Father Leo Hausmann
Homily from the Televised Mass, NewsCenter1
The 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 11, 2024

In the first reading from the first Book of Kings, we heard how Elijah went a day’s journey into the desert and sat down under a broom tree and prayed for death. Elijah was at a point of complete exhaustion and total discouragement. 

But this is what happened before the scene in today’s reading. Ahab, King of Israel, married a pagan queen, Jezebel, who imported pagan worship into Israel. She also had the Jewish prophets killed to silence God’s voice in the land. However, God sent His prophet Elijah to give them a last chance to hear God’s word and repent of their moral disobedience and worship of pagan gods. 

To prove that there is only one true God, Elijah challenged 450 prophets of Baal, the pagan God, to a contest. Elijah and the pagan prophets each built an altar and placed a sacrifice of a young bull on the altar. Then first the pagan prophets danced around their altar in a frenzy but no fire from heaven came down to consume the sacrificed bull. 

Then it was Elijah’s turn. He poured water on his sacrifice to make it even harder to burn. Then he prayed to God who sent down fire from heaven that consumed the bull and proved that the God of the Jews was the only true God. After that he put the pagan prophets of Jezebel to the sword. When Queen Jezebel learned of this, she sent soldiers to kill the prophet. 

Today’s first reading expresses Elijah’s discouragement and frustration as he fled for his life. Collapsed in the only available shade, Elijah fell into a sleep of exhaustion. God heard His prophet’s prayer and sent an angel to feed him and strengthen him in his flight. The miraculous food provided by God sustained him through a 40-day walk to the safety of Mount Horeb. Elijah was called by God to be His voice at a very difficult time in history and to a very stubborn generation, obstinate in their sinful ways. 

Unfortunately, our world has many false prophets attempting to silence God’s voice speaking to us. The sad truth is that in many ways our culture no longer reflects the most basic of God’s commandments. This is true of the fifth commandment, “You shall not kill.” Some states in our nation allow the killing by abortion even to the time of birth of God’s little ones whom He has loved into existence. 

As you may know, Amendment G will be on our South Dakota ballots this November. If it passes, it will give a so-called “right” to abort a child even up to the time of birth. The proposed amendment to the South Dakota Constitution divides pregnancy into three trimesters. In the first and second trimesters, abortion can be chosen for any reason. But even in the third trimester, which extends all the way to the moment of birth, Amendment G allows abortions for any reason related to health. The amendment doesn’t define the word “health,” but we know from previous court decisions that it’s not limited to just physical health. It can include emotional and psychological health and familial factors.

Not long ago even the thought of such an atrocity would have been abhorrent to almost everyone. However, the false prophets of our time are attempting to drown out the voice of God which tells us that every life is willed by God, is sacred and loved by God. 

Yes, sometimes it requires great sacrifice on our part to welcome one of God’s children and all of us need to do our part to help each other who are in difficult situations. But it is always wrong to directly take the life of the innocent from the time of conception to the point of natural death because we find them a burden. And, yes, we all have an obligation to help those struggling, to be an angel of sorts like the angel God sent to Elijah when he was totally exhausted and at the point of despair sitting under the broom tree.

As Catholics and Christians, it would be gravely wrong for us to vote for Amendment G, thereby lending aid to opening the door for abortion in our state. But, we also have an obligation to do what we can to inform others about the evils of Amendment G, to be a prophet for our time. And certainly, we have an obligation to vote no, so that our inaction by not voting in effect be a vote for the amendment.

The Gospel passage we heard continues the Bread of Life discourse from the Gospel of St. John that we have been reading the last couple of Sundays. In the reading today the Jews were murmuring about Jesus’ claim to be “the bread that came down from heaven.” 

Jesus is making an incredible claim here, that unlike the manna in the desert which the Jewish ancestors ate and died, Jesus is the living bread that comes down from heaven and gives eternal life. Jesus was just too ordinary for them to believe his claim of having come down from heaven. Yet that is precisely where Jesus has come to for us. We celebrate that fact every feast of the Annunciation and Christmas. 

But he continues to come to us from heaven at every celebration of the Mass. In his first coming into this world, he appeared as an ordinary baby, or a child, or a man. In his continual coming into the world in the Eucharist his appearance is ordinary bread and wine. Yet, in spite of the ordinary appearance as a human person or as ordinary bread and wine, he comes in the fullness of his humanity and the fulness of his divinity.

Through the ages God has chosen to show his power and holiness in the ordinary, and he continues that even today. Not only that, but he takes ordinary people like you and me, and he transforms us by his nourishment and grace to do extraordinary things for building up his Kingdom. Like Elijah, we are sustained in amazing ways when we allow God to nourish us with the gift of himself. Nourished and strengthened by the Bread of Life, let us go forward boldly and with God’s love for life, to defend human life by making known the evils of Amendment G and voting against it.