19th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle B 20-21

1 Kings 19:4-8 | Ephesians 4:30—5:2 | John 6:41-51 

Almighty, everliving God, who govern all things both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. 

This is the fourth Sunday in a row that we have gone back to the same image of the bread of life, and what’s beautiful about this image and why it’s worth going back to over and over again is because it’s talking about who is God in your life.  Who is he in the sense of what is he there for.  What is he accomplishing for you, or what is he demanding of you?  Is there a comfort in that image of who God is, or is it a pressure, along with all other pressures, that just make life a little bit more complex and a little bit more stressful?  Well, if you use the image of this God as he fully is, as he longs for you to see him is like bread, like food, like energy, the energy is given to you from this God directly into you as a way of giving you the ability to live the life that he’s called you to live.  And the goal of religion is not to get you to live a certain way through a lot of discipline, rules and laws and judgments and threat of punishment but to engage in something that’s exciting and life-giving and, in a way, pleasurable, if I can say that.  The life that God wants us to live is good, and if it’s filled with stress and anxiety, then something is really missing.  Something is wrong. 

So I want to take the character in the first reading and give you an explanation of his little story, because I think it so resonates with so many stories I’ve heard from other people about their relationship with God.  And here’s the way it goes, Elijah.  Elijah in this story has just had a profound experience.  He’s been working with the followers of Baal, which is a false god.  And there was a big confrontation between God, Yahweh, and the god of Baal, and it was set up by Elijah.  And so there was this great contest to see which god was strongest, and the winner was definitely Yahweh.  It had to do with Yahweh’s power coming down from heaven and igniting a fire that consumed this offering to God, and it was so dramatic and so powerful and so clear that this God, the God that Elijah taught, is the God, the most powerful God.  And so you would have thought, “Wow, God has manifested himself in such a spectacular way.  Everybody is going to believe in him.”  Did you ever hear that experience of people who say, “When God has done something great and powerful for me, I believe in him.  If things are not going very well, I’m not so sure he’s there,” that kind of oversimplification of the love that God has for you and for me is to take away our pain and our suffering?  Well, the interesting part of this story is the people who had seen this great sign, did they turn to Yahweh?  No, they turned against the messenger, and they decided they would kill Elijah.  So instead of being the hero that changed everyone’s mind and opened them to a new image of God, it backfired.  So he finds himself running for his life, but the thing that’s interesting about this moment in Elijah’s life is his depression.  Maybe he’s always thought, “If I could just have some great miracle and I could prove to everyone that God is more powerful than anything else, they would all believe in me and my message.”  It didn’t turn out that way for him in this scenario, and so instead of saying, “Well, that was their problem, and I know God has proven to me once again he is who he is,” no, he just said, “I’m so depressed.  All I do — I just want to die.  I want to end this whole life here.  It’s just too frustrating.”  And an angel comes and starts feeding him and said, “You’ve got to take a journey.  You’ve got to process all of this.  You’ve got to integrate it into who you are and understand it.”  That image of taking a journey is so big in scripture.  It means pondering, wondering, seeking truth.  And so he ends up on a mount, Mount Horeb, which is also Mount Sinai, and he gets in a cave.   And in the cave, you know the story.  You’ll remember it, that he goes to the face of the cave, opening of the cave, and looks out and asks for God to make himself shown to him.  And there’s a big earthquake, and then there’s fire, and there’s storms and all of these spectacular signs of God in the world.  And then the revelation is then came a gentle, gentle, tiny whisper, and the point of the story is there, that’s where God is, not in the spectacular, not in the dramatic but in some kind of whisper.  When somebody whispers to you, there’s a form of some kind of intimacy.  They lean over and cup their hand and give you a message that’s just for you.  What a beautiful image of who God longs to be in your life and in mine.   

So what we have in this story then is an image of what it is that we need to understand that happens to us when we open ourselves to the reality of who God really is and we drink of that, and that becomes food, and the food changes us.  But it doesn’t change the world that much, meaning if I’m looking for signs from God that show his goodness to me by an image I have of what that means, that would mean that God would take away something that’s awful for me.  Say I have lost someone or something and it’s gone, and I want it back.  I want it healed.  I want it found.  I say, “God do this, because you said you will help me in any way you can, and you’re so powerful.”  And nothing happens.  Then there’s this sort of crisis.  “Well, God doesn’t answer my prayers.  So why do I mess with him?”  Especially if it’s something that’s so crucial to you.  Why doesn’t he answer it?  Why doesn’t he fix things for us?  Because that would make him into some kind of figure that we would use, much like money in the bank, much like a power.  It would go to our head.  It would be egocentric.  There’s so many problems if you have God’s ear and God will do whatever you ask him to do, take care of all the pain in you and other people’s lives.  It’s just a bad relationship.  So what are you expecting from him?  What is it you think that God will give you when you turn to him and say, “I need your help”?  Isn’t it interesting that one of the things that we do and are able to do, when it comes to some crisis or something, there’s some way in which you go through a cycle of grieving and mourning, and it moves you from — the famous Kubler-Ross things about — you go from denial to anger to bargaining to some kind of acceptance and finally forgiveness.  Well, that process of integrating whatever is happening to you into your story, into your process of becoming who God wants you to be, going through that process, that’s the miracle.  That’s the miracle of God working in your life, that he is going to be there to be the source of getting you through something, and then going through it is the journey that gets you to the insight that you couldn’t have without that pain.  It’s a very different way of imagining God working with you, in you, through you.   

