Pentecost 11(B) – 1 Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51
The writer of Ephesians says, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another.” He also says, “Speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.” We are members of one another.
On Sunday morning, a man walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Park, Wisconsin, and opened fire, killing six. And on Monday, an arsonist set fire to a Muslim mosque in Joplin, Missouri for the second time in two weeks; this time, it did its work, and the place of worship was burned to the ground.
We need to talk about this. We need to, if for no other reason than there will be other people who will talk about it, people with voices much louder than mine, people who claim to be Christian leaders but will speak words of hate, words that are lies, words that are evil. And the writer of Ephesians tells us to speak truth.
But I’m a Biblical preacher, so if I wanted to connect the sermon with these news events this week, I needed to find some way to tie them to the scripture lessons set aside for this Sunday. I was delighted, then, to turn to our Old Testament lesson for the day, and see Elijah. What a perfect reading! Elijah, I recalled, is running away from religious intolerance, running for his life from Queen Jezebel and her priests of Ba’al.
Which is why it’s important to not just rely on your memory, but to engage with the actual text of scripture. Because as well as I know our scriptures, it turns out that if you pay close attention to the text, it’s a bit more complicated than all that.
Elijah is commonly hailed as the greatest of the Hebrew prophets. His life is so godly that, at its end, he does not die but is carried up bodily into heaven on a chariot of fire. The stories tell us that he is to return to help announce the coming of the Messiah, and so both John the Baptist and Jesus himself are compared with him in the Gospels. Jewish believers, when celebrating the Passover, still leave an empty place for him at the table, in expectant hope of his return, a beautiful gesture.
And yet, for such an important prophet, he doesn’t do a whole lot. Elijah appears for the first time in chapter 17 of 1st Kings, and after just eight chapters later, he’s gone. Among those chapters, there is one in which he does not appear. The others have him doing such incredible things as bringing about a drought, only to make it rain again; moving in with a poor widow and making her take care of him for three and a half years (although he does provide an endless jar of oil and grain for her, and raises her son from the dead, which I suppose is payment enough); and choosing a successor to this illustrious career. And then, of course, there is today’s story, where he is running away. Not much of a faith hero.
When you look closer at what Elijah is running from, you discover that this hero is not, in fact, a hero at all. The story goes like this: Queen Jezebel is from another country, and she’s brought her country’s religion with her. There are 450 priests of Ba’al, and another 400 priests of Asherah, a female deity. And she’s got her husband, King Ahab, wrapped around her little finger, so the state religion begins to shift. The people of Israel are confused. Should they worship God, or these new deities?
Elijah sets up a contest. He prepares two oxen for sacrifice, and directs the priests to build an altar. But where a sacrifice would normally be burned, in order to “go up with the smoke to God,” he says they should not set fire to the ox. Instead, they should ask their respective gods to bring fire down from heaven and consume the offering. Of course, after much prayer and pleading and ritual on the part of these many priests, the offering to Ba’al is unchanged.
Elijah commands that water be poured onto his ox and his altar, to prevent it from burning. Then, with a simple prayer, fire comes down, dries up the water, and consumes the ox, proving that Elijah’s God is indeed God.
The response? Elijah instructs the priests to be taken to the river, and killed. In his anger, Elijah’s actions cause the slaughter of 850 people. It should be no surprise that Elijah is running for his life. We can’t blame Jezebel for being angry. Elijah’s action is terrible, evil, wrong. And it sounds suspiciously like the sort of hateful, violent act in our current news stories.
The Bible scholar, Phyllis Trible, did pioneering work in what she calls “Texts of Terror.” She looks at Bible stories which traditionally we have seen as great stories of faith, examples of God’s amazing acts of power, and wonderful, holy human response to them. But when you shift perspective a little bit, reading the story from the viewpoint of a different character, you can find a destructive, painful narrative in its place. This story is one of those Texts of Terror, when read from the viewpoint of the foreign priests.
So what do we do with this text? Sometimes, the answer, “I don’t know,” can be a good one. Not every Bible story reveals its holiness in every breath. But I don’t think that has to be our only option here. Because, of course, our story isn’t over.
Elijah is exhausted, he is afraid, he is miserable, and he is maybe even beginning to feel twinges of guilt, realizing the fullness of what he has done. And so the prophet gives up. He says to God, “I’ve had enough. It is enough, I can’t do any more, I may as well die.”
And God does something incredible. Instead of following through on Elijah’s request for death, God feeds him. God sends an angel with cakes and water, shakes him awake, and tells him to eat.
Because God is not a God of death; God is a God of life. God does not destroy when He can create. God does not deal in despair, but brings hope. Think of even the times when the Bible interprets God’s work as punishing. Adam and Eve are in the garden, and they have brought sin into the world; God sends them out–their actions have consequences–but God sends them out clothed and provided for. Humans build a tower in Babel to the heavens, to become like gods themselves, and how does God deal with it? By creating nations and languages, which become the cultures that enrich our world with such beauty today.
And, of course, we know where the stories ultimately lead. God’s own Son is hung on a cross and killed. And on the third day, God raises Him from the dead, proclaiming that death has no power, that life always wins.
And so Elijah is fed, and the food that God provides gives him the strength for a long journey ahead of him. In the consequences of his actions, God provides for him.
I was frustrated by the news this week, because this is the sort of violence and hate that makes me angry, that makes me want to do something. But what can I do? I’m one person, so insignificant. But then I discovered that every time I’d think about Wisconsin and Missouri, my mind would inevitably head back to a conversation I had last Sunday. After worship, I gathered with eight of our teenage members to do some planning for the year ahead. The theme of our youth ministry this year is, “Breaking Down Walls,” something we brought back with us from New Orleans. And so, as I think about what sorts of service work we can do this year, I asked the youth members there what walls they want to work on breaking down. And you know what they said? Before we’d even heard about the news this week, before any of these things had happened, our teenagers decided they wanted to work on walls of religious intolerance. That they want to reach out to our neighbors here in the Worcester area, to the Jewish and Muslim and other faith communities here, and say that we will not let hate and fear win, that God loves them, and that we will work together to understand each other and change our world together.
And I realized that all week long, God was feeding me through them, through the courage of these young people, God was feeding me.
Sisters and Brothers, sometimes we get exhausted. Sometimes we are worn down and think we can’t go on any further. Sometimes we turn to God and say, “It is enough.” And God says to us, “No. I am enough.” God feeds us with his own body and blood, and gives us renewed strength for the journey ahead, a journey that is marked not by death but by life, not by destruction but by creation, not by despair but by hope. So come and be fed with the Bread of Life that is Jesus Christ. Amen.