Sweep it under the broom tree

In the reading that we had from Sunday, Elijah is hiding out under the broom tree. 

People asked me on Sunday what a broom tree is, and, here's one now.  Related to the juniper, it's actually a big old shrub.  Big enough to hide under.  Big enough to give up under.  Big enough to die under. 

Elijah had just moved on from facing down with the priests of Baal at mount Carmel, one of the banner moments in the life of this vitally important prophet, where he stands up against the hordes of Baal and calls down fire right in front of them, decimating them and having the presence of God being fully manifest before them. It's an amazing moment, and after that, unsurprisingly, Jezebel and her cohorts want him dead.  which they do.  So Elijah flees, and sits under the broom tree, and seeks to just sit there and die.  He's all done.  Everyone hates him, they want to kill him, and Elijah, having worked on overcoming the priests of Baal, having prayed for rain, is spent, he's done.  This is a matter of contemplating what the cost of doing the right thing actually is.

Most people don't really look at the Old Testament that often, they don't really look too deeply into what the content of the Old Testament actually is, but what we end up seeing more often than not is that proximity to God isn't comfortable, and it isn't easy. Being close to God, getting cozy with him, leads to more problems than it does solutions.  It's a scary, terrifying place to be essentially because he is so fundamentally good.  The better someone is, the more frightening they are to get close to.  They better they are, the more challenging, the more hurtful it will be to get up close to them and to work things out with them.  God's words, his commands, his edicts and his decrees are good and right, just and pure, but being close to them, trying to observe them, that's exhausting, tiring, and hazardous.  It's also unpopular.  If you're like Elijah, if you take a stand against people who are wrong, who are doing things that ought not to be done, if you're doing all that stuff you are going to find resistance.  In a sense, it's equivalent to swimming upstream, you know.  That's exhausting, and it always seems easier for the fish to just go with the direction of the water, but that's probably not where they want to go. 

Now, if you're going to do the right thing, the real right thing, it will be as tiring and taxing as swimming upstream, because you are, spiritually at least.  You're not supposed to be infants, tossed about by every wave.  You're supposed to know where you're going, and what you're doing, at least partially.  You're supposed to know what direction you should be moving towards, and to move in that direction.  Being tossed around by every wave only ensures that you're never going to really get where you want to go.  But if you stick with the right path, the correct path, it's going to involve swimming upstream for a bit.  And that is exhausting.

If you were to take the words that Paul wrote in our epistle reading and take them as divine edict, which they are, you'd be in trouble.  What Paul delivers are all things that we would agree with, we would all agree that these are things that are worth doing and should be done, but putting them into practice is a horse of a different colour. If you were to want to get that stuff done, you would rapidly find it exhausting, too much to possibly consider doing on your own.  It's too big, too hard, and too complicated.  It's impossible to get it sorted out all in one shot.  And if you're like Elijah, you're going to end up sitting under a metaphorical broom tree, knowing that even if you do what is right and good and just and pure, you're still going to be exhausted, broken down, and essentially waiting for death. 

So when Elijah was sitting under the broom tree waiting to die, an angel came and fed him, a loaf of bread baked on coals and a jug of water.  And it's not just the food that the angel gave, but also the words that the angel spoke to Elijah: 'Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.'  Those words are true, not just for Elijah, that great lion of the faith, but also for you, too.  The journey of faith is too great for you.  It's too great for me, too.  It's not as though any of us can just through force of will decide to keep those commands that Paul recommends, that he encourages, that he tells us are mandatory and required in order to attain perfection.  If you look at that list for more than one second, you're going to find that it's essentially impossible for you to keep, to adhere to, and to get done.  This is the journey that is too great for you - the journey between your ideals and your actions, between your intentions and your results, between your reach and your grasp.  And this is why we come to church, and why we are fed by God there.  We need to be fed by him in word and sacrament precisely because the journey is too great for us, because we are not going to get things worked out all that well.  We aren't going to be moving on our own strength on this one. 

The Old Testament reading from Kings has Elijah eating the food, and going on the strength of the food for 40 days.  He is equipped with the food for the journey ahead.  And you need to think of church that way too.  The journey is too great for you.  The journey of righteousness, of perfection, it's too great for you to get done on your own.  You need to be refueled, or you'll just sit under the broom tree and wait to die.  But if you return to the Lord your God, if you are fed through word and sacrament, if your sins are forgiven, if you are renewed and equipped by the one who has overcome the world, then you can start to make this journey. You can start to get things done.

