Generosity & Scarcity

"Generosity & Scarcity"

1 Kings 17:8-24
June 6, 2010

Eventually the brook dried up because of the drought. Then GOD spoke to him: "Get
up and go to Zarephath in Sidon and live there. I've instructed a woman who lives there,
a widow, to feed you."
10-11 So he got up and went to Zarephath. As he came to the entrance of the village
he met a woman, a widow, gathering firewood. He asked her, "Please, would you bring
me a little water in a jug? I need a drink." As she went to get it, he called out, "And while
you're at it, would you bring me something to eat?"
12 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."
13-14 Elijah said to her, "Don't worry about a thing. Go ahead and do what you've said.
But first make a small biscuit for me and bring it back here. Then go ahead and make a
meal from what's left for you and your son. This is the word of the GOD of Israel: 'The
jar of flour will not run out and the bottle of oil will not become empty before GOD sends
rain on the land and ends this drought.'"
15-16 And she went right off and did it, did just as Elijah asked. And it turned out as he
said—daily food for her and her family. The jar of meal didn't run out and the bottle of
oil didn't become empty: GOD's promise fulfilled to the letter, exactly as Elijah had
delivered it!
17 Later on the woman's son became sick. The sickness took a turn for the worse—
and then he stopped breathing.
18 The woman said to Elijah, "Why did you ever show up here in the first place—a holy
man barging in, exposing my sins, and killing my son?"
19-20 Elijah said, "Hand me your son."
He then took him from her bosom, carried him up to the loft where he was staying, and
laid him on his bed. Then he prayed, "O GOD, my God, why have you brought this
terrible thing on this widow who has opened her home to me? Why have you killed her
son?"
21-23 Three times he stretched himself out full-length on the boy, praying with all his
might, "GOD, my God, put breath back into this boy's body!" GOD listened to Elijah's
prayer and put breath back into his body—he was alive! Elijah picked the boy up,
carried him downstairs from the loft, and gave him to his mother. "Here's your son," said
Elijah, "alive!"
24 The woman said to Elijah, "I see it all now—you are a holy man. When you speak,
GOD speaks—a true word!"

The two scenes before us are an amazing duo, miracles by God in moments of
powerful scarcity and fear. You have the prophet Elijah, who before our text today, has
risen up and confronted King Ahab and his notorious wife, Jezebel, for their willingness
to worship other gods, especially Baal, and their campaign to have the rest of the
nation of Israel do the same. Elijah has called King Ahab out, and said that there would
be no more rain on the land, something that the god Baal was believed to control—and
so you now have the God of Israel challenging the central power that the competing
deity is believed to be in control of. But the moment Elijah confronts King Ahab, he is
told by Yahweh to flee, to go to the desert, that place of testing and safety, both oddly
enough, and so Elijah goes to desert, the worse place to be in the midst of a drought,
with only the promise that the ravens would feed him, which they indeed do. But
eventually the drought dries up his water supply and from there, he is then told by
Yahweh to go to Zarephath, found in the region of Sidon, which is, ironically enough,
the very heart of enemy territory, the very homeland of Jezebel, this queen whom he
has so insulted with his challenge to her and her husband.

And so that is where we find out text beginning, with Elijah meeting the widow near the
gate of the city, picking up sticks, which was surely a bad sign—she was clearly an
impoverished woman, as most widowed woman were in that country, because men were
expected to take on all support for the family, and when a man died, the family of the
widow were not expected to help out in anyway. In fact, the child of a widow was
considered an orphan, even though he still had a mother—that is how dominant the
male figure was in this profoundly patriarchal culture. Elijah demands—and demands is
the right word here—food and a drink, expecting her to have heard this command from
God to feed this wild looking prophet. But she doesn’t seem to have heard the word,
and so there is some surprise when he wants food, in addition to water, and she says
to him—“look, we’re at the bottom of the barrel, and all I was going to do was to put
together one final meal for me and my child, and, after that, we’re just waiting around to
die.”   But Elijah assures her that there is enough, for him, for her, and for her child,
and to just trust and do, and things will work out, that there will be enough food to feed
them beyond the next few hours. And, much to her credit, she does what he says, she
does the absurd, which is to share what she thought was her last meal, with another,
with Elijah—and, of course, the miracle happens: the jar never empties, and all three
are fed, day after day, in the midst of a deep famine.

