It was 1990 in the City of Ottawa when a young man called Simpson decided that he was going to rob a bank. He went in, gun in hand, deciding that it was the right time and place to get as much money as possible. The only problem is that he only got $6,000. The story was covered in The Ottawa Citizen a little while later and brought to light the great irony: the gun he used in the robbery was a 45 Colt from 1918. The Ross Rifle Company out of Quebec valued it at $100,000! He ended up in prison – and his gun ended up in a museum! The man had no idea what he had possessed! He was beside himself when he realized that he had lost so much with this one act of greed and self-indulgence.
It is a truism, I think, that many of us don’t know what we’ve got and that we live a lot of our lives driven by fear and by uncertainty, because we are not sure if we will have enough to sustain us in our lives. So many people are frightened of not having enough. Yet when it comes to the really important resources of life, the really meaningful things, we don’t realize we have them. So we waste our lives in fear, agony and despair not realizing how blessed we really are. It is a lesson that most of us, except the very poor, need to learn. There was also a prophet in Israel who needed to learn exactly that lesson: Elijah. To have the ministry he had, he had to recognize his resources, and not worry or be anxious about the things that he didn’t have. One of the great characteristics of Elijah is that he learned to trust, and in trusting, had the power of his convictions.
Elijah learned this, as we heard in today’s passage from First Kings. The background is very simple, and we need to understand it. The wonderful showdown on Mount Carmel. Ahab, who was the King of Israel, had married a woman from Sidon called Jezebel. She adopted the religions of Baal and followed the teachings of their prophets. Essentially at its core, the prophets of Baal believed that this was the god that represented rain and agriculture. As I mentioned last week, there were different strains within the tradition of the prophet of Baal, but this is important, rain and agriculture were the things that the prophets of Baal espoused as the key part of the god Baal.
Elijah, realizing that this god was starting to be embraced by the people of Israel and in a syncretistic form was being brought in alongside the worship of Yahweh, was concerned. He was concerned not only on his own behalf; but because of the call of God to denounce this syncretism and the adoption of this other god. You can understand why Ahab, as the king, was weak on this issue. Jezebel brought with her a lot of money. In Sidon, there were the cedars, oils, and commerce. Ahab thought he had married well and had wealth coming in, the money that comes from attaching itself to the prophets of Baal – a small price to pay for having a marriage of convenience!
Elijah gloried in this in a different way: rather than enjoying what Ahab had, he gloried in the God of Israel who saw that this money and this worship of idols had to come to an end, and told Elijah that if the people of Israel and Ahab the King continued to worship the prophets of Baal, there would be a drought. Notice the irony: Baal is the god of rain; and Yahweh is predicting a drought!
What is the worst thing that Elijah could have done but to prophesy the drought? This was a rejection of Baal and all that Baal offers, and so he was shunned. He was sent to a ravine somewhere in Jordan, and there he stayed in exile from his land, thrown out for professing what was at the core of the faith of the people of Israel: “You shall have no other God besides me.” Then, being in this position, Elijah had to learn trust. He had done what God asked him to do; he had been part of this great movement; but now he had to trust in the God who had called him. During a drought and having nothing, we read in the story that the ravens provided food and drink and meat and bread for him, and that he learned to rely on God, the Creator, and the ravens who this God had created, to feed him and nurture him in the midst of a terrible drought and poverty.
Then, suddenly the Lord takes him from his place of comfort in Jordan – and where does he send him? To Sidon – the home of who? Jezebel! There he is to meet a widow in Zarephath, who will take care of him. He is going now from having been a prophet in Israel, speaking to the King, denouncing the King, predicting the drought, to asking a widow in a gentile place, in the home of Jezebel, for food and shelter. Elijah goes to the woman and says to her, “Can you give me some bread? Can you give me some water?”
The widow’s response is crushing. She says, “No, I don’t even have enough for myself. I don’t have enough for my son. How am I going to be able to feed you as well?”
In this embarrassing moment, these two extremely vulnerable and needy people meet by a wall in a city in a gentile world. Elijah is needy, he has been thrown out of his own kingdom and has no home; no resources; no bread; no water; nothing. He has given everything up for the sake of prophesying.
The woman is vulnerable. She is a widow – she has lost her husband. As we know in the Bible, the widows and the orphans are the ones who have the least and are the most vulnerable. The widow had nothing. She had a son to look after, she was all on her own, and it was a drought. It was terrible! Yet, and this is key, when these two incredibly vulnerable people come together, God is in the midst of it. What does Elijah do when the woman says “I have nothing for you”? Does he get upset? Does he reject her? Is he angry? No! He just simply says, “Do not be afraid.” He is not just reassuring her; he is reassuring himself, for he knows that it is fear itself that will cause the greatest problem here. He has to rely on God; God has brought him this far. And this woman and he now, together, must cease their worries, and not be afraid, for God is at work.
