran into a Grocery store to pick up a few items. But it wasn’t my local grocery store where I’m accustomed to knowing exactly where items are. It was a different Kroger and they had the audacity to set up their store in a different way. So I went in the wrong door because the pharmacy should be on the left. But it wasn’t. I had expected it to be the way it usually was at my Kroger. But the Grocery decided for a new presentation at this particular location. I had expectations and they were unmet. I had to learn something about the new layout.

I’m thinking about the innocent expectations we carry when it comes to hearing from God. When it comes to divine communication, we have a certain outlook on how things should go. We have experienced God in certain ways in the past which leads us naturally to expect that God will continue to communicate in just those ways. We all have a shared vocabulary about the ways in which we expect God to reveal God’s self to us. How God speaks, when God speaks, where God speaks, through whom God speaks.

If you watched movies such as The 10 Commandments with Charlton Heston, you learn to expect a certain epic version of God and God’s power. God’s mighty actions in the Exodus. That understanding of God acting in BIG ways is certainly a part of my religious imagination. That’s one of the ways I was told God communicates.

We expect to hear from God at church. Hopefully. You go to church with the gathered community expecting to hear about, and perhaps even to hear from God. So, the pulpit becomes a symbol for hearing from God.

There are those among us who might list Nature as a way they expect to experience God. People often remark about spiritual experiences while being in the woods under the sun experiencing the beauty of our world.

But what if all these expectations of where to find God—still good and right as they may be-- are at the end of the day too narrowly defined. Too conventional. Too limiting for the Living God.

What if we carry around false expectations when it comes to God’s voice, God’s way of speaking into our world.  What if there are in fact multiple reasonable ways to design a grocery store?

The ancient Israelites also had expectations regarding God’s voice and actions. Our passage this morning from the book of 1 Kings gives us a brief moment in the life of the prophet Elijah. We find Elijah in a cave at Mount Horeb. He’s in a cave, some might recall, because he is hiding from Queen Jezebel who seeks his life. She is mad at him for what he has done to her prophets. Elijah feels both zealous and lonely. And the word of the LORD comes to Elijah in that moment, in the cave, with his life hanging in the balance, and God tells him to stand on the mountain and wait for God to pass by, to pass over, to appear. Await a word from the Living God. What an incredible moment! God has told Elijah exactly where to go to receive a word from God!

Elijah is at the place, the very mountain, Horeb or Sinai in some biblical traditions, where God revealed the Torah or teachings to Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness. He is standing in fact in a place of major revelation. He is at the place where his people have heard God the clearest and he is waiting also to hear from God.

So, God tells Elijah to stand on the mountain and wait for God to pass by. Elijah is ready to hear a word. What will God say? How will God show up?

Well, first there’s a great wind, so mighty that it shatters mountains and rocks. Wind is so associated with the presence of God that the Hebrew word for wind is the same as the Hebrew word for spirit. And perhaps Elijah thought about that wind of God that hovered over creation in Genesis 1 OR the wind that blew back the waters at the Red Sea so that the Israelites could walk through on dry land.

BUT God was not in the wind.

Next, there was an earthquake. And perhaps Elijah thought he was doing to get to experience what Moses did at this very spot so long ago. Perhaps he recalls the stories that were passed down through the generations about the thunder and lightning that accompanied that divine revelation. Maybe he thought, just maybe God to show up just as God did last time in this place.

BUT, the story says, God was not in the earthquake.

So, next, there was FIRE. And perhaps Elijah thought “ah yes! I’m good with fire.” For you see Elijah himself has just called down fire from heaven in the previous chapter. That’s why he’s hiding in a cave. In just the previous chapter, Elijah has a duel of sorts with the prophets of Baal. These false prophets are not able to get their God to set fire to the sacrificial offering. But Elijah is able to call down divine fire and even though the offerings and altar are soaking wet, the fire burned up the whole offering and all the water as well.  Elijah thinks to himself, I know how to deal with fire. Fire is my specialty, my major in prophetic seminary. He had heard powerfully from God before through fire.

BUT, the story says, God was not in the earthquake.

Finally, there was the sound of sheer silence. “The still small voice” as the King James Bible puts it. Three words in Hebrew having to do with voice/sound, with silence, and with thinness or crushed.

Something Elijah had never heard before. A way to communicate that wasn’t a part of the tradition. Something new. Not something BIG, but rather something small. Not something external, but perhaps something within.

And Elijah heard the sound of sheer silence. He got the message. This new way of divine communication registered with Elijah, the prophet.

So, this remarkable story comes to us. It comes to us to remind us that our expectations have a great influence on how we expect God to communicate. That if we expect the earthquake, we may miss the fire. If we expect the mighty wind, we may miss the silence.

I recently came across a clever paradigm from neuroscience that reframes this story for us today. The scientist offered up the idea that our brain normally switches between exploratory and exploitatory modes. In exploratory mode, we are open to new experiences, we want to learn, we are willing to take risks, to try something new. In exploitatory mode, we rely on existing knowledge, we gravitate toward predictable situations, we think we don’t need to learn something new, we have enough information.

How will we set ourselves to exploratory mode and seek new learnings, new risks, new ways of hearing from the Spirit?

Perhaps our story about an ancient prophet will prompt us all to not expect the usual. To open ourselves to the still small voice of the Holy One. Listen! Listen God is calling! Calling through the sound of sheer silence.