Scripture: 1 Kings 17
I decided, with the encouragement of the worship committee, to do what I’ve done several other years, which is to spend some weeks during the summer focusing on stories and characters from the Hebrew Scriptures. One year it was the stories from Genesis—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Another year it was the series of stories about David. This year I’ve settled on Elijah, who is a kind of a major Biblical figure. So for the next several weeks I’ll be doing what amounts to a kind of Bible study on the four chapters of First Kings, where most of Elijah’s story is to be found. But since I’m doing that, I feel a need to begin with a few comments about how I approach this material.
These stories, such as the ones we’ll be dealing with about Elijah, are our family stories. They are not here because we voted them in as our favorite stories. We don’t pick them off the shelf because they are chicken soup for the soul. These are not necessarily the greatest stories ever told, or the most edifying, or the most inspiring. We have not chosen them at all, for any reason. They are our family stories and they have been bequeathed to us.
I believe it is our job to engage with these stories, to try to be open to what they may have to say to us, and to be willing to talk back to them. The scriptures are a significant bequest. They are not something to be discarded or stowed away in the cedar chest under some blankets. But they are also not meant to control us. The sacred writings have laws in them, but they are not a law book, or an instruction book. They are not merely a collection of messages, morals, and life lessons. They are not there to do our thinking for us. And they don’t give us heroes we are necessarily supposed to imitate. They do give us various kinds of writings to engage with, and stories, stories that take us places spiritually, stories that by various means bring us face to face with ourselves and face to face with God.
The stories about Elijah are good examples of what I’m trying to say. I described him earlier as a great man and just now as a major Biblical figure. I didn’t say I liked him. In fact I don’t find him very likeable or even very human, and I certainly do not consider him a role model. I do not recommend that we look to him for inspiration or accept him as an example of what it means to be a person of faith. I don’t think we should even necessarily think of him as the main character in the stories that involve him. But I do think that these stories that we hold as a bequest are rich…and very much worth our attention. So let me get to it.
Elijah, you have heard, makes his appearance in the story by just coming from out of nowhere to stand on King Ahab’s doorstep. And he says just one thing: “As God is my witness, and God is my witness, there won’t be any more rain around here until I say so.” Now…there will be some parts of the story that make it even more clear why I’m not especially fond of Elijah, but this will do for starters. We’re going to assume that Elijah didn’t really mean that whether it rained or not was up to his say-so. We’re going to assume he meant he was speaking for the Lord and that when the drought was going to be over, God would tell him and he would relay the message. Still there is a certain lack of humility here. This is not a man who is walking humbly with God. This is a man who thinks he knows the mind of God, and who is not very clear on the distinction between his voice and God’s voice. We have too many such people around. Maybe some of them set off bombs in London last week. But whoever they are and whatever banner they crusade under, people who think they speak and act for god are dangerous. Elijah and I don’t get off to a good start.
Of course Elijah and Ahab don’t get off to a great start either. The news Elijah has for Ahab is not exactly good news. In fact this is a poor economic forecast, and Ahab blames the messenger. We don’t find this out right away, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear that a drought has in fact occurred and that Ahab has put out a contract on Elijah. No wonder God told Elijah to get out of town, to go live at Cherith Creek and be fed by ravens, and then later to go find this widow in the town of Zarephath. God knew what was in Ahab’s heart and knew that Elijah needed to make himself scarce. That may be one reason that God tells Elijah to go to these places; he needs places to hide out. In terms of the way the story is told, I think there is another reason as well.
On the one hand, over here, we have the scene in the capital city, Samaria. The king has just announced a proposal for corporate tax cuts that he says will stimulate the economy. The drought definitely has not been good for business, so something has to be done. Hasn’t been good for the poll numbers either. (The king doesn’t have to worry about elections, but he does like being popular.) The Department of the Interior is being severely criticized for not anticipating the drought and being better prepared. A blue ribbon panel has been convened to study why no one saw it coming and how to prevent droughts in the future. A certain preacher who shall remain nameless has blamed the whole thing on homosexuality. There is definitely an atmosphere of crisis in and around the capital city and in the corridors of power.
But then over here is Elijah, first out in some deserted area where eventually the creek bed dries up, then at the home of a woman and her son in a faraway foreign place, a little village in Queen Jezebel’s home country. There is an atmosphere of crisis here too. The woman and her son are about to die and they know it. Elijah has no food to give them. In fact his showing up only adds to the crisis, another mouth to feed. But this crisis that has been brought about by the drought has an entirely different look and feel to it, depending on whether you are looking at it from the point of view of the center of power and the grand stage of history or whether you are looking at it from the perspective of a woman and her son who don’t have enough to eat and who are living on the edge of survival. It is the difference between a crisis that consists of a shortened vacation for the king and high level meetings at the palace, reports that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate has gone up another three-tenths of a percent and the daily flurry of press releases trying to reassure the public, that kind of crisis versus the crisis that has a human face—a woman and her son who have no grand stage of events to operate on and no platform from which to speak, a woman who as far as Ahab is concerned is a nobody and in fact in the story not by accident doesn’t even have a name. I believe Elijah was sent to her not only so he would be safe from Ahab but to make the point that although worldly attention might be focused on the centers of power, God’s attention is focused on places like Zarephath and people like the woman and her son. Her voice may not be heard in Samaria or Jerusalem or Washington, but it is heard in the heart of God.
