Questions God Asks Us, Part 5: What Are You Doing Here?

 Friends, we’re now in part 5 of this 10 part sermon series that I’ve put together based on a short book titled Questions God Asks Us by pastor and author Trevor Hudson. In every chapter of this book Hudson takes a question that is posed in the Bible to people, either by our Creator God in the OT, or by Jesus in the NT, and he flips our expectations: often God does the asking, and then we answer. So how do we respond faithfully?

This week’s question is the last that Hudson picks out of the OT, and it comes up in the book of 1 Kings: What are you doing here?

Hudson dropped us into a section of the OT that Frozen Chosen Protestants don’t tend to visit frequently during our worship services. Deep into the history books, we’re in a time of heavy conflict, frequent war, constant turmoil, and a lot of murder. Queen Jezebel, wife of King Ahab of Israel, idol worshipper and OT antagonist de jour, is out to get everyone who doesn’t worship her god of choice, Ba’al. In defiance of this tyranny, a rebellious prophet named Elijah has just had the most boss moment of his life.

Elijah has summoned several of Ba’al’s prophets and challenged them to a bet: build the sickest altar to Ba’al you can, put a sacrificed animal on it, and pray to Ba’al to set the altar on fire. Elijah promised to do the same, and to pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Whoever’s God lights the biggest, prettiest altar fire wins, and everyone will start worshipping that God. Scout’s honor, if Ba’al delivers the best fire, Elijah will convert.

The Ba’al worshippers prepare an altar, put some beef on it, and spend hours praying that Ba’al will light it on fire. Nothing. They grow in desperation. They chant. They yell. They sing. They pierce their bodies with swords. This gets intense. No fire. Ba’al doesn’t respond.

Then Elijah casually saunters over to an empty plot, and asks for a little help arranging an altar with stones around it, and getting a cow to put on it. Remember, the challenge, specifically, is whose God can start a fire. So Elijah approaches this mostly wood altar, glances over at his helpers, and says, “hey, see all those water jugs? Fill ‘em up and soak this altar.” Jaws drop, because we all know what happens when you try to light a campfire on wet logs, but Elijah’s helpers obey. Then Elijah says, “nah, not enough water, do it again.” His helpers obey. Elijah says, “mm, no, still not wet enough.” And his helpers soak that wooden altar a third time. The wood is practically ruined, and, for the benefit of y’all who never started a campfire in Scouts, that drenched wood isn’t getting lit on fire anytime this century. Then Elijah prayed, took a big step back, yelled “FLAME ON”, and God created the most spectacular inferno with that wet wood that human eyes have ever beheld.

Elijah didn’t just win that bet. He won at life. He crowdsurfed out of there…and then ran for his life, because if Jezebel hated him before, oh boy does she want to put his head on a spike now.

Elijah brought his all. He delivered like he never had or would again for God. He changed hearts and minds. And now he was spectacularly burnt out, pun very much intended. He has nowhere safe to go, he has no food or water, and he has no help because Jezebel killed all his friends. The OT was a rough world, y’all. Curled up in the fetal position on the floor of a cave in the middle of absolute nowhere, he hears something, and knows well enough to know that it’s the voice of the Divine: “What are you doing here?” Elijah’s response: “I love God. Now everyone wants me dead.”

Our stories may be vastly less interesting, but human feelings are the same in every generation. If we’ve lived long enough, we’ve been there. Not necessarily the “everyone wants me dead” part–at least I sure hope not–but the burn out part. The “I’ve done everything I can, and it’s still not enough” part.

School.

Jobs.

Parenting our kids.

Caring for aging parents and grandparents.

Times of illness and injury.

Times when money is impossibly tight.

Times of disaster.

Times when the world is even harsher than usual.

“I love God. Now I’m surrounded by death forces. And there’s no one left to help.” God doesn’t judge us for hiding in the cave, seeking safety and temporary refuge, and even shutting people out for a while. Our cave might be literal, or it might be figurative, curled up in the fetal position on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and gnoshing on Cheetos while Dr. Phil plays in the background, or hiding out in the bathroom doom scrolling on your phone while your kids yell at you from down the hall.

