(Nineteenth Sunday of the Year (B): This homily was given on
August 12, 2012 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Nineteenth Sunday 2012]
How do you deal with discouragement?
That’s a very important question,
since most of us get discouraged from time to time—or, at the very least, we’re
often forced to deal with situations that
have the potential to get us
discouraged.
To which the prophet Elijah would
say, “Well, welcome to the club!”
In our first reading this morning,
we heard about a very discouraged Elijah, who sat under a broom tree one day
and prayed for death.
He was not suicidal—he wouldn’t
have done any physical harm to himself (he knew better than that!)—but he was
so discouraged as he sat there that he wouldn’t have complained at all if Almighty
God had chosen to take him home at that precise moment.
A little background information would
be helpful here. Elijah lived way back in
the 9th century, B.C., at a time in the history of Israel when most
of the people—including the king and queen, Ahab and Jezebel—had compromised
their faith and were living lives of idolatry and sin, worshipping Baal and other
false gods. Elijah did his best to battle
this evil and lead his fellow Israelites to repentance and conversion, but it
was an uphill fight all the way. Day in
and day out, he met up with all kinds of resistance—especially from the king
and queen.
He finally had a direct
confrontation with the prophets of Baal—all 450 of them—at Mt. Carmel. As we are told in 1 Kings 18: "Elijah approached all the people and said, 'How long will you straddle the issue? If the Lord is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him.' But the people did not answer him. So Elijah said to the people, ‘I am the only
remaining prophet of the Lord, and there are 450 prophets of Baal. Give
us two young bulls. Let them choose one,
cut it into pieces, and place it on the wood, but start no fire. I shall prepare the other and place it on the
wood, but shall start no fire. You shall call upon the name of your gods, and I
will call upon the name of the Lord. The
God who answers with fire is God.’ All
the people answered, ‘We agree!’”
Now unfortunately, for the prophets of Baal, it
didn’t go very well that day. They
danced around and engaged in all kinds of weird antics while they begged Baal
to send fire from heaven to consume their bull—but nothing happened. However, when Elijah prayed to God--the one, true
God--the Lord sent a fire from heaven that consumed not only Elijah’s bull, but
also the one that the false prophets of Baal had prepared.
And that caused the day to get
even worse for the false prophets of Baal, because Elijah immediately had them
all taken down to a nearby brook and executed!
Well, as you might imagine, Queen
Jezebel was not too pleased with all this, and she immediately swore an oath
that she would have Elijah killed within 24 hours.
Which is the point in the story
where today’s first reading begins.
Elijah, discouraged that most of the people have still not repented, and
afraid because Jezebel is trying to kill him, takes off into the desert where
he comes upon this broom tree. And after
he sits down under it, he says to God those words we heard a few moments ago:
“This is enough, O Lord! Take my life,
for I am no better than my fathers.”
God, thankfully, doesn’t decide
to “take” Elijah by allowing him to die (although he does eventually take him
to heaven alive on a flaming chariot!).
But in the meantime he helps Elijah
to deal with his discouragement. And
here’s where we can learn some important lessons for our own lives: lessons
that we can apply in the midst of the discouraging situations we face.
The first point to be made here
is that God provided two types of remedies for Elijah: natural and supernatural.
First, the natural. As we heard a few moments ago, shortly after Elijah
fell asleep under the broom tree, the Lord sent an angel to him with some food
and drink: specifically a hearth cake and water. And the angel told Elijah to consume this
food and drink twice, so that he
would have sufficient strength to make the long journey that he needed to make
to Mt. Horeb.
The lesson here for us should be
clear enough: To battle discouragement in our lives we need to take advantage
of all the good, natural remedies at our disposal. Healthy eating, exercise, sufficient rest,
counseling and/or spiritual direction—and sometimes even medication: these are
some of the means—the natural means—that God gives us so that we can deal successfully
with discouraging situations.
As long as the natural remedies
in question are morally good, we should not hesitate to utilize them.
But, if we want to be like
Elijah, we won’t stop there—although that is where Elijah “stopped” in today’s
first reading. The text we heard a few
moments ago ended with his arrival at Mt. Horeb after a walk of 40 days and 40 nights.
But the story continued. After Elijah arrived at Mt. Horeb something
very important happened to him: He had a
powerful encounter with God in prayer.
In a famous scene from the Old Testament, Elijah met God in a “tiny
whispering sound.”
This provided Elijah with an
added supernatural remedy for his
discouragement—which is what we should also seek for parallel situations in our
lives. In this regard, I don’t think it
was a coincidence that we heard these words in today’s responsorial psalm: “I
sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Look to him that you may be radiant with joy,
and your faces may not blush with shame.
When the afflicted man called out, the Lord heard, and from all his
distress he saved him.”
I’m sure Elijah would say a big
“Amen” to that!
It was also not a coincidence
that our second reading today was about forgiveness and about getting rid of
our sins. St. Paul said, “All
bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along
with all malice. And be kind to one
another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in
Christ.”
Unforgiveness is incredibly
destructive. Any good psychologist or
spiritual director will tell you that. In
fact, you could say that what cancer is to the body, unforgiveness is to the
soul. And so it shouldn’t surprise us
that unforgiving people are much more likely to experience deep discouragement
than forgiving people are.
Actually, any unrepented, serious
sin can make discouragement worse—which is why the sacrament of reconciliation
is one the most important supernatural
remedies we have for the condition!
This means that as baptized,
practicing Catholics in 2012, we are actually in a much better position than
Elijah was in back in the 9th century, B.C. Yes, he was able to receive supernatural help
to battle his discouragement through prayer—for example, by encountering God on
Mt. Horeb in that “tiny whispering sound.”
But we have much more assistance available to us. We not only have the opportunity to receive
supernatural help from God by praying on a daily basis; we also have the
opportunity to receive God’s help where Elijah couldn’t, namely, through the
sacraments—especially confession and
the Eucharist.
Was it a coincidence, therefore,
that the Eucharist was the focus of today’s gospel passage from John 6?
I don’t think so!
That was by design—God’s design!
So the bottom line is this: Many
people (including many Catholics) battle their discouragement by using natural
means only: with good food, exercise,
rest, etc. But there’s something lacking
in that approach. As I once heard a
speaker say, “When you battle a problem [like discouragement] by using natural
means only, you get only natural results; but when you tackle that same problem
with natural and supernatural
means, you get natural and
supernatural results.
As we just heard, with the help
of God, Elijah the prophet used both in battling his discouragement.
May we always follow his example
in battling ours.
