Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 8, 2021 – 1 Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51

The Righteous Brothers had a huge number one hit in 1965 called “You Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” So big was the song itself, that it was recorded again only four years later by Dionne Warwick, and she brought it to number 14, and Elvis used it quite frequently in his touring. So I’m going to recite the very last verse and leave out the last line. I want to see if you can fill in the last line.

“Bring back that lovin’ feelin’, whoa, that loving feelin’. Bring back that lovin’ feeling, cause it’s gone, gone, gone.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

“Nope.” Nice try. Only the last time in the song.

“…cause it’s gone, gone, gone. And I can’t go on … whoa, whoa, whoa.“ There’s the “whoa, whoa, whoa.”

“And I can’t go on.”

We may say that that’s a little melodramatic for the breakup of a teenage love affair, but nevertheless, it’s true to life. And it gives us a window through which to observe our first reading.

First we have to talk a little bit about the readings themselves. Ordinarily, what the church does - and by the way, all Episcopal churches, Lutheran churches, most Methodist churches - hear the same scriptures every Sunday morning that we do. So this is vast enterprise. Almost all of the Sunday scriptures are set up so that the first reading and the gospel are a matched set, and they mutually comment on each other, and the second reading stands alone, like the cheese. But not today. Today, the first reading sets up a problem, and the gospel and the second reading offer two complimentary responses to the problem.

When we read the little snippets of scripture we read on Sunday morning we frequently read them out of context. So we have to know what the first reading is all about.

The prophet Elijah was sent to confront the prophets of the god, Baal. Ahab, a Jewish king, had done the unthinkable; he married a pagan woman, Jezebel. And she convinced him to set up a temple and an altar to her pagan god right near the altar and the temple to Yahweh God. And it was drawing people away from the worship of the one true God. So Elijah came up with a plan. He said to the prophets of Baal, “Listen, I’m going to have a contest. You set up a sacrifice to your God, but don’t light it. I’ll set up a sacrifice to my God and not light it. Then we’ll both pray to our respective gods to light the fire without our doing anything. And let’s see what happens.”

So, according to the story, all the prophets of Baal danced around the altar for two to three hours, calling out to their god, and lashing themselves, and cutting themselves, and nothing happened. And very cunningly, and with a great deal of humor, the author says nothing happened because no one was listening.

Then Elijah starts to pray, and he stops and says, “I’m going to up the ante. I’m going to pour water all over my altar, so that, ordinarily, a flame couldn’t catch. Then I’m going to pray to Yahweh God, and let’s see what happens.” As he just begins his prayer, a bolt of lightning comes down, lights the altar, consumes the sacrifice, and Elijah wins the day.

However, Elijah was not content with that victory. He called his assistants, and between them, they slaughtered all the prophets of Baal. The scripture says there were 450 of them. It outranks almost every mass slaughter that we’ve seen in our society recently.  450 people were put to the sword because of Elijah’s spite.

That’s why he’s in the desert. Because Jezebel and Ahab put a fottula out on him, and he had to get out of there real quick. So when he flops down under the tree, exhausted, and says to God, “Take my life,” the thing that is the key problem is what he says next. “I am no better than my fathers.” I am no better than my fathers.

Let’s take a really fast look at a couple of things of the last hundred years of the world’s history. In the early 1960s, the church had the second Vatican Council. The decrees that came out of that council were marvelous. I would say a divine blueprint for bringing the church into the modern age. That council was conceived, and all the hard work was done, by people who were born in the 20s, 30s, and 40s of the twentieth century. They were in the prime of their life when they did that. And they had a wonderful blueprint for the church’s moving on.

In the early to mid-1960s, the civil rights movement caught fire. The people who were in the forefront of the civil rights movement, both Catholic and other, were people mostly who were born in the 40s and 50s.

Near the end of that decade we had the antiwar movement, and we had the movement for the equality of women in society, especially in the workplace. That movement was spearheaded mostly by people born in the 50s and early 60s.