Or, our cave can look like a dozen or so people sitting in the back two pews of a dwindling, rural church.

“We did it all. We can’t do more. We’re still dying.”

If any of those images sound just a little too familiar to you, this question calls out over Dr. Phil, over the Cheeto bags, past that locked bathroom food, louder than the whining kids, and past the empty pews. It even reaches us in buildings with no WiFi.

“Bro, what are you doing here?”

God’s question to Elijah touches base with the question God asked Adam: where are you? Why are you hiding from your boss, hiding from your kids, covered in chip crumbs, and hiding from the world? How did you end up here in the first place? What pins did you drop on the map of your Spirit?

Then, because God knows we can withstand the challenge, God pushes us a step further: What are you doing here NEXT? How will you move on from this cave?

No matter how stuck, depleted, and hopeless we feel, God always challenges us to new action. God doesn’t let us forget that we’re still those baddies that called fire down on a soaked altar. The setbacks can never take the victory away.

My social media feeds are problematically cluttered with complaining people telling me bad news, everything from “hey, don’t forget we’re still at war,” to “breaking news: humans made more terrible choices today,” to “Taylor Swift’s new album was kinda mid.” And I’m expected to react with an equal amount of passion to each of those headlines. The world sets us up for burn out, and God knows it. When God says “what are you doing here?”, God is also happy to fluff our pillows and warm our tea so that we can recharge to glory. Implied within God’s question is “oh man, what did they do this time?”

Sometimes, like with the news of the Cornell 7, I have to put my phone down and go find that proverbial cave before the world does me in. God gets it.

Sometimes, though, while I’m in the cave, God throws the newspaper at my face and says, “Dude, read this.” This week, that happened with an article from CNN titled “A Tsunami of Church Closings is Poised to Remake America.”

That article begins with a story about a United Methodist congregation in Michigan. 120 years of history, beautiful stained glass windows, a hand-painted mural of Jesus behind the altar. Two years ago, a clergywoman got in that pulpit, and faced 12 people in pews built to hold a thousand, and announced that the church would close at the next annual conference session.

It’s happened to dozens of churches while I’ve served in the ministry, including the very first one I was ever called to. And it will keep happening, as the work of maintaining a congregation becomes too much for the folks sitting here. Sometimes, we feel like we’re the only ones left at the altar, lighting a fire for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob while the folks around us are busy worshipping Ba’al, or the new iPhone, or the latest hot celebrity.

But sometimes, like the author of this CNN article points out, those emptying pews weren’t an altar to God, they were a cave, and God is craning inside to ask, “What are you doing here?” John Blake, author of this article, points out that the United States is a rapidly changing landscape. Roughly 60% of American adults identify as Christian, which in itself is a lower number than previous generations. But, even so, those 60% of adults aren’t all looking for a church to join, nor do they think, like many of their grandparents once did, that you have to join a church to be a person who does good. We’re as spiritual as we’ve ever been, maybe moreso. But when our churches stop feeling like flaming altars, and start feeling more like caves of hibernation, we look elsewhere for meaning.

God yells “what are you doing here?” into our pews, because we need to take seriously that a church with a dynamic faith is one that stays relevant. We need to change and move and adapt to survive. But more than anything, the churches that actually are thriving right now didn’t get that way with the perfect tithing campaign, or the best chicken BBQ, or the prettiest sanctuary carpet. Elijah ignores the flashy signs, the winds, the earthquakes, and the fires, knowing that’s not God. His ears perk up when he hears something else, the same thing we need to be listening for. Statistically, people come to church, and stay, when they feel like they’re performing meaningful acts of service there.

Those meaningful acts of service are what save Elijah. That and getting out of isolation. God realizes Elijah needs a friend, and introduces Elijah to his new bestie, Elisha. And they go off and do great things together, starting with feeding a ton of people.

What are we doing here? Sometimes, to recover from how hard it is to be alive, we need to be dormant for a little while, and that’s ok. Seeking rest makes us no less fabulous to God. But if we want to make it, it won’t be because droves of people love our beautiful altars. It will be because we convince one person to feed the hungry. The small acts of service are exactly what we should be doing here.

May it be so.

Amen.