Back in the day when I first became involved in the Ministers Council there was much talk of the organization as a labor union, a description some still repeat and believe. To be totally honest, I do recall early 1980s Senate discussion about the advisability of advocacy through adversarial action, such as striking for adequate compensation. I also remember thinking what an incredibly naïve impulse that was.
But that was then and this is now: the Ministers Council is and has been since its founding in 1935 our professional association of American Baptist pastoral leaders, governed and funded by us, not a part of the denominational structure or participant in its mission revenue stream. It has always been up to us to determine the Ministers Council’s direction to serve pastoral leaders, and to some degree our destiny in ministry through it. These days the energizing conviction of the Ministers Council is this: excellence requires a deep understanding of and participation in the kind of covenantal faithfulness that all professions must honor. It is our job to create for ourselves systems that strengthen that covenantal faithfulness and relationships that support it, so that our constituents know that we are people of our word, and we are able to be that.
When the Ministers Council Executive Committee met last February 14, Valentines Day, their hearts were definitely full of love – for you, and for all our colleagues in ministry throughout American Baptist land. During that meeting they planned this meeting as a space for appreciation of your ministries and renewal of your spirits, in the hope that you would take back home the passion to provide the same for members of your constituent Ministers Councils. They gave the meeting the theme name Good to Go: Collected, Connected, Commissioned, based on the structure of the theme Scripture they had chosen, I Kings 19. Their conviction is that we need one another to serve God faithfully and effectively. It is not good for the clergyperson to be alone.
By this the last day of this year’s Ministers Council Senate it will not have escaped your notice that Senate 2007 has been shaped on the theme of Elijah’s experiences in ministry. Elijah of course was a prophet in ninth century Israel, called to summon God’s people back to the covenant. The point of the summons was to make real God’s sovereignty through becoming a holy people walking together in God’s ways without limping like a bird between two branches at once -- in other words, moving forward firmly committed to God’s covenant as a whole people.
I hope that by now it is clear that there is a point in our focusing on Elijah. What are we to make of this character? On the one hand, he dared to challenge Ahab’s apostasy, raised the dead, brought down fire from heaven and was carried up into heaven in a chariot of fire. What a hero! On the other hand, he cowered from Jezebel, essentially tried to commit suicide by exhaustion and dehydration in the desert, confronted God with the conviction that he alone was zealous for the Lord, and, we might conclude, intended to die so that there would therefore be nobody left to bear God’s Word to God’s people. What a mess! In a heartbeat, the man full of faith was transformed into a man full of fear; from responding to the call to the response “I quit!”
Is it not often thus with God’s leaders, alternately called to and capable of great things; then burnt out and bitter, pessimistic and self-important? According to James, “Elijah was a human being like us” (5:17). Perhaps at times you see Elijah in yourself. I know that I do, now and again. It is all such a paradox, indeed, a downright mystery.
Which is what Martin Buber named his play about the prophet: Elijah: A Mystery. We know Buber in shorthand as the “I-thou” theologian, arising from his conviction that Israel or any people cannot become a people of God without faith between and among human beings. His philosophy of dialogue urges us both to meet others and to hold our ground, the very dynamics that allow a people to live together in a covenant relationship of equals.
The British theologian Paul Fiddes in his eloquent explorations of covenant among Baptists uses that same concept of mystery to explain how it all works: “In some mysterious way,” he says, “this eternal covenant, made from God’s side and by God’s own initiative, became actual in time and space when believers bound themselves to each other in faithful fellowship.” Later he continues the thought by suggesting that “covenant and communion in God are in fact mysteriously intertwined in both time and eternity, and that in this interaction there is a distinctive Baptist theme” (Doing Theology in a Baptist Way: Paper Two: Theology and a Baptist Way of Community, pp. 10, 11).
So let us consider the drama of Elijah in light of that mystery, and in the process consider our own dramas as well, in awareness that narrative structures life and guides behavior. In fact, researchers find strong correlation between what is going on in your current life and the story you tell about your past. Adults who are resilient and energetic and committed to benefit others tend to see events of life in reverse order, so linked by themes of redemption that each difficult experience is seen as exactly what leads to a better next stage (Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). The story that we live by determines much about the shape our lives will bear, as individuals and as organizations.
