Trinity 10
Sermon preached by the Revd Olga Fabrikant-Burke
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
What do you know about the prophet Elijah? What do you think of when you hear his name? Probably not today’s peculiar episode with Elijah under a broom tree in the wilderness, with food and drink delivered to him courtesy of the angelic courier. This passage is often overlooked and passed over in silence. That hardly comes as a surprise. After all, not only does this story seem short and therefore dispensable, but it is also sandwiched between and overshadowed by the far more famous and dramatic tales about our prophet. For example, in the chapter immediately preceding ours, Elijah bravely stands his ground and confronts the wicked king Ahab. He challenges the royal lackeys, the prophets of Baal, to a contest—a fight to the death. As he goes head-to-head with his pagan foes, he calls down fire from heaven and emerges triumphant.
Skip forward to the passage immediately after ours, and Elijah famously encounters the Lord God on Mount Horeb: not in the earthquake, nor in the wind or fire, but in the sound of sheer silence, “the still small voice.” Flip back a few pages and in yet another well-known passage, Elijah is seen to possess the ability to perform awe-inspiring miracles. He pays a visit to a destitute widow in Zarephath, a Phoenician city on the Mediterranean coast between Sidon and Tyre, and miraculously provides her with bread. Not only does he conjure up bread on demand, but he then brings a dead man back to life—he resurrects the son of this widow, who fell gravely ill and tragically died. Finally, Elijah’s story comes to a specular end when he is taken up into heaven. As evidence of his stature and popularity, Elijah even stages an appearance in the New Testament, in the company of Moses and Jesus at the Transfiguration, which we celebrated on Friday. Interestingly, and revealingly, the crowds often mistake Jesus for Elijah. Has Elijah, a hero of old, come back in this enigmatic Galilean who heals and performs miracles, and even brings the dead back to life?
Elijah, then, is remembered as a confrontational figure with an undeniably impressive roll-call of miraculous deeds to his name. He seems immune to pain or trivial distractions, having risen above human limitations. But in our account this morning, we catch a glimpse of a different side to Elijah, this mighty man of God. “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”
Our Gospel this morning, for its part, continues its slow march through the bread of life discourse in John 6 for a third Sunday in a row. Coupled with the story about Elijah, however, we are invited to draw a slightly different lesson from it. We are reminded not so much that God will provide—which he will, of course—but that we need provision. Jesus is the bread of life, true, but the central point is that we desperately need bread.
But in what sense do we need bread? What does it mean to require provision? Elijah’s story furnishes us with an important insight. Ask yourself, what exactly is Elijah suffering from in this episode? What is his problem? It may be that he is simply exhausted, and his strength, physical and emotional, is depleted. It may be that he finds himself in despair; he is depressed and discouraged to the point of asking God to take his life. Only eternal rest will suffice. Or it may be that Elijah simply got up on the wrong side of the bed, a bit grumpy and moody. It happens to the best of us. These are all perfectly legitimate possibilities, and the message is loud and clear: we are in need of refreshment and renewal, and God embraces us in our moments of weakness, when we are knocked down and lying on the floor. That said, the deceptively simple passage before us is, in reality, very clever and subtle, with further and deeper layers to it, and we need to pay closer attention to what is going in the text.
“Elijah looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water.” The Hebrew word for “hot stones” is quite rare. The only other place in the entire Old Testament where it is found is in a famous passage in Isaiah 6:6: “And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’ Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal—here it is again, the same word, “hot stones”, “live coals”—that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.” The cake for Elijah is cooked on hot stones, or live coals, which seem to evoke the coals taken to Isaiah by the senior angels from God’s altar in the inner sanctum of the heavenly throne room. Isaiah was awed and cleansed by the scorching coals of divine glory. “What about Elijah?”, the perceptive reader is led to wonder by this parallel.
The Hebrew word used for “jar” is likewise very uncommon. Curiously, it appeared just a few chapters prior, in that episode I mentioned earlier, featuring the poor widow in Zarephath. The unnamed widow feared she was going to starve, but God miraculously provided for her. “The jar of flour was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.” The jar was used to provide for the widow, with Elijah acting as a star miracle-worker and a celebrity instrument of divine provision. Now a similar jar is used to provide sustenance for Elijah himself, the broken and hurting hero. What a fascinating echo.
Taken together, what all this means is that these are no ordinary provisions. This is not simply food or drink or rest. What lies behind this story, it seems to me, is that Elijah got the wrong end of the stick about his place in the world and in God’s purposes for his creation. That is what lies at the root of Elijah’s problem. Along with the nourishment, what he needs and what he ultimately receives is a gentle reminder that he does not star in a one-man show. The show, we might say, is not about Elijah in the first place. Neither is it about his ostentatious battles with prophets of Baal. Elijah does not fight this fight in his own strength. It was not Elijah who went to battle against the prophets of Baal, but God. It was not Elijah’s fight against the nefarious pagan powers, but the Lord’s. Unfolding before us is a mission of a holy God whose purposes are beyond Elijah and beyond us. You are no better than your ancestors, Elijah, you are quite right, but fortunately it is not about you. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Is this what Elijah ultimately exclaims, like Isaiah, at the end of our story?
It would be too crude to view this story as a barbed rebuke or a snub from God, along the lines of, “Do not get above yourself, Elijah.” It is not as though God puts Elijah in his place in a fit of pique, because God is an attention-seeking drama queen who does not want to share the spotlight. Rather, it is an act of tender and gentle divine care. It is precisely because God cares for Elijah that he puts him in his place. It is only when we are put firmly in our place that we find true freedom, find true rest, and find true joy. The weight of responsibility, indeed the weight of life, is too much to bear for a human being. We are deluded if we think otherwise. Elijah, a very gifted prophet, tried and failed.
How wonderful it is, then, that we do not have to go it alone. As blunt as it sounds, the story about Elijah under the broom tree serves as a lesson and a warning to us about the dangers of idolatry—that is, mistaking ourselves for God. Try hard as we might to accomplish all that God has entrusted to us on our own, we will only drive ourselves to the brink of exhaustion and despair. It is only in the strength of divine nourishment that we can go on.
Where does Elijah’s story touch ours? Where does his experience resemble yours today? Perhaps you do not get adequate rest and nutrition, because you think your efforts are enough to carry you through. Perhaps instead of remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy, you pack your so-called “day of rest” with endless chores and activities because you think the planet will stop spinning if you pause even for a moment. Perhaps at the end of that day, you find yourself in the same place as Elijah, collapsing in a heap and unable to take another step. Or perhaps you are so exhausted and discouraged that, like Elijah, you have come to believe that there is no future for you.
Wherever you find yourself this morning, the moment has arrived for all of us to hear and heed the good news. We all have a future because it is God’s future. We can be free, refreshed, and joyful because it does not depend on us. Today the Lord comes to us bringing bread as he visited Elijah all those thousands of years ago, in his hour of despair, doubt, and sorrow. Will we get up, and eat and drink, and then go to the mount of God in the strength of divine nourishment?
Amen.