In each case, we thought we had the tiger by the tail. And now look where we are. Now, those people born in the 20s, 30s, 40s, are mostly gone, although one of the primary architects of Vatican II is Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who is still among us. But look where we are, as a people, as we grow old. And all of those public reversals simply mirror the reversals in our own lives. The quarrels, the divorces, the losses, the changes of attitude that have taken place. So that we also can say, with Elijah, “I am no better than my fathers.”

What is God’s solution to the problem in that little story? You know, I had an Italian grandmother, and she used to say, when you came into the house, “Mange, fatta grossa.” Which is Calabrese dialect, and what it means, literally, is “eat and get fat.” But the context of the expression is, “Have something to eat because it will make you strong.” It’ll make you strong. It’ll make you a full human being. “Mange fatta grossa.” That’s God’s solution to the problem. Angels are always God’s messengers. So when the angel shakes Elijah awake, the angel says, “Here’s some bread and some water. Eat something.” And Elijah kind of ignores the angel some more. “Come on, wake up. Eat something. Otherwise the journey will be too hard for you. And too long.”

Bread and water. They were primary symbols in the Old Testament. Moses takes the people into the desert, where God feeds them with a miraculous kind of bread, and then he taps a rock to make water flow to slake their thirst. Bread and water. The staples of human life. God says, “Eat, otherwise the journey will be too long for you.”

Now, I said there are two responses to the problem - one in the second reading and one in the gospel. Usually we go first reading, second reading, gospel, but today we have to go first reading, gospel, second reading because, in the gospel, we find almost exactly the same problem that we found in the first reading.

I asked you, “What was the central problem in today’s gospel story?” It was that the people could not recognize Jesus for what He was because He was too commonplace for them. What do they say right at the beginning of the story? “Who does He think He is? We know this is Joseph’s son. We know who His father and mother are.”

Now, understand the situation here. These people have been praying intensely for over two centuries for God to send someone to rescue them - a final messiah. Not just every now and then like we pray. Several times a day, every day, an entire nation prays for just one thing. And when God answers their prayer, they don’t recognize the answer because He doesn’t look right. He’s just a plain old human being, like you and me, whose father and mother live in town. And so, they cannot grasp what Jesus is saying because He doesn’t look like they expect Him to look. He’s the same old, same old. We are no better than our fathers.

What Jesus says is, “If you allow God to draw you to Me, then you will recognize that I am the bread promised in the Old Testament,” when bread was frequently used as a symbol for wisdom. He says, “You will come to the wisdom you need to recognize Me, if you open your hearts to God.”

Then we move to the second reading. You have to understand, also, the context of the second reading. St. Paul is writing in the early sixties of the first century. Everybody in Christ’s time and Paul’s time are living in the great Pax Romana. What is that all about? Around thirty years before the birth of Jesus, Caesar Augustus had conquered the Greeks and now Rome controlled the entire Mediterranean basin. And so they declared there to be a great peace, but the peace was forced upon people by the weapons of the Roman army. So it’s not the kind of peace that we’d like there to have, but, nevertheless, commerce and industry and all those things, prospered and flourished because of the Pax Romana.

By the time Paul was writing, the first cracks are beginning to appear in the foundation of the Pax Romana. They had a couple of, awkward, to say the least emperors - Nero, Caligula, Claudius, Trajan – they’re all not what Augustus had envisioned for leading their own people.

And so, Paul is out converting people who had grown up in a society that is prosperous, but is rigorously controlled by a superpower. And, because of that, their attitude toward the world is belligerent. Notice the faults and sins that Paul highlights in today’s reading - violence, anger, foul speech. All of those things are indications of the trouble with the society to which Paul is addressing the message of Jesus. And he says, “You have to let that stuff go, and instead attempt to be kind to one another.” He doesn’t just say be kind, he says try, try to be kind to one another. That’s how what Jesus said becomes an action for people to adapt and to imitate.

So there are two responses to the challenge of the same old, same old, and we are no better than our fathers were. The first is open your hearts to God and Jesus will provide wisdom for you. With that wisdom, you are invited to try to change your stance toward the rest of the world.