This week, we begin a new sermon series that will go for the next six weeks. We’ve titled this series “Scrapbooking Our Faith.” How many people here have made a scrapbook before? If I were to ask you to define in one short sentence or phrase what a scrapbook is, how might you define it? (Take responses.) Yeah. So, according to Merriam-Webster, a scrapbook is “a blank book in which various items (such as newspaper clippings or pictures) are collected and preserved.” So for this series, we are going to look each week at a story from the Bible. And while the Bible is not a scrapbook, as we look at each story today and over the next five Sundays, I want you to imagine that we are making this story into a scrapbook page. What images, what lessons might we want to preserve on that page?

Now, I’ve not really done much scrapbooking myself. April and I attempted to create a scrapbook for our honeymoon 20 years ago and it still is not finished. The various items we collected from that trip still sit in a box, unseen and unpreserved. I think that is often how the Bible is in our lives. We hear the stories on Sunday or we read them at home, but then they just sit in a box somewhere collecting dust. We kinda forget about them. This series gives us a chance to pull that box off the shelf, dust it off, and create a few scrapbook pages that we can look at and enjoy. And we start off this week with one of my favorite Old Testament stories. The heading in my Bible calls this story “Elijah Meets God at Horeb.” And that’s a fine title but it doesn’t really tell us what we should remember from this story. So let’s delve a little deeper into the story and see what images stand out to us.

The story begins with Elijah fleeing for his life because King Ahab and his wife Jezebel were out to kill him. He arrives in Beersheba, where he leaves his servant, before going a day’s journey into the wilderness. Elijah plops himself down under a tree and prays for God to take his life. Now, this was the first part of the story that stood out to me as being unusual. And it made me want to look back at Elijah’s life up to this point. And what I found was that Elijah really believed in the power of prayer. Prior to this, Elijah had prayed for the widow of Zarephath’s son who had died and he had come back to life. Elijah had prayed for God to bring fire upon the altar in order to prove that the prophets of Baal were false prophets and God set the altar ablaze. So then here, Elijah prays for God to take his life. And it doesn’t make sense to me. Why did a prophet with the faith that Elijah had previously exhibited all of a sudden want his life to end?

God responds to Elijah in a couple of ways. First, Elijah falls asleep and an angel comes to him in a dream. The angel tells Elijah to get up and eat. That makes me wonder if Elijah wanted to die because he was exhausted and hungry. I don’t know about you, but I don’t always make my best decisions when I’m hungry. And once Elijah had eaten, he lay back down and went to sleep again. Again the angel woke him and told him to eat. Apparently he was both hungry AND tired…a good combination for bad decisions. Once Elijah has slept and eaten and drank, then he sets off on a journey of 40 days and 40 nights to reach Mount Horeb. And there he found a cave and spent the night in the cave.

When he awakes, he hears the voice of the Lord asking him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” It’s hard to discern what God meant by this exactly since we can’t read inflection. But it makes me wonder if Elijah hadn’t gone where God had wanted him to go. Or perhaps God wanted Elijah to answer that question because he wanted Elijah to consider for himself why he’d come there. Either way, I’m not certain that Elijah completely gets it. He responds to God, “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 no longer asking for his life to be taken away, but he still sounds a bit melodramatic. But God doesn’t seem to judge. God simply tells Elijah that he is about to pass by.

This is where it gets really interesting, in my opinion. Elijah goes out of the cave and stands on the side of the mountain. And a great wind comes up. But God is not in the wind. Then a great earthquake comes, but God is not in the earthquake. And then there is a fire, but God is not in the fire. And then, in the silence, that is where God comes to Elijah. Now, it’s not that God couldn’t come to us in wind, he does that on Pentecost, right? And it’s not that God couldn’t come to us in an earthquake. He does that with Paul and Silas in prison. And it’s not that God can’t come to us in fire, he does that with Moses and the burning bush. But in this story, there is a different lesson for us. That lesson is that sometimes God comes to us in the silence so we need to make space.

