A sermon by Rev. Dan Calvo
Pittsburgh New Church
June 29th, 2025
Video:
Text:
(1 Kings 19:9-18)
SECRETS OF HEAVEN 219: The voice of Jehovah in the Word is taken to mean the Word itself, teachings about faith, conscience (or an alertness to what is inside us), and every reproof of conscience.
Elijah was looking for God because he had nowhere else to go.
He ran away to save his life through the desert for forty days and forty nights, facing the blazing sun by day and the dangerous animals and deadly cold by night, with the threat of queen Jezebel’s soldiers looming over his head. One night, Elijah found a cave to protect himself and hid there. This wasn’t just any cave, however: this cave was in Mount Horeb, also known as Mount Sinai, where Moses had received the ten commandments several generations ago, the same ten commandments that Elijah had tried to uphold against the heresy of queen Jezebel and her evil priests. And yet, Elijah was now in fear for his life because he had tried to uphold these commandments of the Lord.
It's easy to feel like Elijah sometimes. While we may not encounter ourselves in life-and-death situations in our everyday lives, we can become overwhelmed with the evils of the world just how Elijah did. We watch the news and see how the world is falling to evil, how wars break out causing suffering to innocent victims, how love for our neighbor is replaced by hatred, selfishness and greed in almost every conceivable way. It seems that there is no end to these evils, and sometimes we want to run away from them and hide away in a cave! We are trying to save ourselves from that evil, and we are looking for God to save us from them.
Elijah felt powerless in this story, and with good reason. Elijah was hiding away in the cave after he did everything right! He obeyed the Lord’s commandments, and when he defeated the evil priests, he did it all under the guidance of God. Yet, he was now in danger of being murdered. It was as if all his faith and work were meaningless in an evil world. Because unfortunately, after everything that Elijah tried to do, the world didn’t change all that much. Queen Jezebel was still ruling over in her kingdom, she had killed the priests of the Lord, she was continuing her heresy, and she was getting ready to kill Elijah. And now, Elijah was looking for some sign from God that he could overcome this, that change could actually happen, that evil could finally be defeated. He was looking for a sign from God that the world could change for the better.
We can feel like this sometimes when we are hiding in our caves, so to speak, thinking that we need some kind of extreme change because it seems to us that what we are doing in our lives is meaningless in the bigger picture. There are many ways in which people look for that change in the world, and these different approaches are represented by the signs of power in the story. The wind, earthquake, and fire all have deeper spiritual meanings that reveal in what ways people look for change in an evil world.
The first sign that Elijah saw was a powerful wind that was so mighty that it could even destroy rocks. In the Word, wind can represent many different things, but we can interpret it in this story as an agent of destruction (AC 7679). Broken rocks can represent false ideas about religion, or more specifically, the false ideas that come from thinking about the Word in purely literal terms (AC 10582). If people only interpret the Word based on its external meaning, without trying to go deeper, then many false ideas can come from this, and these may lead to evil. For example, if we were to take “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” literally, we would end up looking for revenge against every person that has ever wronged us or done something evil. In our own lives, we may want the Lord to come down and destroy every one of these false ideas in the world, so that only pure truth prevails.
However, we are told that God is not in this destructive wind! If God was to destroy all these false ideas in people, He would remove our freedom to think more deeply about the Word ourselves. People must be free to think about religion in whatever way they are able, even if it leads to something that we do not agree with or that is false. Eliminating this freedom of thought would not destroy evil in the world but would remove the very thing that makes faith and charity valuable: freedom of choice.
The second sign that Elijah saw, the earthquake, has a similar spiritual meaning. In the Word, an earthquake represents changes in the church, or more specifically, changes of good and truth, which are the things that make the church (AC 3355). When looking at all the evil in the world, and particularly the way that the literal sense of the Word is used by some institutions to cause division and hatred amongst people, we may think that it would be best to just destroy all organized religion. Either that, or we think that it would be best to change it completely to fit our own view of what religion should be, removing everything we disagree with. Yet, we’re told that God is not in the earthquake either. Change cannot happen without any kind of guidance, design, or order. When we think about the ways we can change the world for the better, we must always do so using the Word as our foundation, instead of our own perceptions of what good and truth are.
