Food for the Journey
Food for the Journey
2 Kings 19:4-8, Psalm 34:1-8, Ephesians 4:25-5:2, John 6:35, 41-51
Jesus said: “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The first reading today is a small snippet of a larger story about the prophet Elijah that, for me at least, is one of the most important stories in the Bible. Elijah was the first of the great Old Testament prophets; he lived in the northern kingdom of Israel in the 800’s B.C. The king at the time was Ahab, and the Book of Kings – which has a fairly low opinion of most of the kings of Israel – says Ahab was one of the worst. His wife Jezebel was a Canaanite who worshiped the Canaanite god Ba’al, and Ahab did as well, while Elijah insisted that Israel must remain faithful to Yahweh, the God who freed Israel from slavery and gave them the Promised Land.
Now you might think – aren’t all religions more or less the same, we all have different names for God, but why can’t we all just get along? Well, that’s not how Elijah saw it. Because Ba’al was not a god of mercy or freedom or justice – Ba’al was a bloodthirsty god who demanded human sacrifice. King Ahab even sacrificed some of his own children to Ba’al. And many people in Israel went along with this.
So it happened that Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh the god of Israel, challenged the prophets of Ba’al to a contest on Mount Carmel, near the modern northern Israeli city of Haifa. The idea was that Elijah and the prophets of Ba’al would each offer a sacrifice to their respective gods, and whichever god accepted the sacrifice would be the true God.
Now if you know your Bible, this contest might remind you of another story, of Cain and Abel. The book of Genesis tells us that these two brothers, these two sons of Adam and Eve, each offered a sacrifice to God, and that God – for reasons that are not entirely clear – was pleased with Abel’s sacrifice and not with Cain’s. And as you know, that story doesn’t end well. It is a dangerous thing, when human beings get into contests with each other over who can offer the more pleasing sacrifice to God.
The prophets of Ba’al prepare their sacrifice and pray to Ba’al to send fire from heaven and accept their sacrifice. And nothing happens. Elijah, offstage, ridicules them: Call louder, maybe Ba’al is in the bathroom and can’t hear you! The text says the prophets of Ba’al started to slash themselves with swords, “as was their custom” – as I say, they believed Ba’al was a bloodthirsty god, but there was no response. Then it was Elijah’s turn. Elijah prepared his sacrifice, he poured cold water all over it to demonstrate that Yahweh didn’t need any help from Elijah to start a fire. Elijah prayed, the lightning bolt came – Crash! – and the sacrifice was consumed. And the people rose up and said: Elijah was right! Yahweh is God! Yahweh is God! Then Elijah told the crowd – Now that you know Yahweh is God and not Ba’al, let’s kill all the prophets of Ba’al. And the crowd did kill them. Four hundred and fifty of them.
It is, perhaps, the Cain and Abel story in reverse. The one whose sacrifice is acceptable to God takes this as license to kill his brothers.
When Queen Jezebel heard about it, she vowed that she would have Elijah killed within a day. So Elijah flees for his life. As we pick up the story in our first reading today, Elijah has made it across the border, a day’s journey into the wilderness, and so technically he’s safe. He is on his way, the Biblical text says, to “the cave” at Mount Sinai – that’s the cave where Moses is said to have been able to see God from behind. Where, in the famous ending to the story, Elijah expects to see God as Moses did, in earthquake and thunder and fire – and instead hears God in a small, still voice. A God who tells Elijah that he’s gotten it all wrong, that God never wanted any of this killing. A God who calls Elijah to be converted away from a religion that was not too different from the bloodthirsty worship of Ba’al, to a God of justice and freedom and compassion.
But as we begin our reading today, Elijah is only one day into his forty-day journey to Mount Sinai, and on this day, Elijah is just done. He just wants to pull the covers over his head and forget everything. He has just pulled off an amazing triumph, and he is shocked to discover that he is depressed. That he has lost even the desire to live. Take me now, God, I’m done. I don’t want any of this any more. I can’t do this.
This story of Elijah’s conversion away from a violent God who demands sacrifice and blood is, I think, especially important for people today. Because there are a lot of people – and I include myself in this – who have come to believe that the religion they grew up with, the religion that they’ve been told the Bible teaches, is a religion of death and not life. A religion that tells us that we’re right, and everyone else is going to burn and they deserve it. A religion that demands inhuman sacrifice, that we deny our sexuality or our deepest needs for love and meaning. A religion that offers not joy but despair. A religion that, in the end, isn’t very different from belief in Ba’al. Who needs it? I’m done. I think a whole lot of people feel that way today.
And – for those of you who know some of my story – I’ll just say that 25 years ago I felt a lot like Elijah in the reading today. I didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. I had had enough, I felt trapped, I didn’t want to go on. I didn’t know that there was still a journey of conversion and faith ahead of me, just as Elijah didn’t know yet what was ahead of him in the cave on Mount Sinai. I just knew that what I was doing was leading to death and not to life and I didn’t want it any more.
Our lectionary pairs this story of Elijah with the gospel reading of the aftermath of Jesus feeding the five thousand, and for good reason. When the crowd realized what Jesus had done, it was such a clear sign of the presence of God that they wanted to make Jesus king – showing that this crowd was like the crowd that witnessed Elijah’s demonstration on Mount Carmel. Yes! You are the one! Yahweh is God! You are the anointed one – so tell us, who should we kill? Elijah told them who to kill – and it took a long and painful journey for Elijah to deconstruct and be converted to begin to see what a mistake that was. Jesus saw this same desire building in the crowd, and Jesus wanted nothing to do with it. He fled. Walked on the water to get away from them.
And after passions had cooled, when the crowd catches up with Jesus, Jesus tells them: The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. For it is in the flesh of the Son of God, in the still small voice of a dying man on a cross, that we finally discover who God really is. A God who has nothing to do with the bloodthirsty idols of kings and queens, a God who never asked us to sacrifice or kill, not others and not ourselves. But a God who would take flesh and let bloodthirsty human beings do what bloodthirsty human beings do when they want to justify themselves, all in order to disarm us and our demonic urges to be better than our neighbors, and so give life to the world. This is the God that Elijah slowly and painfully came to know, the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
But as Elijah lay on the ground in his depression, he did not know any of this yet. But suddenly a stranger tapped him on the shoulder. Get up. Look, here is some hot, freshly baked bread, a jug of water. Eat, drink. Elijah ate and drank, and went back to sleep. Then the stranger woke him up again. Eat, drink, you have a long journey ahead of you. You will need to be strong. So take this bread, take this cup, they are given for you. You will need it for the road ahead.
This stranger who finds Elijah paralyzed with grief and shame, who finds Elijah depressed and unable to go on, who finds Elijah still with a long way to go before he can understand the God who is revealed not in glory but in a cross – this stranger reaches out to Elijah, treats him as a human being, shares with him the food and the drink that will lead Elijah back to life.
Who was this stranger? A random kind person? An angel of God? Does it matter? This is what God offers us for our own journey, this is who we get to be for one another – people who comfort and strengthen one another as we are each learning, slowly and yet ever more deeply and ever more broadly, the compassion and mercy and grace of the true and living God.
Our hymn of the day is a setting of the 23rd Psalm. Number 782 in the hymnal, My Shepherd, You Supply My Need. Let’s sing it together.