1 Kings 19.1–18; John 12.27–28
We live in a world filled with noise.
The sounds of the city, the
endless chatter of media,
the clamour of opinion and
outrage,
all of it can drown out the
quieter movements of the heart.
Even in church life, we often
find ourselves
caught in the rhythm of
activity and performance, of constant doing.
Yet there comes a moment, for
every person of faith,
when the noise must stop,
when we find ourselves, like Elijah,
worn out and longing for
something deeper than words.
His story speaks to that place
in us
where exhaustion meets
encounter,
where God is found not in the whirlwind of success or the blaze of certainty,
but in the stillness that
follows.
Elijah the prophet, perhaps
Israel’s greatest,
comes to the end of himself,
and it is there, in exhaustion and despair,
that he discovers the presence
of God
not in the earthquake, or the wind, or the fire,
but in “a sound of sheer
silence.”
It’s a strange story for All
Saints’ Sunday,
but perhaps an entirely
fitting one,
because the lives of the saints, those we celebrate today,
were rarely stories of endless
triumph.
They were lives that moved
through noise and silence,
through hope and despair,
through struggle and grace.
The question before us this
morning is this:
Where is God to be found
when the noise dies down?
Where is God when faith feels
thin,
when the clamour of the world
overwhelms us,
when the work of justice or
compassion seems too heavy to carry?
The story begins in fear.
Elijah has just faced down the
prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel
in a dramatic showdown of fire
and faith.
He has experienced the heights
of prophetic success,
a moment of public
vindication.
But immediately afterwards,
Queen Jezebel threatens his life, and Elijah runs.
He flees into the wilderness,
collapsing under a broom tree,
praying for death. “It is
enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.”
Here is the prophet undone by
his own vocation.
He has been faithful,
courageous, unyielding,
but now he is simply tired.
His courage has run out.
His faith feels hollow. He
cannot go on.
And God’s response? Not a
rebuke.
Not a rallying call to get up
and try harder.
Not a sermon about resilience
or duty.
Instead: sleep, food, water.
“An angel touched him and
said, ‘Get up and eat.’”
God’s first act of grace is not
a command but compassion.
The prophet’s body, mind, and
spirit all need tending.
Before God speaks, God feeds.
Before the divine word comes,
there is divine care.
This is a profoundly pastoral
moment.
It tells us something crucial
about the God we worship,
a God who meets us not at the
height of our zeal
but at the depth of our
weariness.
Many of us know this place.
The point at which the work of
faith, the labour of love, becomes too much.
When the news feels
unrelenting,
when the world’s injustice
feels immovable,
when hope seems to slip
through our fingers.
I think of those who have given
themselves to the work of justice,
campaigners, carers, community
organisers,
who find themselves burnt out,
unseen, unheard.
Elijah’s prayer under the broom
tree, “It is enough,”
could be their prayer too.
And yet God meets him there.
Not with triumphalism, but
with tenderness.
Sometimes the most spiritual
thing we can do
is to rest, to eat, to let
ourselves be cared for.
God’s presence is as real in
the meal shared in exhaustion
as in the mountaintop
experience.
Holiness begins with humanity.
Strengthened by food and rest,
Elijah travels forty days and nights
to Mount Horeb, the mountain
of God.
There, in a cave, he waits.
And then comes one of the most
beautiful and mysterious passages in Scripture.
There is a great wind, strong
enough to split mountains,
but the Lord is
not in the wind.
Then an earthquake,
but the Lord is
not in the earthquake.
Then fire, but the Lord is not
in the fire.
And after the fire, “a sound of
sheer silence.”
The Hebrew phrase is delicate:
it means, literally,
“a thin silence,” or “a gentle
whisper.”
It suggests not simply the
absence of sound,
but a fragile, almost
imperceptible presence,
a silence that speaks.
This is revelation stripped of
spectacle.
God does not appear in the
signs of power
but in the space left when
power has spent itself.
