The Elijah Syndrome

          10/28/12                "The Elijah Syndrome"           Grace UMC

One of the narratives in the Bible that has always fascinated me is the account of Elijah up on the mountain with the still, small voice.  The attitude we see in Elijah seems to me to be so incredibly common, not least in myself, that I have started to call a particular habit of speaking and thinking, "The Elijah Syndrome."  But before we can spell out what that looks like, we have to understand the narrative as it stands and within its context.

Elijah was a mighty man of God.  He had performed many miracles before this and would perform many more after it.  Recently, there had been a three-year drought that had devastated the entire Northern Kingdom of Israel because King Ahab so stalwartly refused to listen to the God of his ancestors.  Elijah was the one who said the drought would come and had become almost synonymous with the right hand of God, bringing divine judgment down on the nation.  He was a man who was greatly respected and feared.

Eventually, when the time came for the drought to end, Elijah came to Jezreel, the capital city, and challenged the King and Queen along with their pagan prophets that they paid to keep in court.  He said to the people, "How long will you go limping with two different opinions?  If The Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him."  He took, depending on how you count it, either 450 or 850 pagan prophets up onto Mount Carmel and set up a test.  Whichever god responded by sending fire was the true God.  After the pagan prophets cried out for hours, wailing and ritually cutting themselves, Elijah simply prayed and God sent a fire that was amazing in its intensity.  After that, the drought ended and the people put the pagan prophets to death.

But as you might imagine, royalty do not take kindly to the overturning of their authority.  When Queen Jezebel found out about this, she dedicated herself to hunting down and killing Elijah, if it was the last thing she did.  This is where we pick up our text for this morning.  In spite of the fact that Elijah has just been part of a mighty victory, he is running for his life.  He ran so long and so far that he went from Jezreel, which is firmly in the Northern portion of Israel, all the way down to Mount Horeb, the mountain where Moses saw the burning bush which is just across the Red Sea from Egypt.  That night, Elijah stays in a cave in the mountain.

While he was there, God spoke to Elijah, saying, "What are you doing here Elijah?"  Clearly, the God of the universe is not suffering from misunderstanding, he is not simply seeking facts.  We might paraphrase that into a more modern idiom by saying, "Why in the world are you here, Elijah?" or "Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  Elijah's response is heartfelt.  "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."  Basically, Elijah is saying that he feels all alone.  Nobody seems to want to listen to God; so much so that they are killing the prophets and Elijah is the only one left who cares about God.

It is after that answer that God sends the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, none of which brought with them the presence of God, and finally calls Elijah out by a still small voice, or the sound of sheer silence.  Elijah, presumably in awe, makes his way to the entrance of his cave and listens to what he is sure will be a profound message from God.  Amazingly, it turns out to be the exact same question he had been asked, not long ago.  "What are you doing here Elijah?"  For whatever reason, Elijah thinks that the best answer he can give to this repetition of the question is a repetition of his answer.  "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."

I don't know why Elijah gives the same answer a second time.  Maybe he was confused, maybe he thought God hadn't heard him the first time, maybe he thought it was a test to see if he would be consistent.  Regardless of the reasons he may or may not have had, it seems to me that God was looking for something else altogether.  After God gets the pity speech for the second time, he takes a very different approach.  Paraphrasing somewhat, it is as if the conversation goes something like this.  "Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  "Well God, nobody likes me.  I know you have called me to be faithful but I feel so alone.  Everyone is out to get me."  Dramatic displays of power and gentleness.  "Let's try this again.  Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  "Well God, nobody likes me.  I know you have called me to be faithful but I feel so alone.  Everyone is out to get me."  (With a big sigh) "Alright Elijah, this is what you are going to do.  You are going to get up and head back North.  Anoint this person as king over Aram, anoint that person as king over Israel, and anoint that other person as your successor.  Oh, and by the way, there are over seven thousand people who have never bowed down to the false gods that you seem to have no idea about."

In the chapter just before our text for this morning, we read about Elijah coming to meet with Ahab.  On his way, he meets with a man named Obadiah that he uses to send his message.  Now Obadiah was not a prophet like Elijah.  He did not stand in front of mighty men and women and declare the word of the Lord to them.  Compared to Elijah's deeds of power, Obadiah would seem incredibly unimpressive.  However, he occupied a high position in Ahab's court and, when persecution was about to break out against the prophets of God, Obadiah managed to hide them in caves and gave them food to eat and water to drink.  His faithfulness wasn't showy.  It couldn't be or else people would have died.  And yet, I can't help but think that he is precisely one of those seven thousand people who have never bowed their knee to a false god.  It is not just that Elijah has never met the faithful people in Israel, but he might very well know them and yet not recognize them as faithful people.  And yet, they might actually be doing, in a sense, more than Elijah himself.

This is what I have called "The Elijah Syndrome," a conviction that I am all alone, that I am the only one who feels the way I do, that I am the only one who really takes God seriously.  The Elijah Syndrome can sometimes manifest itself in terms of pity, like Elijah seems to be doing primarily.  "My life is really hard because nobody else around me seems to understand God.  God tells me that his good news is for everyone, but people just don't seem to want to listen."  It can also be manifested in judgment.  "None of you poor souls really understand God like I understand God.  My relationship to God is special.  We are connected in a way that you do not share and you cannot share in it or have any kind of real spiritual depth unless you live out your faith like I do."

