Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
June 10, 2007
1 Kings 17:8-16
Many years ago a group sang a song, I am thinking it was the Kingston Trio, a song that told a story of a man lost in the desert who comes upon a well – a pump – and next to the pump sits a jar of water with instructions to prime the pump. Well the man faces a dilemma out there in the desert – does he trust the note and prime the pump, hoping to get more water, or does he just drink the jar of water and satisfy his thirst and move on? The chorus of the song was the note that had been pinned to the pump and it went something like this:
You’ve got to prime the pump, Drink all the water you can hold,
You’ve got to have faith and believe. wash your face, cool your feet.
You got to give of yourself Leave the bottle full for others.
before you’re ready to receive. Thank you kindly, Desert Pete.
It is a song about trust and faith. Does he trust that priming the pump will produce the abundant water that is promised? Is he willing to risk his life, there in the desert, with that promise?
Well that is the issue in our text today: faith… trust… believing in the promise. As I said it is the beginning of the story of the prophet Elijah. He appears suddenly during the reign of King Ahab. Now Ahab has displeased God. He has taken Jezebel, the daughter of a Gentile king, as his wife and has now built altars to her god. And so we read that this evil has ‘provoked the Lord’, never a good thing to do. Now there is a drought. This is desert country anyway and with a drought there is famine and death. And so Elijah appears and he challenges the king. It is interesting how the true prophets to the Old Testament always seem to be in opposition to the king – it is always them against the empire. They are holding the king accountable. There is no executive privilege as far as the prophets are concerned. Elijah declares a kind of spiritual war against Ahab. “There will be no rain as long as Ahab pursues his evil and faithless ways.” And then just as suddenly as he appeared, Elijah is gone.
God then calls Elijah out into the wilderness. God is always sending people ‘out into the wilderness’ and God promises Elijah there will be water there, the ravens will feed him.
Again, will he trust the word of God and go? Well, he does and indeed God’s promises are true – Elijah comes out of the wilderness and discovers it is not over. He is now told to go to this widow in the town of Zarephath in Sidon, which is Gentile country. This Jew is told to go and have this Gentile woman take care of him. Will Elijah trust yet again? He goes and what does he find when he gets there but this woman gathering sticks by the city gate so she can prepare one last meal for her son. In the midst of the drought and famine there is just enough food for one last meal. It is a rather poignant scene when the woman says, “And then we will die.”
So Elijah says, “Now wait just a minute, before you die, can you give me a little of your food and water? And then trust that the Lord will take care of you.” A Gentile woman being asked to share the last that she has with this Jew and to trust in his God. So now what is she going to do? Is she going to trust and believe the promise?
This is a dilemma that neither one of them ever thought they would face. Jew and Gentile, man and woman – the barriers between them were enormous – years of distrust and fear. Now they literally hold each other’s lives in each other’s hands. And God is saying to them, “Go ahead, trust me, it will be alright.” You got to have faith and believe.
I just can’t resist that old joke – a guy falls over the cliff, grabs onto a branch on the way down. “Help! Anybody there?”
“I’m here”
“Who are you?”
“I am the Lord. You can trust me, just let go. I’ll take care of you. Trust me.”
The man continues to hang on and then says, “Anyone else up there?”
I imagine both Elijah and the widow must have wanted to ask that same question. They were being asked to put an awful lot on the line…all on the basis of a promise in the name of faith and trust. A little reassurance might have been helpful… “anyone else up there?”
We are separated from this text by literally thousands of years, by culture, by circumstance. And yet, it speaks to us still...at least it speaks to me still. In fact, this text challenges me, it just grabs me by the lapels and won’t let me go. I read this text and I wonder…how much of my life do I dare place into the hands of God? How much of my life, if any, do I trust to God? The widow is starving, her son is starving. This man, this Jew, this foreigner, let’s face it – this enemy – comes to her asking for food and drink and telling her it will be okay, to trust his God. And what is even weirder in this text is she has already felt the stirrings of this same God in her own heart. She is told to not be afraid – an interesting concept in this fear-filled country of ours. She is told to share her meager supply of food – another interesting concept in a society where accumulation of more and looking out for number one are expected, if not encouraged; and she is told to trust that God will provide. Don’t be afraid, share what little you have, and trust in God. And what is absolutely amazing is that is exactly what she does. It is a radical, audacious, trust.
