You’re Not You When You’re Hungry

A sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 14
August 11, 2024, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs

Readings: I Kings 19:4-8; John 6:35, 41-51

“You’re not you when you’re hungry.” Do you remember those Snickers commercials from a few years ago? There is a deep truth there, one that we have seen in ourselves, in our families, among our friends. Hunger, even meager hunger, makes us different, prone to anger and despair, more impulsive, perhaps. True, famine hunger drives people to desperation and impossible choices. Hunger does that to us, and it did that to the prophet Elijah, too. 

Elijah is a great prophet. Read the books of I and II Kings. You will see he is a mighty witness, akin to a warrior, unafraid to call out the evil in the world around him. Immediately before today’s passage he has a showdown with the prophets of Ba’al. You likely remember the story. He challenges them to a duel, of sorts. They build competing altars with competing sacrifices. But it is only Elijah’s altar and sacrifice that are consumed with fire from heaven as a sign of divine approval. As for what happens next, well the prophets of Ba’al don’t make it out alive. When the king and queen hear of it, they are furious and they vow revenge. So Elijah, this warrior prophet who didn’t seem to be afraid of anything, goes into the wilderness on the run. There, defeated, he asks to die.

You’re not you when you’re hungry. Neither is Elijah. Not only is he physically famished, but more importantly, he is spiritually famished. He thinks he is the only one left–that there is no one else who is seeking to follow God. He does not have support and fellowship; he feels like he is carrying the whole world on his shoulders alone. He feels that he has failed those who have gone before. He feels he has failed in his vocation as a prophet and his own expectations of himself, and he is ashamed because he has let his forebears down. That isolation and shame eat at him and push him to despair. 

But then a beautiful thing happens. The God who gave every good tree in the Garden of Eden for food, the God who rained down manna and quail on the traveling band of Hebrews in the desert, the God who just two chapters previously delivered bread and meat to Elijah by raven–that same God visits the prophet with warm bread and water. God visits him with food and rest so that he will have the strength to carry on. And in so doing, God is calling Elijah back to who he is, back to what he has been charged to do, back to the prophet’s reliance on God’s grace. God is telling him that he doesn’t have to do it all alone–and he is not abandoned. God is there, and God’s grace is sufficient for the journey. 

The Old Testament reading is offered as a parallel to the gospel. Jesus has fed the 5,000, and now he is teaching the crowds what he means when he says he is the bread of life. And for those faithful people trying to understand Jesus, they would have immediately thought about all of those stories in the Old Testament about bread and God providing food for the people, including today’s story from I Kings. They would have remembered that God gave bread and grace to the people going through the desert. They would have remembered that God showed up, time and again, in love. But this crowd that was just fed with five loaves and two fish cannot understand that Jesus is saying he is the bread of life; that his life and his way offer strength in the wilderness and help us carry on, just like the manna, just like the bread and water for Elijah; they cannot yet understand that Jesus is the one who has been sent by the Father to feed our souls with grace. 

Sometimes we don’t understand it either. So often we forget that Jesus is on offer to strengthen us and sustain us. Instead, like the prophet, we try to do things ourselves, to rely on our own strength, and we end up hungry and despairing and defeated. 

My friend, you’re not you when you’re hungry. You were not made to go it alone. I was not made to figure everything out myself. That’s not who we are supposed to be. No, we were made for relationship with God, for communion with God, for connection to God. We were made to rely on God, and God gives us the grace and love we need for the journey. We were made to be fed by the bread of life, given for us in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord. We don’t have to make our own bread!

That does not mean everything will be easy. Just ask the prophet. Ask the disciples. Ask the saints. Ask Jesus himself. There will be trials and darkness, challenges and despair. There will be times when we feel alone in the wilderness. There will be times when we want to throw in the towel. But when we face those times, Christ is there to feed us with grace, with mercy, with strength, with love. Christ is there to call us to himself, and there, as we are fed and held in his arms, we find who we were always meant to be. 

You’re not you when you’re hungry, when you’re trying to go it alone, when you’re trying to carry it all by yourself. That’s not who you were supposed to be. Instead, come to Jesus, to the bread of life, to the bread of heaven. Feed on his grace; bask in his love; rely on his strength. And live–truly live–as the person you were always meant to be: a beloved child of God.