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"Three Uneasy Pieces"
June 10, 2007: 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org

Scripture;

1 Kings 17

"Our three readings this morning all come from the Hebrew Bible, from the book of First Kings, chapter 17. May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today."

1. Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, the king of Israel, "As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word." Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah, saying, "Go from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the Wadi Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. You shall drink from the wadi, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there." So Elijah went and did according to the word of the Lord; he went and lived by the Wadi Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening; and he drank from the wadi. But after a while the wadi dried up, because there was no rain in the land.

2. Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah, saying, "Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to the Phoenician city of Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you." So Elijah set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, "Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink." As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, "And bring me a morsel of bread in your hand." But she said, "As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die." Elijah said to her, "Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth." She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.

3. After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. She then said to Elijah, "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!" But Elijah said to her, "Give me your son." He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. Elijah cried out to the Lord, "O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?" Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the Lord, "O Lord my God, let this child's life come into him again." The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, "See, your son is alive." So the woman said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth."

"Friends, God is still speaking to the world. May we open our hearts to hear. Amen."

Sermon:

A word of prologue to our sermon this morning. This comes from just before our morning's readings, from First Kings chapter 16, verses 29 through 33:

That helps what comes next make a bit more sense, doesn't it? And gives it a bit more urgency. The Word of God comes to Elijah to tell him to leave his home in the little town of Tishbe in Gilead, all the way east of the River Jordan, to travel to Samaria, the capital city of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. He's to walk into the royal palace, God says, and go right up to King Ahab, more prosperous than any king since Solomon, and to his queen, Jezebel of the merchant princes of Sidon, this pair who "did more evil in the sight of the Lord than all who came before" look them right in the eye and say, "As surely as God lives, the God of Israel before whom I stand in obedient service, the next years are going to see a total drought - not a drop of dew or rain unless I say otherwise" (1 Kings 17:1, Eugene Peterson, The Message).

Once he's delivered that holy slap in the face to the royal couple, the Word of the Lord comes to Elijah once more, this time with a much simpler message: Run! Run, turn, flee, get out of the palace, get the heck out of Dodge and hide yourself in the wadi, the dry river valley, at Cherith, in the middle of nowhere beyond the Jordan, beyond reach of angry Ahab, while God goes to work putting the squeeze on king and kingdom.

In time, of course, Elijah will become the prophet par excellence, the original "troubler of Israel." He will face down 450 priests of Baal and be taken up into heaven by a fiery chariot. In time, Jewish tradition will make him the forerunner of Messiah himself. But not yet. As of this morning, he is still just Elijah the Tishbite, not a major prophet yet, not really, but more just an errand-boy for the Lord, scared spitless of the ministry to which God is calling him and of the consequences it will undoubtedly bring down on his own head.

This morning's readings from chapter 17 form a sort of triptych, a series of three quick scenes that hang together to sketch a picture of Elijah's exile in the wilderness. In an almost cinematic way, they show us what he learns there, hidden away off in the wings, awaiting his cue to re-enter the national stage and take his place as a true prophet of God's living word, a rebel with a cause, unafraid to speak hard truth to power. But contrary to our expectations, shaped as they are by the conventions of Hollywood heroism, these are not lessons designed to build up his self-confidence, his innate sense of right and wrong, his unquestioning faith. No, over the course of these three scenes, Elijah is prepared for his prophetic ministry by being brought to recognize his utter dependence on the grace of God.

Scene One

The only problem with prophesying that that the land will undergo drought and famine is that even prophets have to eat. Just because he's the one who points out the terrible consequences of the ruling party's faithlessness doesn't mean Elijah can escape them. In this first scene, Elijah comes to recognize his utter dependence on the providence of God to give him what he needs to live day by day. He may be on his way to becoming a prophet mighty in word and in deed, but his tongue still cleaves to the roof of his mouth, his belly aches just as much as faithless Ahab's, and he cannot feed himself. But he trusts God will provide. As the psalmist says,

And wouldn't you know it, but God has just the wicked sense of humor to send ravens—ravens, of all things!—great big, black, ritually unclean scavenger ravens to feed Elijah morning and night. Their startling ministry to him emphasizes Elijah's own participation in the great circle of life created and sustained by grace of God. God gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry, and the ravens in turn give to Elijah. The prophet is no more above the need for God's grace than the king is—we are, for that matter. If we will but ask, if we will open our hands to receive, to share, rather than just snatch and grab and horde it all away, everything we need to have life and have it abundantly is available to us through God's extraordinary, unexpected grace.

