Sermon for Lectionary 10 C  Proper 5C
Second Sunday after Pentecost
June 6, 2010
Texts:  1 Kings 17:8-24; Psalm 146; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17

Whatever was God thinking??

Is what God did in these three Bible texts this morning logical?

No way!

Using human logic,
What God did in the texts we heard this morning,
Makes absolutely no sense,
And we stand here shaking our heads as we listen to these stories.

In hearing Paul’s letter to the Galatians,
As he relates his personal history,
You would have to wonder
Why God would choose a known persecutor of Christians
To be the one to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It would be kind of like getting Rush Limbaugh
To be Barack Obama’s campaign manager. 

God could not have found an unlikelier candidate
To be an apostle of Jesus Christ. 

Then, in hearing the story from Luke’s Gospel,
About Jesus in the town of Nain,
You would have to wonder why the Lord,
Who surely knew all the rules,
Would choose to touch a coffin,
Knowing that he was making himself unclean and an outcast.

Why did God choose to go against the rules,
That God set down in the Torah,
Particularly in the books of Leviticus and Numbers.

And then in the Old Testament lesson from the book of Kings
You really have to ask what God was up to.

Before our story starts, God has rescued Elijah from death by thirst
After the brook by which he is camped dries up in the drought.

But as part of the rescue mission,
God sends the starving, thirsty Elijah
To a non-Israelite widow in the middle of a famine.

Now if you were God, and you wanted to rescue someone from starvation,
Wouldn’t you want to send him to a rich generous person of the same nationality,
Someone who had sufficient provisions to survive a drought and famine,
And who might feel some kinship.

Why would you send him to someone poor, in a foreign country?

As we try to think about the irony in this story
I think it is hard for most of us to really identify
With the total desperation of famine being experience by Elijah and the widow.

We barely have an understanding of starvation or hunger,
Despite the fact over 15% of all US households
Experience some time during a year when members of the family go hungry.

When most of US say we are famished,
We mean that it has been a couple of hours since we last ate,
And we haven’t had time to fix or procure food,
Or we don’t like what we see in our pantries. 

In the US, hunger is due not to lack of resources,
But rather to an inequitable distribution of the resources we have.

Even in the dust bowl era in the southern plains in the 1930s,
Where farms, income and living conditions were destroyed,
By drought, erosion and powerful dust storms,
There was little evidence of a true famine.

Somehow, families with support of neighbors, churches and social agencies
Found enough to eat to ward off starvation. 

True famine is often attributed to a combination of poor crop conditions
And war or political action,
As has happened numerous times in Africa during the past decades.

Deliberate blockades or city sieges can also result in horrific famine,
Such as occurred during the siege of Leningrad, now known as Saint Petersburg,
By the Germans during World War II.
At that time, people ate everything from their pets to the wallpaper paste on their walls.
It’s estimated that 1 Million people died during the winter of 1941-42
From starvation or freezing.

In a true famine, there is simply no food available at any price,
And people, particularly the most vulnerable children and elderly,
Die by the tens of thousands.  

In the Biblical story we heard this morning,
Israel and the surrounding countries, in the eight century,
Were descending into a deep famine due to drought,
In an area that experiences water shortages in the best of times.

Just like in modern times,
The people who suffer the most in a famine
Are the widows, the children and the desperately poor.

So who does God send the prophet Elijah to,
When God is trying to protect him from drought and famine?

In what seems to be a completely illogical action,
God sends Elijah to a desperately poor widow with a child.

When Elijah shows up demanding food and water,
This poor unnamed widow is preparing to make the final meal for herself and her son,
Before succumbing to starvation. 

Elijah doesn’t seem to question God’s action,
But the poor widow is immediately struck with the unfairness of the situation.

You want bread, do you?
My son and I have only enough for a morsel between us.

How can I feed anyone else?

Yet, for whatever reason,
She responds to Elijah’s command to feed him first,
And God responds with the supply of oil and flour
That lasts throughout the duration of the famine.

Her pantry never goes bare,
During a time when literally no food supplies are available.
She and her son survive because of God’s illogical intervention. 