If we were to create a world based only on what we think is good and true, then it would be a world that excludes everybody else’s view, and we would never be able to move beyond our own limited, biased understanding of what the world should be like. Looking at the Word for guidance provides us with an objective universal foundation that tries to accommodate as many people as possible, while still maintaining order, and it helps us keep love for the Lord and for our neighbor as the most important part of any changes that may take place.
After the wind and the earthquake, the third sign that Elijah saw was a powerful fire. In the Word, fire is often a symbol for a destructive kind of selfishness (AC 934). It is easy to see why God wouldn’t be present in this kind of fire! When we see the evil in the world, we may often think that if everybody was to listen to what we say, and start doing things OUR WAY, then everything would be changed for the better. We may think that our own desires and ideas should guide people’s lives, not religion or faith or other people’s thoughts, but our own. After all, we have all the answers, right? Yet, that would lead to all sorts of problems. When we seek to dominate over others, we are no longer living life with love in our hearts, but with hatred. Removing freedom from others and looking to bend them to our will is always evil, regardless of whether we think we are in the right or not.
So, we just saw that the wind that could break rocks symbolizes destruction, the earthquake symbolizes extreme changes of good and truth, and the fire symbolizes the kind of selfishness that can lead to a desire to dominate over others. We can fall into any of these things very easily when thinking about how to eliminate the evils in the world. Yet, we find that God isn’t in any of these big, extreme changes.
So, where is God?
God was not present in the powerful signs, but He WAS PRESENT in a small, gentle voice, which led Elijah out of the cave. Elijah went looking for the Lord and may have been expecting Him to be in the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, but ultimately, he was able to find God in a more intimate way. God is not found in extreme, destructive changes, but He is found in the still moments when we turn to Him with a humble heart. When we become overwhelmed with evil, and we want change, oftentimes we forget that positive change can begin with the small gesture of reading the Word for comfort and guidance. This seemingly small action can bring the Lord into our lives, so we are not creating change without guidance. That’s how we can hear the gentle voice of the Lord.
We may not have the power to change the world at large by ourselves, but we can change ourselves and how we interact with the world. And we can find the voice of God telling us how to change ourselves in the truths that we read in the Word. Like the Ten Commandments, which show us the things we must not do to others in order to live a spiritual life. The golden rule, treating others as we want to be treated. The Lord’s commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. The doctrines found in the Writings that teach us that every single person around us is the neighbor, and we must always look for the good in others.
The act of reading the Word, as simple as it is, as seemingly small as it may be at a first glance, can be life-changing. Not only that, the truths that we find in the Word can legitimately change the world, even if it’s just our immediate surroundings. Every single one of our actions guided by the truths of the Word can have an impact that goes further beyond what we can imagine.
Secrets of Heaven number 6490 says that: “every moment of life holds a chain of consequences stretching into eternity.” If we believe in this teaching, we can rest in the knowledge, that even if it might not seem like it, changing ourselves by going to the Word, reading its teachings, and following them, can have a chain reaction of consequences that affect the world at large, even to infinity. Because when we follow the Word, and allow it to make us happier, more fulfilled, and more connected with a greater good, the world becomes a better place. But that tremendous change starts with listening to that small, gentle voice that we find in the Word.
That is what happened to Elijah in the story. After he heard God’s gentle voice, Elijah received a new command from the Lord. Elijah was to go to Syria and Israel, to anoint new kings that would fight against the corruption of Jezebel and her evil priests. Not only that, Elijah was supposed to anoint a new prophet, Elisha, who would join him in upholding the Word of God. There was hope. The gentle voice of God promised that the world would change for the better and it delivered.
When we are overwhelmed with the evils of the world, and we want things to change, we cannot bring about that change by destroying other people’s beliefs, drastically changing religion altogether, or imposing our own desires upon others. But we can make changes in our life, small as they might be, by looking at the truths of the Word for guidance. Without the faith we get from the Word, any changes we want to do in the world will only bring about even more evil and grief for others. If we listen to the gentle voice of God found in the Word, and use the truths found there to lead our efforts for change, we will be able to change ourselves and the world in the best way possible. Instead of looking for God in the great powerful signs, let us look for God in the most powerful sign of all: His small, gentle voice, speaking to us from the Word.