Amanda McMillen, “Look at All the Lonely People”
While reading the Bible passages for this week in preparing for this sermon, I consistently had the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby” stuck in my head, which is a really depressing song for anyone to contemplate, but maybe especially for a preacher: “Father McKenzie // Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear // No one comes near” Oof! Okay well you all are here, hearing the words of this sermon, and I’m very thankful for that this morning.
Loneliness is what kept coming up for me while reading our passage from the Old Testament for today. “Ahh look at all the lonely people.” Being a prophet is lonely business, and in our story today from Kings, Elijah the prophet is all alone. In the previous chapters of this story, Elijah called upon Yahweh to come down in fire and prove to the worshippers of Baal, the idol god they created, that He alone is God - and He did. The Lord God brought down fire from heaven, when Baal could not, and proved to everyone that He is the one true God. But when Elijah gets a death threat from Jezebel, the queen of Israel, after Baal’s prophets are killed, Elijah runs away as fast as he can to safety. And where our story picks up, he finds himself on a mountain, all alone.
When he reaches the top of this mountain, God asks Elijah: “What are you doing here Elijah?” He responds with his resume: “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.” Elijah is all alone, which is relatively normal for prophets in the Bible. They tend to have some radical message to share which gets them kicked out of most gatherings, and God has them going from place to place to share their message. It is lonely work to have something to say that nobody really wants to hear.
So Elijah finds himself all alone, and after a life of this work, he seems pretty sick and tired of it. He is so afraid for his life and so alone, that he is essentially suicidal. “It is enough” he tells God, “take away my life now, for I am no better than my ancestors”. What does Elijah have to live for? He is hiding away and no one is looking for him. God doesn’t respond to his despair with arguments for why his life is worth something - he just sends an angel to give him food and water. So Elijah eats and drinks and spends 40 days and 40 nights waiting for death to catch up to him.
Elijah makes himself comfortable in a cave, and the angel tells him that God is about to pass by - “go out and stand on the mountain”. And at that moment, a great wind passes by, but God is not in the wind; next, an earthquake shakes the ground, but God is not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, a fire, but God is not in the fire. And after the fire, the sound of sheer silence. At this, Elijah comes to the mouth of the cave wrapped in his cloak. And in the silence, a voice says to him, again: “What are you doing here Elijah?” And again, Elijah explains his loneliness.
Maybe you and I cannot directly relate to Elijah’s prophetic epic drama, calling upon the Lord to prove his divinity, casting down idols in temples and fleeing for his life from those of other religions, but we can, I think, identify with his loneliness. It is lonely to be human.
Robert Frost put it this way: “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces// Between stars – on stars where no human race is.// I have it in me so much nearer home// To scare myself with my own desert places.”
My own desert places - those lonely places. There are so many ways to be lonely, aren’t there? There’s the literal loneliness of missing someone. Of living alone. Of desiring companionship. Of being single and hoping for love, or being widowed or divorced and remembering it. There’s loneliness in grief, in the missing of the person, and in the experience of walking through the world knowing that people you pass by don’t know of the depths of your desert places.
There’s loneliness in our minds, even when we are surrounded by people. Anxiety is lonely, as we pre-emptively play out imagined fears in our minds, taking us away from our actual life; depression is lonely, isolating us from connection; marriages of course can be lonely, feeling misunderstood and further isolated in disconnection. Shame adds another layer to our loneliness - feeling like we can’t share the desert places of our hearts for fear of being judged or misunderstood, propelling us further into isolation. And sometimes we make friends with our loneliness. We build a home in our own caves of isolation, sure that no one else can understand what we’re going through, and not sure how to even reach out for help in it anyways.
And Elijah here seems to be lonely not just physically but spiritually, too. He is actually lonely in his convictions. He believes that he alone is on God’s side, and that self-righteousness actually isolates him from all others. For a person to believe that they are better than those around them is a lonely place to live.
But God has always cared deeply about lonely people. Throughout the Bible, Christians are entrusted with caring for widows and orphans and prisoners, in other words, those who find themselves alone in this world. God has a special soft spot for those who are alone.
So where do you feel alone? What are your desert places? Do you have loneliness that feels like a resounding earthquake in your life, a rushing wind, a consuming fire? Or is it a quiet whisper in the background of your day to day?
In a level 5 maximum security prison in Licking, Missouri, lives a group of men who, as you can imagine being in level 5 security prison, have committed some truly awful crimes. There are men who have been in prison there for all of their adult lives. One of the prisoners featured, Ricky, now 64 years old, has been in prison for murder
since he was 20. He says, when he reflects back on his life, “That’s the pill that’s hard to swallow, true regret…because my mother means a lot to me.” That line got me. Ricky, along with dozens of other men from this prison, wake up 5 days a week to work nonstop from 7:30am - 3:30pm - doing what? I bet you can’t guess. They work each day in prison from 7:30am - 3:30pm as fast, and yet as thoroughly and carefully as they can, to perfect their patterns for quilts that they sew for foster children in the area with upcoming birthdays.
It is totally unexpected - kind of like God talking to Elijah in a whisper - these large, intimidating looking men behind sewing machines, completely consumed with creating a seamless, beautiful quilt for a young child in need. When one quilt’s stitches are beginning to pucker, Ricky (who patiently teaches the trade to the new men coming in, and is a kind of self-appointed inspector of quilt quality) pulls it the whole quilt off the machine and undoes each stitch to realign the edges of the quilt. These men are passionate about producing beautiful, high-quality pieces and it is so clear that they are motivated by real, honest care. Another man, named Chill, says “Anytime I quilt with butterflies I think of my mom, cause she loved butterflies.”
At the end of the film, Chill receives a thank you card from two young girls, and a picture of them laying on their quilts on the beds in their foster home, smiling wide. “Golly”, he says, tears in his eyes. “They got em.” The men stop what they’re doing, the whirr of the sewing machines pauses, as they pass around the card and pictures in this quiet, deeply moving moment. Until Ricky gets out the stapler and puts it up on the board, and the men go back to their work. In that moment, the grind of their work has new purpose. The loneliness of a prisoner is hard to match. The regret, the literal isolation. And in this short film (called “The Quilters” by the way, I implore you to watch it), the loneliness of the one is met with the loneliness of another. “This puts me on the outside”, Chill says. “When I do this here, it’s like I’m not even in here.”
The softness of this work, by these men, is so unexpected. The softness of a quilt on the bed of an orphan. The softness of care from one lonely person to another. The softness of God who whispers to Elijah in his deepest fears of loneliness.
God knows about our loneliness, about our desert places. He knows where we long for connection and care. He knows where we feel misunderstood, and he understands us there better than we even understand ourselves. And how can we trust that? How can we trust that God is really with us in our desert places? Well, it’s simply because Jesus was alone too. Elijah on that mountaintop thought himself the sole righteous one of God’s people, but of course only Jesus can claim that title. Jesus alone was righteous, and in that lonely place, he found himself supremely misunderstood. As he died on the cross, he was met with sheer silence. Loneliness. Isolation. Despair.
But God did not leave him there, and God doesn’t leave you there either. In fact, it is in the sheer silence, in the isolation, where God is particularly present. God brings new life IN the loneliness. IN the isolation. IN the lack, IN the void. IN the wound itself.
IN the emptiness of the tomb. It is there that God fills your loneliness with his presence. In the sheer silence, God speaks. It is unexpectedly soft, and personal. It is grace. It is hope for a future. Through Jesus, you are understood and cared for in your desert places, and you are never left alone. Amen.
Amen.
