August 9, 2015
1 Kings 19:4-8; Eph 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51
Brookdale
So often in the Bible, God talks to people, as in the first reading this morning when an angel speaks to the great prophet Elijah. But most of us have never heard God speak, and our ears are not designed to catch spiritual messages. When I studied this morning’s readings, one thing that occurred to me was how often I miss what God is trying to tell me. The readings exemplify three ways that can happen.
One way is when we are just not tuned in to spiritual messages. The first reading gives an example of where our state of mind is just not ready to perceive messages from God. The reading takes place shortly after Elijah’s tremendous triumph over the prophets of Baal. Elijah proved to King Ahab that God was greater than Baal, and he eliminated Baal’s prophets. Unfortunately, this infuriated Queen Jezebel, who had introduced the worship of Baal and hired the prophets. So she ordered her servants to kill him, and triumph turned into running for his life. In the first reading, Elijah is in the desert, exhausted and frankly depressed. Even when an angel wakes him to eat and drink, he just goes back to sleep afterwards. He doesn’t have the heart to listen to the Lord or even to live. But spiritual messages are persistent and keep trying to get our attention. Eventually, Elijah perks up and walks all the way to Horeb, the mountain where Moses talked with God.
The second reading struck me at first as kind of obvious. I mean, you wouldn’t expect scripture to tell you to practice bitterness, fury, anger, and shouting. But why do we keep doing these things when we know we shouldn’t and at some level we don’t really want to? In my case, it’s often a matter of compartmentalization that leads to “Yes, but” reasoning. Yes, I know I shouldn’t be bitter, but this was just so unfair it’s impossible to get over it. Yes, I know I shouldn’t be angry, but that guy never gets the paper here on time. Compassion and forgiveness are church topics, which often don’t bleed over into the aggravations of ordinary life. God is there in the events of daily life, telling me to practice compassion and forgiveness, but my mind all too often locks him out of the compartment of getting what I deserve.
So we may be psychologically unready to perceive God’s message, or we may compartmentalize God out of some parts of our lives. The Gospel reading gives an example of a third obstacle to getting God’s message. This happens when it requires us to see someone or something in an entirely new way, and we are not prepared to do so.
In the Gospel, Jesus tells the crowd that he came down from heaven, and they object, because they know his parents. I don’t think they perceived a contradiction between being born to human parents and descending from heaven. They weren’t fundamentalists. Rather, the problem was that they were used to thinking of Jesus was a regular person, Joseph’s son, not a special prophet-type person, like Elijah or Isaiah. They couldn’t accept that someone just like them could have descended from heaven. The Christians of John’s community had made the leap from seeing Jesus as just another guy to seeing in him the Word descended from heaven, but many other people did not.
Sometimes getting God’s message requires making such a leap. One well-known example of that is in Charles Dickens’s story A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is used to looking at the world from an extreme monetary point of view; he sees wealth as supremely important and human beings only as instruments of business. Only a major intervention by the three spirits of Christmas enables him to see the world in terms of human relationships. God had tried to get this point across to him before, but his narrow perspective got in the way.
I do believe that we are surrounded by spiritual messages and guidance, but these three things can prevent us from getting them. Our psychological state may cause us to tune out; we may compartmentalize God out of some parts of our lives, especially those closest to our self-interest; and we may be so used to our habitual way of seeing the world that God’s fresh insights just don’t seem to make sense.
But the messages are still there for us, as soon as we have ears to hear.