It’s as if Elijah must unlearn
everything he thought he knew
about how God works.
At Mount Carmel, God’s fire had
fallen spectacularly.
But now, that kind of power is
absent.
The divine presence is not in
the loud, the violent, the overwhelming.
It is in the quiet that
follows.
And perhaps this is where many
of us most need to find God.
We live in a world of
earthquakes and fires,
of headlines and
crises, of politics and protest,
of social media
noise.
We are surrounded by clamour
and outrage.
Even within the church, there
can be a longing for spectacle:
big visions, powerful leaders,
visible results.
But the God of Elijah resists
being contained in such displays.
God is not in the earthquake
or the fire.
God is in the quiet that
follows.
The silence of Horeb invites us
into another kind of holiness,
one that listens rather than
proclaims,
that attends rather than
commands.
But silence is not easy for us.
We live in a culture that fears
it,
where even churches can fill
every gap with words or music,
lest we mistake stillness for
emptiness.
Yet it is often in those
unfilled moments
that God’s voice becomes
audible.
At Bloomsbury, we are
surrounded by the noise of the city,
buses, sirens, the hum of
Shaftesbury Avenue,
the restless pulse
of London.
It is a good noise, a reminder
that life is happening all around us.
But the call of God to Elijah
asks whether, within that noise,
we can still find the quiet
space where divine presence is known.
Silence is not the absence of
engagement;
it is what makes true
engagement possible.
When we allow silence into our
worship and our activism,
we resist the world’s demand
for constant production.
We make space for the Spirit to
move among us,
for compassion to take root,
for justice to be born not out
of rage alone but out of love.
For the prophets, and for the
saints,
silence was never retreat.
It was preparation, the grounding of courage in contemplation.
Every act of public witness,
every step toward justice,
needs first the inner
stillness that listens for the whisper of God.
If the church today is to speak
meaningfully in a fractured world,
we must learn again to be
silent,
not because we have nothing to say,
but because we long to hear
what God is already saying
in the depths of the world’s
pain and beauty.
And this, I think, is what the
saints have always understood.
The saints are not those who
shouted the loudest,
but those who
learned to listen.
They are the ones who
discovered, often through suffering,
that God’s voice
is heard most clearly when the noise subsides.
Think of Julian of Norwich,
sitting in her cell,
listening to the quiet of
divine love;
of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison,
finding God in the silence of
waiting;
of countless unnamed faithful ones who, through prayer, compassion, and
courage,
have quietly borne witness to
the God
who does not need to shout to
be heard.
This is the holiness of
attentiveness,
the capacity to discern God’s
presence in the stillness of everyday life,
in the spaces between words,
in the pauses between actions.
For those of us engaged in the
work of justice, as we are,
through Citizens UK and our
own community life,
this is a vital lesson.
There are moments for speaking
truth to power,
for action and confrontation.
But there must also be moments
of stillness, of silence,
of prayerful listening.
Without that, we risk mistaking
our own voices for the voice of God.
The sound of sheer silence is where discernment begins.
And then, out of the silence,
comes a voice:
“What are you doing here,
Elijah?”
It is the same question God
asked before the earthquake and fire,
but now it means something
different.
In the silence, Elijah’s
complaint, his self-pity, his loneliness,
is met not with sympathy but
with purpose.
God sends him back, not to die,
but to live differently.
“Go, return on your way,” says
the Lord:
Elijah’s work is not over.
He is to anoint new kings
and to call Elisha to share
his ministry.
He learns that he is not alone:
there are seven thousand
others who have not bowed to Baal.
The silence has given birth to
renewal.
The prophet’s despair becomes
vocation reborn.
This too is a word for the
saints, and for us.
God’s revelation is never an
end in itself.
The silence of encounter always leads back to the noise of life.
We are fed, refreshed, renewed,
and then sent.
There is a rhythm here that we
might recognise
as the rhythm of discipleship:
rest and return, silence and service, contemplation and action.
