1 Kings 19.9, Psalm 85. 8-13, Matthew 14.22-23
I discovered this week that the BBC have a wonderful treasure trove of sound effects and background noise on their website, all downloadable. With a little bit of electronic wizardry, [ This can be heard on the podcast], I could perhaps convince you that this podcast was coming to you from a steam train…or the African bush in the night time…or even a camel market, rather than my study in the vicarage.
The background noises we hear are often far more important than we think, giving us subliminal aural clues about where we are. Apparently scammers often play backing tracks of office noise when they phone people, to try to convince their victims that they are phoning from somewhere official.
I wonder whether you have ever thought about the soundscapes of the stories we read in the Bible. We’re are used to seeing Bible stories; illustrations in Bibles, images in stained glass abound. But what would it have sounded like to have been there? What background noises would we have heard? And how might it change or enrich our understanding of them if we could hear them in our mind’s ear, as well as seeing them in our mind’s eye.
This all came into my mind because the two stories we’ve heard today are particularly noisy ones.
In the first, we meet Elijah, who’s run away into a hostile desert to escape from the even more hostile Queen Jezebel, who is looking to have him killed. He feels utterly defeated, powerless, hopeless, ready to give up, but eventually, with a bit of help from an angel he staggers to the slopes of Mount Horeb, where he knows he will meet God. It’s almost certainly the same mountain as Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments, so it was a place associated with divine encounters. And that’s where the noisy bit begins. I’m not going to play you sound effects for this, because the ones in your imagination are likely to be much better, but think about what it might have sounded like.
First there is a wind, a mighty roaring wind strong enough to crack open the rocks. Then there is an earthquake, tearing the mountain apart and sending those rocks crashing down the mountainside. Finally, there is a raging fire, crackling and howling around Elijah.
He must have been deafened and terrified, but possibly not surprised. “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars” says Psalm 29 “the voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness”… And yet he discovers that God isn’t in these noisy demonstrations of power, as he might have assumed he would be. We thought last week about how we often tend to think of God as big and majestic, and miss him in the small things. The same thing applies to the auditory assumptions we make. Elijah discovers that on this occasion at least , God isn’t in all that wilderness-shaking drama. Instead, he finds him in what’s called here the “sound of sheer silence”, sometimes translated as a “still, small voice”.
What is this sound? The writer, and translators through the ages, have obviously struggled to find a way of expressing it, but my experience is that people know it when they hear it, and a surprising number of people have told me that they have, at least once in their lives. It’s that moment of deep certainty about something, that moment when we hear something, from without or within, that cuts through all the other noise and distraction, the moment when we say “yes…this! This is true! This is how it is!” Some people describe an actual voice, actual words, others just a profound sense of peace, an assurance that whatever is going on in their lives, they are loved and, ultimately, held in safe hands.
Elijah has been feeling overwhelmed with feelings of failure. He feels as if he will never defeat the power of the evil King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. “I alone am left!” he wails to God, but God begs to differ, and by the end of the encounter Elijah has realised that, not only does God have his back, there are also many others who are with him. There’s no magic wand, no promise that it will all be easy, but Elijah has found the peace and the certainty he needs.
St Peter hears this “still small voice” in a different way in the equally noisy Gospel story we heard today. The disciples have set off in their boat across the Sea of Galilee. They’ve left Jesus behind to pray at the end of a long and exhausting day, but as the evening wears on a storm blows up. The wind and waves batter the boat – imagine the din; sails and ropes flap, wood creaks as if the boat might break in two, the disciples shout, desperately trying to make themselves heard over the howling wind. And then suddenly, there is someone, walking on the water… and a voice, cutting through the storm saying “it is I; do not be afraid.” And suddenly, for Peter at least, it’s as if that’s all there is to hear. He seems to be oblivious to the wind and waves, at least for a while, as he climbs out of the boat and begins to walk on the water to Jesus. It doesn’t last. The noise of the storm, and of his fear of the storm, breaks in again, reminding him that, actually, people can’t walk on water. But even though he starts to sink, he seems to be aware that the help he needs is right there at hand. “Lord, save me,” he calls, daring to trust that Jesus can and will.
It's a puzzling story to our modern minds, but as with so many of the miracles, we can get distracted by the miraculousness of them, and miss the message their writers meant us to hear. The early Christians who told and heard this story told it because day by day they found themselves out of their depth, all at sea, having to do what seems impossible – walking on water in one way or another - just as we so often do today. The only way they would get through, and the only way we will, is to listen for the voice of the one who still comes to us saying “it is I: do not be afraid”, the one who “speaks peace to his faithful people” as Psalm 85 puts it.
The voice that “speaks peace” which Peter and Elijah hear doesn’t deny the raging of the storm, the problems that they face, but it reminds them that they are in the hands of one who created wind and water, rock and flame, the one who is not overwhelmed by them, and will not let them overwhelm us either.
We live in a noisy world. There is outer noise; traffic, machinery, all those screens and devices that demand our attention, as well as the noises of clashing opinions and arguments that surround us. But the noise within us is often just as distracting and exhausting, the noise of our anxieties and regrets, our anger and frustration, the inner voices pulling us this way and that. We are faced by huge, noisy challenges – personal, national, global. But that means that it has never been more important to stop, and listen for that still, small voice which speaks peace, which points us in the right direction so we don’t drown in our own panic, but instead reach out our hand to the one who can bring us safely through the storm.
Amen
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