In our text from the Old Testament today, we find ourselves dropped into a gutting and precarious moment of the life of the prophet Elijah. Elijah is on the run! These are the days of the reign of King Ahab, the seventh king of Israel, and we know from the few chapters before this one in the first Book of Kings that Ahab is a wicked king. Not only are his deeds nefarious, but - decidedly worst of all - King Ahab is a worshipper of false Gods. We know from the Old Testament that no matter the sins of an evil heart, by far the greatest sign of condemnation was a failure to be faithful to the true Lord and God of Israel. Think of even King David - for all his scheming and stumbling - David is known as the most righteous of kings because despite all else, David’s heart never strays from faithfulness to God. But King Ahab is not only a wayward king, forgetting God and doing as he pleases. Indeed he is a worshipper of the false God, Baal, and his wife, Jezebel orchestrated herself the persecution of all prophets of the true God of Israel.
Just before our passage this morning, the first Book of Kings recalls the famous showdown between Elijah and the false prophets of Baal. Elijah has returned from the wilderness and challenges the king and his wife: bring forth all of the best and most illustrious prophets of Baal and have them build an altar upon which to offer a bull as sacrifice. Elijah, then, will likewise build an altar for the God of Israel. Each will then call upon their own God to set the altar ablaze, and the one who succeeds will be revealed as the true prophet of the true divine power.
The prophets of Baal construct their altar and gather around it, 450 of them. They beg and they pray, they wail and they sing, they cut their own bodies and bleed over their offering – yet not a spark flies downward from the heavens.
Elijah, never to be outdone, not only constructs an altar to the God of Israel but insists that water be poured upon it - not once, but three times. He drenches the offering of the bull, the kindling, and the wood. And when he prays to God, not only is the entire altar set ablaze, but the water itself is consumed by fire. Elijah, vindicated, puts to death the prophets of Baal. But when Jezebel finds out what he has done, she sends a messenger to Elijah with a dire warning: she is coming for him, and when she finds him, she will do to him what he has done to her prophets.
Elijah flees, and this is where we find him today. He is alone, again in the wilderness, exhausted and afraid beneath a solitary broom tree. The text tells us that he asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” After all of his suffering and all of his labors, his life seems to have come to little but shame. Even after his successful revelation of the true power of the God of Israel, there seems to be little that awaits him but pain. Better to die in the wilderness - on his own terms - than to continue in disgrace and be murdered by a wicked king.
But God does not let him die. As he sleeps, an angel visits his solitary broom tree: “Get up and eat.” Again, the angel of the Lord touches him: “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” Elijah takes, eats. On this heavenly sustenance, he is strengthened for forty days and forty nights, blessed with the fortitude to continue in the work that the Lord has given him to do.
The events in the life of Elijah come to us from over two thousand years ago, and yet there is familiar heartache in his words: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.” How many of us have, at some point in our lives - some time ago or even at this very moment - how many of us have found ourselves beneath a solitary broom tree. How many of us come to find ourselves on the run: afraid, exhausted, pursued by the angry false prophets of need, depression, addiction, despair, pandemic. I imagine that even if you have not spent much time in sorrow beneath your own broom tree in the wilderness, the events of the past year and half have brought you to some sort of moment of reckoning. “What is the point? Lord, take me now so at least I can give up on my own terms. It is enough. It is enough.”
This is the tragedy of human limitation, isn’t it. This is what we say when we are starving beneath a broom tree in the wilderness. It is enough. Lord God, it is enough. I’ve had enough. I’ve seen enough. I’ve suffered enough. The wandering, the abuse, the failure, the consumption by guilt and boredom: when we are at our very wits’ end, how easily all of it dumps upon our heads and we have had enough.
We are all Elijah, beneath the broom tree, sometimes. But then...the angel shows up. No, Elijah, you are not meant to die alone beneath this tree in the desert. God is not done with you. Because if finitude is the tragedy of the human condition, our victory and joy is this: when we have reached our limits, our wits end, the very bottom of our capacities for living, God holds us fast. God picks up what we have set down. God fills what has been emptied. God clears a path through impossible sorrow and sets his table, abundant in the wilderness. Sometimes even despite ourselves - when we would rather just die in the wilderness and get it over with - God sends his angels and insists: you are not dying - you just need a sandwich.
As Saint Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans: “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
God is pursuing us just as he pursued the prophet Elijah. This is the truth. No matter where we have run off to or how “enough” things have been, the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ bids us “get up, eat.” Get up, eat. Otherwise the journey will be too much for you. God knows our suffering and our limitations, and how sweetly has he provided for us not only in earthly cakes baked on hot stones, not only in water drawn from an earthly stream, but in the flesh of his dear and precious Son: the Bread of Life, the Spring of Living Water.
Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” There is no limit to this life-giving bread. It will sustain us forty days and forty nights and forty months and forty years. When we are beneath the broom tree, longing for death, this living Bread seeks us out and picks us up.
O, that we might hear those gentle, insistent words: “Get up and eat.” It is our Lord Jesus Christ – calling us to refreshment and to life.
Sermon notes from Mother Brit Frazier
8 August 2021
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia