Clear the Mechanism

Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting the rocks in pieces before the LORD,

but the LORD was not in the wind;

And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake;

And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire;

And after the fire a sound of sheer silence.

When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle

and went and stood at the entrance of the cave. 

(1 Kings 19:11b-13a)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, July 2, 2006

First United Methodist Church, 605 West Sixth Street, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

You’ve heard of “aerobic” exercises, but I wonder if you’ve heard of “neurobic” exercises?  I’m talking about workouts for the brain.  Lawrence Katz, a neurobiologist from Duke Medical Center, has prescribed some rather unusual workouts for the brain intended to “engage your attention by breaking routine activities in unexpected ways.”  These disruptions of habit, suggests Dr. Katz, exercise neglected channels of the brain.  He lists 83, including (1) taking a different route to work every now and then, (2) showering with your eyes closed, (3) learning the Braille numbers in the elevator for the floors, (4) holding your nose as you taste different foods to explore how the taste changes, and a real challenge (5) using your non-dominant hand to go through the morning routine of brushing your teeth and combing your hair. 

The sum of it all?  Do some things differently.  Dr. Katz suggests that the sensory stimulation caused by breaking routine forces the human body to enrich the dendritic connections of the cranium, the branching fiber network which carries impulses from the brain. 

Okay, enough neurobiology.  Let me turn this theme into my own academic discipline of Semitic literary analysis, which long ago demonstrated how this “breaking of routine” is an important component of writing which, in fact, engages the reader’s attention.  A key literary mechanism of ancient near eastern cultures is to establish a pattern in order intentionally to violate that pattern.  I want to offer one very obvious use of this literary principle, the simple surface structure of the book of Lamentations.  Lamentations has five chapters, all but one having 22 verses.  Chapter three triples those 22 verses, having 66 verses.  (With 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, each chapter forms an acrostic, the third chapter tripling the acrostic).  Lamentations, then, has a simple structure which establishes and breaks a pattern: 22 - 22 - 66 - 22 - 22.

One might say that it boils down to avoiding monotony by throwing a curve every once in a while.  Which explains, by the way, why the things children say can be so delightful.  Kids can unintentionally throw some fantastic curves.  During our 2001 journey to the Holy Land, our daughters were living in Orlando.  Ashley told our granddaughter, Christian, who was three years old, that Mimi and Papa had gone to the Holy Land.  She used the opportunity to tell Christian stories about Jesus in Bethlehem and the Sea of Galilee, and so on.  Well, when Ashley got to the day care center to pick up Christian the next day, she noted it was a bit odd how the workers were treating her with unusual tenderness.  Ashley soon understood that this bit of TLC was sympathy when one worker said, “Ashley, we’re so sorry about your parents.  Christian told us that her Mimi and Papa had gone to be with Jesus.” 

This sort of sensory stimuli is one of the key functions of the Jewish observance of the Sabbath, Shabbat.  Even the most casual greetings change.  Instead of Shalom, the normal greeting, one begins late Friday (Shabbat begins around sundown on Friday) to greet others, “Shabbat Shalom” (“Sabbath Greetings”).  This breaking of the everyday pattern on the Sabbath has been vital to our Judeo-Christian heritage.  I can’t resist offering you my favorite example, a very curious custom of Shabbat which I like to point out to our pilgrims -- the Shabbat elevator.  Levitical law states that one is not to light a fire on Shabbat.  Pushing an elevator button lights it up, right?  Since rabbis consider the illuminating of that elevator button to be a violation of Sabbath laws, one elevator in many hotels never stops running during Shabbat, stopping at every floor up and every floor down, without ceasing, for twenty-four hours.  This allows observant Jewish families (who flock to the hotels on Shabbat) to follow rabbinical law.

The message?  Break the pattern of the everyday.  Rest.  Have patience.  Don’t allow your life to become a quest of how many buttons you can push to get you to the places you wish to go.  For this day of rest, quit pushing so many buttons!  Relax.  Enjoy God.  Enjoy your family.  Enjoy creation.” 

A few years ago Kevin Costner made a film called For Love of the Game.  He plays Billy Chapel, an aging, once-overpowering pitcher, but now a mediocre pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. The entire story weaves through the pitching of his last game against his arch-rival New York Yankees, in Yankee Stadium, inching closer and closer as the movie progresses to a miraculous conquest -- finishing his career by pitching a magical perfect game, facing and retiring 27 batters.  As the game progresses the Yankee crowd, which has never liked their nemesis Billy Chapel, is hostile, hurling insults in what becomes a cacophony of angry noise.  Standing on the pitcher’s mound in New York, Chapel was, as Curt Gowdy says in the movie, in the loneliest place in the world.  His was a lonely, and loud calling.