But the twin of this story is found in the next verses, in the story of the death of this
widow’s son, the one being kept alive by the endless jar of food. He dies,
unexpectedly, and immediately the widow goes to the worst place, that worst place
within her, that place that blames herself for what has happened, that some sin in her
has been uncovered by the prophet in her midst, and the Lord has duly punished her
by taking her son from her. Now, there is the normal grief, the all consuming grief of
losing a son, but in her circumstances, it’s even more devastating: her son was the only
hope she had of surviving her old age, since it was expected that sons would take care
of their parents when the time came. Now, the world was even more hopeless then
when Elijah had first arrived, and so she lashes out at him, at her guest, trying
desperately to connect the dots between the tragedy of the moment, and this wild
looking prophet who has alighted upon her doorstep.

It’s interesting the connection she makes, the lines she draws, the assumptions she
makes, that somehow God was punishing her for some unnamed sins, of which the
prophet has somehow shed some light on. And it’s even more interesting that even
Elijah seems to blame God for taking this boy’s life, though, of course, in that ancient
world, everything was believed to have happened because of God—boys don’t just die,
randomly, and because of sheer unlucky chance, but because God did it, or, at the
very least, God allowed it to happen. Of course, a lot of us in the modern world, with
Jesus’ guidance on this issue, don’t always ascribe to God these sorts of tragedy or
immediately blame the victim by assuming that they had committed some sin that
caused the tragedy to happen. Jesus himself refused to do that in the Gospels, but in
Elijah’s time, hundreds of years before Christ’s death, everything happened within God’
s will, either as punishment or reward, something, again, that many of us reject, and
certainly I do, and certainly Jesus does as well. Sometimes things just happen, the
forces of nature and circumstances and chance happen, the result of which is often
great pain, great anguish. But Elijah almost demands that God make it right, especially
for this woman who took such a chance on him and his God, Yahweh, and so God does
indeed bring the boy back to life.

But you known, at the root of these twin stories, these twin miracles, is the belief that
there is not enough in this world, the belief that there is only enough for me and my
kind, that there is not enough love left in God for me, and my kind. I’ve often said that I
think that the worst sin I’ve encountered in my own heart, and perhaps in the heart of
others, is the belief that the universe is against us, rather than for us, and that nothing
or no one can be trusted. You can see it in the widow’s words to Elijah, when she says
that there is only enough for her and her son, and not enough for him, and you can
also see it in her words, her assumption that what happened to her son was because of
something she did, some mistake she made, that God would do such a thing to her, as
some sort of punishment for her sins. This was not a God who was for her, but a mean-
spirited God who would punish her by killing her son. In the first instance, with the food,
the widow believes in the untruth that there is only so much to go around, and, of
course, we can all understand her falling for that belief, especially in her
circumstances. And yet, Elijah and Yahweh counter that lie, this idea that there is not
enough for both you AND me, by making by that jar produce more and more food, a
reminder of the truth that the more we give away of ourselves, the more we receive in
return. In fact, it is the widow’s generosity to Elijah that keeps her and her son alive,
something I’ve found to be true in my own life, the truth that generosity is a life-giver,
not a life-drainer, and to be good to others with time and money, well, it all comes back
to us, in our own unique kind of miracle jars. That doesn’t mean we don’t set healthy
limits for our own sake and the sake of the people or places we are being generous
with, but it does mean that we don’t respond to someone’s plea with words like the ones
the widow offered to Elijah outside the city gates.

A Midwestern farmer had the good fortune to win the Power Ball Jackpot of more than
$100 million.

At the press conference announcing the winner, a reporter asked him what he planned
to do with his winnings. He replied, “I think I’ll just keep on farming until it’s all gone.”
Walter Brueggemann, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological
Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, [and a member of the United Church of Christ] sees as
a recurring theme throughout the Old Testament the conflict between the “liturgy of
abundance” and the “myth of scarcity.”

The Bible starts out in Genesis 1 with a liturgy declaring God’s abundant blessing on all
creation. At the end of each day God declares that day’s work to be “good.” It is not
until we get to Genesis 47 that we encounter scarcity. Then Pharaoh organizes a plan
to save up food for a coming famine. Even in the wilderness, God provides Israel with
enough. But the people are frequently fearful that there will not be enough.

