“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 Ahab, and chapter 16 of 1 Kings tells us that Ahab “did evil in the Lord’s eyes, more than anyone who preceded him,” including serving and worshiping Baal, a fertility god known as “The Lord of the Rain and the Dew.”
Elijah arrives on the scene and as his first recorded act he tells the Israelites that there will be neither rain nor dew unless he says so. Baal or no Baal he’s going to bring about a drought as punishment for straying from Yahweh. It’s a bold move, one that probably angered a lot of people so Elijah does what many of us would do, he books it out of town and travels around for three years until Yahweh speaks to Elijah and tells him it’s time to go back. Elijah returns, tries to get the people to confess that Yahweh is God and Baal is not God and that doesn’t work so he challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest to see which God can send fire down from the sky. It’s a huge production with animal sacrifice and the prophets of Baal dancing and chanting and eventually even cutting themselves in a frenzy. Despite their efforts, Baal fails and Yahweh succeeds. The people bow down to worship Yahweh, Elijah calls for rain, and after three years of devastating drought the rains begin to fall. Everybody’s happy!
Well, not everybody. King Ahab’s wife Jezebel was a Canaanite, a worshiper of Baal, and when she heard that Elijah had not only shamed Baal in a giant spectacle but also killed all of Baal’s prophets she swore revenge. Instead of being celebrated as the prophet who brought the King back to the right path and rain back to the land, Elijah, who has just returned from three years in exile, has to flee once again. And so we find him in our reading for today, sleeping in the dust and hoping for death.
I have never called down fire from the sky and angered a king so that I had to run for my life, but I can imagine how Elijah must have felt because I have poured my heart and soul into projects that ended with frustration and tears, and I’m guessing that many of you have too.
And it is there in the dust and the tears that the angel of the Lord appears and says “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”
The angel of the Lord does not say “You can quit now.” The Angel of the Lord does not say “Hey, you tried your hardest, that’s what counts.” The angel of the Lord also doesn’t say “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get back in there!” No, the angel of the Lord says “You’ve had a nap. Now have a snack and then it’s time for the next journey.” And because the angel of the Lord does not come empty handed, Elijah finds some water to drink, and bread to eat.
Yes, bread, again. If you’ve been out of town you might not have noticed but we’re in year B of the Lectionary cycle which means this is the summer of bread. We’ve had readings about bread for the last two weeks and we still have a couple of weeks of bread readings ahead of us. Mike Miller spoke at length about bread last week, and his sermon is available for viewing on our YouTube page, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it today. I will note that in Elijah’s time and in Jesus’ time bread was a staple food, the source of most of the nutrition in an ordinary person’s day.
The bread that the angel of the Lord brought for Elijah was not a piece of toast to settle his stomach, it was a hearty and sustaining meal that strengthened Elijah for what was to come next.
Jesus says “I am the bread of life . . . whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” The Psalmist tells us “Taste and see.” “Taste and see that the Lord is good, happy are those who trust in him.”
After Mike’s sermon last week, our Senior Warden Mary Marshall Levy leaned over to me and said “Next week, tell us what our manna is today. What is it that God sends that sustains us?” It’s a good question. We don’t have angels appearing beside us with loaves of bread, or at least I don’t. And we don’t have Jesus walking with us in human form. So what is our manna today?
There are, I think, two answers to that question, and both of them involve the word communion. One of them, of course, is the sacrament we keep at the altar every Sunday, the ritual and symbolism of the Eucharist that ties us directly to the living Jesus.
The first time I ever served as a Lay Eucharistic Minister was in the summer of 2006 at General Convention, the big national meeting of the Episcopal Church held every three years. I was there chaperoning some Youth from the Diocese of Washington. My group arrived early on the morning of the big Eucharist and we were asked if we’d be willing to serve. An hour or so later I found myself with a ciborium full of consecrated wafers and a line of about two hundred people, a small fraction of the nearly 2000 people in attendance, but a long line, nonetheless. The first person in line was an Episcopal monk who stood before me, hands outstretched ready to receive. I panicked. I grew up in a tradition where handing out the bread was very much the job of the clergy and I felt particularly unqualified as a woman and lay person, to give the Eucharist to an actual Monk. Then the monk smiled at me, a smile that said “Child of God, you’re going to be fine.” And I was fine. I said the words and shared the bread. The monk stepped to his left to receive the wine from the chalice bearer next to me and the next person stepped up. I said the words and shared the bread, over and over again and each time there was a brief moment of connection: a smile, eye contact, hands touching as the bread was passed, a mutual recognition that we were sharing something important.
Since then I have served as a lay Eucharistic minister more times than I can remember. It has become easy, but it has never become ordinary. Communion is the mystery of the Body of Christ, broken and shared, AND it is our relationships with each other, the communion of saints that connects us all. We nourish and sustain each other here in ways large and small, and then we go out into the world to nourish and sustain everybody else. It is a big job, and sometimes it will leave us sitting in the dust.
Just as God sent an angel to Elijah to feed him bread, God sends us, through the ritual, to provide the Bread of Life. The consecration of the bread and wine is not an act that the priest performs alone, nor is it meant only to connect us with God.
In the catechism, and this is on page 859 of the Book of Common prayer if you want to look it up, in the catechism it says:
Q. What are the benefits which we receive in the Lord's Supper?
A. The benefits we receive are the forgiveness of our sins, the strengthening of our union with Christ and one another, and the foretaste of the heavenly banquet which is our nourishment in eternal life.
It goes on to say:
Q. What is required of us when we come to the Eucharist?
A. It is required that we should examine our lives, repent of our sins, and be in love and charity with all people.
The Eucharist both requires us to be in good relationship with one another and strengthens our relationships with one another. This is why we have a confession of sins and a passing of the peace before the Eucharist, to get us right with each other before we get up here. It’s also why we pass the Eucharist individually instead of putting it in a pile on a table and letting folks take it. Eucharist is not just the bread and the wine. It’s the giving and receiving, the moment of Communion that gives us what we need in order to be what the world needs. When we offer and receive the bread and wine with that intention whether that is here at the foot of the altar or in a hospital room, or a dining room table, it is the bread of Life, meant to nourish us. The bread that the Angel of God brought to Elijah sustained him for forty days. The Bread of Life, freely given and gratefully received, sustains us continually.
Whether you are currently ready for the journey or still sitting in the dust, this table, this communion is here for you.
Get up and eat.
Taste and See.
Before the people arrived.
Proper 14 Year B RCL
1 Kings 19:4-8
Psalm 34:1-8
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51
August 11, 2024
As prepared for delivery
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