Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Today we celebrate the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

The Opening Prayer Almighty ever living God, who govern all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times, O Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A Reading from the Old Testament from the first book of Kings, 19th chapter, 4th through the 8th verse. Elijah went a day’s journey into the desert until he came to a broom tree and sat beneath it. He prayed for death, saying, this is enough, O Lord, take my life, for I am no better than my fathers. He lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree.

Then an angel touched him and ordered him to get up and eat. Dasha looked, and there at his head was a hearth cake and a jug of water. After he ate and drank, he lay down again. But the angel of the Lord came back a second time, touched him, and ordered, get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you. He got up, ate and drank. Then strengthened by that food, he walked 40 days and 40 nights to the mountain of God.

Herod the Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. A reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, fourth chapter, 30th verse to the fifth chapter, second verse brothers and sisters, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God with which you were sealed for the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, 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. So be imitators of God as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us, and handing himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.

The Word of the Lord. Hallelujah. Verse I am the living bread that came down from Heaven says the Lord who eats this bread will live forever. The gospel for this 19th Sunday is taken from St. John 6:41,51. The Jews murmured about Jesus because He said, I am the bread that came down from heaven.

And they said, is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know His Father, his mother? And how can he say, I came down from heaven? Jesus answered and said to them, stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets, they shall all be taught by God.

Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the one who is from God. He has seen the Father. Amen. Amen. I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.

I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate manna in the desert, but they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.

The Gospel of the Lord this is the fourth Sunday in a row that we have gone back to the same image of the bread of life. And what’s beautiful about this image and why it’s worth going back to over and over again is because it’s talking about, who is God? God in your life? Who is he in the sense of what is he there for? What is he accomplishing for you? Or what is he demanding of you?

Is there a comfort in that image of who God is? Or is it a pressure along with all other pressures that just make life a little bit more complex and a little more stressful? Well, if you use the image of this God as He fully is, as he longs to you, for you to see him is like bread, like food, like energy. The energy is given to you from this God directly into you as a way of giving you the ability to live the life that he’s called you to live. And the goal of religion is not to get you to live a certain way through a lot of discipline, rules and laws and judgments and threat of punishment, but to engage in something that’s exciting and life giving and in a way, pleasurable. If I can say that, you know, the life that God wants us to live is good, and if it’s filled with stress and anxiety, then something is really missing, something is wrong.

So I want to take the character in the first reading and give you an explanation of his little story, because I think it so resonates with so many stories I’ve heard from other people about their relationship with God. And here’s the way it goes. Elijah. Elijah in the story, has just had a profound experience. He’s been working with the followers of baal, which is a false God. And there was a big confrontation between God of Yahweh and the God of baal, and it was set up by Elijah.

And so there was this great contest to see which God was strongest, and the winner was definitely Yahweh. Had to do with Yahweh’s power coming down from heaven and igniting a fire that consumed this arm offering to God. And it was so dramatic and so powerful and so clear that this God, the God that Elijah taught, is the God, the most powerful God. And so he would have thought, wow, God has manifested himself in such a spectacular way, Everybody is going to believe in him. You ever hear that experience of people who say, you know, when God has done something great and powerful for me, I believe in him. If things are not going very well, I’m not so sure he’s there.

That kind of oversimplification that the love that God has for you and for me is to take away our pain and our suffering. Well, the interesting part of this story is the people who had seen this great sign, did they turn to Yahweh? No. They turned against the messenger, and they decided they would kill Elijah. So instead of being the hero that changed everyone’s mind and opened them to a new image of God, it backfired. So he finds himself running for his life.

But the thing that’s interesting about this moment in Elijah’s life is his depression. Maybe he’s always thought, if I could just have some great miracle and I could prove to everyone that God is more powerful than anything else, they would all believe in me and my message. It didn’t turn out that way for him in this. In this scenario. And so instead of saying, well, you know, that was their problem, and I know God has proven to me once again he is who he is. No, he just said, I’m so depressed.

All I do, I just want to die. I want to end this whole life here. It’s just too frustrating. And then an angel comes and starts feeding him and said, you got to take a journey. You got to process all of this. You got to integrate it into who you are and understand it.

That image of taking a journey is so big in scripture. Means pondering, wondering, seeking truth. And so he ends up on a mount, Mount Horeb, which is also Mount Sinai. And he gets in a cave, and then in the cave, you know the story, you’ll remember it, that he goes to the. The face of the cave, opening of the cave and looks out and asks for God to make himself shown to him. And there’s a big earthquake, and then there’s fire and there’s storms and all these, you know, spectacular signs of God in the world.

And then the revelation is. Then came a gentle, gentle, tiny whisper. And the point of the story is there. That’s where God is. Not in the spectacular, not in the dramatic, in some kind of whisper. When you think of what.

When somebody whispers to you, there’s a form of some kind of intimacy. You know, they lean over and cup their hand and give you a message that’s just for you. What a beautiful image of who God longs to be in your life and in mine. So what we have in this story, then, is an image of what it is that we need to understand that happens to us when we open ourselves to the reality of who God really is. And we drink of that and that becomes food. And the food changes us, but it doesn’t change the world that much.

Meaning. If I’m looking for signs from God that show his goodness to me by an image I have of what that means, that would mean that God would take away something that’s awful for me. Say I have lost someone or something and it’s gone and I want it back. I want it healed, I want it found. And I say, God, do this because you said you will help me in any way you can. And you’re so powerful and nothing happens.

