A Matter of Death and Life

Here’s a sign you’ve maybe seen at your workplace: If you don’t believe in the resurrection from the dead, you haven’t been around here at 5 o’clock quitting time. Likely where you work, your coworkers are a lot livelier 5 minutes after quitting time than 5 minutes before. Nothing miraculous about that – just the difference between doing what you have to do vs. doing what you want to do. Nonetheless, late afternoons can seem like a daily remake of the movie “Afternoon of the Living Dead.”

Today’s readings from the lectionary give us not one, but two accounts, one from the Old Testament, one from the New, of young people restored from death to life. In listening to them on a first reading, it may be difficult to see how they connect to us – after all, interruptions of funeral processions in order to bring the deceased back to life isn’t something we experience a whole lot. But in considering the whole story, including the setting and the events leading up to these healings, perhaps we can find that we, too, can find ourselves somewhere in these stories.

In our Old Testament reading, we meet Elijah, that strange and powerful prophetic figure who speaks the word of the Lord, in season and out of season, in a time and place where few are listening. Today we meet Elijah during a season of famine. Ahab, one of Israel’s worst kings in terms of being disobedient to God, is on the throne. His wife, Jezebel, is a worshipper of Baal, the fertility God. Ahab, who comes across as being a bit henpecked, wavers between going through the motions of worshiping God and consulting God’s prophets, while frequently worshiping Baal as well in order to placate his wife – sort of trying to cover all his bases. One of the things that Baal supposedly controlled was rain. So Elijah, in God’s name, decreed that there would be no rain – and for 3-1/2 years there was no rain, despite the appeals of Jezebel to Baal for an end to the drought. Suddenly Baal wasn’t looking so powerful.

At first, as Elijah hid from Ahab in a ravine by the Brook Kerith, God sends ravens to feed Elijah. But later Elijah is sent by God to the home of a widow, who lived with her young son – not a widow of his own land, but a widow of Zarephath, in the land of Sidon – a land largely given over to the worship of Baal. In the patriarchal society of the day, women were valued largely for their ability to bear children. There was not much of a social safety net – no Social Security, no pensions or 401K’s, not even senior citizens discounts or handicapped parking spots, and a woman’s well-being generally depended on having a man around to care for her. This widow was alone, with a young son who depended on her. When the famine came, she would have been one of the hardest hit, just as it is always the poor who get the worst impact of any natural disaster.

This widow, a worshiper of Baal, with just a handful of flour and a bit of oil on hand to prepare one final meal for her and her young son before they both starve to death, find Elijah, the prophet of God, on her doorstep. Not only is Elijah on her doorstep, but he’s asking her for a handout of food. The widow tries to tell Elijah that he’s come knocking at the wrong door – “We’ve barely any food on hand; just a handful of meal and our last bit of oil at the bottom of the jug, I’m gathering a few sticks to kindle a fire so my son and I can eat one final meal together before we die of starvation.” But the prophet insists: “Go and do as you said, but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterward 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 jar of oil will not fail until the day the Lord sends rain on the earth.” She did as Elijah asked – with reluctance, I’m sure – but she obeyed Elijah, and we’re told that “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.”

We’re told that after this, the woman’s son became ill and died. The woman said to Elijah, “what have you against me, O man of God?” Interpreting her son’s death as punishment for her worship of Baal, the woman said, “You have come to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” But Elijah prayed to God to restore the son’s life, and brought her son – now restored to life – to the boy’s mother with these words, “See, your son is alive.” 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.”

This text comes from a culture that is very foreign to us, and so we may find it hard to hear how it may speak to us. But there are several themes that come through strongly. One is that we worship a God who doesn’t welcome competition. We likely remember the story of the Exodus - maybe from the Charlton Heston version in The Ten Commandments – but we may miss the point that many or most of the plagues that the Egyptians suffered – the Nile turning to blood, darkness, and the rest – struck at objects of Egypt’s worship – for example, the Nile was worshiped by Egyptians as the source of life, and God for a time rendered it undrinkable. In today’s reading, God uses a drought to call into question the power of Jezebel’s rain God. It’s important to note that God did this not out of spite, or to say “I’m a bigger God than your God is”, but because of his great love, that he wanted nothing to turn the people away from him – just as we would react strongly to a child or loved one being caught up in addiction or falling in with a bad crowd or engaging in other self-destructive behavior. We may plead, we may yell, we may become angry – but only because in our passionate love we want the best for our child or loved one. And so it is with God – God knows what is best for us, and demands that we accept no substitutes for God’s love.

