“And after the fire a still small voice”

God was not in the wind. He was not in the earthquake. He was not in the fire. But, “after the fire a still small voice.” It is a powerful image. The text does not explicitly say that God was “a still small voice.” All it says, with economy and eloquence, is that the Lord passed by Elijah, not in the wind of storm and tempest, not in the earthquake and fire, but “after the fire a still small voice.”

We confront the mystery and the wonder of Revelation. Elijah is in despair; a prophet who has endured persecution and who contemplates the radical disobedience of the people of Israel who have “forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword.” He complains to God that “I, only I am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” Jezebel, the notorious, indeed, nefarious queen of Ahab, king of Israel, is determined to have Elijah killed; he is, from their standpoint the “troubler of Israel.” “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest,” another King would say more than a millennium later about Thomas à Becket. It has been, too, we might say, the recurring complaint of many an authority within and without the Church by kings and bishops alike.

“What makes this rage and spite?” Samuel Crossman asks about Christ’s crucifixion in his lovely hymn, My Song is Love Unknown. Somehow we are meant to consider and contemplate the meaning of persecution, of enmity and hatred, by way of the Cross. Somehow that is part and parcel of the Christian blessing. “Blessed are ye, when men revile you and persecute you,” “for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you,” as Jesus teaches us in the Beatitudes. Strange, isn’t it, that blessings are to be found in the hardest and most disturbing of things? And yet, isn’t that precisely the wonder and the miracle of the Christian gospel? But, if the Beatitudes are not puzzling enough, there is Jesus’ equally strange commandment in the Eucharistic Gospel for today, to “love your enemies.” Love those who seek your hurt. Amazing.

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Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies’

It is a moral imperative. Like so many of the moral imperatives of the gospel, it signals what is at once a divine necessity and a human impossibility.

How can we be commanded to do what we cannot do? Because God makes possible what is humanly impossible. In the commandment to “love your enemies,” we see the real force and character of love; its deep truth and reason, as it were. We are shaken out of the soft sentimentalities of our inconstant hearts. We are shaken into the strong desiring of the love of God whom we ask, in the words of the Collect, to “pour into our hearts such love toward thee.”

The radical, uncompromising and unconditional commandment to love confronts us with what is indeed beyond our human understanding, considered in itself, in order to raise us to a divine understanding. “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more,” therefore, “likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” What is commanded by God for man is accomplished in Christ Jesus, both God and man. It is to be realized in us by the quality of our life in Christ. “Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” The consequence is that being “with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.”

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“Love your enemies”

The Collect which graces this day and the week following is one of the most beautiful and compelling in the Prayer Book. It captures profoundly the nature of our human longings and the reality of the human condition.

“O God, who hast prepared for them that love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding,” it begins, defining us in terms of God’s love; both our love for God and the love that is God himself. But what do we mean by love? Something of the radical nature of the love of God for us and in us is hinted at in the Collect. Not only does it belong to those “good things [that] pass man’s understanding,” but more significantly to “promises which exceed all that we can desire.” We are directed to something beyond our knowing and beyond our desiring and yet a something more that belongs to what God wants for us.

But is this something more merely something whimsical? A fantasy? An illusion? “Pie in the sky, by and by”? Unreal, unknowable and unattainable? If it is beyond our knowing and our wanting, then how can it have any meaning for us? Because it is something that has been prepared for us, something that has been made known to us. We can enter into it and struggle to know and love the things of God more dearly, more clearly and more freely. In other words “the good things [that] pass man’s understanding” are not of our own devising. They are not simply the products or the projections of ourselves. The promises of God always exceed our desiring precisely because we do not always know clearly what we want. This is part and parcel of our human condition. We confront the limits of our knowing and our desiring. We confront the incompleteness of our knowing and our willing.

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“Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”

The passage from 1^st Peter, appointed for the epistle for today, begins with the phrase “be ye all of one mind.” It ends with our text “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” Everything in between is held together by these two phrases. And what is in between is an exhortation to a godly life against the forms of wickedness which so easily arise, not only in our hearts, but also in our common life together.

“Be ye all of one mind,” he tells us. But what is that one mind? Is it mere unanimity regardless of what one is agreed about? Surely not. Peter is talking about the mind of Christ for he goes on to describe the qualities of the love of Christ towards us which must become the form of his life within us. A group of people may be united in ways that are quite ungodly. They may arrive at a perfectly fine decision but the manner of their deciding may be perfectly disgraceful, regardless of the decision itself.  Or the process of decision making may be perfectly fine while the decision itself lacks intellectual, spiritual and moral integrity. We see this time after time in every aspect of our culture.  Mere consensus is no surety for truth; nor is pure process. For if “being of one mind” arises out of viciousness, personal abuse, willful ignorance, resentment, envy, paltry excuses, self interest, incompetence and dark prejudice, (and let us be honest, such things are all too evident and all too common), then it is not what Peter is talking about.

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“What went ye out for to see?”

He catches our attention, though not necessarily our affection, unlike St. Francis, the Hippie Saint of the sixties. He catches our attention and, yet, we are even drawn to him, attracted by something strange and yet compelling. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity is celebrated on June 24^th, and whose feast day marks the anniversary of the landing of John Cabot in Newfoundland in 1497. Thus he has become the patron saint of what has subsequently become Canada. His feast day also was the occasion for the baptism of Chief Membertou four hundred years ago in 1610, an event that marked the conversion of the Mi’kmaq to Christianity.

The figure of John the Baptist frames our summer sojourning; his nativity marks the beginning of summer, so close to the summer solstice; and his death, “The Beheading of John the Baptist,” coming at the end of August, marks the end of summer, being so close to the end of cottage season. We are talking about the Maritimes here!

Birth and death. Summer and winter. This birth points us to the winter’s birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. In a way, that is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice has just past; the long summer’s march to winter, yes, even to Christmas, dare I say, has begun!

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