Introduction
Don’t we all come at some time in our lives to a passage where we just have to gut-it-out? Isn’t that where we as a nation are right now? Isn’t that where many of us are …or where our family members or friends or fellow parishioners are… right now? Those who are showing up in ever greater numbers at Hot Dish and Hope to be fed or at the Barnabas Network to be provided with the bare essentials to sustain a family – isn’t that where they are…right now? Gutting-it-out, hanging in there, hoping and praying for that day to come when the burden will be lifted from them!
The loss of a job, the evaporation of a life’s savings, a critical illness, the loss of a loved one, or simply living in the midst of a world that too often seems to be driven by fear, hatred, and distrust – any one of these experiences can thrust us into a narrow, churning, ominous rapids in the stream of life that requires us to tough it out, to hang-in-there in hope and trust until we emerge into calmer waters. The inescapable nature of this journey of life is that at critical passages we are simply called to endure and to trust.
Endurance is one of the four Cardinal Virtues of Christians. Yet we give it little stature in the Christian life, perhaps because the church is so embedded in a popular culture where the notion of endurance runs counter to our sense of entitlement to happiness and ease.
Endurance cuts against the grain of a popular culture which has construed our Declaration of Independence’s assertion of the right to the “pursuit of happiness” to mean some kind of vapid happiness based on ease, comfort, and pleasure propped up by unprecedented affluence and an ubiquitous and mind-numbing entertainment industry and consumerism.
Endurance is a challenge to our way of life, and yet there it is – an inescapable part of our human experience and one of our four Cardinal Virtues. It is a part of our Christian heritage, tracing back to Jesus himself and far back beyond him into the mists of the Judeo-Christian tradition, indeed into the mists of virtually all religious traditions.
In fact, the whole of the Bible is a tale of endurance – the endurance of Israel, God’s chosen people, the endurance of God’s own son, the endurance of the prophets and the apostles – even and most especially of God himself who has had to endure the fickleness and faithlessness of his people from the very beginning even to today.
Elijah’s Story
Endurance is at the heart of today’s narrative of Elijah. Elijah was a great prophet of Yahweh at a most inconvenient time in Israel’s history when King Ahab, influenced by his Canaanite wife Jezebel, is attempting to eradicate the worship of Yahweh and replace it with her Canaanite Baal gods.
He was a hunted man for having had the temerity to stand up to Ahab and his wife. Elijah, one of the most revered of the prophets of Yahweh, became the most wanted man in all of Israel. The King’s determination to eliminate this thorn in his side had driven Elijah into hiding in the wilderness. Finally, however, Elijah decides to hide no more but to confront Ahab and Jezebel and the prophets of Baal in a show-down between Yahweh and the Baal gods on Mount Carmel.
The king accepts the challenge, and without going into the fascinating details of this contest on Mt. Carmel, suffice it to say that when Elijah calls on Yahweh, Yahweh answers and shows himself to the people of Israel in a powerful and compelling way. People and king repent and return to Yahweh. The Baal gods are destroyed and their Baal priests removed. But Jezebel remains obdurate…
She does not accept defeat. She seeks vengeance, and because of her wrath Elijah is forced to flee once again to the wilderness. It is in the midst of his flight south that today’s lesson picks up Elijah’s story. We see this faithful prophet of Yahweh fresh from his triumph on Mt. Carmel sitting under a broom tree praying to Yahweh to take his life.
We see him lying down – and to lie down in the desert in the middle of the day is the surest way to die. Elijah is feeling defeated, dejected, depressed, deserted, and is ready to end his own life and to forsake his call. He cannot conceive of going another step, of enduring any more trials and tribulations for his commitment to Yahweh. His tank is empty; his hope seems to have evaporated in the desert heat… Has your tank ever been empty? Have you ever been there? Have not all of us been there at least once?
But then Yahweh speaks to Elijah: “Arise and eat, else the journey will be too great for you.” In other words “stop feeling sorry for yourself, get back on your feet, and get moving. I will provide for your needs. There is more ahead, more to be done, more to be revealed.”
Elijah is fed and nourished and called to endure until his journey is completed, until his work is done and all is revealed. Strengthened by Yahweh’s provisions for him, he makes his way to Mt. Horeb, the mount of God and there finds refuge in a cave. Once again Yahweh speaks to him, calls him to come out and stand upon the mountain and wait for Yahweh’s revelation.
It is here in this place and at this moment in time that Elijah beholds the power of an earthquake, the wind, and fire and discovers that Yahweh is not in any of these powerful phenomena but rather in the “sheer silence” that follows, the “still small voice of calm” that reveals to him that it is time to go back yet again and take up the work for which Yahweh has appointed him.
This story speaks not only of the prophet’s remarkable endurance but of Yahweh’s own endurance, for finally it is Yahweh who has to endure his people’s fickleness and faithlessness without abandoning them. Still, it is Elijah’s endurance that we can most identify with. If one of the greatest and most faithful of God’s prophets was tempted to give up hope and faith before God was done with him, is it surprising that we who are weak by comparison come to those dry spots in our journeys where we lose faith and hope and are ready to give up on a God who never, ever gives up on us?
