A dialog sermon based on Psalm 46 and 1 Kings 19 by Pastors Chris Neufeld-Erdman and Eunbee Ham
Eunbee: Psalm 46 is a song of trust in YHWH in the face of cosmic and geopolitical turmoil. The seas are roaring, mountains trembling, nations are in uproar. But where God reigns, the churning waters turn into rivers of gladness. YHWH ceases wars and disarms weapons of violence. The psalm ends with a call to be still and know that I am God.
This call to “Be still and know that I am God.” can be a difficult call to heed. What good does it do to be still where there is painful loneliness and isolation, a virus that seems out of control, winds that knock over fences, poverty, and racism? A call to action seems more appropriate than the call to “Be still and know that I am God.” Chris, what do you make of this call to be still?
Chris: I think it’s a really hard call. I mean, on the one hand it sounds so spiritually good, like it’s something spiritually-oriented people are supposed to aspire to. But it also can feel awfully idealistic, and even a form of what I call “spiritual bypassing”—using spirituality as a way to avoid or escape reality.
So yeah, this call to stillness can feel like a high bar and inappropriate in times like these. That said, I still believe that really good things can come out of getting quiet, harnessing the relentless drive to always be doing something, and turning down the noise from that relentless committee of voices in the head. The poet, Mary Oliver, has a couple really great lines in her poem, “The Journey.” She writes: “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices inside you kept shouting their bad advice.”
Eunbee: I love that. I have so many committees in my head.
Chris: Right? We all do. Some of those committees are great and functional, others are pretty dysfunctional. And so, practicing stillness is one way we can recognize those voices and name the bad advice they often give; it’s also a way we can trick them into silence by out-lasting them. This is one of the reasons I have a daily practice of sitting in stillness. When I practice stillness and silence, I’m training myself so that I don’t have to listen all the time to all the voices in my head. I’m training those voices not to expect that I’ll follow all their instructions. I don’t have to do what they say; I don’t even have to pay attention to them if I don’t want to.
Years ago, I had a stunning realization. I’d been meditating for a year or so—sitting in stillness, watching my thoughts without following them—and one day it occurred to me that because I can think a thought and observe a thought and even swap one thought for another, I am therefore not my thoughts. There’s a Me that’s bigger than my thoughts.
Maybe that seems obvious to some people, but it’s not obvious to all people. A lot of us have never realized that we don’t have to be controlled by our thoughts. We’ve never stopped to say to a random or unhelpful thought, “Halt! Who goes there and what’s your business?” For me that realization was revolutionary.
Eunbee: Hmm...that is so intriguing. I am not the best at sitting in silence because I get impatient with all the chaos floating around in my head. So I’m supposed to let them go. Did I let them go? Wait, I’m not supposed to be analyzing here, and that’s usually how this practice goes for me. So I prefer journaling to put my thoughts on paper rather than sitting in silence, evaluating what is supposed to be happening here. But I like the way you described your process, watching your thoughts without following them. Tell us more about what you do.
Chris: Yup. Same thing happens to me. So here’s what I do. And it’s not for everyone, but it’s worked pretty well for me for the last fifteen years. I set a smartphone app for 21 minutes so I can let go of my need to be distracted by thoughts about time. Then I grow still, paying attention to my breathing and gently reciting the words, “I am,” in concert with my breathing. “I am” of course is one of the names for God in the Hebrew Bible and it’s the way Jesus speaks of himself in the Gospel of John. So with those words I’m not just settling my thoughts, I’m also summoning God. It’s also a marvelous little existential statement: “I am.” What could be more true than that at the most basic level, “I am”?
As I sit, thoughts, memories, things I regret, things I plan to do, things I need to do, all this crowds in upon me. Sometimes I want to write it all down. But this is the only time I get during the day when I don’t have to do anything. So I do my best to let the thoughts pass through like leaves floating along a gentle brook. If I wander down the path of one thought or another, and I do, over and over again, I return to my breath and to the words, “I am.” I just keep doing that, avoiding analyzing the experience or judging it good or bad. I let go of my thoughts, over and over again. And eventually they seem to get tired of making a fuss. They seem to realize I’m serious about being still. And occasionally (though not every time, and then often for just a brief moment), I sense that I’ve gotten to a place inside my head where all the voices have grown still for just a moment and it’s as if all those voices have heard another Voice saying “Be still and know that I am God.” And then it seems as if, just for that moment, I experience a remarkable breakthrough to calm, clarity, and even bliss. This bliss is an altogether different kind of beauty from what we often experience; it’s what I call the Beauty with a capital “B” that’s behind or within all beauty, small “b”. And this encounter with Beauty (big “B”) is an encounter with God, who’s revealed through beauty (small “b”). This is the Beauty that the biblical writers often call the holy fear or reverence or awe that renders us speechless.
I say all this, realizing stillness is important and vitally important to our spiritual lives. And yet it’s such a hard thing to do because there is so much to do: there’s the dog who wants out, and kids who need fed, an email to write, a text to answer, the bathroom to clean, and on and on and on. And so, despite the infrequent yet powerful moments of bliss I can experience, I admit that to most of the voices in my head, this kind of stillness really seems irresponsible given the challenges we all face daily.