Elijah’s story reminds us that
faith is not sustained by solitary heroism
but by shared vocation.
When God sends him back down
the mountain,
it is to discover companions
in the work,
Elisha, Hazael, Jehu, and the
seven thousand who have not bowed to Baal.
The prophet who thought he was
alone
finds that God’s purposes have
always been larger than his vision.
This is, in many ways, what it
means to be church.
We are not a gathering of the
self-sufficient
but a community of
the renewed,
people who, at different
times, have each known something of Elijah’s weariness
and each been
called again into life.
In worship, in prayer, in the
breaking of bread,
we hear again the quiet
question:
“What are you doing here?” and the gracious invitation to begin anew.
At Bloomsbury, this renewal
often takes flesh in our shared life for justice,
in the partnerships we build
through Citizens UK,
in the welcome we
offer to strangers,
in our full inclusion of LGBTQ
people within the life of our church,
in the standing
together that gives courage
to those who would
otherwise lose heart.
We return from our own caves of
isolation to find a fellowship already forming,
the Spirit already at work
ahead of us.
The saints we honour today are
not just figures of the past
but companions in this same
movement of grace,
those whose faithfulness has made possible our own,
and whose lives remind us that
every act of renewal is also communal.
God’s voice still sends us back
into the world,
not alone but together,
as part of the company of those who listen for the sound of sheer silence
and then speak words of
justice, mercy, and peace.
And it is the rhythm of the
saints.
The holiness we celebrate
today is not withdrawal from the world
but engagement
with it,
shaped and sustained by the
quiet presence of God.
Those we remember today, our
saints, our loved ones, the faithful departed,
did not live perfect lives.
They lived faithful ones: lives
of prayer, service, courage, and compassion.
Lives that listened for the
still, small voice and followed where it led.
Our Gospel reading adds a
further layer to this theme.
In John 12, Jesus, facing the
reality of his own suffering,
says, “Now my soul is
troubled. And what should I say?
Father, save me
from this hour?
No, it is for this reason that
I have come to this hour.
Father, glorify
your name.”
And then a voice comes from
heaven:
“I have glorified it, and I
will glorify it again.”
Here, as with Elijah, divine
communication
comes in a moment of
vulnerability.
Jesus’ soul is troubled, his purpose tested.
And again, the revelation is
misunderstood.
Some who hear it think it is
thunder;
others say an angel has
spoken.
God’s voice is always
available, but rarely obvious.
What some hear as thunder,
others recognise as love.
Revelation is not spectacle; it is relationship.
This is the same dynamic as on
Horeb.
God’s speech is not designed
to overwhelm
but to draw us deeper into
communion.
It is heard not by the loud,
but by the listening.
Jesus stands in that long
prophetic tradition of those
who hear God not in the noise
of power
but in the quietness of
intimacy.
And in him, that quiet presence
becomes flesh,
the Word who dwells among us,
full of grace and truth.
The story of Elijah ends not
with spectacle,
but with a renewed sense of
companionship.
He learns that he is not alone,
that there are others who have
kept faith,
others who listen, others who
act.
This is the deep truth of the
life of faith:
none of us walks the journey
in isolation.
The communion of saints is not
a distant company of the departed
but the living network of
grace
that binds us to one another
in God’s love.
It includes those who have gone
before, yes,
but also those beside us now,
the companions who encourage, challenge, and sustain us
in the work of discipleship.
It is the quiet solidarity of
believers who keep showing up,
who listen and pray and act,
who refuse to let the world’s
noise have the final word.
God’s presence still comes to
us in the stillness of compassion,
in the courage of community,
in the whisper of conscience.
And through that presence, we
are sent,
back into the world, back into
the work of love and justice,
back into the places that most
need the quiet persistence of hope.
So let us listen again.
Not for the earthquake, or the
fire, or the wind,
but for the sound of sheer
silence,
where God is still speaking, still calling,
still renewing life in us and
through us.
