In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Father Lawrence apparently
unsatisfied with my performance this morning,
has demanded more of me, asking that I speak
to Elijah. So if you'll sit for a moment, I won't
keep you all that long, but I will say something.
This is one of the wildest and most frightening
figures in all the sacred scriptures. You might
have noted, if you were listening to the readings,
that he personally dispatches the 400 plus. priests
of Baal. I suppose the other ones as well. Jezebel's
whole stable of missionaries. But that's not
quite what I want to talk about. Let me begin
with his name. Elijah's name, like every Hebrew
name, and most every name in the ancient world,
means something. El Iyar. Yah is my God. Yah,
the first syllable of the tetragrammaton, the
name that God gives to Moses at the foot of Mount
Sinai, the burning bush, that no one knows, whose
pronunciation no one knows. We know it's Y -H
-W -H. and the first syllable seems to have been
yah so wherever you see yah in the scriptures
like you'll know that word is theophorus and
elijah's name is his program he's come to bring
israel back to worship of the god of sinai and
the covenant Because Israel was faced with a
grave temptation. A wandering people, shepherds
doubtless, had settled into the agricultural
life of the ancient Near East. And the agricultural
life then, as now, was predicated on the existence
of water. If you know your geography, you know
that the Holy Land isn't exactly abundant in
that commodity. It's like here. And just like
here, the weather comes from the west. And just
like here, it doesn't come until sometime late
October and is done by April, usually. And just
like here, the Holy Land in summer is brown,
and in January is green, if it rains. Now, whether
or not it rains in those days, even more than
now, I mean, we've had a terrible drought here,
right? But no one has starved to death. We've
got trains, we've got semis, we've got refrigerated.
containers. So food comes to us from all over
the world, even if there may be drought here.
Well, it wasn't that way in Elijah's time. You
made your own food, normally. Most people lived
in the land, and they were hardscrabble farmers.
And if they didn't get the rain, they died. So
whether or not those clouds formed at the end
of October was a matter of life and death. And
in consequence, the peoples round about had developed,
I guess we would call it a religion, but it was
also a kind of technology. Since controlling
the weather was the item on the agenda of personal
survival. And the religion involved the mating,
as it were, of earth and sky. That mating being
understood as fulfilled in the rain. Sky was
Baal and earth was Ashtaroth, or Astarte, or
Ishtar. She has different names. And encouraging
the sacred marriage of earth and heaven, meaning
the rain, was a matter of life and death, and
people understood that you could help it along
by engaging in similar activity on earth. Humans
coupling helped the gods couple. And as it were,
Joe Israelite, living next door to that, well,
he had his God, yes, and his God had his feast
days, but then there was the matter of how do
you eat? And the neighbor's survival techniques
looked pretty good, and of course it involved
some fun as well. So they took it up. And a queen
had just come to the northern kingdom. who was
something, one of the more interesting people
in this Old Testament. She doesn't get a very
good rep, of course. She's a girl from the Lebanese
coast, daughter of a queen, a king, rather. A
good dynastic marriage for the Northern Kingdom.
But she's also, unlike most queens, right into
the early 20th century, who might have been of
a different faith, but married their husband.
for dynastic purposes, like Alexander married
Nicholas in Russia. She was Lutheran, at least
when she came to Russia. He was, of course, Orthodox.
Well, she stays where she is. And moreover, she's
a missionary. And is prosecuting the religion
of Earth and Sky. So... a little bit more profoundly,
perhaps. Thank you. I don't know if this stuff
is going to work. A. B. When God's already acknowledged
the reign of God. All the way to the showdown
with God. But third, you might recall that how
he is following his victory. She issues a death
warning. She takes out a contract with a girl.
And he beats it. That's how it got there. And
that's how it went on for a second. And that's
how it went on for a second. And that's how it
went on for a second. it earth, air, fire, or
water. He is none of the four elements. God is
not a cosmos. He is not a created universe. But
the universe is created, precisely created. There
is a creator who And so far as we can tell whether
the right name means anything, it seems to me
something that it could mean, something like
he will be, or he will cause to be. But there
is no name, there is no handle. Not in the sense
that we learn from the story of Elijah. I could
bring in that this is about the fire from heaven,
because that has all kinds of interesting echoes,
but that's another thing. And, of course, the
issue of bloodshed, and there's quite a bit of
that in the whole Elijah legacy, but I won't
go into that one. But I will stress that these
things, the story of Elijah's... There is only
one. In one translation of that sequence of the
fire, the wind, the earthquake... the champions
and we have two hours Thank you