Proper 14 Year B 2024: 1 Kings 19:4-8

A couple of times in my career, now, I’ve had the experience of being the go-to remaining staff person when a rector had left the parish and we were waiting for an interim. At the beginning of this year, my rector moved on to a new call and I remained as a solo priest in a parish that was definitely a two full-time priest parish. For a good portion of the time waiting for an interim, we weren’t sure who the interim would be yet and so I was limited in my ability to plan too far out, as I didn’t want to tie the hands of whoever would be coming in as interim rector. During this time, my colleague Mother Jean was in an accident where she was hospitalized. She posted to social media from her hospital bed that she was binge watching Forensic Files and I had a moment where I thought, “Man, that sounds nice, to just not do anything for a day.” Which really told me how burnt out I was getting. Because Jean was “getting” to watch Forensic Files all day because she was in the hospital. She had to learn to walk again. Pro tip: if you’re so burnt out you’re jealous of someone in the hospital, you should probably change something.

Elijah expressed his cry for help in a different way than I did, but he had also just experienced an intense few years. He had been calling for his people to turn from the worship of Baal to the worship of the one God. And he had been the voice of reason for years. Israel’s King Ahab had begun worshiping Baal which led the people to follow the king’s lead and worship Baal also. In response to the people abandoning God, Elijah proclaimed there would be a drought. If Baal, being the storm god, truly is more powerful, then he should overcome this drought. But he didn’t. For three years. And so Elijah kept on keeping on for three years, as “I, even I only, am left a prophet of the Lord; but Baal’s prophets number four hundred fifty.” Even though this is almost certainly hyperbole, it speaks to how I imagine it felt to be Elijah. He spoke  out against the king - usually not a great choice if you like being alive or at the very least not in prison. Even though Elijah knew what he was proclaiming to be true, the position of speaking truth to power left him feeling isolated. Then, at the end of the drought, Elijah kills all the prophets of Baal - which we also know to be hyperbole just based on the 1:450 ratio. But no matter what may have actually happened, the end result is Elijah was back in the wilderness as a wanted man, alone and exhausted. He felt like Moses - unqualified. And maybe even like the anti-Moses. Moses led his people out of the wilderness and now Elijah is back in the wilderness. Elijah, here reminds me of the line sung by Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar: “after all I’ve tried for three years / feels like 30”.

The Church can experience burnout too. Sometimes we have a few superstar volunteers doing too many things, so many, that if they ever had to step away, even expectedly, we’d be in a lot of trouble. I was at a parish where there were two (actually several) volunteers named Chuck - two Chucks. One of them managed one ministry and the other managed several. I was in a meeting where someone said “Chuck’s quitting” and another person in that meeting panicked. Widespread confusion ensued until it was established that it wasn’t the Chuck leading several ministries who was leaving but the Chuck who was leading only the one ministry. While it was still a space that needed to be filled, it was the less catastrophic Chuck. But the fact that there was a catastrophic anyone is a problem; it means not enough people are carrying the load and may lead to superstar volunteers burning out.

So what do we do? Thankfully, most of us aren’t good enough actors to convince everyone we’re fine when we’re not. For my situation, I had a retired priest who had my back. As well-meaning as “how can I help you?” can be, when you’re overwhelmed or getting burnt out, just thinking about your list can be so much that you can’t even think about what you would give to someone else if you could. Instead of the blanket “how can I help”, my colleague offered me a breather. He said, “how’s about the next time the deacon preaches, I celebrate and you take a Sunday off?” His offer reminded me that I didn’t have to do everything. One of our greatest gifts is each other. And my colleague was absolutely right in that I needed to take a Sunday off. And, since celebrating a Sunday Eucharist is one of the few things I can’t just ask anyone in the parish to do, it was the particular gift he had that could give me.

Elijah felt that there was no way out, that he was at the end of himself, and didn’t even know he could ask for help Then, the Lord sent the messenger, Elijah listened, rested, and ate. Elijah’s response of laying under the tree and asking to die may be seen as a little dramatic. But I don’t think it is. Queen Jezebel had put a price on his head, he was exhausted and terrified, and felt like a failure. He was honest with the Lord about how he felt and then he listened to and accepted help.

What are we to do as a church? When Fr. Andrew Merrow began his call as rector at St. Mary’s in Arlington, VA more than 30 years ago, it was against the advice of his colleagues. St. Mary’s was not doing well, and was seeing closure on the horizon. St. Mary’s is now a thriving parish and an important fixture in the life of the community. If you were to talk with Fr. Andrew about how this parish got turned around, in the course of the conversation he would probably say this: “half of the people are waiting to be asked, the other half are waiting to be thanked.” In my case, I was on a committee here at St. Matthew’s a decade ago that I wasn’t going to volunteer for. But Laura Franz asked me to serve on that committee and I think she surprised me so much that I said yes. Sometimes other people can see gifts in us that we can’t see in ourselves, and when we do that identifying work we help share labor and lighten one another’s loads.

So at the end of the day, our answers are, as they so often are, God and each other. And it can be just as hard to ask for or accept help from God as it is to ask for help from one another. When I had my first daughter, I was in seminary. This meant I lived within a five minute walk of all of my friends. And if I had it all to do again, I would have asked for more help. I would have shown my friends how much I trust and value them by letting them help me, because I did trust and value them. I just didn’t ask. And so that’s what I work on: in the balance of not always needing to be the helper, I can accept help too. And giving and accepting help can go hand in hand in unexpected ways. I remember expressing my guilt about sending that daughter to day care and my professor of Christian Formation said to me, “but in sending her to day care you are helping those teachers who feel the call to care for children in living into their vocation.”

It’s a delicate balance, between this “doing too much and not doing enough”. And we tend to overcorrect in ways that lead us back and forth between chaos and leisure. Between, like Elijah, carrying the worries of the world on our shoulders and laying under a tree and just quitting everything. Our hope is seen in Elijah when he meets the Lord at Mount Horeb. He meets the Lord, and the Lord gives him new kings over both Aram and Israel, and a new disciple, in Elisha. Let’s learn to both ask for help when things are too much and learn how to offer help when we see that someone might be carrying more than their fair share. The messenger of the Lord helps Elijah continue. We can be those messengers to one another. Amen.