The Hearing is in the Acknowledgement

The Hearing is in the Acknowledgement

Do any of us really want to come into close contact with God? God’s mercy, absolutely! God’s truth? What links our Old Testament and Gospel readings today are human beings invited to “come,” as Jesus invited Peter on the wind and the waves, come to God, not keep God at a safe distance. For Elijah — and the Twelve in their boat — there is a storm around God that we would wrongly identify as God because of our fear of God. And yet God the Father Son and Holy Spirit keeps inviting us to “come” through the storm to God the Three-In-One, which first requires us to be clear about where God is not.

Poor Elijah thought he had God in his back pocket. He had correctly predicted a three-year drought in Israel at a time when King Ahab’s foreign wife, Jezebel, was converting many Israelites to her pagan gods. After three years he had challenged the prophets of Baal to see whether he or YHWH — Hebrew had no vowels, add them and you get Yahweh — controlled the rain. A fire had come from Yahweh and consumed the altar and offering of the prophets of Baal. Elijah had enlisted the Israelites in slaughtering those prophets, and then the rain had come.

Elijah won the argument, to which Jezebel had responded, “So may the gods do to me if I do not make your life as the life of one of the prophets by this time tomorrow.” That’s why Elijah was at Mount Horeb, where God had given the Ten Commandments to Moses. He was on the run. It didn’t matter that he had won the argument. So maybe God wasn’t in the argument. Nor was God in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. We want to see God in earth-shattering power, especially when that power is supposed to be on our side. But that’s not where God is.

God is in a “thin silence,” a “low whisper,” a sound of sheer silence,” a “faint murmur.” These are all translations of the same verse we read today. What does a silence you can hear sound like? Perhaps it’s something like the total silence — no rain, no wind, not even chirping bugs — which warned me that the county tornado siren wasn’t about a storm 20 miles away. Except that that was the calm before the storm. What Elijah experienced was the calm after the storm saying to Elijah: Elijah, I’ve got this, but not on your schedule or according to your script.

The disciples were also in a storm, their boat being literally “tortured,” not just “battered” by the waves. Unlike other churches where the entire worship space is called “sanctuary,” only the space around the altar is called that. You’re sitting in a “nave,” which if you pronounced the vowel would sound like “navy?” The Latin root means “boat.” Look up and see the hull. What storms might be in danger of torturing our boat? What if we actually saw Jesus walking through the storm toward us? Would we panic because actually seeing God would be like seeing a ghost coming as a grim reaper? What if we heard Jesus through the howling wind calmly saying, “Take heart. I AM (in Hebrew YHWH). Do not be afraid. Come.” Could we get out of the boat, trusting that even if we started to sink, however far away he seemed, Jesus’ hand would be right there? And if we hesitated, could we still trust that Jesus’ hand would still be there, even if he gently chided us?

Every Sunday, we board this boat. Why? For what it’s worth the textbook answer from our Outline of the Faith is: “In corporate worship, we unite ourselves with others to acknowledge the holiness of God, to hear God’s word, to offer prayer, and to celebrate the sacraments.” (BCP, p. 857). Our first and therefore most necessary task in corporate worship is acknowledgement, not conjuring. Focusing on the acknowledgment of God’s holiness keeps us from turning our worship into entertainment, or trying to manipulate people into an emotional high. But at the same time, we cannot acknowledge what we do not recognize.

Somewhere, through our personal and corporate storms, through all our spoken and sung words, though the melodies and harmonies we hear, perhaps even through the silence, there is a sound beyond translation, beyond description, which says in whatever way we need to hear, “Come.” Through these inadequate words, and all the other sounds and silences of this day, may all us passengers recognize the one and only sound that each of us needs to hear, “Take heart. I AM. Do not be afraid. Come.”

August 9th, 2026

11th Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 14, Year A

The Rev. David Kendrick