Eunbee: I like that image of your thoughts eventually getting tired of making a ruckus and the sense of calm and clarity you find in being still. I also appreciate that you know this practice may not be ideal for everyone.
But what strikes me as I’m listening to you is an implicit sense of humility in your practice of stillness, which assumes that our thoughts do not always reflect reality. It’s the opposite of “I think; therefore, I am.”
Recognizing the limits of our intellect touches on our conversation a few weeks back that God is so much more than what we think or believe about God at a given moment in our lives. We misunderstand even our closest friends and family, so why wouldn’t we misunderstand the reality of the divine? Stillness seems to invite us into a humility about so many things that remain beyond our understanding.
Chris: That’s exactly right and beautifully put. God is always beyond our understanding. Our words and ideas and rituals only point to a reality we can’t fully describe. And when we encounter the awe-full beauty of God, the truest human response is stillness, silence. Even our best ideas and actions are next to nothing when we come face to face with God.
Eunbee: As we talk about coming face to face with God and struggling with stillness, I’m reminded of one of my favorite prophets Elijah and his struggle with stillness. In scripture, Elijah is this fiery prophet who gets things done. I mean he has an international warrant for his arrest, and yet he persists in being the lone voice of resistance for YHWH, raising awareness that the people have abandoned God’s covenant and killed God’s prophets. But it seems that whatever he does, nothing changes. After years of isolation, hiding in ravines, and being public enemy number 1, it doesn’t seem that all his work made any difference. So he is depressed, angry, and exhausted.
He runs and runs for days until he reaches Horeb, the same mountain where Moses stood in the presence of God generations before. He accuses God, “I have been zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. The people have forsaken your covenant, thrown down the altars, killed your prophets. I alone am left, and now they’re trying to kill me, too! Elijah’s tone is very clear here: “I’ve been doing all this for you, and what have you been doing?”
Chris: That’s an accusation I’ve thrown at God a number of times. What have you been doing, God?! So, Elijah’s in this cave high on Mount Horeb. He’s sulking. He’s angry. He’s alone. His life is in danger. The world as he knows it is in tumult. He’s praying hard, anguished words, accusing God of malpractice. Lots of words. He’s active, pacing around inside the cave. Then the story tells us that the earth itself gets really active: “there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” Silence. Now, we know that God is in all things, not just silence; nothing in the universe doesn’t have divine energy in it. But the story wants us to know that the deepest encounter with the raw reality of God came not in activity, but in stillness, in “sheer silence.”
Nothing Elijah thought or wanted to do was as real or as important as that encounter with God in stillness. Nothing the earth did was as real or as powerful as that stillness.
Eunbee: Right. In that stillness, Elijah gets clarity and perspective. God tells Elijah that he’s not the only true prophet left. There are 7000 others that he doesn’t know about. God also invites Elijah to anoint Elisha, a successor to continue the work after he’s gone. So in the stillness, Elijah learns that there is so much more going on than what he knows. He is not the only righteous prophet. There are others who are equally called, and they need to journey together.
I especially giggle at this part because of Elijah’s humanity. He doesn’t leave full of love and inspiration. He’s still disgruntled, even though he’s had this profound mystical encounter with God. Stillness might inspire us but transformation takes time. I find this a pretty realistic story of how we are slow to change, and yet God chooses to meet us where we are and work with us.
Chris: Absolutely. Look, I get up from 21 minutes of stillness and it doesn’t take long for the worries and drivenness to return. I still grumble about things and bark at people I care about. But practicing stillness cuts a path through the briars of my dysfunction to something better, it keeps me open to God and to my better self, and over time, that better self grows and grows. I imagine that Elijah could have called his encounter with that “sheer silence” of God “beautiful.”
He wasn’t healed all of a sudden of his orneriness, his fretfulness, his control issues, his self-image problems, or whatever else plagued his personality. But that moment of encountering the Beauty-behind-all- beauty would never ever leave him, and he knew where to go to seek it again. Stillness. Silence. Awe, wonder, and mystery.
It’s a crazy world. It’s craziness demands the best kind of action.
But it’s so crazy we need to stop often, get still, be in the silence, encounter this vast Beauty, capital “B”, so we can make the world a more beautiful place.
Eunbee: Hmmmm. So Chris, take us there. We have a few minutes for meditation. And keep in mind folks like me who haven’t been practicing stillness for 15 years like you have.
Chris: Alright. It’s simple, but it’s anything but easy. Close your eyes . . . Get comfortable in your chair . . . Hands placed downward on your knees in a gesture of stability, or upward in a gesture of openness to God . . . Now, pay attention to your breathing . . . In . . . Out . . . In . . . Out . . . Gentle attention . . . And as you notice your thoughts parading across the screen of your mind, just watch them, and let them keep going without following them . . . When you do, just come back to your breath . . . And now follow me as I repeat these simple words from Psalm 46. I’ll provide some silence between phrases. Let the words carry yourself for just a few moments into a little more stillness . . .
“Be still and know that I am God . . .”
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“Be still and know that I am . . .”
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“Be still and know . . . ”
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“Be still . . .”
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“Be.”
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