Desperate Strangers [Proper 27B - 1 Kings 17:8-16]

 The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

1 Kings 17:8-16

 

Desperate Strangers

St. Timothy’s, Westford

 

The excitement was overwhelming…until it suddenly and decisively abated.  The hometown crowd had been buzzing about the return of their rising star.  Jesus was making a name for himself in the surrounding villages.  And now, he was coming home, to do his thing. 

 

It started off strong.  Jesus was amazing.  They were impressed; it was impossible not to be impressed.  His beginnings were humble but you would never know that, the way he held the crowd, the way he exuded otherworldly wisdom.  They were hanging on his every word.  He was even better than they imagined.

 

Jesus should have quit while he was ahead – pulled a George Costanza and walked off on the high note.  But Jesus stood back up.  He played the encore.  After wowing the crowd, Jesus decided to add a little something to the end of his highly successful sermon: “The truth is,” he said, “there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.”  This addition was not well received.  The adoration turned quickly to rage.  And the crowd, the hometown crowd, decided to throw Jesus off a cliff to his death.  All because Jesus reminded them that God loved the people they despised.

 

The drought, the drought Jesus mentioned, was the reason God commanded Elijah to go.  Elijah’s wadi, his water source, had dried up.  And without water, the prophet would have surely died.  And so, of all the places in the world, God sent him to Zarephath.

 

Zarephath was to Elijah what Ninevah was to Jonah.  It was enemy territory.  It was a hostile destination.  And the prophet was set to arrive as a refugee – a political exile, on the run from his own king.  In a time of drought, in an age of scarcity, Elijah came to Sidon, as a foreigner, to drink their limited water and eat their limited food.  And, perhaps to make matters worse, he comes for the limited water and limited food of a young widow and her starving little boy.

 

Unlike Jonah, Elijah does go; he is more desperate.  And, just as God promised, he finds the widow, gathering sticks.  Sticks for a fire.  Sticks for a last meal.  She has nothing.  And Elijah asks her for everything.

 

But she has a little child.  And her husband has died.  And they are on their own – struggling to survive and failing to survive.  And so she cannot bake bread for a foreigner.  She has to take care of her own.  She denies his desperate request.

 

Elijah is a prophet, a seer, a man of mystical vision.  And he sees what truly haunts this woman, what drives her decision: fear.  She is afraid to lose her child too; she’s already lost her husband.  She is afraid of the death that stalks her home.  She is afraid that there is not enough – food, water, time.  Maybe she is even afraid of this male immigrant and his unreasonable demands.  And what he might do to her and to her child if she refuses him.

 

Elijah recognizes her fear and names it.  He says to her, “Do not be afraid.”  But she is because there is much to fear.  And yet something amazing happens: the prophet’s word works a little miracle in this young widow and she takes a chance.  She risks everything on the generosity of a God she does not know.

 

And God, revealed to her through a desperate stranger, gives her new life.  And she and her little boy live; they eat the bread of heaven in a time of drought.

 

Jesus told this story in his synagogue and it almost cost him his life.  And that seems strange, but also it makes sense.  Because it is the story of a God who loves across borders and beyond bias.  In the zero sum game people play, God deals in reckless abundance.  And a lot people do not like that.  God loves our enemies as much as God loves us.  And a lot of people don’t like that either.

 

The cruelty of our lines and limits clashes with the mercy of God.  We value power and yet our God came to us packaged in weakness, the weakness of both manger and cross.  We celebrate the winners and yet our God gives justice to the oppressed and lifts up the lowly.  We fear the other and yet our God cares for the stranger. 

 

We read this story from 1 Kings from the perspective of the prophet, through the eyes of our hero.  But the truth is: Elijah is the stranger in this story.  He wanders into a foreign country to seek safety, shelter, and help.  He is desperate and desolate.  He is a criminal on the run from the authorities. 

 

Elijah was at the mercy of an impoverish woman.  And she opens her heart to him – even though she is afraid, even though it is a risk.  And in the merciful desperation of their relationship God creates a miracle.  Because God loves them both and means for us to find our salvation with each other.