Today’s worship service was special. We recognized our 50+ year members, and we installed four new elders. Then our choir surprised Shirley Curry, our Minister of Music, with an anthem that was commissioned in honor of her birthday. You can watch the whole service here or read the sermon, below.
“Doing the Impossible”
1 Kings 17:8-16
Our story for today takes place within a series of stories about Elijah. Scholars are quick to point out that three miracles appear in this chapter alone. In the first few verses of the chapter, Elijah told King Ahab, the king of Israel, that God was quite unhappy with him. Ahab had married Jezebel, a Sidonian princess, and had begun worshiping her god, Baal. Elijah warned of God’s wrath, saying, “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” It is not clear whether Elijah was predicting the drought or causing the drought, but either way, King Ahab was furious and Elijah had to flee for his life. He went into hiding, and God fed him by having ravens bring him food. This is the first miracle. Of course, ravens are considered unclean, so the birds working as room service attendants is a bit iffy; but Elijah was miraculously fed, and he drank water from the riverbed.
But after a while the riverbed dried up because, of course, there was this drought that Elijah either predicted or caused to be. So God told Elijah to go to Zarephath, in Sid’on. God promised that a widow in Sid’on, a Sidonian woman, would feed him. You heard the story a few minutes ago—he asked the widow to use her last bit of oil and meal to make him a meal. She did as he asked, and then her oil and meal never ran out. That was the second miracle.
In the passage immediately after the one we read, the woman’s son soon became gravely ill. Elijah either healed him of a deadly disease, or raised him from the dead—the way it’s written, it’s hard to tell which. Either way, that was the third miracle.
But I think scholars missed one. They missed the miracle of a mother giving to a stranger that last meal she had for her child. Most mothers (and fathers) are pretty adept at putting other people’s needs before their own. But putting other people’s needs before their children’s needs? Not likely.
The widow, as a resident of Sidon, was most likely a follower of Baal. Maybe she was a devout believer in Baal, or maybe she was simply a follower of the god of her culture. But either way, she has no reason to trust Elijah and no prior faith in Yahweh. Remember, she replied, “As the Lord YOUR God lives, I have nothing.” Yahweh was not her god.So why would she do it? Why would she prepare food—her last bit of food—for a stranger before feeding her own child? Did she somehow have faith in this prophet she had never met? Did she somehow have faith in a god she’d never worshiped or experienced? Did she have a gut instinct or intuition or some sixth sense? Unfortunately, we don’t know her motives any more than we know her name. But somehow she did what I as a mom would call impossible.
In the Bible stories we often focus on the miracles God performed, while overlooking the fact that the miracles occurred because humans allowed them. The widow could have refused to share. Moses could have refused to return to Egypt. Mary could have refused to consent to the pregnancy. Yes, God acted in miraculous ways—multiplying oil, freeing slaves, bringing life—but each time the humans consented. Or maybe convincing the humans to consent was the real miracle.
My father’s father, “Hank” Maddox, was a farmer. I think I’ve told you about him before. He never made it past the seventh or eighth grade. He was rough and course and always smelled like the barn. My father was gentle and tender with his girls, and I didn’t know what to do with this man who would grin as he pinched me under the kitchen table and intentionally scratch my face with his whiskers when I kissed him goodnight. Plus, I heard a few stories about my dad’s childhood—stories that made me wonder how my grandfather had managed to raise two gentle, loving sons, when he didn’t appear to have an abundance of either characteristic.
And yet. There was a time in the life of their little country church in Scott Depot, West Virginia, when there were problems. People were upset with the pastor, and some of them were leaving. “Hank, you leaving, too?” they asked. “Naw, I’m not goin’ nowhere,” he purportedly said. “Why not?” “Well, when we built this church building, I gave the deed to my farm as collateral. The bank is still holding that deed.”
How do you do that? How do you risk your farm—your home, your land, your income, your investment for the future—all for the sake of your church? Plus, that wasn’t the end of that conversation. My grandfather said, “The bank is still holding that deed. . . . And I wouldn’t leave even if they weren’t. This is my church.” I call that a miracle.
I was recently re-reading parts of A Pilgrim People Still, the book on our church’s history. It is filled with stories of difficult times. In 1756 the pastor’s installation service took place in an orchard because the faction of people opposed to the pastor locked the others out of the building. A year later, 24 parishioners were sent to prison for refusing to pay the parish rates. (I don’t want to hear anybody complain about our stewardship campaigns!) At some point there were questions about whether the pastor had been poisoned. (The Search Committee left out that little story!) But by 1765, the pastor whose installation had caused such controversy “eventually won the respect and confidence of his fellow citizens” and the faction that had left, rejoined.
Then in the early 19th century, the church faced numerous challenges. Our book tells us, “At the turn of the century, the church was nearly extinct.” “There was an era of religious and moral indifference, periods of inactivity when the church did not have a settled minister … and years when there were inadequate funds to pay the pastors.” At one point the parishioners questioned the pastor’s “religious conversion,” and a few years later, the next pastor questioned the parishioners’ religious conversion.
I love this part: “After having previously made derogatory remarks about declining church membership and the discouraging religious prospects of Cape Elizabeth families, [the pastor] stated in an address in 1831 to members of the Cumberland County Temperance Society, that ‘more than three-fourths of the male heads of families in Cape Elizabeth are habitually intemperate.’ As may well be imagined, his accusations did not endear him to the parishioners and sparked a bitter controversy, especially after his remarks appeared in a local newspaper. (I make mistakes, but I promise not to tell the newspaper if you are “intemperate.”)
Throughout these years, there are repeated stories of financial difficulties. But in spite of all these challenges, and conflicts large and small, the church survived. Is it a miracle we survived? I don’t know. At times I’m sure the people felt like they were living in a drought. I’m sure it seemed like their oil and meal would run out. But it didn’t. The spiritual food of this congregation never ran out because the people were generous … generous in money, generous in time, generous in forgiveness.
We are here because of the generosity and determination of those who came before us—personified in the 58 current members who have been members here for at least 50 years, and for the 54 elders currently serving our congregation. They are part of the miracle. So are we.
This church may have survived because of Elijah-sized miracles—miracles of an unending supply when we thought we would run out. And maybe we as individuals have survived the same way. But our miracles don’t have to look like Elijah’s. All of our miracles don’t look like divine intervention.
Some of us are sitting around with empty cupboards and empty spirits. Some of us feel like we’ve been living through a drought, and we’re at the end of our supply of anything that could bring us life. And we don’t see unending oil and multiplying meal. That’s not what our miracles look like. Instead, our miracles are a little bit more like the widow’s. We keep ourselves and our hopes alive in the face of famine. We make a difficult choice, one that seems right even though rational thinking says it’s wrong. We handle what life throws our way, and although we bend, we do not break. These are the miracles the widow teaches us.
Today we celebrate the miracle of unending oil and meal, and the miracle of sharing all that we have. We celebrate the bread broken and the cup poured.
(Continue with communion.)