Our Daily Bread
Scripture Reading: 1 Kings 19:1-8
In what seems like another lifetime ago, Sandy and I once owned an Internet cafe in the middle of Manhattan. The cafe was located on the edge of Koreatown, on the corner of Fifth Ave. and 32nd St., in the shadow of the Empire State Building. This was more than 20 years ago, in the early 2000s. We had come into some money through the City’s effort to incentivize residents to remain in Lower Manhattan after 9/11. Our apartment, which we purchased the summer before 9/11, was located just two blocks from where the South Tower had stood.
With this extra income, plus taking a cash advance on our credit cards, we had enough capital to open the cafe, which we named Cafe d’Orsay, after the Musee d’Orsay, the impressionist museum in Paris. With her artistic eye, Sandy was in charge of decor while I handled technology. She transformed what was a drab office space into a stylish but cozy cafe that would have looked right at home on a Parisian boulevard. For my part, I purchased a few of those iconic white half-globe iMacs with the flat screen and adjustable arm that were the coolest thing in personal computing at the time.
Any new business faces an uphill climb, and that was certainly true for the cafe. We lost money each month, and with no capital in reserve, some months it was a struggle to come up with the rent. On more than one occasion, we simply didn’t have it.
What I’m about to tell you is absolutely true. Our accountant, a Korean man whose office was in the Empire State Building, stopped by one afternoon. He asked to speak with Sandy. It wasn’t to discuss our taxes. Mr. Choi was a devout Christian, and he told Sandy that God had directed him to help us. With a smile, he slid an envelope across the table. In it was a check for $2,500, the exact amount of our rent. We had not told him of our financial situation, nor the amount of the rent.
A few months later, with the cafe still struggling and our debts mounting, Mr. Choi came by once more, and once again he handed Sandy an envelope with a check for $2,500. He didn’t seem quite as pleased this time, but he again said that God had directed him to help us.
A month or so later he showed up a third time, and this time he made it clear that he came against his will. He felt that he was wasting his money—and to be honest, he was—he was only delaying the inevitable. But he again said that God had told him to help us. How God made this clear to him, I don’t know.
What I do know is that even though the cafe never turned a profit and mercifully closed after 18 months, each time we thought that we had reached the end—that we could not go on any longer—we received a miraculous gift that allowed us to keep going.
At some point in your life—whether in your marriage, in your career, in your studies, or in some other aspect of life, you will reach a point at which you say, “It is enough.”
In the reading today from 1 Kings, Elijah similarly is convinced that his days have come to an end. The idiom Caught between a rock and a hard place could have been coined to describe his situation. The powers that be in Israel are out to kill him, for such are the dangers when a prophet speaks truth to power. And so he flees into the wilderness—an inhospitable place where food and water are scarce. So despondent is the prophet that he pleas for the Lord to take his life.
God does answer his prayer, but not with a peaceful death but rather with a miraculous gift of bread to sustain him for the journey ahead. For while Elijah may have given up on himself, God has not given up on him.
Let’s set the stage for how Elijah ended up alone in the wilderness welcoming his own death. Elijah was a prophet during the reign of Ahab, the most infamous king in Israel’s history. The fact that Ahab lent his name to the equally infamous ship captain, the one whose obsessive pursuit of the great white whale Moby Dick wrought destruction upon his own crew, hints at his moral character, or absence thereof. The biblical Ahab abandoned the faith of the one true God for the worship of pagan gods, stole land that did not belong to him and murdered its rightful owner, and slaughtered his political rivals, including the prophets of the Lord, who called upon him to repent.
In all this Ahab was aided and abetted and even led by his wife Jezebel. In fact it is she, more so than Ahab, who has a vendetta against Elijah, for it was Elijah who had humiliated and then put to death 450 of her own prophets. In response, she sends a messenger to Elijah saying, “So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” In other words, Elijah is a dead man. Jezebel will use all the powers of the throne to hunt down and kill Elijah.
Terrified, he flees as far as he can, to the edge of the wilderness. But even there he doesn’t feel safe. He leaves his servant behind and travels a full day’s journey deep into the wilderness. And “wilderness” is a bit of a misnomer. The place that Elijah flees to is not a forest but a desert—a harsh and barren terrain of rock and sand with scarcely a living thing in it. There Elijah finds a patch of shade beneath the branches of a broom tree, lies down, and prays for death. “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” And with that, he falls asleep and waits for death to take him.
At some point in your life—whether in your marriage, in your career, in your studies, or in some other aspect of life, you will reach a point at which you say, “It is enough.” You will feel that you’ve gone as far as you can go, and yet you still will not have escaped whatever it is that’s pursuing you—the sting of regret, the pain of a broken relationship, the stress of being buried in debt, the fear of a serious illness, or the anguish of feeling that you are utterly alone. What began with excitement and promise will feel like absolute failure.
Just look at Elijah. He is coming off his greatest triumph as a prophet. We did not read chapter 18, but if we had we would have heard of Elijah besting the prophets of Jezebel. He had challenged them to a kind of prophetic throwdown: the God of Israel and his lone prophet versus the pagan god of Jezebel and her prophets who numbered 450.
When the pagan god did not respond to the cries and chants and exhortations of the prophets, Elijah even engaged in a bit of trash talking. “Cry aloud!” he said with derision, mocking the idleness of his adversaries’ idols. “Surely he is a god; either he is meditating or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened” (1 Ki. 18:27). That’s right, there is trash talking in the Bible!
But then how sudden and how steep do the tables turn on Elijah! In less than 24 hours he goes from feeling that he is on top of the world to fleeing to the end of the earth to escape his pursuer. He is being hunted like an animal, and so he runs as fast and as far as his legs will carry him. Yet no matter how far Elijah runs, God is there with him. He can flee into the furthest reaches of an arid wasteland, but even there the voice of the Lord will call him and the hand of the Lord will uphold him. Even as he sleeps, hoping and praying for death, the Lord watches over him.
Elijah can flee into the furthest reaches of an arid wasteland, but even there the voice of the Lord will call him and the hand of the Lord will uphold him
Elijah wakes from his sleep to the sound of a voice saying to him, “Get up and eat.” There next to his head is a cake of hot bread and a jar of water. Elijah eats and drinks and then falls back to sleep.
The passage says nothing of Elijah’s frame of mind. Is he puzzled? Curious? Grateful? Does he think to himself, “How did this bread and water get here?” We don’t know. Perhaps it seems like a dream, as can happen when you wake up in the middle of the night. The other night I received a phone call at 3:00 in the morning from a number I did not recognize in Illinois. Still half asleep, I double-clicked the side button to silence the call. When I awoke a few hours later I checked my recent calls to make sure that I hadn’t dreamt it.
Elijah is not dreaming. He awakes a second time to a voice saying, “Get up and eat” with the added warning, “or the journey will be too much for you.” Or the journey will be too much for you. These are among the most hopeful words in all of the Bible. Why? Because Elijah believed that he had come to the end of his journey. He had lost the will to carry on. He did not have the strength to take another step. He put his head to the ground and waited for death. But the Lord would not leave him to despair.
When we feel that we have come to the end—after the marriage ends in death or divorce, after the diagnosis comes in, after we don’t get accepted to our dream school, after the layoffs are announced, after we learn that retirement isn’t as carefree as the financial commercials imply—after we say “It is enough,” the Lord speaks to us a word of hope: “Get up and eat.”
In the Lord’s Prayer we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Taken literally, we are asking for God to provide that which is essential for life…bread. But more than that, we are asking for Jesus Christ who himself is our daily bread, who is for us the bread of life. He is the one who feeds us with hope so that we might have strength for the journey ahead.