Scene Two

Elijah's second lesson makes lunching with ravens look easy. In the midst of the ongoing drought, the prophet is called to leave the wilderness and make his way north to Zarephath, where God promises a kindly widow woman will take care of him. But widows are proverbial in their poverty, and this widow has even less to share. We are told with brutal frankness that she and her little boy are literally on their last legs, preparing to eat their handful of meal and die.

What's more, Zarephath isn't in a good Jewish neighborhood; in fact, it's in the territory of Sidon, the great city of the Phoenicians and home to Queen Jezebel herself. How likely is it that this pagan woman, a foreigner standing outside the covenant of God's grace, as Elijah has hitherto understood such things, would want to harbor a prophet of the God of Israel, much less the nation's most wanted, and to share with him her very last morsel of food? And, really, even is she could and would, just how likely would Elijah be to welcome any such help from her unclean hand? Long shot doesn't begin to cover it.

But God loves the long odds and so calls Elijah to open himself to receive help from an unexpected and even undesired quarter. God works through this woman so like his sworn adversary, Jezebel, to feed and house Elijah, who must stand by and witness the wonder-working power of God in her life not just once, but again and again, day after day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the man who would be God's great prophet is forced to eat raven—I mean, crow—to choke back his own prejudice and swallow his pride as his all his preconceived notions of clean and unclean, inside and out are turned upside down. Perhaps as he did, Elijah remembered the words of the Torah, where in the book of Exodus, God saves God's own obstinate, rebellious, good-for-nothing chosen people by invoking God's right to be gracious to whom I will be gracious," and "show mercy on whom I will show mercy" (Exodus 33:19). God's grace, it seems, like the miracle jug and jar, simply will not fail, or fail to surprise.

Scene Three

Well, it's one thing to acknowledge your own limits and accept help from God. It's another to accept God's help from the hand of a supposed enemy. But it's a whole other ball of wax to ask for God's help on behalf of that very enemy, as Elijah finds out when the woman's only son becomes deathly ill, and she comes sobbing to lay the blame at Elijah's feet: "What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin," to mock me as a woman, a widow and a foreigner and a non-believer, "and [then] kill my son?" (1 Kings 17:18, NIV)

Her grief and her anger are understandable. It's just that, to Elijah, who has lived under her roof and shared her table for some time now, the woman and her son have become so much more than those petty little labels—poor, foreign, Gentile. Together they have all shared in the grace of God poured out so miraculously among them. What they needed, God has supplied, and in the meantime, by the grace of God, they have become family, a family of God's surprising choice.

So it is that, against all expectation, against all reason, despite all their differences, Elijah is moved take up the widow woman's complaint and make it his own and carry it to God in prayer on her behalf. In a moment of remarkable tenderness and power, he cradles the breathless child in his arms as he would his own son, rocking back and forth, and cries out to God to help this his adoptive family. He even challenges God for them, asking point blank "O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?. . . . O Lord my God, let this child's life come into him again."

And God hears Elijah's prayer and fills the boy's lungs with the breath of life once more. Elijah returns him to his mother, who is so filled with joy and gratitude and love, she is moved to exclaim, in her thick accent, "Now I know that you are a servant of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true."

Just after this, of course, Elijah brings his sojourn in the wilderness to an in order to venture back into the world, back into the frenzy and the fray of high powered politics once more. The man from Tishbe graduates to become the mighty prophet God calls him to be. He does indeed go on to trouble the king and queen of Israel and best the 450 priests of Baal and even gets to hear the very voice of God. But he does all this in the strength of that poor widow's benediction: "Now I know that you are a servant of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true." In these difficult days, when the world is torn asunder by wars and rumors of war, when injustice masquerades as common sense and oppressions run deep, we may feel God calling us to be prophets, too, to walk right in and speak truth to power. If so, we can ask no better teacher than Elijah, and no better lessons than these, offered for our meditation this morning, and no better blessing than hers:

Now I know that you are a servant of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true, because you acknowledge your need of God's grace. Now I know that you are a servant of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true, because you have opened yourself to receive that grace from whatever unlikely hand God gives it. Now I know that you are a servant of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true, because you have been moved to pray that same grace for others unlike yourself, even for those who would seem to be your enemies, because you have come to see them as sisters and brothers, children of the same Maker.

May her blessing, which is the blessing of God, who is ever faithful to supply our need, whose grace is broad like beach and meadow, and whose love breaks down the dividing wall of hostility to build us up together in one family, be ours today, and forevermore. Amen.


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