A social media post from contemporary English author and theologian, Dr. Joy Marie Clarkson, circulates all the major platforms every once in a while. It reminds us:
This is your gentle reminder that one time in the Bible Elijah was like “God, I’m so mad! I want to die!” so God said “Here’s some food. Why don’t you have a nap?” So Elijah slept, ate, & decided things weren’t so bad. Never underestimate the spiritual power of a nap & a snack.
Dr. Joy Marie Clarkson
It’s one of those that makes you laugh because it feels so true, isn’t it? I like it. I’m not sure sure Elijah would feel quite the same, but I like it.
The events leading up to his nap under the broom tree really did feel like things were so bad. In an epic showdown of prophets, Elijah had just been the sole competitor to represent the God of the Israelites in a duel against a stiff field of 850 other prophets and priests representing the god of Israel’s neighbor. By competing against each other, calling on their gods, they wanted to determine whose god was the most powerful. Elijah was there to speak the truth of God’s righteousness and dominion over all of creation.
The team representing Baal went first, and they were, of course, unsuccessful at the task of calling down fire from heaven in order to light the wood for a burnt offering. When Elijah’s turn came around, he increased the drama a bit, showboating for the audience. He filled jar after jar with water and dumped it all over the wood of his altar, until a trench of standing water formed at the base. He prayed to God and, without fail, fire fell and consumed the sacrifice – all of it, the wood, the stones, the dust, and EVEN the water in the trench. Elijah was the winner, declared the prophet of the most powerful God, and his prize was satisfying, the death of 850 enemy prophets of Baal and Asherah.
That part of this story is hard to reckon with this morning. It’s the kind of story where it seems like the deaths of one’s enemies is celebrated. The violence sounds divinely sanctioned, even divinely ordained. “How to address violence in the Bible” is practically a whole PhD thesis, so I’m not going to reconcile it this morning in an aside in a sermon, but I hope it suffices to say that contemporary Christians, contemporary Christians in a modern nation that is one of the world’s leaders in political, economic, and military power, should not equate, replicate, or take as a divine mandate the religious stories of a small, struggling religious group feeling pressure on all sides from it’s neighbors written to try to help them make sense of their relationships with God, with one another, and with the world. How God’s people are faithful to God in difficult times, how they listen, how they show up, how they are obedient, how they are aligned with God’s purposes are the kinds of things we take from a story like this. Justification for destruction and death is NOT a lesson it is teaching us. The stories of God’s people and God’s prophets are the stories of underdogs, their motivations, their mistakes, and their victories. They simply cannot be superimposed on the situations facing our own nation today. And we cannot extrapolate from them that mass destruction and death is the divine will.
OK. Back to our story.… In this moment, life is good for Elijah, if only for an instant. There is just one problem. He just made a fool out of the gods and priests and prophets of the foreign-born queen of Israel, and now she is very unhappy. She threatens to take his life the same way he had taken the lives of other prophets, so, terrified, he runs. He runs far, well out of the kingdom of Israel, into Judah to the south, the land of the Dead Sea, at the edge of the wilderness.
Elijah is exhausted. Not just tired from the battle and its aftermath. Not just weary after a long journey. Elijah is that level of exhausted you hit when you just don’t know what to do anymore. When you can’t see the next right step to take. When you have been working long and hard, with your whole body, mind, and spirit, and you just aren’t sure what to do next, you just aren’t sure if there’s anything that can be done next. When it even feels dangerous.
It’s the exhaustion that comes with speaking truth to power. It’s the exhaustion that comes with looking at the world and wondering if any of your advocacy, any of your protests, any of your pursuit of justice, equity, and antiracism has made any difference in the world. It’s the exhaustion that comes when efforts are made at the highest levels to whitewash the full history of our nation in order to gloss over (or at best?) or fully deny (at worst) the realities of chattel slavery and the way the dominant population of White Americans benefited both directly and indirectly from that sinful institution. It’s the exhaustion that comes from the whole life work it takes to speak up and speak out for the priorities of God that include justice for the oppressed, wholeness and peace for downtrodden, dignity for the outcast, freedom for those who have been bound by literal and metaphorical chains for generation upon generation.
Elijah, a prophet of God, a prophet who speaks a hard word to people in power, a prophet who has to tell people things they might not want to hear, things that might tell them who they are iand what they are a part of in ways that they don’t want to face, Elijah feels this kind of exhaustion. He just wants to sleep, to stop thinking, to stop wondering, to stop worrying about whether he’s doing all of this right.
A day’s journey away from anyone he knows, Elijah has successfully withdrawn into the wilderness. A lone tree dots the desert, a lone place of shade and shelter in the stark landscape of his faith. Satisfied that he has withdrawn far enough, he surrenders to the sleep he craves… even if just for a moment.
