“What are you doing here?”
A sermon preached in Yale Divinity School’s daily Marquand Chapel service, Friday 9.3.2021, first week of the fall semester
1 Kings 19: 1–9
Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there.
4 But he himself 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 Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” 5 Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6 He 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. 7 The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” 8 He 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. 9 At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.
Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
What are you doing here, Elijah?
What are YOU doing HERE?
Anyone hearing a voice in your head this week, asking just that question? Maybe the voice is that of a person who doubted you, or tried to discourage you? Maybe it’s your own voice, watching you as though from the outside, and checking to see if it can sabotage you? Or maybe it’s the voice of an angel, wanting to feed and care for you, and then guide you to an intentional and reflective life? Asking how we got here isn’t a sign of misgivings, at least not all the time. Saying how we got here can orient us, like the mall map with the star that says, “you are here,” so you can figure out where to go next.
The Covid-19 pandemic flung our community apart for eighteen months, and during those months, our world went through storm after storm after storm. We had to weather those storms without the comfort of learning, worship, and reflection together; Zoom might be better than nothing, but it kinda sucks. We graduated two classes without hugs, handshakes, or real closure. As those two classes moved on, something strange happened to the partner on the Quad I serve, Andover Newton Seminary. The last students who remembered a time when our embedded institution wasn’t here graduated.
As we begin, gingerly, to come back together, I’ve at times felt tempted to capitalize on the absence of those who don’t know how truly new this partnership is. Fake it ’til you make it, right? Pretend we’ve been here forever; walk around like we own the place! To do that, however, wouldn’t be honest, and it would deprive new students of the opportunity to know that institutions wax and wane, thrive and falter; and in order to survive, sometimes they need to change. Same goes for people; people like us.
So, here’s the story — new to some of you, familiar to others — of Andover Newton Seminary. The year was 1806, and a controversy was raging at Hahhhhrvard over the appointment of a Unitarian (gasp) to the prestigious Hollis Chair. Christian thinkers throughout New England were nervous about the influence of European intellectualism on what was becoming the young United States’ version of the academy. Secular historians characterize the crisis as concern over orthodoxy. I believe a more accurate description would be to say that those who resisted the rise of secular humanism in the academy didn’t believe Christianity could be celebrated or transmitted from the head without the heart. They worshipped a mighty and awesome God who wasn’t to be domesticated by the overeducated.
What ensued was what we now know as the Second Great Awakening, a religious movement in New England characterized by emotional tent revivals in the most unlikely places, including my own hometown of Suffield, CT; where, in worship today, you can’t tell the pillars from the people. Timothy Dwight, then president of Yale, was a key figure in the Second Great Awakening. When he heard that some faculty members at Harvard were getting nervous about the emphasis of intellect over faith, he rode his horse to Cambridge to stoke dissent. When a breakaway faction started a new school in the woods of Andover, Massachusetts, Dwight preached the school’s first opening convocation.
I bet that tiny faculty remnant, without many students or resources, asked themselves the question, “What are we doing here?” more than once. Andover grew, of course. When a similar passion for theological education rooted in both knowledge and faith inspired the founding of Newton Theological School, its first faculty members were Andover graduates. Newton school grew, too. “Phew!” the founders probably said to themselves. We’re safe now; we’ve landed. But not so fast.
Over the course of its first hundred years, Andover’s faculty made the mistake of losing track of what the churches of New England needed in their clergy, so those churches stopped sending candidates to be educated. Enrollment went down, and the secondary school with whom Andover shared a campus became bigger and more influential. By the time they had to rethink everything; they only had four students. They tried to move back to Cambridge and give things with Harvard another go, and suffice to say, that was a disaster. Newton’s ups and downs related in large part to theological rifts within the Baptist denomination. The founding of the more conservative Gordon on Massachusetts’ north shore siphoned away the sorts of Baptists whose families and churches tended to have more money.