Things seem fearful and dangerous in our world today. Unfortunately it seems to me that fear mongering is already becoming a major part of the next presidential campaign. Indeed, according to Newsweek magazine, we in this country seem to have developed a mentality that says we are always under siege, a mentality which then justifies us being in a constant state of war. But things were also dangerous and fearful in the time of Elijah. There were threats on all sides. Foreign enemies abounded. Internally, the country faced drought and death. The king was powerless. Events were beyond royal control. The economy was in shambles. The government had failed, the world had failed, maybe some even thought God had failed. The times were ripe for fear, despair, and dismay. Enter Elijah and a poor widow. They have no credentials, no experience in disaster relief, no political connections. All they bring is faith and a willingness to trust in and follow God. And in the face of scarcity, they find abundance; in the face of despair they find hope, in the face of fear and death, they find the power of life.
Two stories: In his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky tells the story of a peasant woman, a very wicked woman, who, leaving no good deed behind, died and went to the lake of fire. But she insisted that, in fact, she had done a good deed once, she had given an onion from her garden to a poor beggar. And so God held out an onion to her, let her take hold, and see if it was strong enough to pull her out of the lake. An angel pulled on one end and she held tightly to the other and, sure enough, she began coming out of the water and fire. She was almost out when others in the lake began to grab hold of her so that they too might get out. But she began kicking them off and screaming, ‘It’s my onion, not yours!’ And with that, the onion broke and she fell back into the fire.
A second story told by Fred Craddock about his mother. He says, “I lived near a railroad track as a boy, and I remember a number of mornings getting up, going into the kitchen for some breakfast, and there’d be a strange, ugly looking, poorly dressed man sitting at the table eating – just eating away. I was scared of him. And when he left, I would ask, ‘Mom, who was that?’
“She’d say, ‘Well, his name was Henry, and he said he was hungry.’
“’Where’d he come from?’
“’He came down the railroad tracks.’
“People called them hobos,” said Craddock, “They walked the tracks begging, maybe stealing, getting what they could to stay alive. They’d stop by our house and sit there in our kitchen, eating what we had to eat. And I’d say, ‘Mama, weren’t you scared?’
“She said, ‘He was hungry.’
“’Well, I was scared of him.’
“’Yes, I know. But he was hungry.’”
I want to be like her. Now, I know that in this day and age we could argue are you really going to let someone like that into your kitchen with your kids? Still, I want to be like her – here was someone open to the possibility of blessing, of abundance; open to trust, open to life as a gift to be shared, truly believing that there is enough grace and love and hope to go around and that as they are shared, they really do grow. I want to be like her.
But way too often I am like the first woman: clinging to what I have, fearful, seeing danger on all sides, trusting only that which makes me feel safe and secure, never wanting to risk too much of myself lest I get hurt. “This onion is mine. Get your own onion.”
But then along come Elijah and that widow and they just blow all that apart. They do not play by the king’s rules, in fact do not look to the king for security and meaning. They look elsewhere for the power of life and in the process break all conventions, routines and stereotypes about how they should act and what they should believe and who they should trust. And that is what makes this ancient, ancient narrative so compelling and, indeed, so dangerous for us. Look at the radically different path we are invited to follow, look at the audacity of their trust, the depth of their faith.
As Carl Jung once said, “The decisive question for a person is: Am I related to something infinite or not? Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite, can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.” Which I guess would explain the Paris Hilton phenomenon! Am I related to something infinite or not? Or am I just what I consume, what I accumulate, even what I fear? And if I am related to something infinite, something good and loving and grace-filled, then as we sang earlier, “what have I to dread, what have to fear…”
She was just another poor woman, gathering sticks so that she might prepare what would be the final meal for herself and her son. Yet she heard this call from a strange God, something infinite, and was invited to trust. As risky as it was, she accepted the invitation. And a healing, abundant, life-giving spirit, more powerful than any darkness, was released.
And so I have the feeling that while I may be about finished preaching on this text, this text may not be done with me. This image of Elijah and the widow trusting so much to their God will continue to rattle around in my soul for a while. And, oh yes, back to the man in the song with which I began, holding that bottle of water, wondering if he should give in to fear and thirst and drink it, or if he should take the risk of priming the pump. Finally, he trusts the promise, primes the pump and has abundant water. He trusts the promise. May the same be said of each of us.