“Get up and eat!” ( Click here to listen to the sermon. ) At the beginning of our reading from chapter 19 of 1 Kings the great prophet Elijah sits down under a Broom tree and asks to die. Does anybody know why Elijah, a man whose very name means “Yahweh is my God” would be in such despair that he would sit down in the dust and ask for death? This is a real question. Put a hand up if you think you know. As you might have guessed from the name of the book, Kings tells the story of Israel in the years before the exile when there were Kings. You probably remember that the Israelites asked for a king when the prophet Samuel was an old man. God told Israel, through Samuel, that a king was a terrible idea and they shouldn’t do it but they were stubborn and demanded a king anyway so God and Samuel said “Okay, have a king. See how it goes.” It did not go well. By the time we get from Samuel to Elijah the kings of Israel have gotten well off track. The King in Elijah’s time was a man named Ah
What is the reputation of our church? What do people say about St. Andrew’s? This is not an idle question. As a member of the Vestry in the middle of a Rector search, our reputation is something I have been thinking about a lot. Any candidate considering a call to St. Andrew’s will surely ask around to find out about us. The Episcopal church is small enough that any priest will know someone who knows someone who knows us. What will they say? Our reading from Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians today is the very beginning of the first of the two letters we have from Paul to the church at Thessalonica. This epistle is one of the earliest writings of what is now the New Testament. Paul visited Thessalonica in the late forties or early fifties, that is, the first century CE, not the 1940’s. The letter, written from Athens, was written as a Pastor to his congregation. This opening section is an example of Paul’s “Thanksgiving” sections. He opens almost every letter to his churches by listin