Because “Suddenly,” it says in 1 Kings, suddenly an angel appears, not letting him sleep for even an instant, not letting him disengage from the divine presence. “Get up!” the angel commands. “Get up and eat!” At his head Elijah finds a cake baked on the hot stones of the desert and a jar of water. Elijah ate and drank, his physical needs satisfied, and lay down to sleep again.
But again, the angel, touching him, urges, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” God’s persistence in the relationship is relentless. God’s desire for even this one prophet to continue on the prophetic journey is so strong, even the heavenly beings are employed to bring him back into the call. God’s desire to remain in relationship with Elijah is so deep that Elijah can’t be lost to fear and loneliness, hopelessness and feelings of inadequacy. God’s trust in Elijah’s potential as one who will point to truth in the midst of a world that follows too easily what is false, is so high that Elijah can’t be left to sleep. That Elijah has farther to go is not in question for the angel, for the agent of God, so strengthening Elijah for what comes next is her purpose, reminding Elijah of the persistence of God’s grace and providence is her mission.
Elijah feeds on the cakes provided. Elijah eats what is given to him by God. It must be some pretty impressive cake because apparently it is enough to sustain him for the journey that becomes clear is his to take, the journey of forty days and forty nights to the mount of God at Horeb.
Cakes that can strengthen him for forty days…. I want some of that. It sounds good, right? The forecast this week looks like we’ll have some cake-baking hot stones of our own over the next few days, maybe I should find a tree to take a nap under and see what appears when I wake up!
I wish. Maybe you do too. I want some of that sustenance, some of that encouragement, some of that taste of God’s grace, God’s promise, God’s presence. When I am lying listlessly in the deserts of my faith, when I’m doubting the presence of God in my life, when I’m exhausted just looking at the enormity of the task of working for justice for all people, a cake baked on the hot stones that will fill me for as long as I can imagine sounds absolutely perfect. God will provide, we’re told and we want to believe, and yet maybe that particular method of provision isn’t one we should count on or wait for.
Stories like this – stories of single servings of cake that feed a prophet for more than a month – stories like this are few and far between, even in the Bible. Dramatic miracles like cakes suddenly appearing in the midst of the barren wilderness don’t happen all that often. But that doesn’t mean God’s prophets and God’s people aren’t taken care of in other ways.
Once, as I sat under a broom tree in my own desert wilderness, craving the rich assurance of a quick fix cake that would last for days, a friend, an angel of God sent to point out the food in front of me, reminded me of something different. We don’t have to worry about how long the cake will last, how long the food will sustain us, how long it will reinvigorate our bodies and spirit, how long it will strengthen us for the journey. We don’t have to wait for the biggest cake of faith on which to feed, because the Bread of Life is with us all the time. Our bread is provided not forty days at a time, but daily our bread is set before us. “Maybe don’t worry about how many days it will last,” my friend wrote to me. “Maybe then you can see the Bread of Life is always enough for today.”
More prevalent in Scripture than the story of cake that satisfied Elijah for weeks, are the stories of miraculous meals that feed those who are hungry for the day, like manna that fell for the Israelites daily from heaven, or like when Jesus fed the 5000 who had followed him across the Sea of Galilee. Even more common are the simple meals that are shared among the people of God that feed body and spirit, like the one served by Martha when Jesus visited, the supper with Jesus’ friends around the table in the upper room, like the fish the risen Lord cooked on the shoreline when he appeared to his disciples, or the way the earliest believers in the book of Acts shared everything and brought what they had to the table of the Lord. Too often we spend so much time wishing and waiting for overwhelming feasts of miracles that we miss the simple gifts right in front of us – the gift of daily communion with God that will sustain our journey, communion with God who is our rock, whose steadfast love is with us day and night, with Jesus who called himself the Bread of Life, with the Holy Spirit that tends to our spirits and equips us for divine work in the world.
The goal is not to consume all that God offers us in one sitting or stuff ourselves full and expect the nourishment from one sitting, one worship service, one prayer, one inspiring speaker or book or moment to fuel us for the whole journey.
Instead we are nourished every time we feed on the Word of God with the people of God. It sustains us, body and spirit, when we carve out time in our day for reflection and prayer borne of our soulful longing for God, when we create quiet in which we can hear the still small voice of the divine. When we gather as the body for worship, for reading and hearing the word, for celebrating with simple gifts of water, bread, and juice, for praying and receiving the good news of God’s grace, we devour what the Lord has provided. When we step out in courageous faith to hold up a mirror to broken world, standing shoulder to shoulder with those calling for wholeness and welcome for all of creation, we break rich cakes of God’s love through our words of peace, our acts of compassion, our demands of justice for all.
Eaten little by little, day by day, this is what gives us strength to continue on. And in that way, just as the cakes in the desert fed Elijah for the next stage of his ministry, the bread of life is a meal for the road, bread for the journey of justice. People of God, let’s “get up and eat,” that we will be nourished for the journey to which God calls us.
