It's Moving Week!

As you may have already noticed, this week's sermon was not posted here to the Theophilus Project, and that is because my blog has new online digs, at my new website: ericatcheson.com.

I have loved this blog and getting to share it with you, but after nearly seven years, it was in dire need of a refresh, and as I begin a new phase of my ministry career, combining my blog with my professional website made obvious sense.

The blog is moving, but the writing and advocacy will continue. Especially with Oregon Trail Theology now well into the editing process and my doctoral thesis a little more than two months away from being defended, one of my short term goals is to resume writing content for the blog that goes beyond my Sunday sermons.

While my online presence will be moving, the Theophilus Project will remain up and available for the foreseeable future.

Thank you for reading and hearing what I have had to say over the years. I hope to continue to add to the conversation with you for many more years to come.

Yours always in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "A Great and Powerful Wind," 1 Kings 19:1-14

1 Kings 19:1-14

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, how he had killed all Baal’s prophets with the sword. 2 Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah with this message: “May the gods do whatever they want to me if by this time tomorrow I haven’t made your life like the life of one of them.” 3 Elijah was terrified. He got up and ran for his life. He arrived at Beer-sheba in Judah and left his assistant there.

4 He himself went farther on into the desert a day’s journey. He finally sat down under a solitary broom bush. He longed for his own death: “It’s more than enough, Lord! Take my life because I’m no better than my ancestors.” 5 He lay down and slept under the solitary broom bush. Then suddenly a messenger tapped him and said to him, “Get up! Eat something!” 6 Elijah opened his eyes and saw flatbread baked on glowing coals and a jar of water right by his head. He ate and drank, and then went back to sleep. 7 The Lord’s messenger returned a second time and tapped him. “Get up!” the messenger said. “Eat something, because you have a difficult road ahead of you.” 8 Elijah got up, ate and drank, and went refreshed by that food for forty days and nights until he arrived at Horeb, God’s mountain. 9 There he went into a cave and spent the night. The Lord’s word came to him and said, “Why are you here, Elijah?” 10 Elijah replied, “I’ve been very passionate for the Lord God of heavenly forces because the Israelites have abandoned your covenant. They have torn down your altars, and they have murdered your prophets with the sword. I’m the only one left, and now they want to take my life too!”

11 The Lord said, “Go out and stand at the mountain before the Lord. The Lord is passing by.” A very strong wind tore through the mountains and broke apart the stones before the Lord. But the Lord wasn’t in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake. But the Lord wasn’t in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake, there was a fire. But the Lord wasn’t in the fire. After the fire, there was a sound. Thin. Quiet. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his coat. He went out and stood at the cave’s entrance. A voice came to him and said, “Why are you here, Elijah?” 14 He said, “I’ve been very passionate for the Lord God of heavenly forces because the Israelites have abandoned your covenant. They have torn down your altars, and they have murdered your prophets with the sword. I’m the only one left, and now they want to take my life too.” (Common English Bible)

“From Haran to the Negev: When God Foretells Transition,” Week Three

We have just spent two weeks seeing world-class athletes compete not under their own nation’s flag, but under the Olympic flag—as Russia was banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics for their state-run doping program, and even as they had athletes test positive for performance-enhancing drugs during this Olympics, the rest of their contingent continued competing under the Olympic flag.

There is a long tradition of athletes competing at the Olympics under the Olympic flag, often athletes who are stateless, like Guor Maker, also known as Guor Marial. He is a South Sudanese-turned-American marathon runner who competed in track and field in high school and college and eventually qualified to run the marathon in both the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, with the first being under the Olympic flag as well. To answer exactly why he had to compete under the Olympic flag, I’ll let the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees explain:

Guor lost 28 family members during the Second Sudanese Civil War, including eight siblings, and spent much of his early life on the run. He was eventually captured and used as forced labour. In 1994, he joined relatives in the Sudan capital, Khartoum, where he remained until leaving for Egypt at the age of 14. Two years later, he went to the United States, where he was granted refugee status.

In June 2013, to mark World Refugee Day—and after nearly 20 years away—Guor returned to his village in South Sudan from his new home in Arizona. With the help of UNHCR he was reunited with his parents and other family members who had last seen him in 1993.

If you caught the use of the term “forced labor” in that story—that means “slavery.” He was enslaved. But he escaped. He found sanctuary and security as a refugee here in the United States and, on top of competing in two Olympics, just last month enlisted in the United States Air Force as an airman.

Not too bad for someone who was kidnapped into slavery during a genocide.