It is no accident that endurance is one of the four cardinal virtues of Christians, for to endure when the tank is empty is one of the most faithful responses we can make to a faithful God.
The Voyage of the “Endurance”
Another tale of the virtue of endurance has captured my interest and imagination. It is the story of the expedition of Ernest Shackelton in 1914 on his ship “The Endurance.” With a crew of 27 men he set out in November 1914 for the Antarctic. It was, quite frankly, an endeavor motivated by S’s own pride, and because of that it was probably a voyage of folly. That notwithstanding, it was still an adventure of almost mythic proportion, culminating in a display of endurance that has inspired many, including me.
This was S’s third expedition to the Antarctic. In 1901 and again in 1907 he had failed in his attempt to be the first to reach the continent. In the meantime Roald Amundsen of Norway had reached the continent of Antarctica in 1911. With that prize already claimed, Shackelton decided on an expedition to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent on foot wherein may lie both the pride and the folly of one man -- who in order to make a name for himself -- would place 27 other men at risk, stranding them with him in an Antarctic ice flow for more than a year and a half.
As winter set in. The ice initially locked up their ship, then crushed it, and finally it literally consumed the ship. After abandoning ship and salvaging as much of their provisions and equipment as they could, the party drifted on the random Antarctic currents through an Antarctic winter that was but a prelude to a year and a half on the ice, requiring them eventually to have to kill and eat their beloved sled dogs to survive.
In April 1916 they seized their one possible escape opportunity, launching into the Antarctic Sea in the pitifully small life boats they had dragged with them across the ice. For three days they fought raging seas and below zero temperatures as they rowed across the frigid, open water toward the one piece of terra firma that they would ever have any chance of reaching --an ice-veneered rock outcropping in the middle of the Antarctic Ocean called Elephant Island -- little more hospitable than the ice flow they had left behind except that it didn’t drift, wouldn’t melt out from under them, and was home to a colony of penguins which would feed the starving men.
There 23 of the men hunkered down and huddled together under their overturned life boats while Shackelton and four others set sail for South Georgia Island, the nearest outpost of civilization which lay 800 miles east across the raging Antarctic. Had they missed South Georgia Island, which given their navigational limitations was a most likely outcome, they would have sailed into oblivion and all would eventually have perished. But they managed to find South Georgia Island and came ashore on its western coastline.
On the east coast beyond the 10,000 foot iced mountains that rose out of the ocean was the whaling station which had been their last port of call before sailing toward the Antarctic continent nearly two years earlier. Shackelton and two of his men with frozen and tattered clothing and little food made the trek over the mountains in three days to come sliding down the glacial ice into the whaling station on May 10, 1916, frightening the inhabitants who thought they were being visited by aliens.
After several failed attempts over three months, Shackelton finally secured a proper ship and returned to Elephant Island to rescue the 23 who had remained behind. Twenty-two months after they had first embarked and after nearly a year and a half since they had had to abandon ship in the ice flow, all 28 men were returned to safety. Endurance had conquered the elements, the tempest, and one man’s folly. No one had been lost.
Not One Shall Be Lost
No one had been lost! Do you hear in those words the echo of today’s gospel? “This is the will of him who sent me: that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” I suspect those words of Jesus must have come often to Shackelton’s mind in the months he spent lost in the Antarctic with the 27 crew members who had entrusted their lives to him.
The words of the Master must have haunted him during the long Arctic winter nights and driven him during the few daylight hours. “I should lose nothing that has been given me, no one that trusted themselves to my hands.” And so he endured what few have endured. And his spirit of endurance was transferred to his men. And they too endured what few others have ever endured.
What Elijah and Shackelton and his men endured may be more than we will ever have to face in our mundane lives; what brought them to their testing may be more dramatic than anything most of us will ever experience. Yet we, like them, will inevitably be brought to the test and have to decide: whether to endure, to give up, or to settle? To endure for the sake of our high calling as children of God and followers in the way of Jesus, or to give up the quest, or to settle for some transitory bauble that our popular culture offers as a distraction and consolation prize?
Conclusion
I believe that we who are here today are here because we have chosen neither to give up nor to settle. We seek what is real; we seek the One who is real and true, we want abundance of life, abundance of all that is true and real. We keep showing up because, quite simply, we cannot endure on our own.
We cannot make it through existence as a solo expedition. We need to stay close to the one who made that amazing declaration; we need to be close enough to hear it repeated over and over again for us: “I will lose nothing (NOTHING, NO ONE) of all that has been given me, but raise it up on the last day.”
Endurance requires hope and trust. We come to this place, the church, to renew our hope and trust. We come here to find the strength to hang in there until God’s work on us and through us is completed.
As our Prayer Book so eloquently expresses, we come here to endure “…until the shadows lengthen, and evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”
That is the good news, the promise to all who faithfully endure to the end: “a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last.” It is really great Good News that in the end our endurance is met by God’s Grace, our striving and our struggle to remain faithful to the end are transformed by Grace so that instead of trudging toward Jerusalem Grace lifts us up up as on eagles’ wings to soar to soar homeward bound.