Weathering the Storm

This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregations of Unfinished Community and Ashiya Christian Church on Sunday, June 22, 2025, drawing from 1 Kings 191-15a and Galatians 3:23-26

So last week we spent our time talking about love, and the boldness of love, and the power of love, and the absolute necessity of embracing love in the world. This week, I wanted to continue that theme in something almost but not quite entirely unlike a sermon series. 

Shock and horror, I know. I have never deployed that old preacher’s standard of a sermon series before, and it’s fair to assume I probably won’t be doing it again anytime soon, but I have this rare occasion of back-to-back Sundays with nothing else going on, and a really good and relevant topic to dig into here, so here we are. 

Love, part 2!

Honestly, it’s a good topic, because love is one of those things that feels complicated, even when it really shouldn’t be. And last week we talked about making that complexity simple again, about un-complicating love; removing from it the shame and social condemnation, and allowing ourselves to embrace love boldly and unreservedly. 

But…like all things human, when we go big…we can also very, very easily go bad too. 

And there are no aspects of the human experience more prone to this than love and religion which, ironically, are the two areas of our lives in which we like to pretend we’re operating entirely intellectually. We hold this image of ourselves as wholly rational people, people who can tell the difference between a raging storm of prepubescent emotions and hormones run amok, and a true abiding love. We imagine ourselves as prudent and careful thinkers, who even in our greatest moments of religious ecstasy can tell the difference between spiritual awakening and cult manipulations. We are committed to an understanding of ourselves as the only sane people in the room, the only ones who truly know the right path for us, the only ones who truly understand the calling that God has placed in our hearts, the only ones who can ever, truly see. 

Like besotted teenagers, we scream to the heavens that no one truly understands what we’re feeling or experiencing. It’s unique, special, and just for us! 

It’s different, DAD; you wouldn’t understand!

Powerful emotions can lead to powerful self-delusion, which is why we have our faith to hold us accountable, to keep the feelings we have from getting in the way of the love we are called to share. 

Now you might be thinking that Pastor Don is completely and irrevocably outside his entire mind just now. Didn’t he just preach about loving unreservedly? About loving without boundaries, without limits, and without shame? Where does he get off coming back to the pulpit, a week later, to talk about reining it in all of a sudden?

Well first off…that’s an understandable feeling to have, straw man I just conjured for the sake of rhetorical argument. But let’s make a distinction here first; a distinction that I really don’t think we make very often in our lives, and one which is vitally important to understanding not only what the Bible says about love in the abstract, but to understanding who God - who is Love - is in truth.

Love, that overwhelming feeling that grips our hindbrains like the Hulk on steroids, which overrides our better judgement, which tells us that we have to do whatever we can, at whatever cost, to embrace that feeling, is a completely different thing than Love, the expression of the divine self and the connective force that runs through each and every one of us. 

I still remember, and I have actually talked about it in sermons before, my first “crush” as a teenager. One look at this otherwise unremarkable middle-school girl and, like a snap of a finger, suddenly my life felt like it was irrevocably changed. There was a connection, so vast and impossible that I was sure it was utterly unique in all of time and space. No one could possibly understand this feeling because I couldn’t understand this feeling. I was so dwarfed by the magnitude of it, that I was convinced it HAD to be from God. 

Because nothing in the world could feel like this; this clear, this certain, this utterly incontrovertible. 

I still remember, after all these years, having spent days just…pining on my bed for this girl - who again, to this day, I haven’t said more than five words to - siting down to talk about what was going on with my father. We sat for a while, he and I, and I went through all the usual teenage arguments, screamed about the power of what I was feeling, and my utter certainty that this was divine guidance, that this was destiny, that the Lord on High had stepped down from wherever “High” is to tell me personally that this thing was unquestionably meant to be. 

“How do you know that?” My father asked me. 

“It’s not about knowing,” I snapped back at him angrily, “It’s about feeling! This feeling has shaken up everything in my head, everything in my life. It’s burning through my heart and my mind, changing what I think, changing what I want, changing everything about me and tying me to this one person! What could do that, other than God?”

I’m sure age has me embellishing my teenage eloquence somewhat, but I recall the gist of what I said being…something along those lines.

And while I may not precisely remember my exact choice of words, what I’ll never forget is my father’s response. Uncharacteristically for him, he didn’t say a word. Instead, he just reached into the table next to the couch, pulled out his old Bible, and opened it up to 1 Kings 19:10-13, and read it to me:

Elijah said, "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.” 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, 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 out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

There are so many things in life, my father told me after a pause, that leave us so certain that we have encountered God. So many feelings we have that leave us thinking that we alone have absolute clarity, that burn through us like fire, breaking the rocks in our head into pieces, and blowing us aside like a great wind.  

But we don’t know it’s God; we just feel that it’s God.