Then there’s this sort of crisis. Well, God doesn’t answer my prayer, so why do I mess with him? Especially if it’s something that’s so crucial to you. Why doesn’t he answer it? Why doesn’t he fix things for us? Because that would make him into some kind of figure that we would use, much like money in the bank, much like a power.

It would go to our head. It would be egocentric. I mean, there’s so many problems. If you have God’s ear and God will do whatever you ask him to do to take care of all the pain in you and other people’s lives. It’s just a bad relationship. So what are you expecting from him?

What is it you think that God will give you when you turn to him and say, I need your help? Isn’t it interesting that one of the things that we do and are able to do when it comes to some crisis or something, there’s some way in which you go through a. A, a cycle of. Of grieving and mourning, and it. It moves you from, you know, the famous Kubler Ross. You know, things about you go from, you know, denial to anger to bargaining, to some kind of acceptance and finally forgiveness.

Well, that process of integrating whatever is happening to you into your story, into your process of becoming who God wants you to be, going through that process, that’s the miracle. That’s the miracle of God working in your life, that he is going to be there to be the source of getting you through something. And that going through it is the journey that gets you to the insight that you couldn’t have without that pain. That’s a very different way of imagining God working with you, in you, through you. And then I was thinking about depression. And the thing in this story that was fascinating to me is Elijah gets really depressed after having this spectacular success.

The thing that’s interesting about that is depression is a loss of a sense of your own value, your own dignity, your own worth. It’s like whatever it is in you that gives you enthusiasm, excitement, confidence, excitement about a process that you might be going through, something that you’re going to be attaining. That’s hard, but you know, when you get it, it’s going to be worth all the pain. All of that you might call enthusiasm opposite of depression. Depression, the loss of a sense of value, worth, enthusiasm. I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which I love to do, and it’s such a fascinating word.

Enthusiasm means being possessed by God. Possessed by God. In Theos. In God. My preaching, my teaching has always been focused somehow on this very powerful mystery of what does it mean to believe in God beyond simply that he exists, but believe that he’s in you, with you, as intimate as the one who whispers secrets to you. And when he’s in you and doing that, he’s doing this with an indication, in a conviction, that he wants us to feel that.

This is exciting work. This is amazing work. This is something that’s going to bring you and people around you some kind of inner worth and inner value. And so I was just so interested in thinking, all right, the food that God gives you, this bread of life, is not ever to be thought of as a miraculous removal of pain or fixing a broken problem. You know, fixing a problem is something’s broken. No, it has something much more to do with Engaging you in a process where there’s a inner well being, an inner conviction that all of this that’s going on, as crazy and as difficult as it is, it’s for you.

And then when you digest it, take it in and hold it with this conviction that there is this miraculous part of you that’s called divinity, that has a way of dealing with pain and suffering that brings not depression or discouragement or a feeling that we’re not favored by God. Just the opposite. That this is really a unique gift and it’s designed in. In the most perfect way for me to engage in it so that I am finding something. Now, in the process of waiting to find it, what sustains you on that long journey? Not your own capacity of, I can do this.

My own drive, my own will. No, it has to be this mysterious thing called bread of life, grace. A power that’s not yours, not mine, but comes to us. So I know a lot of people that believe in God. They’ll tell me, yeah, I believe there’s God. And I said, well, kind of like, what are y’ all doing together now?

You ask him some kind of intimate question like, how’s it working? And, you know, and they go like, well, no, I mean, I. My favorite line is. People say, well, I mean, I don’t have a personal relationship with him. I mean, that Jesus had that and that’s not my destiny. Or they have some kind of oversimplified notion of the limitations of God.

As if he’s like us and says, you know, well, he’s too busy. He’s not interested in just my little problem problems. God, is he interested in your little problems? They’re his problems given to you by him for a purpose that gets you to a place that he knows you want to be and that he wants you to be because he created for you. And it’s going to be really, really wonderful. But not in that kind of euphoric everything is perfect sense, but in this kind of calm, easy conviction that every morning you wake up and you know what?

You feel pretty good. And when you get, you know, in the daily grind of things, there’s somehow a kind of unconscious sense that all of this is going to be fine. There’s something I’m looking forward to. But even in the process of doing the ordinary, there’s something in it that just feels like I’m being fed, not starved, not neglected, and certainly certainly not judged. How did we ever turn around this image of this God who is fully revealed by the time we get to the point of Jesus ascension into heaven. How do we ever fall back to those old images in the Old Testament of a God who is judgmental and demanding and upset and ready to crush those who don’t do what he says?

But that’s sort of in there if we’re not careful and it leads to depression. And what is God’s greatest gift is found in that New Testament Beautiful story about someone like you, like me, witnessing what it’s like to be infused with food and we can do the most amazing things, mostly find peace in the midst of stress and tension. Foreign Closing Prayer Father, you have made us for joy and for peace and for a sense of fullness in the midst of all things that might rob us of these great gifts. Bless us with a faith in you that understands the process you’ve asked us to go through with you. So we never feel that sense of alienation from whatever it is that we need to find that inner peace. So bless us with that food that is always from you to us, not within our capacity to do it.

And when we try on our own, we fail. So let us drink of your presence and find that peace. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere, anywhere you download your podcasts.

Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Page Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2024.