And then there is the further point. The drought is a real crisis all right, but it is not the only crisis. Here is a woman who has lost her husband, who is a single mother living in poverty. It is not too hard to imagine that her life was in crisis long before the drought. From the perspective of the king, from the perspective of people who take privilege for granted, a crisis occurs when some unusual event comes along to disrupt the way things usually are. From the perspective of others the way things usually are constitutes a crisis, though it is not called that any more than the woman of Zarephath is called by her name. I know this scripture doesn’t just come right out and make this point, but it takes me in that direction. It asks me to consider and re-consider what exactly does constitute a crisis.
There is a demonstration this weekend organized partly by our namesakes in Washington, D.C., the Sojourners community, calling attention to the genocide in Sudan. Our Elijah story brings Darfur to mind. Do 400,000 dead and 2 and a half million displaced constitute a crisis or is it just something in a faraway place we don’t pay much attention to. If we do pay attention, how much of the crisis to we understand reading the headlines from our places of relative safety? Wouldn’t it be different if we could be there and look into the eyes of a woman who had been raped and her husband murdered in front of her? And what about the crisis situations people live in everyday who get no headlines at all?
I remember a sermon I heard in grad school—I will assure you that I typically don’t remember sermons any better than you do, even my own—where the preacher said that part of being a Christian for him was trying to see the world with God’s eyes and that from that perspective the world was constantly in a state of crisis. What we seem to be able to find acceptable and find ways to get used to in the sense that they’re just part of our everyday world, God does not find acceptable and doesn’t get used to. That people are homeless or hungry or go to war is a crisis to God. As I say, our scripture doesn’t make that point in so many words. It does take me to places where I can’t help but think those thoughts.
These are not comforting thoughts. Here I am suggesting that faith increases our sense of living in the midst of crisis and thus probably increases our stress level, when we all know that stress is not good for us and that we’re supposed to be doing everything we can to reduce our stress levels. Of course the story does have something to suggest in this regard. The power for life in this story comes through simple human compassion. The woman shares her bread with a stranger. The stranger later prays for her son. Deep breathing, music, exercise, all sorts of things may be good for reducing stress. Compassion is best. That may sound a little preachy. I can’t help it. It’s one of the ways the story speaks to me.
And that actually leads me to the comments on theology that I said I would get back to. The story begins with Elijah announcing this drought. The clear implication is that the drought is a punishment for the sins of the king and maybe of the nation as a whole. Elijah doesn’t spell this out, but the story does say that Ahab made God angry, angrier than any other king, and then in the very next verse Elijah appears to announce the drought. This is a way of thinking that I have problems with. A God of judgment who visits drastic suffering on people in order to punish them for their sin, and therefore working backward that wherever there is illness or misfortune it must be because someone made God angry and deserves to be punished—in other words the idea of blaming the victim. This whole way of seeing things gives me problems. It is a way of seeing things that even the widow of Zarephath adopts when she basically accuses Elijah of causing her son’s death by showing up and calling God’s attention to her sin. Her son is dead and she is to blame and Elijah is to blame and God is to blame.
To Elijah’s credit he does not defend God or argue theology, pro or con. In fact after Elijah leaves King Ahab, he does not go around acting like an instrument of God’s wrath and explaining that this is all happening because people, and especially Ahab, have been so bad. He simply quietly goes to take his place among the people who are trying to survive. He doesn’t explain to the widow that God is angry and that this is all happening as a punishment. He and the woman simply do what they need to do to keep each other going. And when the woman accuses Elijah of bringing a punishment on her son, again Elijah doesn’t respond. He simply goes to the child, weeps over him, prays over him, and asks God what on earth is going on here. Instead of acting as God’s representative, all important and powerful, Elijah here acts as a friend to another human being and even calls God to account. It is that act not of holiness but of human solidarity that brings the child in the story back to life. Elijah here takes up not some noble cause of God but the cause of a grieving widow and her son. The miracle is done not because Elijah spoke on behalf of God, announcing judgment or anything else, but because he spoke to God on behalf of another human being. Compassion is not only a way to reduce stress and get through times of crisis. Compassion trumps theology every time.
There is one more thing I have to say about how this story engages me. It may seem like Elijah is the main character in this story. . But it strikes me that we ought to pay at least as much attention to the woman as we do to Elijah. It’s true that he is the big hero here. That’s his role. The woman is a survivor. She has met death before. She lost her husband. She is no stranger to trouble or sorrow. She knows very little about emerging triumphant from the fray. In fact she doesn’t know what it might mean to emerge from the fray at all. She just learns to live with it. Her victories are small and hard won. Her demons keep returning to her. Still, she is the survivor and she continues to fight for life.
I feel pretty sure that my faith, and maybe yours, is much more like the woman’s than like Elijah’s. Our victories too, for the most part, are small ones, and they never seem very decisive, just momentary so that we always know we have to come back and fight another day. Our demons, whatever they are, keep coming back to trouble us, and if we manage to get rid of some, others will take their place. So our faith may not be very heroic. But may it be, as I imagine the widow’s to have been, persistent and loving, and may ours, like hers, see us through. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 10, 2005