Then I was thinking about depression, and the thing in this story that was fascinating to me is Elijah gets really depressed after having this spectacular success.  And the thing that’s interesting about that is depression is a loss of a sense of your own value, your own dignity, your own worth.  It’s like whatever it is in you that gives you enthusiasm, excitement, confidence, excitement about a process that you might be going through, something that you’re going to be attaining that’s hard, but you know when you get it, it’s going to be worth all the pain — all of that you might call enthusiasm, opposite of depression, depression, the loss of a sense of value, worth.  Enthusiasm, I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which I love to do, and it’s such a fascinating word.  Enthusiasm means being possessed by God — possessed by God, entheos, in God.  My preaching, my teaching has always been focused somehow on this very powerful mystery of what does it mean to believe in God beyond simply that he exists but believe that he is in you, with you, as intimate as the one who whispers secrets to you?  And when he’s in you and doing that, he’s doing this with an indication and a conviction that he wants us to feel that this is exciting work.  This is amazing work.  This is something that’s going to bring you and people around you some kind of inner worth and inner value, and so I was just so interested in thinking, all right, the food that God gives you, this bread of life, is not ever to be thought of as a miraculous removal of pain or fixing a broken problem, fixing a problem, that something’s broken.  No, it has something much more to do with engaging you in a process where there’s an inner well-being, a conviction that all of this that’s going on, as crazy and as difficult as it is, is for you.  And then when you digest it, take it in and hold it with this conviction that there is this miraculous part of you that’s called divinity that has a way of dealing with pain and suffering that brings not depression or discouragement or a feeling that we’re not favored by God, just the opposite, that this is really a unique gift.  And it’s designed in the most perfect way for me to engage in it so that I am finding something.  Now, in the process of waiting to find it, what sustains you on that long journey?  Not your own capacity of, “I can do this, my own drive, my own will.”  No, it has to be this mysterious thing called bread of life, grace, a power that’s not yours, not mine but comes to us. 

So I know a lot of people that believe in God.  They’ll tell me, “Yeah, I believe there’s God.”  And I say, “Well, kind of like, what are y’all doing together now?”  You ask them some kind of intimate question like, “How is it working?”  And they go like, “No —”  My favorite line is people say, “Well, I don’t have a personal relationship with him.  Jesus had that, and that’s not my destiny,” or they have some kind of oversimplified notion of the limitations of God, as if he’s like us and say, “Well, he’s too busy.  He’s not interested in just my little problems.”  God, is he interested in your little problems?  They’re his problems, given to you by him for a purpose that gets you to a place that he knows you want to be and that he wants you to be, because he created it for you, and it’s going to be really, really wonderful but not in that kind of euphoric, everything is perfect sense but in this kind of calm, easy conviction that every morning you wake up, and you feel pretty good.  And when you get in the daily grind of things, there is somehow a kind of unconscious sense that all of this is going to be fine.  There’s something I’m looking forward to, but even in the process of doing the ordinary, there’s something in it that just feels like I’m being fed, not starved, not neglected and certainly, certainly not judged.  How do we ever turn around this image of this God who is fully revealed by the time we get to the point of Jesus’ ascension into heaven?  How do we ever fall back to those old images in the Old Testament of a God who is judgmental and demanding and upset and ready to crush those who don’t do what he says?  But that’s sort of in there if we’re not careful, and it leads to depression, and what is God’s greatest gift?  It’s found in that New Testament beautiful story about someone like you, like me witnessing what it’s like to be infused with food, and we can do the most amazing things, mostly find peace in the midst of stress and tension. 

Father, you have made us for joy and for peace and for a sense of fullness in the midst of all things that might rob us of these great gifts. Bless us with a faith in you that understands the process you’ve asked us to go through with you so we never feel that sense of alienation from whatever it is that we need to find that inner peace. So bless us with that food that is always from you to us. It’s not within our capacity to do it, and when we try on our own, we fail. So let us drink of your presence and find that peace. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.