Andover and Newton came together as a marriage of convenience in the 1920s. Andover had an endowment, and Newton had a campus and students. Full merger between them didn’t happen until the mid-1960s, and although there were salad days, enrollment patterns tracked with participation levels in mainline New England churches: look at the year decline began in those participation levels — around 1970 — then add 22 years or so — the age of post-collegiate seminary entrants. That our school got smaller and smaller makes demographic sense, but never underestimate the power of denial. We tried everything to fight the tide.
By the time I joined the faculty of Andover Newton in 2005, it was already well known that the school was seeking a new strategic direction that would enable it to carry out its mission to educate clergy in head and heart within a sustainable institutional model. The fact that, in 2014, the right model would represent a homecoming of sorts, with Andover and Newton joining its Second Great Awakening inspiration, Yale, makes sense in retrospect but bewildered many when the decision was made. Voices of that bewilderment occasionally speak to my subconscious even now, five years later. What are you doing here?
The passage from the first book of Kings Averyn read for us describes an encounter between Elijah and an angel. Elijah found himself on the wrong side of Queen Jezebel, a Ba’al worshiper whose priests were massacred by followers of Yahweh whom Elijah had fired up. Elijah flees to escape her and King Ahab’s wrath, and he finds himself sitting under a lonely broom tree in a land desiccated by the drought Elijah had prophesied God was imposing on a disobedient people.
This turn of events represents a pattern for Elijah:
1. He says unpopular things that anger the powerful, and he turns out to have been right.
2. The powerful scapegoat him.
3. Elijah runs away and is too depressed and tired to feed himself.
4. God intervenes.
In Elijah’s first exile, ravens bring him bread. In his second, a destitute widow he asks for food says she can’t offer it because she doesn’t have anything to give, and God provides her enough oil and flour to feed Elijah as well as her own family. This time it’s an angel. You’d think Elijah wouldn’t be surprised. The angel tells him twice to get up and eat. The second time, the angel is more specific and tells Elijah to eat because he needs strength for a journey. In the passage that follows the one Averyn read, Elijah for the first time hears God not in the wind, and not in the fire, but in a “still, small voice.”
Elijah’s journey has certain parallels with that of Andover Newton. The notion that ministry isn’t just about big-brained intellectualism hasn’t always been popular, especially in the academy. We’ve stuck to that stance in the formation of clergy and we don’t regret it, but doing so has meant fleeing from time to time. Cambridge, Andover, Cambridge, Newton, New Haven. Now we’re here, and I think it safe to say that this has been a happy home, but the move involved risk, and echoes of the anxieties associated with that risk still surface at times.
Elijah’s journey has parallels with all of us here at YDS, too. Those gathered in this community have come together for the first time, or after a long time, and we all have a sense of hesitation. We’ve been through a lot. Covid-19 isn’t done with our society yet, so we wonder if illness will surge or shut-downs will become necessary again. After months of disorientation, characterized by trauma — more for some than for others — we sit under our broom trees, and we have to be reminded to eat and drink and, eventually, get up and do what needs to be done.
My prayers for us as individuals, and for our institutions that have been through the wringer, are that we take our time, and we tell our stories. We shouldn’t get up too quickly and pretend like nothing has happened. We need to take a moment under the broom tree and to be honest about how messed up these months have been. We need to eat our bread, still warm from the stone it baked on. We need to drink water from the jar the angel left us. We need to both hear and answer the question, “What are you doing here?” for ourselves. Lived experiences left unexamined in the light of faith and knowledge aren’t bound to help us grow.
I was tempted to just pretend with this new entering class that Andover Newton had sprung forth fully formed, as though from the forehead of Zeus. We’ve always been here; we’re great; it’s fine! But the truth is that we’ve been through a lot as an institution, and maybe one service we can provide is to model that you, too, can go through a lot. And then rest, and then eat some food for the journey, and then get up and follow God some more. Thanks be to God. Amen.