Back to Elijah: in literary terms, the structure of Elijah’s story recorded in I Kings 19 is called a chiasm. Without reiterating the content of our Old Testament 101 courses, we know that the chi is a Greek letter shaped like an X and the chiastic structure of a piece of literature presents story elements in a sequence moving toward the central point which is the main point, then resolves the elements by reversing direction from that center until the story reaches its consummation. Some time check out a chart that outlines the text as a chiasm (sample provided at the conclusion of this manuscript).
After stunning success Elijah runs in terror from Jezebel, fleeing his ministry and even his world; he encounters the loving sustenance of the God who has cared for him every step of the way from the very beginning; once physically fortified he journeys forty days and forty nights to stand on Mt. Horeb – think Mt. Sinai, in a replication of Moses’ forty days and forty nights on that very same mountain to receive the stipulations of the covenant of God with humanity; God asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?;” Elijah speaks the truth as he sees it -- “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
Now note here the echo of God’s words from the very first human drama, with that identical Hebrew word for “alone”: “It is not good that Adam (the earth creature fashioned from Adamah, the earth) should be alone…” (Genesis 2:18).
Elijah truly believes that he is in that not good state of aloneness. You know how it goes, when you are working day and night to serve God and it feels as if there is nobody there to lend a hand, nobody there to shoulder the burden with you, nobody there who even understands. It is not good for the human creature, the prophet of God, the clergyperson to be about God’s work alone, lest one end up fed up and burnt out and ready to resign, perhaps even ready just to give up and die.
In Martin Buber’s drama Elijah in taking his final leave from the world tells Elisha, the one who will carry on his work, “No one ripens into a prophet who does not learn to bear loneliness.” What we do with our loneliness in ministry will determine our capacity to stick with it.
At the central point of the I Kings 19 chiastic structure God appears to Elijah in what we call a theophany, an appearance of God to a human being. God appears not in wind or earthquake or fire but in a still, small voice. In that intimately present form God once again asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?;” and yet again even in the powerful yet personal presence of Yahweh Elijah complains, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
Whereupon God recommissions Elijah to his call, sending him back into the world and the ministry he had fled, to anoint others to continue the work. God sends him with the pointed statement that there are seven thousand faithful left in Israel who will be redeemed. In fact Elijah may feel lonely but he is not alone, except in his own imagination. He has simply failed to perceive the companions of the journey all around him. He has shut himself off from the companionship that would make the journey bearable.
I am intrigued by the Jewish custom even today of having a chair set aside for Elijah at every circumcision so that he will be a witness at all circumcisions of baby boys whose bodies are marked with the sign of the covenant. Elijah, who told God twice that there were no other Israelites upholding the covenant, that he alone was left, is given the opportunity in tradition to be reminded over and over and over at each circumcision that far from alone he is surrounded by a faithful cloud of witnesses extending through the ages and eternally. Not to mention all the baby girls also joined in God’s covenant…
In the fullness of time, in the center of time and of all our stories, there has come the most powerful theophany ever, in Jesus Christ. At the heart of the chiastic structure of all history stands a personal God whom we can see and feel and touch, whose story grabs hold of human imaginations, whose very Spirit stirs within human spirits. This God has come among us to draw us near, through the intimacy of a tiny baby wrapped in the human condition and of a suffering Servant nailed to a cross. This God resolves the elements of creation’s drama by redemptively wrapping up all the story lines from that center onward until the plot reaches its consummation. Even now that great reversal is moving forward toward its final outcome.
Yet we too can at times feel as lonely as Elijah and can be just as blind to the faithful all around.
But God does not leave us without witnesses whom we can see and feel and touch at any time. At the center of our stories every day God is incarnated in those friends who structure their lives on Christ’s story and who are animated by Christ’s Spirit. Look around you, Sisters and Brothers, they are here in the Ministers Council Senators gathered with you, they are here in the colleagues scattered across the United States and Puerto Rico, they are here in your Ministers Councils at home. We simply need eyes to see them and ears to hear them and hands to touch them, to save us and them from our loneliness and futility.