Brueggemann sees Americans functioning in the world today much the way Pharaoh
did in Genesis. We, the richest people of the world, are the main coveters. “We never
feel that we have enough,” says Brueggemann. “We have to have more and more, and
this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we
must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the
conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of
our belief in scarcity — a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We
spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity. (religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?
title=533. Retrieved December 6, 2006--Homiletics Online)

Again, though, I would add that it is not only with stuff that we struggle with, the belief
that if I don’t have store up enough, stash enough away, and continually limit my
generosity, then there will not be enough for me—it is not only with stuff that we
struggle with but the belief that God is abundantly not good to us and with us,
something we see in the widow’s assumption in the text, that Elijah’s God was like all the
other Gods, cruel enough to kill a child in order to make a point. Even Elijah makes this
mistake, confronting God as if God had done this thing, had killed the widow’s son,
somehow. Certainly, one can hold God responsible for not doing something to prevent
this tragedy—I think that is a fair argument to have with God—but to assume that God
actually did this thing, that God willed it, well, that is to believe that God is more against
than for us, that the universe is a place of scarcity, where God is fickle and cruel, petty
and mean, rather than assuming what is present all over the early creation stories, as
Bruegemann points out, that this is God of goodness and abundance, that this life and
this world is a good thing, a good gift from a good God. It doesn’t mean that there
aren’t times of scarcity, as, again, Bruegemann points out with Genesis 37, with Joseph
and the famine in Egypt, but what it does mean is that God is right there, even in those
times of scarcity, those times of famine in our lives, as the widow found out in her own
life, a truth that became real to her the moment she shared what little abundance she
had with someone she didn’t even know.

In World War II, a soldier got separated from his unit and was trapped behind enemy
lines. The enemy knew he was there and he had little chance of escape.

He found a cave and hid. He knew that it was just a matter of time before they found
the cave, too.

He prayed to God, “God if you can, please save me, but I trust your will. If I’m to die, let
me die bravely, and take care of my family. Amen.”

He lifted his head and saw a spider busily building a web over the opening of the cave.
Back and forth she went. “Silly spider,” he thought. “We’re both going to be blasted to
bits. I need a brick wall and I get a spider web?”

He heard the crunch of boots and loud talking in a language he didn’t understand. But
he did understand two words. “Spider web.”

As the enemy soldiers walked away, he realized that because the mouth of the cave
was covered with a spider web they thought no one was in the cave. The spider web
had been as strong as a brick wall. (Homiletics Online)

Surely, this is story reminds us of a truth that is found in God’s goodness to us, the
truth   that God doesn’t always give us that abundance in the ways we expected, that
we may not always get a steak dinner, or a brick wall, but God will always give us what
we need, in those moments, moments when the abundance maybe simply a spider web,
or a jar of flour, and some oil, the stuff with which to get by on. When you have
nothing, something sure looks like a whole hell of a lot.

The point, of course, is that we are in relationship with a God who does not give us
stones, as Jesus said to his disciples, for food, but, instead, God gives us the good
stuff, even if the good stuff doesn’t seem like all that much, or what we want, at the
moment. Ultimately, we can choose to trust the God who has always been there for us,
even in ways that were no expected, or even wanted, or we can live our lives thinking
that we don’t have enough in this life, and hoarding what little we do have, never giving
any of it away.

James Hopkins, pastor of Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, shows us those two
choices in this final story, with which I will conclude this sermon.

I know that Rufus Watson loved this story (the story of Elijah and the widow]. Rufus,
who lived to be ninety-nine years old, was born in Texas, the son of former slaves. He
served his country in the military. He pitched in the Negro professional leagues. He
made some money investing in real estate. He witnessed lynchings and spent a lifetime
wondering how people commit such atrocities and still go to church and call themselves
Christians.

He found comfort in this story of Elijah and the widow. He said if his life was not proof
enough, this story showed that God meets people at the bottom of the barrel. “That’s
where God meets us, Jim, at the bottom of the barrel. God meets us when we’ve gone
so low that all we can do is to look up.” If Rufus trusted God to meet him at life’s low
points, if Elijah trusted God to meet him at life’s low points, if God met Elijah and the
widow at the point where the grain, oil, and rain were running out, I guess we are well
advised to do the same. We can hold onto our questions. They are not
inconsequential or invalid. Elijah probably held on to his. He just spoke his faith and
backed up his words with actions.

Of course, let’s not forget about [King] Ahab—fuming about Elijah’s impudence, wishing
someone would do something to make it rain. We could always put our trust in him.
(Feasting On The Word, Year C, Volume 3, 103)