Under the Broom Tree: All Around Us is Our Food

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff.

This is almost certainly the 9-hour drive back from Alamosa, Colorado with a van full of teenagers talking—but I can understand Elijah’s weary petition under that broom tree: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” No, our youth were lovely, actually, and despite the minor horrors of sleeping on a church gym floor in a barracks of sleeping bags and cots that seemed to spontaneously generate candy wrappers and dirty socks by the minute, despite stutteringly cold showers and mashed potatoes more slopped than mashed, it was, on the whole, truly a joy to be with each of you this past week: an honor to get to know you better, to experience your bright spirits and growing faith, to hear about your questions and passions, and it was privilege to serve alongside you and to pray with you. 

So, Elijah and the broom tree. Having just bested the prophets of Baal, Elijah flees into the wilderness, away from his triumphant victory. Too triumphant, you might say, since he went on to kill all the false prophets… Now his own life is in danger, and it seems he’s too tired to go on. He drags himself a day’s journey away from anything he recognizes, and picks out a broom tree, a scrubby little juniper, surely gnarled by the years of drought. Elijah lays himself down on the ground under its hunched branches and falls asleep as he waits for death. 

But the next thing he knows, an angel is shaking him awake. “Get up and eat.” Out in a hostile landscape, Elijah wakes to find a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water, sitting by his head. This sustenance is pure grace; there is nothing in the barren surroundings that could supply what he needs. Apparently the prophets get hangry, too, and God feeds them. Earlier, Elijah was fed in the wilderness by ravens who brought him provisions twice a day, an echo of the manna and quail that fed the children of Israel in the wilderness. Now, it is an angel who brings Elijah something to eat; yet again the God of our life has brought him exactly what he needs, though he did not know it. Elijah goes back to sleep, and the angel comes again, again offering miraculous food and drink to sustain him in the desert. This gift is not just one of solace but given for strength: he is told to “get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” Elijah does eat and he goes in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God, also known as Mount Sinai, where Moses received the law and glimpsed God as God passed by. 

When Elijah is weary, when his overzealous striving to serve God and defend God has run him bone dry, then he can finally set himself down under the sheltering shade of God’s loving providential care. The lowly broom tree is a place of refuge, where Elijah can stop trying to earn God’s favor and rest in the grace God is spreading out over us, the grace in which we stand, in which we live and move and have our being. Though we labor and labor under the illusions of self-sufficiency, of achievement and ambition, chasing an already-given love we’re determined to finally earn and finally deserve, the basic truth below all our whirlwind frenzy is that we receive our life from God’s hand. Milk and honey without price, bread in the wilderness and a cool drink to quench our thirst. It is all given to us. God knows what we need before we ask for it, and we can trust we will be given what we need. As Sylvia Dunstan’s hymn puts it:  

All who hunger, gather gladly; holy manna is our bread. 

Come from wilderness and wandering. Here, in truth, we will be fed. 

You that yearn for days of fullness, all around us is our food. 

Taste and see the grace eternal. Taste and see that God is good.

“All around us is our food.” When we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we do so in the trust that whatever we are given this day is our bread, all that happens, and every person we meet is our nourishment to sustain us and give us strength for the journey. And that’s true whether we find the events of the day fair or foul, painful or pleasant. God our trustworthy Father, our loving Parent who watches over the sparrow, who cares for us tenderly and knows what we need has given this to us—and so we can trust it is precisely what will nourish us. This is daily bread. “You that yearn for days of fullness, all around us is our food.” 

So it remains to us to get up and eat. To receive what has been spread out before us as the gift of God’s provision it surely is. Receptivity, opening to whatever comes as a gift, is profoundly vulnerable, and we spend much of our energy trying to reverse things so we are giving and doing and other people are receiving. We can even put a good religious spin on this resistance!

The Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows writes wisely about this dilemma and I’ll quote her at some length:

“If the heart of Christianity is the God who gives nothing less than God’s own Self, it follows…that the fundamental stance a Christian must take is that of receiving Him. First and foremost we must accept to be loved, allow God to love us, let God be the doer, the giver, let God be God to us. But how hard it is for us to do that consistently! We are always reversing the role, intent on serving God, as we say, on doing things for God, offering God something. This is our natural bent, but it must be corrected by the vision of faith. Over and over again, Jesus tries to get his disciples to drop this self-important attitude and to understand that, before God, they are only very small children who have no resources within themselves, but must look to their parents for everything, simply everything. It is not their role to give, but to receive. Jesus knows that this calls for a radical change of outlook and, more than outlook, a radical change of heart. From always trying to prove ourselves to God (is it not really to ourselves?), we have to become poor in spirit just as Jesus was. Jesus remained always a small child before his Father, always poor and dispossessed. The one thing in himself to which he draws attention is his meek and humble heart. … [Jesus lives] only by the Father, disclaiming any life of his own, any personal resource. He is an emptiness into which the Father is always flowing, an unwritten melody waiting for Him to sing.” (Ruth Burrows OCD, Essence of Prayer, 48-49)

Jesus invites us into his meek and humble heart, and that empty and receptive place where we let God be God to us, where we let God love us and feed us, is the path to both rest and fruitfulness. “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” (Matt. 11:28-29). 

In Alamosa this past week, we kept to a fairly tight schedule, at times racing from meals to chores to service sites to evening activities without much wiggle room. The thing that made it work, that source that made any of it possible, was the time set aside each morning for devotions and prayer. After breakfast had been cleared and the bathrooms cleaned, we made room for half an hour of empty, open space, time that we gave to God, each in our way, resisting the creeping flurry of activity until later in the day. Some spent that time reading and reflecting on scripture or in personal prayer. A small group of us gathered outside under a scrubby tree on the sidewalk outside the Methodist church where we stayed to pray morning prayer and then spend time attending to “the sound of sheer silence.” That was our broom tree, the place where we were fed and nourished for the work ahead. Remember, God appeared to Elijah on the holy mountain not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in the sound of sheer silence. Out of that time of communion, the youth went to their varying service sites throughout the week to paint and stain and build and mow, to lavish attention on children coming out of homelessness and spend time with the elderly, to pull weeds at the organic community gardens and spruce up worship spaces and attend to the people whose homes they entered as if they were encountering Christ Himself. 

And even that doing, that activity and loving service, was also revealed to be a receiving, as we were blessed and fed—often literally—by those we had just met and “served,” as friendships flourished on the playground and faith deepened through the meandering conversations that crop up while painting and gardening. Slowly, slowly, what I think we are being shown is that by grace, through God’s reckless, prodigal love, we are heirs to the divine promise, which has been spilled out over all people. “As many of you were baptized into Christ Jesus have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The former divisions are broken down: male and female, black and white, gay or straight, sick or well—all the ways we like to divide against each other collapse under their own weight, and all that remains is God’s unfailing providential love for you and you and you and yes, you, exactly as you are. “All around us is our food.” 

Give us this day our daily bread, and may we find our rest in receiving it from your hand, O Lord. Amen.