Perhaps like me you have dedicated some time to reading the Harry Potter saga, this summer culminated in the seventh and final book. Trust me, I won’t spoil the ending for you if you have not read it, since it will come as no surprise that while no matter how his story ends Harry is of course the hero even as and especially as he endures the loneliness of not knowing just whom to trust. Harry is a hero, yet not without all his friends: Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom, Luna Lovegood -- all remaining to the end loyal to Harry although such loyalty threatens their own lives. It is not an overstatement to say that even the hero could not have made it without a lot of help from his friends.
Here is the mystery that you and I inhabit, the narrative that structures our days, the tension that Elijah seems unable to manage. Yes, called by God to heroic endeavors, to minister to folk in the midst of sometimes nearly intolerable grief or in postmodern contexts that call for new ways to mediate the Old, Old Story, we do feel lonely, often; yet there are those seven thousand or so American Baptist colleagues in the ministry, not to mention those in other faith communions. God is incarnated there in holy friendships when we draw near to one another and share our stories in the midst of laughter and tears and, being Baptist, often a good meal that seems Eucharistic because God is so powerfully present in it. It is not good to be alone -- but we are never alone, no matter how lonely we may at times feel.
So the question for each one of us as we return home to our places of ministry is this: what story line will we live by there, what narrative will we tell and believe about our lot as American Baptist leaders? Remember the words of Paul Fiddes, how he discerns that in some mysterious way, this eternal covenant, made from God’s side and by God’s own initiative, becomes actual in time and space when believers bind themselves to each other in faithful fellowship.
We have the privilege and the responsibility of choosing the perspective that frames our stories. Each of us can recommit here and now to take our place in the great cloud of witnesses who are our colleagues in the Ministers Council and summon others to join us there -- or stand aloofly alone. More depends on that decision than just the faithfulness of an organization. At stake is our faithfulness in ministry as well as the faithfulness of our colleagues and, it is not too much to claim, the future faithfulness of the Church.
Scripture leaves the conclusion of Elijah’s story somewhat ambiguous, as is fitting. Some commentators see him totally renewed and recommitted for ministry as he leaves Horeb with God’s new set of instructions, while others perceive that God has essentially accepted Elijah’s resignation so that what he goes forth to do, and does only incompletely at that, is all about succession and passing on the ministry.
As individuals and as a professional association, how will our ministry dramas play out in the days and years ahead?
My prayer as we wrap up Senate 2007 is that any such ambiguities among us are resolved -- that each one of us is prepared to return home Good to Go: Collected, Connected, Commissioned to togetherness in ministry as our way of life. Amen.
Kate Harvey
Ministers Council Executive Director
August 14, 2007
Chiastic structure of I Kings 19
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19:1-4 Elijah flees from the world and prophetic ministry |
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B. |
19:5-9a Elijah’s renewal begins ? instructions for Elijah: “arise and eat”2 ? Yahweh responds to Elijah’s needs with food and water, and a suggestion that he go to Horeb ? on the strength of the food Elijah travels to Horeb |
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C. |
19:9b-10 “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ? “I have been exceedingly zealous . . .” |
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19:11a Elijah is told “go out and stand” |
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E. |
19:11b-12 Yahweh passes by |
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D’. |
19:13a Elijah goes out and stands |
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C’. |
19:13b-14 “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ? “I have been exceedingly zealous . . .” |
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B’. |
19:15-18 Elijah’s renewal is completed ? instructions for Elijah: “go and return” ? Yahweh responds to Elijah’s needs with a new commission and reassurance ? Yahweh tells Elijah to leave Horeb |
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A’. |
19:19-21 Elijah returns to the world and to prophetic ministry |
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~ http://www.directionjournal.org/article/?1418; 1 Kings 19: The Renewal of Elijah, Dan Epp-Tiessen
I Kings 19, NRSV
Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there. 4But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” 5Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. 7The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” 8He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.
9At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” 11He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 12and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 14He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” 15Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. 16Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. 17Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. 18Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”
19So he set out from there, and found Elisha son of Shaphat, who was plowing. There were twelve yoke of oxen ahead of him, and he was with the twelfth. Elijah passed by him and threw his mantle over him. 20He left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, “Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.” Then Elijah said to him, “Go back again; for what have I done to you?” 21He returned from following him, took the yoke of oxen, and slaughtered them; using the equipment from the oxen, he boiled their flesh, and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out and followed Elijah, and became his servant.