Bob Maddox's Blog

June 6, 2010
1 Kings 17:8-24
No Class Session, Fellowship Breakfast
Bob Maddox

The Widow of Zarephath
Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah saying, ‘Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’ So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, ‘Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.’ As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, ‘Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.’ But she said, ‘As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.’

Elijah said to her, ‘Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.’ She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.
Elijah Revives the Widow’s Son

After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. She then said to Elijah, ‘What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!’ But he said to her, ‘Give me your son.’ He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. He cried out to the Lord, ‘O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?’ Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the Lord, ‘O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.’ The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, ‘See, your son is alive.’ So the woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.’

Today’s discussion takes us to Elijah the Tishbite, one of the more notable and intriguing characters in the Old Testament and far beyond into many religious traditions across the centuries. To get a clue to his enduring presence note that the Internet Wikepedia article on Elijah runs to twenty-three pages. Elijah makes several highly charged appearances in the Hebrew Bible. *In the opening verses of this chapter, he announces a prolonged drought to King Ahab, *in today’s text with the widow of Zarephtah, *reviving her moribund son, *on Mt. Carmel when he vanquished and slaughtered the priests of Baal, *at Mt. Horeb when God comes in the “still small voice,” *at Naboth’s vineyard when the prophet pronounces doom on the House of Ahab for its idolatry and selfishness, *when he and his successor, Elisha, cross the Jordan River dry shod and *finally when the whirlwind of God accompanied by fiery chariots swoop him up into heaven.

In the New Testament John the Baptist gets compared to Elijah. Elijah and Moses come to Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Beyond the Bible, Elijah has a place of prominence in rabbinic Judaism. A chair for Elijah is reserved at some Jewish rites such as Seder and circumcisions. Elijah is revered as a prophet of God in the Koran. Mormons say that Elijah appeared to Joseph Smith on April 3, 1836. Members of the Baha’i faith say that Elijah became incarnate in the person of the founder of that movement in the middle of the 19th century.
He appears out of nowhere in 1 Kings 17:1 when he announces to King Ahab that a terrible drought would strike the land. The calamity comes from God as punishment on Ahab for his promotion and worship of Baal, the false god of the Phoenicians. The whole land would suffer because of the king’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh.

Recall that the tiny but unified kingdom of David and Solomon split apart north and south after Solomon in about 950 BCE. A succession of kings in the north, Israel, managed to hold the realm together for something over two hundred years. Israel’s leadership changed hands several times as a result of cunning and murder. Nineteen kings running through several dynasties ruled Israel for those years. In the biblical record all nineteen of those kings did “evil in the sight of God” due to their failure to uphold the pure worship of Yahweh. By contrast, the even smaller kingdom of Judah with Jerusalem at it center, also had nineteen kings, all of the house of David, with that dynasty lasting something like four hundred years until Babylon conquered Judah and destroyed Solomon’s temple in 587 BCE. A few of these kings of Judah earn positive marks from the biblical writers because of their adherence to their Yahwistic faith.

According to the chroniclers of the pre-exilic Jewish monarchy, north and south, the bench mark for good and bad kings was always their faithfulness in maintaining the worship of Yahweh. Some of the kings of the north did earn accolades from secular historians because of their able leadership including Omri, who built the city of Samaria as his capital, and his son Ahab, forever reviled in the Bible because of his marriage to the” wicked” Jezebel.
Elijah served Yahweh with absolutely focused devotion. History shows nothing of his origins. We know nothing of what turned him to God with such single vision. In most biblical literature, extended biography is just not important. We would like to know how and where he and Ahab encountered each other. Did Elijah show up at the palace one day? Did Elijah confront the king while he was on tour around the country? The Bible does not give us a clue. Why would God punish the entire nation for the sins of the king and queen? But that’s the way it is. We the people always pay a high price for the folly and/or evil of our rulers.

What about the drought? Did God bring the drought? We now know that droughts and other such natural disasters happen periodically. Across the eons, climatic changes have dramatically altered human habitation. Prolonged drought, rain, cold, heat, etc., have forced us human visitors on the planet to alter the way we live. According to many archeologists, several thousand years ago sea levels were something like three hundred feet lower than today. As the last ice age gradually ended, sea levels rose pushing humans further up on the shores.
Not too many television weather forecasters were around in Elijah’s time. Since God or the gods got blamed for everything (American presidents had not yet been invented), the long dry spell came from God’s anger. It was payback time to the king and queen for their worship of Baal.

When Elijah himself began to suffer, God directed him to take his bed roll to a nearby creek. Ravens fed him day and night. In the cultural lore of the time, ravens were unclean birds. Here God breaks through their taboos to use unclean creatures to take care of the Lord’s chosen servant. Maybe this scene got incorporated into Peter’s vision eight or nine centuries later when the Spirit of God sent the apostle to preach Jesus to the Roman centurion. To get Peter’s mind in gear for the encounter with the unclean Roman, the Spirit sent Peter a dream in which a sheet full of unclean animals was lowered before him with the voice of God telling him to eat these ritually repugnant creatures. When Peter recoiled, the voice of God came saying, “What I have declared clean is clean!”