And yet, God’s illogical actions continue.

In case you thought the widow and her son were safe
Once the famine was over,
Not yet.

After rescue from the famine,
Her son dies suddenly from some unspecified disease.

This widow now wants Elijah out of her life,
And even Elijah is struck this time with the unfairness of the situation.

God indeed does respond to Elijah’s words
Pleading for God’s own intervention. 

God brings the boy back to life,
Saving both him,
And his mother, the widow, from certain destitution.

After her son’s resurrection,
This widow, a foreigner,
Sees, acknowledges and believes in the power of God.

This story bears a lot of similarity to the story told in the Gospel of Luke,
Where Jesus, whom Luke calls Lord,
Brings back to life the only son of a poor widow.

Jesus following in the tradition of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha
Takes compassion on a widow whose only source of hope
Has been stripped from her by death.

By restoring the son to life,
Jesus also restores the widow to the hope of an old age
Supported by her son. 

God’s logic in either of these stories is not clear to us.
Why send a starving man to a starving widow?
Why save a widow’s son only to let him die,
And then bring him back to life again?
Why did Jesus choose the Widow from Nain’s son to raise from the dead.

We have also have difficulty extrapolating from God’s actions in these two cases
To all the suffering widows and children we know,
Who have not been healed and whose family members
Have not been raised from the dead.

We can’t read and tell these stories with the expectation,
That God is going to turn around every bad thing that happens
In our own lives or in the lives of our friends and family. 

We tell these stories to help ourselves see the nature of God.

We tell them to help us realize that God’s logic is not human logic,
And to help us understand that we cannot predict God’s action.

We tell these stories to help us see again and again
That our God is God of mercy and compassion.
Not a distant, arms length kind of God,
But one who is capable of intervening on a personal level.

Think about it,
Jesus, as Lord, defied a restrictive law,
And healed a young man with a touch.

God heard the pleas of Elijah and intervened to save a widow’s son.

These stories don’t tell us what God will do for us,
But rather give us a glimpse of the nature of God.

Instead, these stories give us the so-called “foretaste of the feast to come”.

Luke has been telling us that the kingdom of God
Or the reign of God is upon us.

In these healing and feeding stories,
We see a glimpse of that kingdom,
A kingdom where there are no suffering widows and children,
Where there is no famine,
Where the bread and oil never run out
And where a mother is never forced to bury her son.

In this kingdom of God,
God uses all sorts of people to do things
That ordinarily would make no sense.

Paul, a hater of Christians, becomes a Christian evangelist.

A starving widow is used both to save a starving prophet
And to witness to the power of the living God.  

And a  grieving mother provides the opportunity for a miracle
That has ordinary people proclaiming the glory of God.  

These glimpses help us to see that the reign of God is here,
Not fully here but enough for us to believe in its existence.
Sometimes we say that the kingdom is already, but not yet.

Because we are a people who live and thrive on hope,
These little glimpses at what God intends for us,
Give us hope for the time
When God’s reign will be complete.

This is the time predicted in the Book of Revelation
When there will be no more hunger and no more thirst,
And no more mourning and no more crying,
And God will wipe away every tear
From every face. 

So why do we care about the two widows in these stories?

Why do we care that their sons were fed and healed?

How do we deal with our reality and logic
That tell us that not all the sons get healed
And not all the children get fed?

How do we deal with our human logic that cries out
O Lord why, and how long,
And why haven’t you healed me or my child or my spouse or my friend,
And why is someone in my family still unemployed.

We care, because even though we live in the today,
In the now, the already and the not yet,
In the chaos, pain and suffering of our world,
In the middle of all the things that are not right,
We need these glimpses of the world that God intends.

We need the hope of a God
Who promises to tend to us,
Who promises to show mercy and compassion,
Who promises to wipe the tears from our eyes,
And who promises us that yes there is something better to yet come.

We need the hope of the one,
Whom Luke calls Lord,
Who does indeed rise from the dead himself,
And who promises us that we and our loved ones will also rise once again.