12th Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 19:4-8
[Elijah] went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O God, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then, he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly, an angel touched him, and said to him, “Get up and eat.” [Elijah] looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of God came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” [Elijah] got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God.
The Valley of Death
During my first spring break when I was in seminary, I took a bunch of friends down to Southern California for what we called Epic Spring Break. We made our way down the coast, with many stops to take pictures along Bug Sur, as well as coffee, and meal, and bathroom breaks, turning what was normally a 7-hour drive into a 14-hour one. The next day we did the whole LA tourist thing: the Walk of Fame, the Hollywood sign, Chinatown. The day after that was Disneyland, and then we capped the whole thing off with a short camping trip to Death Valley National Park.
If I remember right, we took a caravan of four cars to get there, because there were so many of us. I had never been to Death Valley before, and as we were making the 5-hour drive there, I started to get nervous. I had no idea why I had chosen Death Valley. We could have gone to Yosemite, Sequoia, even Joshua Tree, but Death Valley?
Death Valley is literally the hottest place in the world. The hottest temperature ever recorded was 134 degrees Fahrenheit, in Death Valley, on July 10, 1913. Just for reference, a medium-rare steak is cooked to an internal temperature of 130 degrees. The highest surface temperature ever recorded on Earth was also unsurprisingly in Death Valley, on July 15, 1972 at 200 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to cause third degree burns in a matter of seconds.
I kept imagining my friends and I arriving at this hot, desolate wasteland, with nothing to see or do, and it would’ve been all my fault. But, as we continued on, and I worried about what the next few days would be like, I realized that Death Valley had to have been designated as a national park for a reason. The government doesn’t just give that designation to random places. We just had to find out what that reason was.
I know these thoughts I was having about Death Valley were probably very different from what Elijah was thinking when he made his escape into the desert, but he had to be wondering about what he was going to do. The desert is not a place that you go to unprepared. When I went to Death Valley, we brought tents, and chairs, and clothes, and food and water, wood for the fire, and the best camping accessory of all, my parents! They are really good at setting up a campsite and camp cooking.
Unlike me, Elijah didn’t have time to prepare. He was running for his life. The queen had ordered his death, and he didn’t have time to stop and pick up the things he would need. So, we see him, as he eventually finds a tree to sit under, a solitary broom tree in the desert. He has nothing. I can just imagine the harsh landscape around him: sandy, rocky, dusty. And, he finds this one lonely tree, where he can hide from the sun, and he asks God to take his life. Elijah has escaped from Jezebel, but now he was in the desert. His life is still in danger, because of the hostile environment that he’s found himself in. And, even though he was running to save his life, now he’s asking to die.
We see that all he wants to do is sleep. An angel comes, gives him food and water. He eats and he drinks, but then he goes back to sleep. I don’t think they understood this back then, or even had a word for it, but it seems like Elijah is depressed, here. He wants to die and all he wants to do is sleep. It’s makes sense, Jezebel wants him dead, and she has the power to do it, and he’s alone in the desert, he has no family or friends he can turn to. He has no support system. He doesn’t know what to do.
So, God sends an angel. It’s a miracle: a heavenly being showing up in the middle of nowhere with bread and water. In our modern-day, if you tried to tell someone that this happened to you, they would think that you had heat stroke, or that you were hallucinating. But, in terms of biblical miracles, this is kind of a small one. It’s not the parting of the Red Sea, it’s not 40 days and 40 nights of rain, it’s not bringing someone back from the dead. It’s food, and it’s water.
When we think about miracles, we often think of incredible, unbelievable events. But, God gives us miracles in all different shapes and sizes. Earlier in Elijah’s story, Elijah was looking for God. God wasn’t in the violent wind, God wasn’t in the earthquake, God wasn’t in the raging fire. God was in the still, small voice. God was in the bread and the water, in an angel sent to be with a man who was lost and alone, sleeping under a tree in the desert.
There are a lot of stories in the Bible about people encountering God in the wilderness, and it’s something that we still do. So many people talk about encountering God in the mountains, in the trees, by the river. The desert is often used as a metaphor for hopelessness and uncertainty, sadness and despair. But, the desert is a wild place; it’s as wild as you can get. And, God can always be found in the wilderness.
When my friends and I arrived at the Death Valley campsite, it was just this big, uneven field of gravel…no trees, no shade, just rocks. And, it was hot. But, it was spring, so the high was just in the high 80s.
We set-up camp, and started to explore, because we only had a few days there. Death Valley is a stark place, a place that looks like it would be completely inhospitable for life. It doesn’t look like the Sonoran Desert or the Mojave Desert, which are also hot and dry places, but where life is evident in cacti or Joshua trees. At first glance, Death Valley looks desolate. But, life is there. There are huge, rocky fields that explode with wildflowers after the rare desert storm. There’re scraggly bushes with yellow flowers growing among the sand dunes, their yellow petals collecting in the dips and curves of the sand. There’s the pupfish, a tiny, critically endangered fish that can only be found in a few small pools within the park.
One of my favorite memories of that trip was the night we all decided to have a communion service by the light of the campfire. This is the kind of thing that happens when six seminarians go camping together. Two of my classmates were from Korea, and one was from the Dominican Republic. My parents are from the Philippines; they both speak Tagalog, and my dad also speaks Mandarin Chinese. And, between all of us, there were even more languages that we had studied at some point in our lives. So, we thought it would be neat if we could speak the words over communion in as many languages as possible, with each person who was able, contributing their voice to the service.
We spent the day writing out all of the different versions that we would need that night; there’s surprisingly good cell phone service in Death Valley. When night fell, we gathered around the campfire, and we prepared the bread and the juice, and we celebrated communion together, in English, Korean, Tagalog, Bicol, French, Spanish, German, Greek, and Chinese. It was beautiful. It was magical. It was God coming to be with us in the wilderness. My nephew, who didn’t really go to church very often, even said that it was really cool, and he hoped that we could do it again, someday.
Two nights and three days are not enough to see everything in Death Valley. There’s a big salt flat, sand dunes, canyons, and huge craggy mountains with different colored stripes, formed and bent and broken by the Earth’s geologic processes. It’s so stark, and hot, and dry, but it’s so beautiful. And, you can’t be there, surrounded by all of that vast eerie openness, the hot, dry, whistling wind, and not feel God’s presence.
God is with us in so many ways, in the beauty that surrounds us, in the small miracles of our everyday lives. We just need to be open to it. We just need to be looking for it. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