A bit of the problem with the Elijah Syndrome is that it is so defensive and isolating and yet, at the very same time, so offensive.  How can anyone respond to a statement like that?  If I am suffering from the Elijah Syndrome, I have a tendency, everywhere I go to be saying to anyone I meet, "Nobody really understands like I do.  People just can't seem to see the God who is right in front of them."  Of course, if I say that to you, I am implying that you are also one of those people who don't understand and who can't see God.  Not only am I saying that you don't understand, I am basically saying that you can't understand, since I have special insight that is not shared by the common person.

What can you say to me if I have that attitude?  I can always dismiss any input you have to offer by saying, "You haven't thought about this like I have.  You can only see it as an outsider."  You are just one of the poor fools that is, at best, ignorant of the truth, or at worst, out to get me as the one faithful person left.  The Elijah Syndrome cuts off all help from our brothers and sisters in Christ and isolates the person in a cave of self-pity and self-righteousness.

The Elijah Syndrome is not something I read about in a book, though I have read many books.  It is not something that is merely an academic issue for me.  I came to understand the Elijah Syndrome through experience, and not, primarily, experiencing other people who had it.  I learned about it so clearly and completely because it is something that I myself have experienced.  Every criticism I can launch against the Elijah Syndrome is one that has cut me first and foremost.

There was a time in college where I had what can best be described as a brush with Fundamentalism.  I had just started reading the Bible with some seriousness for the first time and I became aware that the scriptures had a lot to say about a wide variety of topics.  I was increasingly interested, not just in what the Bible said, but the ways it said it.  I looked around and I noticed that many people that I knew, friends included, simply weren't interested in the Bible like I had become.  In particular, I became fascinated with the Old Testament.  There was so much there that I had never heard before.  However, there were not only stories that shaped my understanding of the history of Israel, there was book after book of judgment on the people of God for not taking him seriously.  I should point out that the problems that I had were not with the judgment itself, but because I did not adequately understand the context of the judgment.

All of these things combined together to set the stage for a perfect storm.  I began to be judgmental of those who smugly dismissed Christian faith.  I may have said, and I certainly thought, that those people were in significant danger of hell.  But my real judgment was reserved for the Christians I knew.  These were people who, it seemed to me, ought to know better.  I could see no reason why the things that seemed to me to be so incredibly important should not seem equally important to everyone else who called themselves a Christian.  I looked around at my group of friends and thought that nobody really cared about God but me.  I looked around at the campus ministries at UNI and even around the United Methodist Church and felt that, if people could just do more of the things that I was doing, the church would be renewed.

A clear example of this kind of thinking came to me through my good friend.  He was having some conflict with someone who was significantly pro-life and who was expressing his displeasure that his home church didn't seem to get as excited as he did about the issue of abortion.  While everyone has their own strong feelings about the issue of abortion, my friend responded like this.  "You can't expect everyone to have the same passions that you do.  Everyone can't focus on the same thing.  Not only would that define what Christians should be about in an incredibly narrow way, it would also leave a lot of important things undone.  For example, the campus ministry I am in leadership with is very much concerned with interracial and global justice.  That is no less Christian and no less of a need."

As has been so often the case in my life, I needed to be able to see my own problems in someone else before I could realize how deep they were in myself.  The next time I read the story of Elijah, I was amazed that I so often do the same thing that he was doing.  I took myself as the standard of what a Christian should be doing, a dangerous thing to be sure, and then, since other people didn't share the same gifts, graces and passions as I did, I assumed they were not Christians or at least that they were sub-Christian.  I never once asked God what he thought.  I simply assumed.

It is so easy to do this.  It is so easy to get caught up in the things that we are passionate about; after all, we are passionate about them. We think they are important, perhaps the most important things in the world and we can't imagine why other people wouldn't see them the same way; and if our passions are even remotely close to things we could make an argument are related to the Christian life, such as reading the Scriptures in my case, then it doesn't take much to be like Elijah and cry out to God that we are all alone, that nobody else understands God like we do, that we are even being persecuted for our devotion.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes what I have come to understand as one of the single most ignored passages in the whole Bible.  This is what he says.  "Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.  Some believe in eating anything while the weak eat only vegetables.  Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them.  Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?  It is before their own lord that they stand or fall.  And they will be upheld, for The Lord is able to make them stand."

This was Elijah's problem.  He was a particularly prominent man of God.  He had done amazing things.  If you judge every Israelite by whether they have performed as many miracles as Elijah you aren't going to have many "real" people of God before long.  What Elijah had to learn was that God is not interested in the yardsticks that we use to judge ourselves and others.  He simply doesn't ask us whether someone is faithful or not, which is a good thing since we all fall short and might find ourselves on the wrong side of the dividing line if he did.  God is more graceful than humans are, than we are, and that is good news.

There are times when we feel tremendously lonely, that we are the only ones who do what we do.  Whether we never even dream of saying it out loud, even just to God, or whether we have alienated those we love by our declarations that nobody else understands or that nobody else is faithful, it is easy to get caught up in the Elijah Syndrome.  If you have the Elijah Syndrome today, know that the God who has worked mightily in you is working mightily in others, even if it doesn't look like you think it should.  If you have loved ones who seem to have it, remember that when God shook Elijah out of his attitude, it was not in the wind, earthquake or fire, but in the still, small voice, in the place of intimacy and trust.  It was the gentleness of God that opened Elijah's eyes.

You are not alone, even when you feel alone.  The Lord is with you and so are your brothers and sisters in Christ.  If you can't see God's work in them, go looking for it.  It is there, and it is every bit as glorious as the work of God in you.  Let us pray.

AMEN