Ordinary Time 10: Fire from Heaven

What do you think about the retelling as reframing of the story of Elijah that Tim shared in today’s sermon? How did it impact you?

What were some of the things that stuck out to you or stirred your curiosity and imagination?

What’s your sense of what it means for this story’s reframing, rooted in Jewish scholarship, to be so different than the way the story is told and understood in most Christian contexts? What are the possible outcomes of one understanding being embraced over the other?

Elijah spearheads a dramatic event at which the power of God decisively puts to shame Baal’s priests and their acclaim of Baal. He acts with great faith and devotion to God. As soon as his faith is vindicated, he turns around and immediately commits a great act of violence against his opponents.

What does God’s response to Elijah tell us about God? Which part of it resonates for you or catches your attention?

Have you had experiences in which your faith felt justified or validated? How did you respond to those moments? What did they teach you about God? If you’ve ever erred in your response to God’s faithfulness, what did you see in God’s response to you?

A reading of Elijah’s story, informed by Jewish scholarship, clearly frames Elijah’s violence as mistaken and out of sync with the spirit of God. Tim taught that, even one of the stories of Jesus visiting Samaria centuries later reinforces God’s rebuke of Elijah’s actions that day.

One of Tim’s slides read, “the kingdom comes not through violence, but through gentleness; not through one leader’s zeal, but through an [alternative] faithful community.”

Think about parallels and places in our world today in which we face dramatic injustice at the hands of empire. What does this story teach us about a faithful response to that injustice? How do we show up and engage as something akin to whisper in which Elijah experienced God’s presence while still remaining active and effective in our faithfulness and love?