So that's where we get to churchy type things.  That's where we get to the purpose of church at all, really.  You're not there to socialize alone, not just to sing songs and hear some talking, you're there to be fed.  You're there to be equipped.  You're there to be forgiven, to be healed, and to be reinvigorated because the journey is actually too great for you.  Keeping pace with the morals and ethics of the Bible is too hard for you, which is why most people just give up and don't try.  Heck, keeping up with your own ethics  is often too hard, which is why people give up and don't try.  There's a real big metaphorical broom tree out there that people sit under and wait to die.  But God knows that the journey is too hard for you.  It's too hard and too far, which is why he visits, redeems and sustains you, guides you with his hand and equips you for his service. 

Leftovers

If you've ever met me, you'll know that my favorite genre of movies is horror movies.  Not that I get to watch too many of them these days, what with the small children and all, but when I get the chance, I still enjoy a good horror movie.  I enjoy them because they have a clear line between good and evil, demonic forces and their corollary are taken seriously, and violence is treated with the reaction that it should engender, ie. a bad one.  And one of the all-time sleeper classics is the film called 'parents,' which is a film that should be called 'leftovers.'  In this film, a small child has the idea that his parents are sneakily turning him into a cannibal by serving up nothing but mystery meat.  And when the child asks his parents what the deal is, asking them what the leftovers used to be, his father responds by saying 'before they were leftovers, they were leftovers to be.'

What a great little sleeper hit it was.  But aside from waxing elegaic about horror movies from the eighties, I do wonder if a lot of my contemporaries not only saw this film, but saw it and were profoundly affected by it.  That is, I wonder if people saw this film and developed a natural, or unnatural revulsion to leftovers.  Here in North America (I've only seen stats for the USA  but I refuse to believe that they can be much different for Canada) we hate hate leftovers.  The consumption of leftovers has dropped precipitously over the last 50 years, to the point where so much food is being tossed in the trash that it's frankly shocking. 

What's going on?  Simple stuff, really.  It's fairly simple to understand that in the 1950s when the movie Parents is set, the adults from that time had lived through or grown up in the great depression.  They were spendthrifts, they had learned to hold tight to their items, to get the most out of absolutely anything that they could find.  Every meal had to be stretched to ludicrous levels, in order to get the absolute most out of every purchase.  Nowhere was this more prominent than in the United Kingdom, my ancestral homeland, in which rationing was still going on into the 50s after the second world war, and boy, you had to scrimp and save and make your one egg a week really last.

I mention this because now that things are plentiful, now that times are good, we are hooked on not just eating more, but on variety.  And variety is a real issue for the average Canadian.  I've brought this up before, but there's a moment from family guy in which Peter comments that he can almost see into Bonnie's room from where he is standing, and Stewie is incredulous as to why he would want to.  And that's when Stewie figures something out, and it's profound, at least for a talking baby.  Stewie says 'Oh, I get it.  It's worse, but different.'  This fairly simple statement drives a lot of the misery that the Israelites suffer in their wilderness wandering.

Picture this - In the Old Testament, in the book of Exodus, the Israelites have finally departed from Egypt, from the land of slavery, and are set to journey out to the promised land.  And because they're human beings, the grass on the side of the fence of slavery starts to look awfully green.  Not that it was, you understand.  Slavery is a horrible, brutal thing, designed to chew up as much human capital as possible for zero payoff.  The slaves that exist are gobbled up in the mouth of the overseers, who crush them in pursuit of riches and an easy life.  The Egyptians could only keep their place of relative ease if they had a proverbial army of slaves working for them who would do all the drudgery that they didn't want to do in order for them to be able to do what they wanted.  But in order for the slaves to do the work that you don't to do, they have to be well fed enough to accomplish it. You have to put gas in your tractor if you want it to run, and you have to feed your slaves with all kinds of nutritious food if you want them to keep working.  If all you want to do is kill them, you don't have to worry about what you're feeding them, but if you want them to work, you've got to feed them something.  Apparently, the Egyptians didn't give their slaves their freedom, but they sure gave them a lot of tasty snacks.

