Series: September 2026
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
“The Still Small Voice - Talking About God 7"
When I first started working with kids, still a teen myself, I employed a simple approach—meet energy with energy, volume with volume. By the end of any given week, my voice was gone and I was shot. I could not match 8 year-olds. Then, one day I saw something, someone, that changed my approach forever. Once a week these day campers would spend the night. This was a big deal. Of all the things on their agenda, sleep was not among them, not to mention quiet. It’s getting late, smores have been consumed, it’s time to wind things down, do a story and go to sleep. The kids have not gotten this message. It’s pandemonium—pillows flying, kids jumping all over, laughing and yelling. In walks Jim, a more experienced staff member. He doesn’t yell. He sits down, gets quiet, and says: “There are times to be noisy and move your body all around and times to more quiet, more still, and listen. This is one of those times.” Total silence. They heard this soft voice, the story that followed, and then drifted off to sleep.
How do we believe God meets us? In our series exploring names for God, we have explored God as a father, as a mother, as the present and available one, as protector, as a safe place, as that peace we find in nature. You’ve probably seen God depicted as a voice thundering from the clouds. Today we explore the opposite.
Here’s the setting: Elijah the prophet has reached the end of his rope. He’s one of the most important prophets. In fact, you can’t fully understand Jesus if you don’t know about Elijah. His life’s work has been to wrestle with the people as they drift from their God Yahweh to worship Baal, the Canaanite God associated with storms, rain, and fertility. He comes to God exasperated, and here’s what transpires:
1 Kings 19:9b-15
9b Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking 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, 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 14 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” 15 Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram.
The people have defiled the worship spaces, defied the tenets of their faith, killed their prophets, and are now coming for Elijah. God tells Elijah to meet on top of a mountain, above it all. There, Elijah encounters a great wind, a massive storm, mountains splitting apart, even an earthquake and a fire, but Elijah does not find God in the earthquake, not the fire, not the storm. Elijah meets God in “the sound of sheer silence” or as you may have heard it translated, “a still small voice.”
How often do we empower with the authority of God the loudest voice in the room, the one who can destroy the most? We get it wrong about God. Maggy Whitehouse is a priest in the Independent Catholic Church (not Roman Catholic). A mystic, she says Christians get it wrong when they say Jesus came to change God’s mind about us, that we deserve slaughter, but he would take our place. No, she says Jesus comes to change our mind about God. We want God to set things right through violence—expecting warrior kings to end our enemies—God shows up instead with restraint, mercy, self-giving love. Jesus endured the cross; he didn’t inflict it. Ironic, then, when Christians behave so violently.
Elijah stands high on a mountain while the world below him comes apart, but God isn’t to be found in the coming apart. When you split mountains, you find rubble. God shows up in the still small voice, the sound of sheer silence.
Do we listen? Do we even allow for the conditions for listening? Imagine just a beat of silence in any form of media you consume. Forget quiet, the only way to get a word in edgewise is to cut someone off before they’re finished. Have you noticed the really wise people among us almost always, when asked a question, stop and hold quiet for a moment. It’s so unusual that it’s almost unsettling. It’s as if they’re making room for that still small voice of divine wisdom to enter in. They’re creating what Mary Oliver describes as a space “in which another voice may speak.”[1]
How can we encounter that other voice, when there is hardly any quiet space left? Gordon Hempton is an acoustic ecologist who has made it his mission to find and fight for places unaffected by “anthropogenic noises,” noises made by machines and electronics. There is scarcely a place left where you can go and not hear a car or an airplane or a jackhammer. It’s the buzzing of the refrigerator you only notice going away when the power goes out to that guy that just has to bring his loudspeaker to the national park. Hempton found his square inch of quiet in the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park, which we had the chance to visit this summer. There among the giant trees and moss underlay it was remarkably quiet, though since Hempton claimed its quiet, the Navy has taken the airspace above it for the noisy dog fighting of its jets.
This is not some privileged buzzkill; there are measurable benefits to silencing the hum of motors. Studies expose measurable health effects of noise pollution—heart attacks, higher blood pressure, stroke, diabetes, dementia, depression.[2] Beyond humans, artificial noise harms other creatures too, inhibiting their ability to find mates, hunt or escape predation, and migrate properly. Hempton points out, "When we look at the healthiest ecosystems that exist today on our planet, we're finding they're also the quietest places.”[3] I’m citing here studies produced before the data center boom. While there may well be a place for these, we need to be thoughtful about mitigating their harm.
We need the quiet. One article summarizing a study on silence and its benefits, concludes, “One of the most surprising findings involves the hippocampus, which is the brain region responsible for memory. Scientists found that after three days of sustained silence, participants showed measurable growth of new brain cells in this area.” It went on to detail the effect on calm, creativity, and focus as well as the benefits for emotional wellbeing.[4] That makes quite a case for going on silent retreats in addition to building more quiet into your life. I mentioned a few weeks ago a 5-minute podcast we release every Thursday that is an invitation to contemplative prayer. It’s meant to help give you the quiet you need to encounter God.
Hempton believes solving silence might be the path to solving so many other things. "Why save quiet?" he asks, "Isn't global warming more important, and toxic waste clean-up and habitat restoration and endangered species? Well, when you save quiet, you actually wind up saving everything else, too."[5] Hempton seems to be pointing to the idea that when you make room for quiet, a voice of wisdom enters in. We have to wonder if we keep ourselves so audibly inundated so we don’t have to hear what God would say to us. Yet, we resist. In a disturbing study, some people, particularly men, chose administering themselves electric shocks over simply sitting quietly with their thoughts.[6] What are we afraid we might hear in the silence?
Matthew Fox, our companion theologian for this series, includes Silence as his 89th and final name for God in his collection. In the midst of quoting Meister Eckhart and Rumi, Hawaiian elder Nana Veary, brain research Andrew Newberg and the Jewish Kabbalah, Fox says, quite simply, “Stillness leads to an encounter with the Divine.”[7] So, do we or don’t we want to meet God, and if not, what image of God are we carrying?
If you’re waiting for God to meet our volume, to show up as a storm and earthquake, careful what you wish for. If God shows up that way, or we do, we won’t want to be around for it. Let’s instead take the chance to hear God speaking softly now. There are times to more quiet, more still, and listen. This is one of those times, for God the still small voice is trying to say something to us.
Amen.
[1] https://readalittlepoetry.com/2025/10/28/the-prayer-by-mary-oliver/
[2] See https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/burden-of-disease-from-environmental-noise-quantification-of-healthy-life-years-lost-in-europe , https://coeh.ucdavis.edu/research/how-noise-pollution-quietly-affects-your-health
[3] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210712-the-worlds-most-endangered-sound
[4] https://komonews.com/news/offbeat/-silence-actually-good-for-you-new-study-shows-quiet-time-can-significantly-impact-health-healthy-mental-physical-memory-meditation-cognitive-training-hippocampus-brain-anxiety-emotional-alzheimer-disease-illness-creative-science-researchers-aging-noise
[5] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210712-the-worlds-most-endangered-sound
[6] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/people-will-take-pain-over-being-left-alone-their-thoughts?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[7] Matthew Fox, Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God….Including the Unnameable God, 137.