All Saints’, Dorval
June 22, 2025
White-tailed deer in the middle of the Williams College campus when I was at Reunion June 12-15
My soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God; when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
This psalm, with its poignant image of a thirsty deer searching for water on the dry hilltops, expresses a longing that may feel familiar to many of us. God seems distant or absent, we yearn for the reassurance of a real sense of God’s presence, and we wonder whether it’s something we have done that has led to our feelings of emptiness and loss.
Sometimes, though, it’s the other way round. Sometimes, we just want God to leave us the heck alone.
This morning we heard part of the story of the prophet Elijah: the part that comes after his spectacular demonstration of God’s power on Mount Carmel, where he defied 450 prophets of the false god Baal and called down fire from heaven to consume his sacrifice to the Lord, thus ending a three-and-a-half year drought. As a result, Queen Jezebel, the worshipper of Baal, is Big Mad, as the kids say, and is pursuing Elijah to try to assassinate him. Elijah evades her by escaping into the wilderness, where he “came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: ‘It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.’”
Much has been made of the ways in which Elijah in this story echoes the story of Moses, the great prophet who received the law from God on the top of Mount Horeb (also known as Sinai). However, in this passage, Elijah is reminding me much more of Jonah, the prophet who literally fled in the opposite direction when God called him to prophecy, and when God had finally dragged him back and forced him to go preach to the people of Nineveh, got Big Mad when the people of Nineveh actually listened and changed how they behaved, and went and sat down under a bush and yelled that he wanted to die. Sound familiar?
There’s a strangely similar dynamic in the Gospel reading, where the man possessed by demons, upon seeing Jesus, cries out, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.” Far from longing and thirsting for God, he is actually begging God to go away.
This is perhaps understandable from someone possessed by so many demons that they call him Legion; you might expect those forces to be hostile to God. But just a few sentences later, we are told that “the whole throng of people of the surrounding region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, fore they were seized with great fear.”
What is going on here? Aren’t we supposed to love and seek God? Shouldn’t we want to be as close to God as possible, conscious in detail of the ways that God is working in our lives? Shouldn’t we cry out with the Psalmist, “My soul is athirst for God”?
Well, maybe. But there are all kinds of things that can affect our lives and make us feel quite differently. And several of them are present in these stories.
For example, burnout. After Elijah’s pièce de resistance on the summit of Mount Horeb – building an altar, working miracles, manipulating the emotions of hundreds of people, and incidentally being at the forefront of the slaughter of the priests of Baal – he is worn out. Worn out with performance, with conflict, with being the focal point of the attention of the living God. He cannot take it any more. Anyone who tries to talk to him, God included, is going to get their head bitten off.
There’s also shame. I think shame is at play in both these stories. Elijah sulks about being “no better than my ancestors;” despite the remarkable prophetic works that he has just done, he is still plagued by a profound sense of inferiority. And the man possessed by the legion of demons has practically nothing left to him in life but shame: naked, chained, raving, living among the tombs, he is everything that his society finds repulsive, and people shun him out of irrational fear that his shame might be contagious.
And finally, fear. It’s stated quite flatly that the Gerasene man’s neighbours, even having witnessed his miraculous restoration to wholeness, are “seized with great fear”. There can be all kinds of reasons to fear God – the knowledge of our own sin, the desire to avoid having our lives disrupted, the simple terror of being in the presence of what we don’t understand.
(Right now, what’s making me want to tell God to go away and leave me alone is the relentless drumbeat of bad news from the outside world, topped off by last night’s bombings.)
Remarkably, the exception to this desire to distance oneself from God seems to be the restored demoniac himself. While everyone else is running away, he comes back to Jesus and “begged that he might be with him.” But instead of welcoming him as a new disciple, Jesus sends the man back to his home to declare what God has done for him (also a reversal of Jesus’ usual habit of telling people not to say anything about his miracles).
And how does God respond when people are burned out, fearful, filled with shame, generally cranky, and run in the other direction rather than seeking out God with devoted hearts?
Well, when Elijah lies down under the broom tree and falls asleep, God sends an angel to bring him food and water not once but twice, an incident that has led to the creation of an internet meme about this verse that remarks, “Never doubt the spiritual power of a nap and a snack”. Then, after Elijah has run for forty days and forty nights to Mount Horeb, God appears to him, not in the wind, earthquake or fire, but in “a sound of sheer silence” – perhaps the only way that prickly, burnt-out Elijah is capable of encountering God, for now. Anything more dramatic would just send him running again.
Likewise, when the people of the Gerasenes ask Jesus to leave, he doesn’t rant at them or call down curses from heaven for their faithlessness: he matter-of-factly “got into the boat and returned.”
God is not offended when we have fits of temper, when we turn our backs, when we ask God to leave us alone. I imagine God looking at Elijah or Jonah – or me – with the amused patience of a parent looking at an overtired toddler who is screaming that she is NOT TIRED while clearly desperately needing a nap.
God loves us; there is nothing that can change that. God knows us, inside and out; it’s not like there’s anything we can actually do to hide our thoughts and feelings from God.
God would like us at least to be honest about those thoughts and feelings, but God is prepared to wait with cheerful patience, at a distance – offering the occasional snack or nap, and granting us the gift of sheer silence and space to work through our Big Feelings – for as long as it takes.
The work will still be there when we come back – the work of establishing the name of the one true God, of teaching the people, feeding the hungry, and making the suffering whole. God gives us the time and space we need to rediscover our genuine passion for that work after it has been ground out of us by burnout, shame, and fear.
The summer season is beginning, when for once the norms of our burnout-inducing, work-glorifying culture allow for a little bit of ease and rest. Embrace it, my friends. And sooner or later we will once again be able to pray:
As the deer longs for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God. My soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God; when shall I come to appear before the presence of God? … Put your trust in God, for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
Amen.
Leave a Reply