The most memorable line of the movie is an oft-repeated mantra whispered by Billy Chapel as he stands on the mound to face a batter.  With belligerent noise swirling around him, his body aching more with each inning, the noise loud enough to suffocate anyone’s concentration, he whispers, “Clear the Mechanism,” a refrain that has become through the years his mental trick for clearing his mind, achieving ultimate attention to the task at hand.  The film then does a neat thing -- it lets us inside Billy Chapel’s head.  The noise is muffled, the volume turned down until it is as if Chapel and that batter are alone on an island of silence.  The cameras allow us to see the raging crowd, still waving their arms and shouting insults, but we, with Billy Chapel, can no longer hear them.  They are shut out of Billy’s head.  In the middle of Yankee Stadium, Billy Chapel has achieved a deserted place.  He listened for silence, as the old theologians used to say to describe meditation.  What is it Yogi Berra said?  “90% of the game is half mental.”  True, I think, of baseball, and of life.

Billy Chapel makes me think of Elijah, the loud and lonely prophet of Israel.  We might imagine that the confrontational ministry of Elijah made him accustomed to noise, clamor, and excitement.  After all, he was on a miraculous conquest, too, settling for nothing less than vanquishing paganism in Israel.  His was a loud ministry.  And lonely.   After his stunning victory over the prophets of Ba’al on Mt. Carmel, a strange thing happens.  When Queen Jezebel threatens, he runs, all the way to Beersheba in the Negev, the southernmost tip of Judah, far from Jezebel’s reach.  His body aching from exertion, God sent an angel to minister to him.  And he complained, “I have been very zealous for the LORD.  For the Israelites have killed all your prophets, and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life to take it away.”   Loud and lonely.  That’s Elijah’s ministry. 

He continues forty days into the desert to Mt. Horeb, har ha-elohim, the Mountain of God.  There, in a cave in the Sinai, Elijah experiences some extraordinary sensory stimulation.  God throws him a curve.  Elijah, you see, was accustomed to seeing God in the shape of fire from heaven consuming the sacrifice on the altar, or in wind and rain from the Mediterranean to bring an end to the drought.  Elijah was accustomed to a God of fire and thunder.  But here, at Mt. Horeb, the weary and aching prophet was about to experience a spiritual shapeshifter, a Clearing of the Mechanism.

Elijah witnesses again the wind, experiences a jarring earthquake, and feels the heat of the fire.  But God is not in these things.  The Hebrew text is patterned and hypnotic.  Lo be-ruach Adonai (The Lord was not in the wind).  Lo be-ra’ash Adonai (The Lord was not in the earthquake).  Lo be-esh Adonai (The Lord was not in the fire).

 Then Elijah hears the “sound of sheer silence.”   In this whisper more silence than sound, Elijah recognizes the Divine Presence, wraps his face in his mantle, and goes to the entrance of the cave.  It is a Clearing of the Mechanism, as Elijah experiences a sort of internal re-wiring, neglected sensory channels being brought back online.  Elijah has discovered that the soft sound of silence shimmers with unexpected depth.

 Chapel seems a great name for a pitcher, suggestive of the soul’s quietness.  The chapel is a place to come apart from the crowds, to find aloneness with God.  Most of us have had times in our lives when we thought the swirling noise of our increasingly complex and confusing lives would suffocate our focus.  Preoccupied with any number of stress points — issues of family, of work, of financial pressures, of health — we have a vague sense that God is somewhere in all this, we’re just not sure where.  We sang in our opening hymn, “Drop thy still dews of quietness, till all our strivings cease.  Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace.” 

Just as this sanctuary is a Cathedral in Space, the Lord’s Day is a Cathedral in Time.  The lesson is to stop pushing all those buttons which are part of our daily life.  Take a break.  Take a deep breath.  This is Shabbat.  Enjoy God.  Enjoy your family.  Enjoy creation.  Enjoy God.

I hope now that you will find Holy Communion a way to achieve Shabbat of the soul, a way to “Clear the Mechanism.”   In the midst of movement and song, I hope you will listen for a deeper silence that shimmers with unexpected depth, cultivating an intense alertness to the Moment which causes the incessant mental commentary (which our minds have running all the time) to cease, creating a gap in the stream of thought in which you might hear that still small voice, that sound of sheer silence, the whisper of grace more silence than sound.  

In this Eucharist, may it be your soul’s delightful experience, to Clear the Mechanism.

Sources:

In addition to the 1999 film For Love of the Game, directed by Sam Raimi, I am indebted to the sermon “Brain Training,” in HOMILETICS, Volume 13, Number 3, which called my attention to the work of Dr. Katz in his book, Keep Your Brain Alive, Workman Publishing Company, 1999.