I don’t want Guor’s story to just fall into the “heroic, noble refugee” stereotype, though. What I want us to take away from this is, if we can imagine even a fraction of it, the sheer abandonment that one feels in being kidnapped into slavery during a genocide, because it is that sort of abandonment that followers of God have felt at so many points throughout history, and what can help us understand Elijah’s predicament here in 1 Kings 19.

This is both a new sermon series and my last sermon series for you here in Longview. With my last few weeks as your pastor, I want to speak to you in spirit and in truth about the nature of our transition into new roles in one another’s lives, and what my own hopes are for this mighty family of Jesus followers when I am no longer here.

To do this, our Lenten sermon series will cover different stories of transition, moving, and new starts throughout Scripture. We began this series with one of the oldest and greatest—the calling of Abram and Sarai by God to pick up their lives at Ur in Mesopotamia and relocate to Canaan by way of a place called Haran, from which this sermon series takes part of its name.

Haran is located in what is now southern Turkey (and is now called Harran, with the extra ‘r’), and its name comes from ancient Akkadian to mean “road” or “crossroads,” which is an appropriate name for both a waystation for a traveling couple and this series as we approach a crossroads in the life of our congregation. So, this series derives its name from it and from the ending of that passage from Genesis 12, which says that Abram and his household continued on toward the Negev.

Last week, we talked about the the story of Moses at the burning bush. The voice of God has just told Moses that God has seen the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt and is sending Moses to right this historic wrong, but there is still more: Moses needs to know who it is that is sending him to undertake this monumental task. God simply replies, “Say to the Israelites, “I AM” has sent you.”

Today, God has sent another Biblical hero—the prophet Elijah, whose defining trait is the passion with which he opposes the worship of the false deities in the Old Testament such as Ba’al. It so determines Elijah’s sense of faith and public ministry that his name, Elijah, means, roughly, “My Lord is my God.” (From the Hebrew words “Elohim,” for “Lord,” and “Yah,” for “God.”)

Elijah’s fierce opposition to Ba’al worship lands him in trouble, though, because he has just bested in public, and subsequently killed, the priests of Ba’al and Ahab, the king of Israel who worships Ba’al and opposes Elijah, has his wife and queen, Jezebel, pursue Elijah. Jezebel is used as an antifeminist archetype in Christianity today, but essentially who she was is the result of ancient Near Eastern diplomacy: an alliance sealed in marriage, and she brings with her the worship of her gods, in this case the Canaanite god of rain and storms.

Elijah’s fear of Jezebel is so acute, though, and his sense of failure so great, that he literally curls up and wishes for death, praying for God to take him because he sees himself as no better than his ancestors who came before him.

But God is not finished with Elijah just yet. And God makes sure that Elijah knows that. As endangered as Elijah feels, God’s messenger makes it clear to him that God is still present.

A great and powerful wind tears through the stones on the mountain, but 1 Kings says that God was not in it. Then an earthquake, and then a fire. But then God’s voice reappears, in what is now known as the “still, small voice.”

It may feel as though a great and powerful wind is strong enough to rip through the cornerstone of a church, but that does not mean that God is in that wind. God may well appear afterwards, after the initial shock and trepidation.

That may not have initially reversed Elijah’s feelings of loneliness and hopelessness or helplessness. But they eventually, as the chapter progresses, spur Elijah back to his feet to go and find his apprentice Elisha so that they may continue their public ministry together.

We do not always escape in this lifetime the very lowest moments of this world. Such moments take the lives of millions, through injustices like the trafficking and slavery of people like Guor Maker, or through addiction and homelessness, or domestic violence—the ways in which we are brought down by one another are seemingly endless, and many do not end in as happy a way as Guor’s story, or Elijah’s for that matter.

It is important to acknowledge that not all stories end the way we necessarily want them to.

But it is equally important to set all our stories up for as much success as humanly possible.

A new chapter in the story of this congregation will soon begin to be written. What it will say, and how it will end, is up to you, as the Holy Spirit leads you.

My hope and prayer, though, is that what you will write—in a job description, in a congregational profile, even in words of encouragement to each other—will be something that reflects the faith in God that lives within you, and does right by that faith.

Elijah felt he could no longer to right by his own fierce faith in God, and for a moment, he let go and waited for death. It is really not a bad example to look to—letting go of certain things can be an important moment of faithful surrender, because Elijah is completely real before God. He is not pretending to be anything other than distraught. There is real honesty and authenticity in that.

But that moment of letting go did not end Elijah’s story. Nor should this time of letting me go, and me letting you go, end your story. Do not think that God has placed a period where, in fact, God may well have placed a comma instead.

There is still much more story to be written. And you remain the ones whom God can use to write it.

Write the story well, my church. Write it well.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

March 4, 2018