(Preached on Sunday, June 6, 2010)
She said, "I swear, as surely as your God lives, I don’t have so much as a biscuit. I have a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a bottle; you found me scratching together just enough firewood to make a last meal for my son and me. After we eat it, we’ll die.” -1 Kings 17:12
It had not rained for a long, long, long time. In a dry land where every drop of water is precious, that is a calamity. Without rain it becomes impossible to grow food for there is very little groundwater to draw upon. Without food, famine strikes the land, and of course, it is always the weak and powerless, those on the margins of society and existence to begin with, who suffer the most. It is always the weak and lowly for whom events seem to happen that dictate life more than they having an ability to dictate life themselves. Events like droughts, or massive oil spills, or hurricanes, or earthquakes, or financial system meltdowns, or collapsing economies, or grossly indebted governments, which seem to happen far off and beyond our control yet wreak the greatest havoc in the lives of those on the margins with no decision making involvement whatsoever.
So it was for the widow and her son, living in Sidon, just north of the boundary with Israel, to which God sent the prophet Elijah. The text says God sent Elijah to the widow so she could take care of the prophet and provide for him. This seems to be a very strange command from God. After all, the poor widow has almost nothing left. In fact, she fully expects to die – and soon, because of the drought in the land. Her plan is to gather a couple of sticks, build a fire, cook up her last handful of grain with a little oil, eat it and die – and her son will eat and die with her. But that is who God sends the prophet to with the command that she will feed him.
So the prophet goes and encounters this poor widow. She has surrendered to the inevitability of her own starvation. Which Elijah acknowledges and doesn’t try to talk her out of. Instead he says, “Go and do as you have said.” But he also subverts her plan with an interruption: “But first” … do this other thing. Just introduce this small change into your plans for the day. Feed me before you feed yourself, Elijah suggests. Share, even from your scarcity. Then feed yourself and your son. How outrageous is that? I know you have next to nothing, but please, give to me first. I know your investments have taken a hit, your assets have lost value, but please, support us first, give to the church, to this charity, to those poor people, please, give.
But Elijah also gives the widow two reassurances: do not be afraid, and there will be enough. Elijah begins with that always-reassuring good news, “Do not be afraid.” Angels and prophets and Jesus himself tell us not to live in fear, no matter how bleak things look, and no matter how difficult the times. The widow, preparing to die with her son, at the end of her rope, suddenly has salvation arriving at her door. Where there was scarcity, there is suddenly sufficiency. This sounds a lot like what we learned from Esther and Mordecai about living faithfully in difficult times. The importance of faithful risk-taking and the openness to see the grace upon grace we have been given.
Some will point to this story as an example of faith on the part of the poor widow. Challenged with feeding the prophet first from supplies which will barely be able to feed herself and her son she is offered the opportunity to demonstrate faith in God. But I find it a challenge to imagine that this poor, desperate woman has “faith” in any “God” at this point: after all, she is preparing herself, and her son, to die. Just as families who have fished the Gulf waters for generations are finding it difficult to have faith in the Federal Government, or BP, or perhaps even God, to salvage their way of life.
Perhaps what is at work here is more an invitation to hope, even desperate hope. After all the realities of drought and famine, thirst and hunger, poverty and despair, suggest hope-less-ness. And in the worst possible moments, hope can still persist deep within our hearts, no matter what God or god we have been raised to worship, and taught to place our faith in. Perhaps the word “desolation” fits the widow’s situation even better, because it means “emptiness,” and when there’s nothing left, and you’re totally empty, there is room for all sorts of grace to move in, and grow. Could it be that surrounding ourselves with so many things, so many activities, so much noise, so many worries, makes it hard for us to open up ourselves, our hearts, to God’s love and grace to fill in the empty places underneath it all? I just wonder about that. It’s not that we’re not hungry, deep down in our spirits, maybe even starving, but if we fill ourselves with enough spiritual junk food, we may not even be around when the prophet bearing good news – and hope – arrives.
But the widow is around when the prophet arrives, and she is empty, so she has room in her heart for hope. As a result she is able to act out of hope against hopelessness, with trust and faith that allows her to take a risk in the face of her fear. And she sees the grace upon grace which she is being given. God is at work supplying what the widow needs, even as God supplies what the prophet needs. The prophet shares what he has to offer, hope and faith, and the widow shares what she has to offer, her meager provisions. Effective power is exercised through small gestures, meager resources, feeble words, human obedience, and the witness of a poor woman. Through such lowly means, God’s work gets done, even in the most difficult of times. Communal sharing turns scarcity into abundance.
Imagine global mission a novelty in the early 1800s! It was a new and ambitious pioneering element of U.S. society and churches to think of possibilities beyond the bounds of the local community. The beginning of overseas mission work from the U.S. church is generally traced to five college students who took refuge under a haystack in a lightning storm in 1806 and heard a collective call to foreign mission work. Four years later the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was established in Massachusetts and Connecticut and two years after that, in 1812, sent those young men across the sea.
That is a well-known story in the church. But less well known is the work begun by women, the Female Society for Spreading Christian Education, organized in 1801, a full five years before that haystack call. The women started the “Penny Society” and asked women in the churches to give one cent a week for mission. By 1812, when four of the young men and their wives were duly commissioned and ready to sail across the sea, the Mission Board sending them knew the funds were not sufficient to book passage. Ironically, or in God’s timing, the ship’s sailing was delayed for several weeks. In the meantime, churches were inspired by the prospect of mission and money began to flow. But it was the women that saved the say. The women’s Penny Society over twelve years had raised $6,000 – that is 600,000 pennies! Their $6,000 was what enabled the eight to book passage on two clipper ships, fully outfitted with supplies and food and salary for one full year! We can safely say that without the women this would not have happened.
For fifty years the women faithfully collected their mission pennies and funded many, many missionaries. They also established a new funding effort among the children they taught in the churches. They asked the children to give just 10 cents to purchase a coupon – one share toward buying a passage for a missionary on a ship across the ocean. Do you know that over 20 years the children bought enough coupons to fill three clipper ships of missionaries!
It has always been that when the church was functioning at its best it was remembering that it is one body with many members. Gifts of many shared with all… what do we bring to our world? What gifts can we share? When we look around at our lives and the life of the world, and the life of our church, what abundance is about to break forth because of unexpected generosity and surprising compassion? What hope do we dare to welcome, and to entertain, in our own lives? Even when faced with limited resources, even in the most difficult of times, we ought never to underestimate the power of what we can do. Sometimes desperate times call for desperate hope and real risk-taking. And when we take that risk, it is important to be open to seeing the grace upon grace we have been given. Let us remember that with God all things are possible for the good of all.