Bread for the Journey

[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on Sunday, August 8, 2021.]

1 Kings 19:1-8
Our first Bible lesson for today comes to us from 1 Kings 19:1-8. The books of 1 and 2 Kings trace the story of God’s dealings with His largely faithless people, ancient Israel, from the reign of King Solomon, the son of David and Israel’s third king through the disintegration of God’s people into two nations--Israel or Samaria in the north and Judah in the south, and finally the destruction of both kingdoms as independent nation states.

Throughout these years, there was a handful of kings who sought to lead God’s people to repentance and faith in God, only to be replaced by kings who engaged in idolatry, injustice, and the mixing of worship of false deities. In these same years, God sent prophets who spoke the Word of God to His people in both the South and the North. They were largely ignored or murdered. Isaiah records that the people to whom he tried to give God’s truth responded, “Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions.” (Isaiah 30:10) They only wanted to hear messages that told them how wonderful and right they were.

Our lesson from 1 Kings involves the greatest prophet in Biblical history, Elijah, a person described by Israel’s idolatrous king Ahab as the “troubler of Israel.” (1 Kings 18:17) As we join the narrative, God has just used Elijah to bring a thunderous confirmation of God’s sovereignty and faithfulness in a contest between Elijah and 450 prophets of Baal, the Canaanite fertility deities favored by King Ahab’s wife Jezebel and countenanced by the king. All the false prophets of Baal had been killed.

In the wake of this victory of God, Elijah might have been ecstatic with joy. And he was for a while. He bowed in thankfulness to God, pronouncing that now God was sending rain to the thirsty land. For a prophet who had faithfully declared God’s call to God’s people to stop limping along as they tried leaning on different gods, this was vindication.

But Queen Jezebel was unbowed. After Ahab tells her of all the dead prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel and how the Baals had failed to produce rain but God did, she sends a messenger to Elijah. She will ask all the baals to kill her, she says, if, by the next day, Elijah isn’t a dead man. Now Elijah might have sent the messenger back to Jezebel to tell her, “You’re bluffing. If you think you can get away with killing me right now, you wouldn’t have sent a messenger, but an assassin.”

That’s not what Elijah does. Instead, he became “afraid and ran for his life.” (1 Kings 19:3) He ran a distance of more than seventy miles, from Mount Carmel in the north to Beersheba, a place at the southern edge of Judah, way outside of the land ruled by Ahab. He should have felt safe. Instead, he goes out into the desert and finds a broom tree. There, Elijah asks God to kill him off, “I have had enough, Lord.” And then, referring to his ancient Israelite forebears, dead and gone, tells God, “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” (1 Kings 19:4)

What on earth is going on with Elijah? Many students of the Bible think it was this: While being pressed hard by Ahab and Jezebel in the run-up to the contest at Mount Carmel, Elijah had been desperate enough and dependent enough on God to pray about everything. But when the victory came, Elijah was lulled into thinking that all would be well, that Ahab and Jezebel would be chastened and repent, turning to God. He thought that his faith rather than the God in Whom he reposed his faith, had on the day! The most dangerous time for us a Christians comes when God answers our prayers with a yes and we begin to think our blessings came not from God, but from our own effort or virtue. That’s the moment when the devil, the world, and our sinful selves snap the trap. When we face an insurmountable problem with the false notion that life depends not on what God does for us, but what we do for ourselves, we are in trouble. So, when Jezebel threatened Elijah, now thinking that everything depended on him, he ran.

Life had become too much for Elijah. Have you been there? Have you ever been in such a tight spot that you couldn’t see a way out? Elijah was so despondent that he asked God to take his life. When you think about it, this is one of the funniest places in all the Bible as we read further along in 1 Kings. God’s answer to Elijah’s prayer was, “No.” Elijah is one of two people in the Old Testament who, we’re told, never died, but were simply taken to heaven with God. Elijah’s story reminds us that “No” is one of the answers God may give to our prayers. 

But there’s a more important point to be garnered from our lesson. After falling asleep under that broom tree, Elijah is touched by an angel who tells him to, “Get up and eat.” At first, we don’t know who this angel is. But then we’re told in verse 7: “The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.’” In the Old Testament, the term angel of the Lord is used as another name for the Lord, Yahweh. God came to Elijah to tell him feed on His Word and His grace because the journey that lay ahead of him was more than Elijah could possibly handle on his own.

Life in this world can be hard. Especially when you think they don’t need or can’t count on God. But we do need God.

We need God, first of all, because, like Elijah, we are sinners bent toward forgetting God, thinking that we ourselves are gods. We put unnecessary pressure on ourselves when we fail to, in the words of the old hymn, “take it to the Lord in prayer.” We need God’s forgiveness.

We need God also because we are mortals bound for eternal separation from God apart from receiving Jesus, the “bread of life” Who offered Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sin and rose from the dead to lead us out of darkness into the light of life with God.

We need God too, because the journey of this life is just too hard to bear without the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Tom Grabeman spoke for many when, before his mother’s funeral on Friday, he asked, “How do people who don’t have faith in God cope?” Through the years of having been with people of faith and with people of no faith as they or their loved ones died, I can tell you there is a qualitative difference between those who feed on Jesus, the bread of life, in their lives’ journeys and those who go hungry and without God. I agree with the lines of an old Bruce Cockburn song: “You can take the wisdom of this world / And give it to the ones who think it all ends here.”

Friends, the journey of this life, the journey toward that day when we meet God face to face is too much for us to do on our own. We need the bread of life, Jesus, found in God’s Word of Scripture and in Holy Baptism and in the bread and wine of Holy Communion, Jesus’ body and blood. We need all that God gives us in Jesus Christ: forgiveness, grace, love, hope, and peace. Today, God tells you again, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” When we are weak enough and desperate enough to hear those words with repentance and faith, then we have the strength to hope and thrive and love no matter what our circumstances. Amen