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| Life, Death and Everything in Between |
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(please email questions or responses) June 6, 2010, 1 Kings 17: 8-24; Luke 7: 11-17 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. This poor widow in Zarephath that we heard about in our first reading today probably was not thrilled about becoming a bit player in this story that is supposed to show God’s power and Elijah’s role as a super-prophet. It’s bad enough that she and her son were starving to death. Most likely, she did not know that it was Elijah and his God who brought this famine upon the land in the coastal region of what is now southern Lebanon. All she knew was that the end was near and then this stranger came out of the wilderness demanding she share what little food she had. She clearly knew about suffering. Her husband had died. She and her son were teetering on the edge between life and death. And now this wild man was at the door. Yet she responded with hospitality and with trust. She shared what little she had. And this should mean we are looking at a happy ending to the story, like when Jesus asked the crowd to share the few loaves and fish among them and all were fed. Only in this story of Elijah, after the prophet’s presence seems to have brought with it an endless supply of meal and oil, the woman’s son stops breathing. What kind of thank you is that from Elijah and his God? These readings today are readings that have the potential to touch the deepest cores of our beings, to make us squirm, to make us try to figure who God is and who we are and how we deal with these ultimate questions about life and death and where we fit into the universe. Both of these stories need a bit of context to make sense of them, but even with the context, they pose real challenges to our understanding. I can provide the context, but we are going to have to work together over more than just a few minutes on a Sunday morning to gain the understanding. The context for the Elijah story has to do with the battle going on among the people of his time – we’re talking about that time in Jewish history after David was king and after his son Solomon was king and after a few other kings when there were power struggles galore. The king at this point was named Ahab and his wife was Jezebel – now there’s a familiar name. She was from the region of Sidon and brought the worship of the god Baal to the king’s court. Baal was a god who provided rain for the crops. Remember our children’s musical a month ago when Abraham struggled with the notion that there were too many gods in his world? Well, the Jewish people had pretty much settled on the God of creation, the God who led them to freedom, the God who showed them a smarter way to live. But people in other regions – people like Jezebel – still had their own gods and part of the story of the Hebrew Bible is story of defining the God we know as the one God. As the story goes, God sent Elijah to the king to tell him that there would be no more rain until Elijah’s God – the God of the Israelites, the one they called Yahweh – saw fit to tell the rain to start again. This was the first in a series of contests to establish whose god would rule the land. And so the crops dried up and food was scarce. God, recognizing that this would not make Elijah very popular around the king’s city, told Elijah to head off the wilderness where there would be water and where ravens would feed him. But even there, the water dried up, and that’s where our story begins today, with God sending Elijah to get help from this widow. This, of course, is a miracle story, as is the story from Luke’s Gospel where Jesus brings another widow’s son back to life. That’s one of the elements in these stories that can make us uncomfortable in our modern era. It’s not that we don’t appreciate stories of superheroes who come in to save the day – Jack Bauer on the TV show 24 or Xena Princess Warrior or going back a bit, Superman or Batman. There’s been more than a little longing the past month and a half for a superhero who could stop the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and clean up the coastline all at the same time. Or for superhero who could bring peace to the Middle East. Or who could stop the cancer in our best friend or revive the heart in a loved one. That longing seems to be part of our humanity. And the stories of Elijah and Jesus that we heard today respond to that longing with these miracles of unending food and of life restored. They are stories of God’s power and of Jesus’ stunning relationship with God. The authors of these stories first of all wanted to establish the power of God and the central roles of the prophet and the Messiah for their readers. But if we get hung up on whether or not miracles can happen or about how much power God has, we can get sidetracked from the other messages in these stories. In some ways, it is easier to get into a debate about the viability of miracles than it is to probe our own experiences of fear of scarcity or of profound loss in our lives. Yet these two stories open those doors for us. The widow in the Elijah story – she has no name, as so often happens to the women in these stories – has given up on life. She has lived with sorrow and now she is barely living with scarcity. There is no reason for her to go on, but at least she takes minimal comfort in the fact that she and her son will die together. Elijah walks into that moment and changes their world. At first, this is a story of the woman deciding to share what little she had. Elijah’s part in this offers us a glimpse of how we might respond as well. When the widow’s son stops breathing, you can only begin to imagine her horror. And Elijah is caught off guard – God hadn’t said anything to him about this part of the plan. But Elijah acts, taking the boy upstairs, yelling at God and then not really waiting for an answer from God, just acting on his own to try to get the breath of life back into this boy. And the boy breathes again. “See, your son is alive,” Elijah tells the widow. The widow in the Jesus story – she, too, has no name – seems to come out of nowhere. Jesus and his band of followers are walking into the village of Nain. This is in southern Galilee, the region where Jesus lived most of his life. They meet a funeral procession coming out of the town. Two processions meet, in effect – one a procession of death, the other a procession of life. She doesn’t say anything. But Jesus is touched to the core of his being by what he sees. Anyone who has had to bury a child, anyone who knows anyone who has had to bury a child, knows the profound grief of this moment. According to the expectations of the time, Jesus should have just kept going. In Greek and Jewish culture of that era, showing compassion was a sign of weakness. According to Jewish law, for a man to touch a corpse was an act of ritual impurity. For a strange man to speak to a woman was out of bounds. But like Elijah, Jesus recognized the grief of this woman and he acted without being deterred by expectations. Life was restored. Jesus gave the boy back to his mother. The mother’s sorrow was turned to unimaginable joy. Yes, this young man would die some day. But maybe now, his death would come after his mothers. He could care for her through her life and the order of life would be restored. These stories raise questions of fairness, of course. Lots of people were dying from the famine around Elijah. Why save only this one boy? Lots of young men died in Galilee. Why save just this one? We know that struggle. Lots of people in our world face starvation or homelessness or curable illnesses, yet we can only help some of them. Every week, people call here looking for help with rent or utilities or some other urgent need, yet we can only help some and often we can only help a little bit. Notice that neither Elijah nor Jesus spend much time worrying about those they cannot help. They simply respond with compassion to the need that is front of them. When Elijah faced the arrogance of a king and queen who were leading the Israelites away from their God, he acted with courage. When the starving widow found a hungry stranger at her door, she acted with hospitality. When the widow of Nain was sobbing over the loss of her son, her friends and neighbors walked with her. Nobody in these stories stood still, even though they all could have justified staying on the sidelines. Then Elijah and Jesus took the biggest risks of all, acting against all expectations to try to bring life out of a moment of death. For me, the power in these stories is not in these miracles, it is not in their assertions of God’s power. For me, the power in these stories is that in the face of some of life’s biggest challenges, yes, even in the face of death, these people trusted enough in God’s goodness and love that they could act. They did not let themselves be limited by what we normally think is possible. Every time we do that – every time we respond to a need we see, an injustice in our midst, an unspeakable sorrow in our circle of family and friends; every time we go beyond what we think we are capable of doing, I think a miracle happens. When we do those things, we are part of the process of bringing life out of death, of transforming the lives of others and transforming ourselves in the process. In that spirit, I’d ask you to go back to the hymnals and turn to hymn 581 that we sang earlier and one more time sing just the chorus of “Lead Us From Death to Life.” |