Richard Foster calls the practice of making space for silence “the discipline of solitude.” And he writes this about it, “There is an old proverb to the effect that ‘all those who open their mouths, close their eyes!’ The purpose of silence and solitude is to be able to see and hear. Control rather than no noise is the key to silence.” Were the rumbles of the earthquake completely silenced when Elijah heard God? Had the winds completely died down? Was the crackling of the embers totally snuffed out before God was heard in that still small voice? We don’t know. But what we do know is that Elijah made space for silence and there the Lord met him.

As we think about this memory and as we decide what should go on our scrapbook page to remind us of this story, how might we depict God coming to Elijah in the silence. What image would capture that for our imaginations? What have the moment of silence in your lives looked like? I remember one distinct moment of silence from my own life. It was the moment I felt a call into ministry. I stood alone in an empty sanctuary behind and empty pulpit, and I heard God tell me that I could do ministry in the church. So, perhaps for me a picture of an empty sanctuary would go on my scrapbook page.

Richard Foster tells of an experience he had with hearing God in the silence. He writes,

“My first conscious experience of hearing the voice of Jesus occurred when I was a college student. It grew out of a period of genuine frustration. Because of my poor academic training and a less-than-stellar intellect, it seemed I had to study harder than everyone else if I was to succeed in college. On top of that I was carrying two part-time jobs to bring in enough money to put food on the table and to buy books. My first job was at a cannery on the cleanup crew after the night shift.

I worked from four to six each morning steam-cleaning the machinery, and I got back to the college just in time to wash dishes at the dining commons, my second job. It was a perfect schedule, for I could do all of this before my first class began at eight a.m.

Then too I was doing some service work at a local church … oh, and I was involved in student government…all of which made for a heavy load for a young college sophomore. Still, I believed each of these tasks was important for several reasons: to earn needed money, to hone my speaking skills and to interact with the lives of precious people.

But they left little time for the leisure and social activities that seemed to be such a large part of other student’s lives. And I was frustrated at my seeming loss. One evening I was taking a stretch break from study, walking out in the night. Soon I began speaking prayers of complaint … a little like the lament psalms in the Bible. I wasn’t angry, really, just frustrated. They were “poor me” kinds of prayers. My walking took me into nearby woods and, as I walked along by the light of the moon, my complaining prayers began to diminish and I became more and more quiet.

Finally, I fell into total silence. A still, listening silence. It was then that God spoke, spoke out of the stillness and into my frustration. You know how we are able to distinguish between human speakers by the quality of their voice, the spirit in their voice and, of course, the content of what is being said? It is much the same with the divine voice.

Sometimes God comes to us even in the midst of the chaos and noise of life. But often God comes to us in the moments of silence and provides perspective to the rest of our lives. It’s like the rests in a piece of music. Susan Scott, in her book on leadership entitled Fierce Conversations talks about the importance of silence in conversations and I think her message applies to our conversations with God as well. She writes, “[I]t is in the rests between notes that the music is savored. It is in the silence trembling at the end of a gorgeous musical phrase that our hearts swell. It is in that moment that we believe all things are possible, that we can be good, that perhaps we can make a contribution to mankind. Anyone can play the notes. The magic is in the intervals, in the phrasing. That’s where silence comes in.” Our life is full of music. Some of it is slow pretty music and some of it is fast and rough and difficult. But the rests give us pause. They allow us to see things a little more clearly. They allow us to savor the good things and unburden ourselves of the bad.

So as we craft our scrapbook page for this story, let’s put images reminding us of the times God came to us in the silence. Let’s include on the page a rest to remind us to savor those silences between notes of life. And let’s be ready to look and listen for God in the silence. Oddly enough, in our noisy world, silence can often feel more disconcerting and scary than the noises. But we must make space in our lives to embrace the silence. Because often times God is not in the winds, or the earthquakes, or the fires of our lives. Often times, God is whispering to us in the silence, in the rests between notes, in those moments when we stop running at full tilt and open our minds and hearts to receive what God has to say to us. May this image of silence that we are making in the scrapbooks of our lives remind us to rest in the silence and listen for God’s still small voice. It will be worth it. Amen!