Biologically speaking, our feelings can easily mislead us, because they are meant to fuel our passions, but be regulated by our minds. On a biophysical level, our emotions (in particular love, lust, ego, desire, possession, power, and feelings like that) operate in the same way that hardcore drugs do. That storm we’re experiencing? All it really is is a gigantic FLUSH of dopamine, running wild right through our brains. 

And as soon as we feel that all of us, to a one, start behaving like drug addicts. We want that rush, we need that rush. We want to feel it again, and again, and again, and anything that gets in the way of it gets tossed aside in favor of our next fix. 

So how do we know if our feelings are true, or just the product of our brains throwing dopamine at us all willy-nilly like?

It’s not like we have a boss, some disciplinarian who’ll smack us upside the head when our feelings lead us into crazy places like these. And as Christians, we aren’t bound to specific behavioral laws that hold us fast so that we’ll do the right thing, no matter what we might be feeling. 

We only have two things: faith, and the great community united through that faith, made into children of God in Christ Jesus. 

Our community stands behind us, ready to tell us - as my father did - when our hearts have led us astray, when we’ve been seduced by the power of our own emotions, lured away with the promise of quick hits of that sweet, sweet dopamine. The accountability of our community, who tells us when we’re limbering up to do something phenomenally stupid - or worse, when we already have  - is the first line of defense that keeps us on God’s loving path. 

But it is our faith in God, and our knowledge of who God is that we have obtained through Christ, which really shows us which is with.

When we think we have experienced love, when we think we have encountered God because of the sheer magnitude of feelings coursing through us, nothing else matters. We simply can’t think of anything but feeding those feelings, following this new path that has suddenly opened up before us. 

Evangelicals and other cults have built their entire universe on selling this fix, because people who experience this feeling are so very, very easy to control. Once people associate your church, or you personally, with this brainstorm of dopamine-induced pleasure, it becomes an addiction that is terribly difficult to break free of. 

But…God isn’t in the storm, and neither is the storm God. 

That’s just…not how God works. It’s not how LOVE works. 

God’s love, God’s presence, isn’t a storm that rages through our lives, rearranging things to suit God, breaking down walls, and rewriting who we are as people. 

Love, and therefore God, isn’t powerful in that way at all.

We tend to imagine power in terms of force; the winds that blow, the quakes that shatter the ground, fire that burns. We imagine power in terms of the ability to exert change, to force things to conform to our will; the ability to change minds, to change reality, to make things happen in the ways we want them to.

But God’s power isn’t force.

It’s restraint.

The voice of God comes in a whisper, after the fire has devastated, and the ground has shattered, and the winds have blown. The voice of God, the presence of LOVE itself comes as a still voice amidst an utter silence, drawing us out from the caves where we are sheltering in fear of who we thought God was. 

God is Love, and love isn’t some great show of impossible force. 

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Does that sound anything like Romeo and Juliet? The love that moves mountains, and shakes the very foundations of the world? Does "patient, kind, quiet, not insistent, not irritable, forgiving, honest and always willing to do the right thing rather than the quickest thing to satisfy the siren call of the heart"; does that sound anything like those overwhelming, unstoppable, life-changing feelings of  love to you? Does it sound like the experience of religious ecstasy? Like that feeling you get when the praise band hits the key change, the bass drops, the lights go way down low, and it feels like all the air just got sucked out of the room?

No. Of course it doesn’t.

Because God, and the real, authentic love that both is and is from God, isn’t anything like that. 

Love is sitting down to do the taxes together, or taking the kids to the store. Love is a quiet prayer at 2am in a darkened driveway, where nobody else can see. Love is stepping aside so that someone else can flourish, putting yourself second so that someone else can go first.

Love is not explosive triumph, or impossible victory; it is a quiet surrender. Love is not a powerful force coursing through you like electricity through an open circuit, it's a weakness to be celebrated.

God's power, made truly perfect in weakness.

In our lives, we pretty constantly look for the storms; for the shaking and quaking ground, the fire and the hail, firm in our belief that that's where we'll find God. And when we go looking for those things, we find them, and they'll flood our brains with dopamine, convince us that the divine is speaking to us directly because what else could it be but that, if we feel so strongly as this?

But power like that is a mirage. A distraction. 

God is in the whisper.

The quiet voice, which only ever speaks when all has calmed and quieted down, when all the emotions have raged, when all the damage has been done, when the earth has cracked, the winds have blown, and the fires have burned. God is that tiny, still voice which doesn't care about what you've done, doesn't care about who you think you are, doesn't care how far you've run, doesn't care if you're Jew or Greek, slave or free, male, female, or anything in between.

It only cares about you, and the infinite stores of quiet, patient, love waiting within you, waiting to come out into a world so wrapped up in passion and power that we’ve forgetting the quiet voice of love, whispering to us; 

What are you doing here?

And where will you go from here?