Advent 2018, a study in Elijah, day one.

A year of inner words and silence it has been since my last post on 1 January.

But this Advent has challenged me in a new way: Advent has always meant arrival, appearance, anticipation for me. Looking ahead to something coming. Which is odd. In fact, we are looking back at a past arrival and remembering it, imagining and reinventing its coming, but in our own eyes and age. I lose the perspective of what it must have been like not to know the New Testament's "wrap" of the Old Testament's build-up.

This Advent I am returning to the prophet who was to reappear before that First Advent. Elijah. 

The final verses of the last book of the Old Testament:

"See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse." 

Then four hundred "silent" years go by and we flip a few pages in our Bibles and read about the angel talking to Zechariah burning incense in the temple. The angel says of a son promised to him and his barren wife, Elizabeth:

"Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and the power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous--to make ready a people prepared for the Lord."

Elijah we know as a wild and crazy prophet; some of our best known Bible stories are about him. But he was genuinely seeking Advent. The Promise had not yet come. The nations were not yet blessed. And fathers' hearts were not turned to their children. 

Welcome. Each day will offer a poem attempting to peer into the life, heart, and soul of Elijah and the people he encountered. Where were the rays of hope in his tumultuous career?


Day One: The Rain and Dew

1 Ki 17: 1  "As the LORD, the God of Israel lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word."

The calling of a prophet is not lightly undertaken

When the land is rife with chaos and despair;

When the people sit in darkness, for by Light they are forsaken,

When the weight of spirit-worship fills the air—

The hand of God is heavy when He calls His man to speak

The words the people still refuse to hear:

God makes the message plain through the upright and the meek

That His anger is again their cause to fear.

The man of God is broken by what breaks the heart of God:

Demon-idols crushing souls of men like stone.

Lives and bodies shattered by malicious, deadly fraud:

Prosperity, security, and home.

When the king is on his throne and the prophet stands before,

And the message is of emptiness and drought—

The only thing that holds the holy man within that door

Is knowing disobedience lies without.

Before the king the Tishbite stands

And foretells drought throughout the land.