(Preached on Sunday, November 8, 2009)
As she went to get it, he called out, “And while you’re at it, would you bring me something to eat?” 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 for make a last meal for my son and me. After we eat it, we’ll die.” -1 Kings 17:11-12
As a child I distinctly remember that moment when my mother would spoon out the portions of dessert for her five children. Would it be enough? With watching eyes capable of calculating the slightest difference in amount, we crowded around the table, straining to see which bowl held the largest portion. With an unerring hand, she divided the portions so that everyone seemed to receive an equal amount. Not only were all the portions amazingly equal, we also could never finally agree that someone had received less than they wanted. It always was enough!
There was a famine in the land. But God was providing for the prophet Elijah. Early in the famine God has ravens bring bread and meat in the morning and the evening, as he lives by a small stream from which he can drink east of the Jordan River. But then the waters of this small, hidden stream dry up. So God sends Elijah to a foreign widow living in the region near the seacoast just north of Israel. It is a fascinating choice by God because this widow, a single mother, has almost nothing herself.
Life for a widow in ancient Palestine was nearly impossible. The life of any woman was difficult. A woman in that day was considered just half a human with absolutely no rights. As a widow there was no place for her to go and no one to support her, if there was no other male in her family who would take her into his household. It was no wonder that the morning prayers of all pious Jewish men included the declaration “Thank God I was not born a woman.” A widow would usually have to rely on the practice of working the fields of others by following after the harvesters and scraping together the few little heads of grain they missed; or begging in the streets; or turning to prostitution, in order to support herself and whatever children she might have.
So it is a rather audacious idea that God would send, this male prophet, Elijah, to this widow who is clearly struggling to survive, to be taken care of during the famine. She has the bare bones of almost nothing, a little flour, a little oil. She was already staring death in the face and had decided she would bake this last loaf of bread for she and her son to eat and then they could lie down to wait for death. And yet, this almost too little turned out to be almost enough. They were almost ready to starve, to sink down into listless death. She was collecting almost her last bunch of sticks for almost her last fire. But she gave the foreign man a little bite, a small sip of water, almost too little to notice. And she kept baking flour cakes from the almost empty jar and almost zeroed out jug of oil. Elijah ate. She ate. And her son ate. She gave him shelter under a roof almost blown apart in the brittle, dried out drought wind. She let the prophet sleep on a straw bed almost eaten by animals.
There is an amazing solidarity among the very poor. Right or wrong, wise or foolish, the very poor often give beyond reason. Yet there is a beauty in this which demands admiration even as it provokes anger at the injustice of their situation.
A woman who had survived on the streets for years by living hand-to-mouth in a lodging house when she had a job or in alleys or coal cellars when she didn’t have a job, finally found friends who enabled her to begin to hope for something better. With their help she began to plan for a secure home and began the process for obtaining the public assistance to which she was entitled. Her health had been ruined by the years of malnutrition, abuse and rough living. At the home of her friends where she often went for her meal, there was sometimes an old man, a confirmed alcoholic who was seldom sober, who also came by for a meal or a cup of coffee. He was a sad sight – a once intelligent and energetic man, now unable to think of anything except where to get the next drink. Since he quickly spent his monthly pension payment (or was robbed of it by youths who waited for him to cash his check and then beat him and took it) he would ask for money. The people at the house did not give him any, knowing it could do no good but would be spent immediately for liquor. But the woman who had spent years on the streets did give him money, often more than she could afford. Her hosts chided her, pointing out the futility of doing so – but she would not change her mind. “When I needed a dollar, he used to always give it to me, or buy me a meal,” she said. “There’s no way I’m going to refuse him now.”
Such is the solidarity of those who have known especially tough times and who realize anything they receive comes to them as gift. This is a lesson we are perhaps more capable of learning and more open to learning at this time in our history. Up until now this has been a difficult lesson for us to learn for our lives have been filled to overflowing with activity and possessions, relationships and commitments, all the complexities of modern life. When our lives were overfilled thus we tended to lose sight of the source of all our blessings and what our true blessings included.
Most of us, whatever our true financial state, have always lived with a sense of scarcity in our lives. And most institutions, such as churches, operate with a constant fear of the wolf at the door if they don’t keep growing and expanding. So our instinct has always been to clutch and hoard any shreds of security we can get our hands on.
But now we are living with a greater reality of scarcity and financial insecurity. More of us have experienced loss of income, loss of jobs, and loss of investments and so we worry more and more “Will it be enough?” Along with that we have experienced similar losses in the church, as well as loss of members through death, aging, and relocation. Which lead some of us to ask the same question of the church, looking at the members who are here and the financial resources we have, we wonder “Will it be enough?”
Now we can answer as did the widow before Elijah showed up; by taking what we consider to be our meager resources and stretch them as long as we can before we lay down to die. Or we can move into the future trusting in God each day, as did Elijah, to take our meager resources and make them be enough.
What Elijah knew and what the widow and her son discovered is that God is an awesome God of abundance and generosity, not a God of scarcity. Scarcity happens when we don’t trust in God’s abundance and generosity, when we think that we – not the community and certainly not God – are the source of our own security. Scarcity happens when we lose hope and turn inward toward ourselves and forget about the future. Scarcity happens when we fail to notice and appreciate the abundance right before our eyes, here in the love and care of this church.
We discover true security when we realize that before God, all of us are impoverished. Nothing we have or do can purchase or earn or require a response from God. In fact, without God we are totally impoverished. The truth of our situation is that every single thing we have and are is a gift from God. All that we have that is truly our own to give is our gratitude. Our thankfulness is truly precious in God’s sight because it is the one thing God cannot give us or require of us. It is truly ours to give. And so is our trust in God.
The only way to give a positive answer to the question “Will it be enough” is to acknowledge our ultimate dependence on God. And often the best way to do that is by giving our all to God, whether our money, or love, or pessimism about the future. Especially when God’s gifts seem too sparse to spare, that is the time to respond with trust.
The situation is like this: in the midst of the desert stands a water pump. Beside the pump is this sign: “I have buried a bottle of water in the sand by the pump. There is only enough water to prime the pump. Don’t drink any of it. Pour half into the pump to wet the leather; wait a little while and then pour in the rest. Then pump; the water will come. The well has never gone dry. When you are through drawing water, fill the bottle again and bury it in the sand for the next traveler.”
All right, you are that traveler. You are hot and thirsty, your water supply is almost exhausted, and you come to that pump, and you read that sign. You dig in the sand, and sure enough, there is that bottle filled with nice, clear, clean water. You take it up and hold it in your hand, and you have a critical decision to make. There stands that pump, rusty and bone-dry. Will you pour that precious water down that rusty old spout? Will you have that much faith? The widow shown to Elijah had that faith. When we do trust in God, we will discover that even our scarcity is God’s blessing. With that trust, we discover that what we have will always be enough.