Saturday, August 29, 2015
Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 14B ~ August
9, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
….the bread that I will give for the life of the world
is my flesh.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
Today’s first reading suggests
a pattern: Elijah is despondent, God sends what he needs to revive his spirit
and persevere. Elijah tells God he wants to die, and then he goes to
sleep. (Even the greatest of prophets, who had lots of personal experience of
God, had his bad days.) He was depressed and wanted to quit.
But God wouldn’t let
him. God sent an angel with food. Elijah ate and then went back to sleep. That
is the detail in the story that struck me. Even after being visited by an angel
and nurtured with miraculous food, Elijah still wanted to die! God didn’t try
to cheer him up, but neither would He let him sleep. God’s angel kept poking
Elijah until he got up and ate enough to sustain him on the difficult journey
ahead.
So, like last week,
it is possible to see ourselves in Elijah. How often we would just like to go
to sleep. Even when we get what we need, we happily take it and then go BACK to
sleep. But, it seems, God won’t let us alone. For some
reason, God wants Elijah to go on a journey. To Horeb, the mount
of God. Another name for Sinai, perhaps. Doesn’t matter. It means heaven,
where God dwells. The point is Elijah’s three states: sleep, waking, and the
mount of God – ordinary consciousness, spiritual awakening, and
union with God. I notice that this is the same form as last week’s story about
the rebellion in the wilderness: the people despair and complain and God feeds
them, so that they can journey on to some unknown destination, which for all
they know may be purely imaginary.
Once again, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in that this seems to be the
pattern of our individual spiritual lives, too. Elijah’s example makes it at
once more individual and more communal. I suppose we are never more alone than
when we sleep - except when we die. Of course, sleep is a metaphor
for death. Elijah wants to die: to lose consciousness. But God won’t let him.
God keeps prodding the great prophet and God also provides everything he needs
to keep awake and to keep going. Bread and water.
It is obvious why the
lectionary pairs this account with our Lord’s proclamation that He is the Bread
of Life. Elijah suggests that it is all about consciousness: sleep is our
ordinary consciousness. We have moments of awakening but our inclination is to
go back to our ordinary state. God’s Bread and water help us to wake up more
and more, so that we can go to the mount of God, a third level of
consciousness, perhaps: something beyond imagining.
The bread and water
are the center of Elijah’s story. They are what he must have to make the
journey. They bring him out of sleep into consciousness, out of death into
life. They give him the strength to go to the mount of God. But it’s not just
about him. The bread and water belong to the world.
Christ gives His Flesh for the life of the world, that is, of
all the cosmos together. Furthermore, while water occurs in nature, bread does
not. Bread is a human artifact the product of civilization. Is this meant to suggest
the communal nature of the journey? Even our journey to the unknown heights of
Horeb? To get there, Elijah needs not only God’s gift of water, but
bread, God’s gift through human society. If Elijah’s sleep
represents death and solitary alienation, is not his awakening the opposite:
life and communion? Elijah’s Bread represents the Communion that Paul
describes, the Body in which we are “members of one another.” Is not that the
Communion that brings the world to life?
The bread that I will give for the
life of the world is my flesh.
Bread is the center of the story. Bread
awakens Elijah and Bread also gives him what he needs to go on through the
desert.
Elijah’s destination represents our encounter
with God, which is to say eternal life,
a condition as far exalted above ordinary waking consciousness as that
consciousness is above sleep, a condition as far exalted above ordinary life as
that life is above death. In today’s Gospel, our Lord calls it heaven.
But something is different in the Gospel: Elijah has to go to the
Mount of God. But in the Gospel, Life comes to us. We don’t have to go anywhere;
Life comes down from heaven:
I am the living bread
that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.
AMEN
LORD, GIVE US THIS BREAD ALWAYS!