We today don’t worship false gods in the sense of bowing down to images made of wood or stone, or worshiping natural phenomena such as the sun or the moon. But whenever we are tempted to put our reliance in anything other than God – wealth, military might, international diplomacy, national pride, big business, big government – we veer dangerously close to committing modern-day forms of idolatry. Not that these things don’t have their place – but only God is in first place. In recent months we’ve read the accounts of the disaster in the Gulf, with millions of barrels of leaking oil wiping out the livelihood of fishermen and potentially wiping out wildlife in the region on a huge scale. While I’m loath to attribute this disaster to anything other than human carelessness on an epic scale, I can’t help wondering if in the midst of this disaster, where, as in the Nile turned to blood, there is oil and water everywhere but not a drop of either for human use, perhaps we might want to question whether it’s time to reconsider our dependence on oil, whether God may be calling us to consider changing our lifestyles and our technologies, most of all whether God may be giving us a not-so-gentle reminder of our limitations as humans and our need to rely on God. (A strong statement, perhaps, but for me, this all strikes a little close to home; while I’ve never lived in the Gulf nor have I lived near any oil wells, I grew up on the northern tip of Berks County, just down the road from Schuylkill and Columbia counties – coal country back in the day – where a mine fire underneath the town of Centralia has been burning since 1962, now nearly 50 years, and what was a pleasant small town of 1400 people or so has dwindled a ghost town of 9 people, fewer than we have at worship today, where Rt 61, the major road through those parts, has been re-routed and still cracks from shifting ground run across the road and the surrounding landscape, and steam comes up out of the ground…it’s an desolate, eerie, seemingly haunted place to visit, and if you ever go, I recommend you don’t stay long, as poisonous gas is present, and the ground has been known to open up and collapse unexpectedly. The fire started through human carelessness, and both business and government have long since washed their hands of the whole situation, content to pay people to move out of communities in which their families lived for generations. I can only pray we’re not reading similar stories about the aftereffects of the Gulf oil leak 50 years from now.)

Besides the consequences of idolatry, ancient or modern, from our reading today we can learn the importance of hospitality and generosity, even across religious lines, even when it seems we have nothing to offer. Elijah followed God’s call to hide from Baal-worshipping Queen Jezebel and seek refuge and hospitality, ironically, right in the center, in the heart, of Baal-worship. God wasn’t telling Elijah to worship the widow’s god, but God did call on Elijah to accept her hospitality, hospitality which for her would be quite costly. Meanwhile, the widow at Zarephath was literally down to her last meal, and yet she found it in herself to feed this strange prophet who spoke on behalf of what to her was an alien God. And in offering what little she had, she was blessed with sustenance, with her son’s restoration to life, and with an opportunity to experience the power and loving provision of Elijah’s God.

And so often we, as individuals and as the gathered community of Emanuel Church, may think we’re too small or too weak or too poor to have anything to offer – certainly when money is tight, our first impulse is to hang on to every dime we have - and yet God has sent and will continue to send people who need our hospitality, our generosity, our love, to our doorsteps. They may be very different from us – or they may not – they may or may not look like us, talk like us, live like us; their families may or may not look like ours – and yet we are to welcome, to offer what we have. I’m not calling on us to send our last dollar to one of the TV preachers, most of whom have more of other peoples’ dollars they could ever use, but I am calling us to welcome all who come our way, to offer our coffee and cake, our gracious hospitality, our faith in God and love for neighbor, to those who find their way here. I’m reminded of my trips to Cuba, when our group from the UCC’s Penn Southeast Conference received such gracious hospitality from Christians who had so little by American standards, and yet offered their very best. We, like the widow at Zarephath, may find that when we are faithful in this way, our seemingly minimal resources are multiplied, that “the jar of meal is not emptied, neither does the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord.”

All of which leads to what is perhaps the strongest teaching to be drawn from this account, that God’s love is for all, not only for us, that we are to be channels, not storage jugs, of God’s love. This was the lesson Jesus drew from our Old Testament reading, when he gave what the writer of Luke’s Gospel portrays as his first sermon to his hometown synagogue, a sentence or two of which is quoted in the bulletin. Jesus was telling the folks in his hometown congregation that God not only loved them, but loved this widow from a foreign land, who worshipped a foreign god, enough to send Elijah the prophet to her. The Lord our God is a jealous God – God does not like competition – but God dislikes competition is because he loves us, each of us, all of us, and our neighbors, near and far, intensely, passionately, infinitely, eternally. And in our Gospel reading today, we read of Jesus performing a miracle very much like Elijah’s. He encounters the funeral procession for the only son of a widow, is moved by compassion, touches the funeral bier – despite the purity regulations against touching a corpse – and stopped the procession. Jesus had only to speak the word, and the son sat up and began to talk, and Jesus turned him over to his mother. Those watching immediately made the connection to Elijah’s miracle, and knew that God’s power and love had found their way to them, even to them.

God’s power and love long ago found their way to Bridesburg. God’s power and God’s love are what called Emanuel Church into being. God’s power and God’s love keep us going to this day, and God willing, for many, many days to come. May all who come here, whether for the first time or whether we and our family have been coming here for generations, be able to say, with the widow at Zarephath, that surely here are people of God, and the word of God spoken here – the word of God’s saving love - is truth. Amen