I remember hearing a long time ago about a famous circus that had tigers that would perform for people. I know this is not in vogue these days and rightfully so, but back then, tigers would perform. A trainer would, with a whip and a word, control these tigers. There, locked in a pen with them, this trainer starts the performance, and suddenly all the lights go out. The tigers of course could see the trainer, but he of course could not see them. It is one of the potentially deadliest moments, completely surrounded by tigers with no idea of what is going to happen. But he made it through and the lights came back on. When he was interviewed afterwards, he was asked, “How on earth did you manage to stay safe in what was a very frightening and dangerous situation?”
He replied, “Well, I know that I couldn’t see the tigers, but they didn’t know that I couldn’t see them. So I continued to use my whip and my voice in the hope that they would respond and think that nothing had changed. I was terrified, but I kept doing what I thought was the right thing, and I was seen through it all.”
As I have been saying the last few weeks, we are not always aware when God is at work; we are not always aware when God is present. Often we, through our own subjectivity, through our own fears and doubts, do not see God before our eyes, but that does not mean that God is not at work, God is still sovereign, God is still caring, and God is still active in the world. For Elijah and the widow, when he says, “Do not be afraid” he believed it precisely because he knew that even though he could find no reason for optimism, God was still God. As the story goes, the woman was supplied with water, with wine and with bread, and the jug and plates never emptied. She and her son survived. It is an incredible story of faith. It is also an incredible story of generosity, for indeed the widow shared with Elijah. No longer frightened, she could be generous.
I read a wonderful quote by Jack Manion that was in the Leadership Journal a couple of years ago:
The chief inhibitor to generosity isn’t greed; it is fear. Fear of not having enough; and the only remedy for fear is trust. Trust and generosity walk hand-in-hand, and it is really difficult to pursue the generous life while scared. God delivers us from fear as we trust God to unleash generosity, and when a person begins to tap into generosity, they are dialing into a core of God’s very character and nature.
In other words, even the impetus to be generous comes when we stop being frightened and simply give, for this is how the Lord operates.
Elijah had to trust one more time before Mount Carmel and the prophets of Baal. Again, this time it was with the widow and her son. Her son died, or appeared to be dead. She calls on Elijah, and what does she do? She does what so many grieving people do: she blames Elijah and Elijah’s God for having taken her son. She is angry, and she condemns them. She lets Elijah have it! I love what a great South African preacher that I knew, Rev. Sibisi, once said, “You do know that the Complaints Department in heaven is the largest department that exists, because we like to blame God for so much.” But it is a natural thing to do when you are faced with a crises, when you are vulnerable, when you lose a loved one, or when you are in pain. You turn on the one who you think should be there solving every problem. Elijah takes the brunt of it! He and his God are responsible for the death of her son. Can you imagine how that must have hurt Elijah? Can you imagine how much the mother must have been in pain? What does Elijah do? Does he get angry? Does he get defensive? Does he give solid reasons for the sovereignty of God in the midst of this problem? No. He simply goes to the boy, picks him up in his arms, and takes him, we are told to an upper room and cries out to God, not once, not twice, but three times. He pleads with God to save this young boy’s life. He puts himself over the boy, covers him like a tabernacle, like a temple, and the boy comes back to life. Elijah picks the boy up and he brings him to the mother. From her tears of sorrow and anger, the widow of Zarephath is now seeing the power of God in action. Have you noticed that at every step of the way in these stories there was a contingency of needs? For example, God needed Elijah to go to Ahab and to declare his prophesy. Elijah needed the widow and the ravens in order to survive. The widow needed Elijah to help with the healing of the son. The son needed Elijah to bring him back to life. And in all things, Elijah needed to trust in God, for only in God is he redeemed.
You know, so often these stories get pushed to the side in the annals of history, yet they speak of the incredible pastoral love of the prophets. We think of the prophets as high and mighty with all faith, being able to draw on the great resource of the Almighty, but we don’t think of them as vulnerable or insecure, and we certainly don’t think of them as people in need. But the prophets had one thing: they knew in whom to trust. It seems to me, as those who follow in the footsteps of Jesus and the prophets (Luke 4 mentions this story), we need to grasp that we do not go through life alone; as solitary individuals figures; we don’t go through it on our resources or even on our own abilities. There is more, far more! For Elijah, there was the widow. For the widow, there was Elijah. And for both of them, there was God.
In an interview this week, Jean Vanier was quoted on the CBC talking about this very reality. He said:
There is something in society that is going wrong. We are thinking all the time that people have to be perfectly independent, perfectly strong, where in reality, my God, we need each other! We need help. We need good doctors, we need old people’s homes, where there is caring and not just one or two nurses or helpers looking after many people and nobody has time to listen to each other. There is a sickness in our society, and how can we, little by little, discover this and to move from the I to the we, for we are all fragile. We all need help, and yet at the same time we all have strengths. My God, we need that!
The prophet Elijah teaches us that truth. We are not just independent creatures. We are not just relying on our own resources. Like the bank robber who went into the bank and stole money without realizing what he had. So too, if we rely on ourselves rather than on the grace, the wonderful sovereignty of God, we do the same. But because of God’s great pastoral heart and because of a community of people who believe in him, we have far more than we will ever, ever imagine! Amen.