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What are you doing here?

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What are you doing here?

22 June 2025

Series: Trinity

Topic: Calling, Elijah, Leadership

Book: 1 Kings, Galatians

What are you doing here?

Ian Banks

You’ll all be way too young to remember but in 1964, Simon & Garfunkel released a song called ‘The Sound of Silence’. The first verse goes like this: ‘Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again. Because a vision softly creeping, left its seeds while I was sleeping, and the vision that was planted in my brain, still remains, within the sound of silence.’

Garfunkel later said that the song was about “the inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly intentionally but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other.” More of that later.

A turning point

Our reading from 1 Kings is quite remarkable. It represents a turning point. And the pivotal question is this: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” God asks it twice. Something quite dramatic happens in-between, yet he gets the same reply both times. Or at least the words are the same. We don’t get to hear Elijah’s tone or inflection to know if they are different.

We don’t get to hear God’s inflection either. So, it depends on where we put the emphasis in that question: What are you doing here? What are you doing here? What are you doing here? You get the idea!

Horeb was the same mountain where Moses had his earlier encounter with the Burning Bush and where he later received the Commandments. The first time was many decades after fleeing alone from Egypt in fear for his life after he’d killed a man. The second was whilst he was on the run, again from Egypt, but this time with all the Children of Israel. Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights whilst he received those instructions on how a community could best live together.

On the run

Elijah had just been involved in a spectacular victory over the prophets of the god Baal, on another mountain, Mount Carmel. Elijah had put his own faith on the line and called on God to bring down fire from heaven in front of all the people. God had done his stuff and the people all acknowledged that “the Lord indeed is God”. Falsehood defeated, truth had won, faith restored, job done.

All, that is, except for King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who failed to see the error of their ways in worshipping Baal. And instead, Jezebel puts a contract out on Elijah and promises that he’ll be dead in 24 hours. So, instead of being elated at scoring one over Baal, Elijah is on the run and in fear for his life.

Elijah escapes into the desert, depressed and distressed that he’s failed to change Ahab and Jezebel. He reaches some sort of crisis point – spiritually, physically and vocationally. As bleak as our confession today may have seemed, Elijah would have struggled to say it. He sits himself by a tree and wishes to die – which, ironically, would save Jezebel the job! After a divine Deliveroo or Just East (other delivery services are available) brought him food, not once but twice, Elijah walks for, yes, forty days and forty nights… to that same mountain, possibly the same cave, where Moses had met with God.

The confronter confronted

What are you doing here, Elijah? Why meet me here – is it for some good reason now or is it with all these links to Moses and the past? Why are you here, when there’s still a job of work to be done somewhere else? Elijah, the confronter, is himself confronted. And perhaps we are faced with the same question. What are we doing here, here in this church, in this town? Is it for some good reason now or is it with all the links to the past? Should we be somewhere else?

We know what happens next, don’t we? God sends a great wind, an earthquake and a fire. But God was not in any of those – though he could have been. It wasn’t long since the ‘fire of Yahweh’ had consumed Elijah’s sacrifice on Mount Carmel in that face-off with the prophets of Baal. Baal was the Canaanite god of storms. And Baal would be expected to come in wind, earthquake or fire. The God of Elijah could have done the same – but now he chooses to come in the peace after the storm, in the sound of sheer silence. Other versions say: as ‘a still, small voice’, ‘a soft, murmuring sound’.

Same answer

God asks his question twice and seemingly gets the same answer both times. Elijah could have said: “I’m running away from Jezebel.” Instead, he boasts: “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.”

And, indeed, he had been zealous. Elijah hated the worship of Baal in his own country and had done all he could to end it.

But Elijah gives the same answer twice. He has not thought through the powerful show that God has just put on for him. Wind, earthquake, fire – and then sheer silence – apparently left Elijah unmoved and unchanged. God had just given him a very practical demonstration that he wasn’t looking for an arm-wrestling contest with other gods to see who was the most powerful. God wanted to show something different. To his credit, Elijah was perceptive enough to realise that God wasn’t in the uproar but instead in the silence. And maybe that was a start, but his words remain the same.

God’s silence

We, (you, me and Elijah) are meant to recognise something. Our God can do the flashy and the showy. After all, that’s what happened at Mount Carmel. And that’s fine if you’re tempted that way. But God says, that’s not who I AM.

Elijah might well have sung along to “hello darkness my old friend” but unlike Simon & Garfunkel’s silence, God’s silence is a place where people are able to love each other. A place, where in the wonderful words of Paul to the Galatians, there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female, for we are all one in Christ. Paul didn’t expect to change society – but he did expect that when Christ-like people met together that they acted towards each other as if they were in the presence of God.

Have to listen

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it like this. We’re to learn from this story that the supreme power cares for the power-less. That the creator of life loves life. That the voice that called creation into being is still and small, barely a whisper. That you have to listen to hear God.

And, indeed, this story marks something of a turning point. The earlier display on Mount Carmel is really the last of the very public fire and brimstone acts of God in the OT. For the most part, from this point on, miracles continue but they tend to be private or non-destructive affairs.

God is working his purpose out. And if Elijah doesn’t get it, then God will find someone who does. Elijah badly got his numbers wrong. He was so self-absorbed that he didn’t realise that there were seven thousand others out there who shared his faith. He might have felt lonely, but he wasn’t alone.

So, God maps out for Elijah a retirement and succession plan, a plan which includes Elisha. Elisha who performs many of the same miracles but with a very different way about him. Moses walked down that mountain with 2 tablets of stone, Elijah with a P45.

Alternatives

Rabbi Sack’s goes on to say that we have alternative approaches set before us. In turbulent times, should religious leaders be confrontational? Should they both proclaim their truths and denounce what they see as falsehoods? Should they give a stark choice between one way or another?

Or should the model be one of compassion and guidance? In an unreligious age should religious leadership provide an example of love of truth – and of solidarity with those for whom truth has somehow become eclipsed? To flip Art Garfunkel’s comment – should they provide a space where people have the ability to communicate with each other, an ability to love each other?

We have a new Pope and so far so good. It will be interesting to see what messages a new Archbishop of Canterbury brings us when that appointment is eventually made. And in a world filled with so much conflict at the moment, perhaps exactly the same challenge should be posed of our political leadership too, both here and around the world.

Conscience

Being zealous might win a battle but it won’t win the war. It creates fear, not love. Faith will always fail if it seeks to impose truth by force; always turns people away from the very God we would want to be served. Ultimately, Elijah had to learn that the threat to his ministry came not from something outside him but emerged from within. The author JK Rowling once said that our “conscience speaks in a very small and inconvenient voice, and it’s normally saying to you: think again, look more deeply, consider this.”

So, what are we doing here? What kind of faith and leadership do we model?

Who are you here?

I read somewhere that God’s question could equally be translated: “Who are you here, Elijah?” Alone here on this mountain, away from the crowds and the razzamatazz, who are you? Who are you really? That’s a question that each of us, sooner or later, may have to respond to. Away from the spotlight, away from what you show to the outside world, who are you here? I pray that God will give each of us enough silence to listen out for and to hear those still, small voices – both among us and within us – that will give us the answer.

And you know I do wonder, if whether in the still, small voice we’re meant to think of Jesus. The Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm, whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm… And whether, on another mountain top, at the Transfiguration, when those two mountaineers, Moses and Elijah, met with Christ, that they finally got the opportunity to put a face to the name. Amen

“What are you doing here?” was delivered by Ian Banks at St James, Woolfold, Bury on 22nd June 2025. It was based on I Kings 19:1-4, 8-15a and Galatians 3:23-end

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