Amen.
Communion Service for
All Saints Day
Theme: In the Sound of Sheer
Silence
Gospel Words
“After the earthquake a fire,
but the Lord was not in the fire;
and after the fire, the sound of sheer silence.
Then there came a voice…”
— 1 Kings 19.12–13
“Listen! I am standing at the
door, knocking;
if you hear my voice and open the door,
I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.”
— Revelation 3.20
Invitation to the Table
Here is the table of Christ,
spread as for a feast:
bread for breaking, wine poured for sharing,
signs of love freely given, symbols of life renewed.
This is the table where saints
have gathered through the ages—
those whose names we know and those known only to God.
They come not in triumph but in trust,
not in noise but in the quiet assurance
that God meets us here in mercy and grace.
So come, not because you must
but because you may;
not because you are whole but because you are hungry;
not because you have found peace, but because you long for it.
Come and meet the risen Christ, who is known in the breaking of bread,
who speaks still in the sound of sheer silence.
Confession and Preparation
Loving and holy God,
we come as those who walk in the footsteps of your saints,
some bold and faithful, others faltering and unsure.
We confess that we have not always listened for your voice,
that we have filled our lives with noise and neglected your silence.
Forgive us for the harm we have
done,
for the words we have spoken that wound,
and the words we have withheld that might have healed.
Speak your still small voice
into the chaos of our hearts;
quieten our fears, still our striving,
and prepare us to receive your peace.
Through Jesus Christ, who shared our humanity
and draws us still into your holy presence. Amen.
The Institution
On the night before he died,
Jesus gathered his friends around a table.
They were fearful, uncertain, and far from holy.
Yet he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said:
“This is my body, which is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way, after supper,
he took the cup, saying:
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
For as often as we eat this
bread and drink the cup,
we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
So now we take this bread and
this wine—
ordinary things of earth—
and we pray that by the quiet working of your Spirit
they may become for us the life and peace of Christ.
Let us give thanks.
Thanksgiving
Creating and redeeming God,
we give you thanks for all your saints,
those who have gone before us and those who walk beside us,
who have heard your voice in the whisper and in the storm.
We thank you for Jesus Christ,
in whom your word became flesh—
who ate with the lost, touched the broken,
and bore in silence the violence of the world.
We thank you for the gift of
your Spirit,
the breath that moves through our weariness,
the whisper that calls us to courage,
the silence in which your truth is born anew.
As we eat this bread and drink
this wine,
may we be renewed as your body in the world:
a communion of saints,
called to do justice, to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with you.
To you be glory, now and always. Amen.
As
we break bread and drink wine together,
all are invited to share with us in
this food that comes as a gift from God.
If,
however, you would rather not take communion this morning,
please just let the elements pass
you by.
Please
eat the bread as soon as it has been served to you,
but retain the cup of wine until all
have been served,
so that we can all drink together.
The Breaking of Bread
Among friends, gathered round a
table,
Jesus took bread, broke it, and said:
“This is my body, given for you.”
Take and eat in remembrance
that Christ died for you,
and feed on him in your heart by faith, with thanksgiving.
(The bread is shared, each
eating as served.)
The Lifting of the Cup
After supper, he took the cup,
saying:
“This cup is the new relationship with God,
sealed in my blood.
Whenever you drink it, remember me.”
(The wine is shared, all
drinking together once all are served.)
This is the cup of life,
the sign of God’s enduring promise.
Prayer After Communion
Silent God,
in this bread and wine we have tasted your presence.
In the stillness of this moment
we have met you anew.
As you have fed us, send us out
to feed others.
As you have forgiven us, send us out to forgive.
As you have met us in silence,
send us to speak your word of peace
in a world of noise and fear.
Grant us courage to walk the
path of the saints before us,
to live faithfully, to love boldly,
and to trust that beyond every shadow
there is the light of your unending day. Amen.
