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