Today is not about Elijah

Lectionary readings:  1 Kings 17: 8-24 and Luke 7: 11-17

The prophet Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta by Bernardo Strozzi

Today is not about Elijah.

And yet he is one of the towering figures of the Old Testament and his story starts in 1 Kings 17.

What I love about Elijah is that he is no cardboard cut-out figure.  He is as complex as the rest of us. The bible story does not just focus upon the most exciting events of his life but also allows us to see that, at times, he is anxious and depressed.  We see him here confidently speaking truth to power to King Ahab. Later we see him as God’s instrument for the public humiliation of the prophets of Baal and Asherah.  A short while later, he is to be found curled up, in the foetal position, under a bush; fearful, hopeless and utterly reliant on the grace of God to sustain his life. 

Give yourself a treat – when lunch today is over, settle down and read 1 Kings 17 to 2 Kings 2 and enjoy his story with all its ups and downs.

But today is not about Elijah.

It is about two women whose names are not recorded for us in scripture. We simply know where they live, their status in society and about the hopelessness that confronts them both.

In the Old Testament reading, the word of the Lord comes to Elijah. “Go to Zarephath in Sidon and stay there. I have commanded a widow in that place to supply you with food.”  At face value it is simply a statement but for Elijah it would have added greatly to his anxiety.  For Zarephath was in enemy territory. By telling Elijah to go there, God is asking for the highest degree of trust from his servant.  He is also showing that he is at work outside his chosen people of Israel.  The very idea would be a deeply unpalatable one and yet we see it in several places in scripture. For example, the Israelites are to have no dealings with the people of Moab.  Yet it is Ruth, the Moabitess, who becomes the ancestor of King David.

The widow’s situation is hopeless. She expects that she and her dependent son will run out of food within a day or two.  She is gathering firewood to cook a final meal before the pair of them will starve.  We see that she is a morally upright person by her implicit rejection of the alternatives: resorting to earning a living by begging or prostitution.

When God tells Elijah that he has commanded the widow to feed him, we have no sense that she was conscious of this.  She was a Phoenician and would have worshipped the gods of her homeland. She recognises that Elijah is a Jew and acknowledges (as his name suggests) that he worships the God whose name is specifically Jehovah.  But she is what seems to be: a Phoenician woman of low status.

God provides a source of food every day for the widow, her son and the prophet, who is hiding in the last place that his enemies would expect – their own land. We are not told the precise mechanics of the way God provides them with food but it is clear from the story that somehow this takes place – and God gets the credit for it.

Yet for some people, misfortunes tend to come along in clusters. Although her economic needs have been met, this woman now faces another crisis – the deadly sickness of her son. Again, the significance of this is deeper even than the natural anxiety that all of us would have for a family member who is gravely ill.  For her son is her hope for the future, both in terms of having grandchildren and in being supported in later life.  As life slips away from the boy, she turns to Elijah in her anger and her pain and asks whether he came as God’s messenger to kill her son.

When we face such times, it is natural to cry out against God. Indeed, Elijah, the man of God himself – in his prayer – wonders whether God is the author of the unfolding tragedy. I worry about people whose Christian experience has never included shaking their fist at God and wondering why he allows such bad things to happen. 

Well, God is good. When he hears the prayer and the boy’s life is restored, the joyful response of the mother shows the beginnings of faith in the living God.  And I get the feeling that Elijah’s own faith in God has grown too as he says to the woman: “Look, your son is alive!” He sounds surprised and relieved.

We may turn the pages of our bibles and learn how Elijah’s story progresses but we hear nothing further about this unnamed mother and son. And yet I have the sense that they were just as much in the mind of God as the headline-hero of 1 Kings.

Nearly 900 years pass since Elijah stayed at the widow’s house in Zarephath before the lectionary links this OT story with that we heard from Luke 7.

At the heart of the short tale is another unnamed widow, whom we know only by her home village of Nain. It is a small place in Galilee, just south of Nazareth.  It is still lived in today. 

Here we see Jesus and a large crowd, just after he speaks the so-called sermon on the plain. As the crowd approaches the town, they see a funeral procession for the only son of a widow.  She is distraught. Jesus’s heart goes out to her and he comforts the grieving widow. He does what no orthodox Jew should and touches the corpse which is being carried to the burial ground and once again life flows into the boy’s body.  Jesus restores the son to his mother and the crowds give glory to God for the miracle they have seen with their own eyes.

So today we have two amazing stories. What are we to make of them and what difference might these ancient tales make to our lives as we begin a new week as followers of Jesus today?

What I take from this, firstly, is that it suggests that God is at work even when he appears to be absent.  God was as aware of the situation of the widow of Zarephath as he was of Elijah’s predicament, though Elijah was ignorant of her very existence until God told him to go stay with her. And God often seems to choose to work with the kind of people that we would not even think of, let alone choose for ourselves.

In neither case where the son dies does either widow ask God for help.  Yet God provides, in the OT story by placing his prophet there with her and in the NT story we read that Jesus was in the right place at the right time – and that his heart went out to her. The word that we often see in scripture for this is compassion.  It is the human response of identifying with another in their pain or distress in ways that lead to acts of kindness and mercy.

I have been much taken recently with the call of Pope Francis for Christians to be merciful.  One of his assistants has helpfully defined this for us. "Mercy," he says, "is the willingness to enter voluntarily into chaos of another."

In our stories today, God chooses to enter into the messiness of human lives in two specific situations, standing with people that no one else notices or names.  He does not wait to be asked and he is not reluctant but is moved by love to do what he alone can.

Perhaps you are like me, in that you are often tempted to think that the Good Lord has made heaven and earth, all creatures and human beings.  He has set the laws of physics in motion so that everything seems to run on auto-pilot. That Jesus came and gave us a steer about how to think and act and that God has now cleared-off to a distant place while we are left to get on with life.  If so, then I hope these stories story speak to you – as they do to me.  They strongly suggest that, while we may not see God or think he is doing much, he is intimately interested in us and in the everyday parts of our lives.  That he is capable of weaving together our tiny lives into his one big story.

That he is still capable of surprising people of great faith, such as Elijah.

That he knows the names and the lives of the people who don’t attract any headlines.

And that he cares and is moved by love to want to help.

Of course, there are many loose ends in such a view.  Plainly God does not appear on a white horse on the crest of every hill, ready to save the day.  And it is natural to wonder why.  The widow of Zarephath thought that her son’s death was a punishment for her sins – whatever they were. But she was wrong.  I daresay the widow of Nain might have thought herself under God’s curse.  Yet the God who we see most clearly in Jesus does not send illness or misfortune.  Instead, he chooses to enter into the chaos of our lives if we allow him in, to stand with us and strengthen us.

Nothing speaks more profoundly of this deliberate choice of God to enter into our chaos, our pain and our human experience than the Communion we now celebrate together.  As you take bread and wine, banish the idea that God is the distant and passive observer of your life. As you remember his death, make the choice to live as though he daily enters into your chaos.  And as you remember his resurrection, ask for grace to choose to go with Jesus into the chaos of those around you – bringing the good news that God knows, God loves and God wants to make a life-restoring difference.

Amen.

This sermon was given at Friars Baptist Church Shoeburyness on Sunday 5th June 2016