And wouldn't you know it, when they reached a point of freedom, they all of a sudden started longing after not what was better, but what was different. They started lusting after the bread of captivity, seeking the sweetness of novelty over the burden of freedom, and that's a situation that functionally continues until today.  And friends, this is us.  This is us when we constantly seek what is new instead of what is good.  We seek what is novel, and not what is right.  You may have things just right, you may have things 100% where they should be, but there will always be that wanderlust built into you that will seek what you do not yet have.  You will always be looking for that one next purchase, that one new career, that one affair, that one relationship, that next thing that will lead you to the happiness that you so fervently want but cannot have.  You can't ever have it because it is always just one step out of reach, will always be just that little bit unattainable.

That's why the illustration from Philippians of their gods in their bellies is so completely apt.  Think about the way your belly works.  You know how it works, come on.  There's a good chance that you went to church on Sunday, and if you did, there's a good chance that you went to brunch on Sunday afterwards, and there's a good chance that as the final hymn was playing, you may have been seriously thinking about the brunch you wanted to have.  All good so far.  But here's the issue, which is that the brunch that you wanted to have, no matter how good it is, no matter how wholesome and filling it may have been, it was imperfect in one key way - you were hungry again later. That is, even if the food is perfectly satisfying, nutritionally adequate, it will be used up, and you will need to eat again.  If your god is in your belly, it will never be anything other than momentarily satisfied until you die.  That's it.  The best you can hope for is to be pleasantly plump after you eat, and hope that that feeling will last as long as possible, but know that it will eventually drop off and fade away and you will be hungry again. In the wilderness, the Israelites wandered around in the wilderness, and kept on eating mana day after day.  They ate of the mana in the wilderness which comforted and filled them for that day, but was not enough to satisfy them long term.  They grew hungry again at the end of every day, and more mana had to fall every day to fill them.  Their daily bread was being satisfied every day that went by, but they were still anxious and concerned, wanting more and more variety, wanting their stomachs to be satisfied with exotic things, wanting the gods in their bellies to be fully silenced.  But Jesus, our Lord, he doesn't work like that.  He tells his disciples, and indeed us as well, that he is the living bread that came down from heaven, and everyone who eats of this bread will never be hungry again.  A bold claim to be sure, and it's not the only time that Jesus says it.  He says quite clearly that he is the living bread, and that he is what satisfies.  He works differently than all the other gods and messages that float around out there, he works differently than all the miasma of other voices.  But to understand how that works, you have to ask a different question: What are you looking to gain from Christ? 

This is where people get confused, and I can't really blame them. The messaging has gotten all fuzzy on this, the same as it has gotten fuzzy about food, too.  For these days, people eat food for enjoyment, for pleasure.  Many have been the times where someone has asked 'are you hungry?' and my response has been 'why does that matter?' For us these days, I don't think that not being hungry has ever stopped me from eating.  Do I eat because I'm hungry, or because I'm bored, or tired, or emotional, or anything like that? Do I eat because I'm hungry, but because I feel like eating? Knowing this goes a heck of a long way towards understanding how the god in your belly works too.  He wants to be satisfied by novelty, he wants to be satisfied by taste and flavour, but more than anything else, he can only be satisfied momentarily.  Christ works differently.  He isn't one who needs to be satisfied, he is the one who satisfies.

Why are you a Christian? Why church ,why Christ, why baptism, why communion, why any of it? You should know that this is all done for the forgiveness of sins, that's why it's there.  That's why we have church and Christ, not for good ideas, not for good direction, not for prophecy, not for guidance, but for forgiveness.  And this is why it works in a completely satisfying way.  Think of your past, and all the things you wish you hadn't done.  Think about your regrets, all the things you should have done and didn't and all the things you shouldn't have done yet did.  If you consider and contemplate all of these things, and work through all that matter, if there was a way for all of that to be blotted out in one moment, and if that one moment could continue to be powerful and effective no matter what you had done, wouldn't that be permanently satisfying? Honestly, after you work out what church is for, what the faith you hold is all about, then you understand why Christ is what truly satisfies, why you will never grow hungry ever again.  It's because you are hungering and thirsting for salvation, for forgiveness, and that is what Christ genuinely and truly provides.  Anything else would just be a momentary reprieve, not true forgiveness, not true life, not true salvation. All the other efforts led to just more of the same, but after Christ, the temple curtain was torn down, the temple itself was smashed, and all the sacrifice was stopped.  It was stopped because, to quote Jesus directly, 'it is finished.'  His work completed, and the hungering and thirsting was stopped, and truly satisfied.