The drought took its toll on the creek so God then sends Elijah to Sidon with instructions to seek out a certain widow who would feed him. Again, God sends the ritually clean and scrupulous Elijah to an unclean foreigner who would keep him alive. “What God has declared clean is clean!” God loves ironies. Often we find something totally new as we encounter God’s ironies.

Who was this woman? We will never know. Is this a parable pointing toward God’s generosity? Is this a word to us to share what we have with others, even though we think we have little to share? What would have happened if indeed the woman’s cruse of oil and stash of meal had run out? Would all three of them have starved? None of that is the point of the story. You can find your own point, I am sure. Remember when you provided help for someone else even at a cost to yourself. Or remember when someone helped you in a crunch even when it cost them more than they had. We can talk some more about this one, also.

Jesus certainly got in lots of trouble centuries later when he reminded his Nazareth neighbors (Luke 4) of the way God sent Elijah to a foreigner for help suggesting that God knew Elijah’s own people would not respond to his needs. Jesus’ people did not want to think that God’s love and grace extended beyond their own borders.
God sent Elijah into enemy territory for help. Baal was the chief god of Sidon. Jezebel, daughter of the King of Sidon, was also the priestess and proponent of Baal. The drought hit the entire region, including, no doubt, Sidon. To show Yahweh’s supremacy over Baal, the Spirit sent Elijah into the stricken region where God fed him and the woman and her son in the face of the drought.

The drought itself showed Yahweh’s power over Baal. The folks who worshiped Baal regarded him as lord of nature, provider of rain and crops, sustainer of life, fountain of fertility. Then along comes Elijah to tell the king and queen that Baal had no power. He could not end the drought. He could not bring rain. Yahweh, alone, could make the world right.

Israel’s gradual shift from many gods to Yahweh alone took centuries to accomplish. Israel’s monotheism became one of the defining contributions of the tiny country to the world, especially the western world. Karen Armstrong talks about the problems wrought by the long string of Israel’s prophets’ insistence that Yahweh alone was God. Israel’s neighbors had no problem with the Jewish claim that their God was superior to the other gods. Every nation made the same claim for their chief god. Serious trouble arose when Israel began to claim that Yahweh alone really existed. The other deities were only fabrications, wood and stone that had no reality.
“Wait a minute!” the surrounding nations shouted. “That’s going too far.” Conflict quickly arose that kept the region in an uproar.

Nothing stays the same, however. Lloyd Geering whom some of us have read, and others scholars in our time are beginning to suggest that insisting that Yahweh, God, the Father of Jesus Christ alone is God brings a measure of confusion to modern people. If “our” God alone is God, why does this God send such terrible calamities on the human race and the world at large? What about other world religions? Are they totally false, are all those millions of devotees delusional? I have a neighbor who is Hindu. Is he wrong? Do we need to expand our idea of God? Hmm!

The widow’s son became critically ill drifting off into death. In profound grief, the woman rails at Elijah. “Here I have taken care of you. Risked the ire of neighbors by having an Israelite in my house, the one who has brought this blight on our land and now the very God who sent you to me has taken my son from me!”
No doubt the woman had prayed to Baal for the life of her son as he became ill. Baal, the lord of life for her and her people, turned a deaf ear.

Elijah then goes through a strange routine in his attempt to restore the boy to life. His ministrations succeed. The boy lives. Again, this shows Yahweh’s power over Baal. For you trivia folks, this is the first time in the Bible that a person comes back from the dead. The witch of Endor calls Samuel back from the grave but he comes only as a ghost, not as a dead person back to full life.

Elijah started out as a creature of his own time despite his faith in Yahweh. In the famous scene on Mount Carmel that would make any Hollywood director of epic movies envious, Elijah calls down fire on the soaking west sacrifice. When God sent the fire, consumed the sacrificial animal and lapped up the extra water in the ditch around the altar that should have demonstrated sufficiently Yahweh’s power over Baal. But not for Elijah. Like any faithful servant of any ancient god, he herded 450 of Jezebel’s priests of Baal into the nearby valley and butchered all of them. That’s the way you did it back then. To kill the priests of this or that god was to humiliate if not kill the god itself.

Talk about a creature of his culture, that’s it. At the same time, Elijah’s devotion to God began to push him in new directions, forcing him outside his cultural comfort zone. Go to a strange land, Sidon, and make yourself vulnerable to a foreigner, a woman at that, God instructed Elijah. That’s progress, moving beyond the norm. If we have a hard time thinking that God caused the drought then ordered the murder of the priests, we can get inside the story and see God’s push to go to new places, and meet new people. Go beyond the norm under the leadership of the Spirit of God.

Today we understand God in a variety of ways, call God by many names, worship through a myriad of rituals. At the same time, we of the Christian approach to God are coming to understand more clearly that we can appreciate the ways of others and faithfully maintain our own ways. This is” our” way to God. That is “your” way to God. We all can all meet the Lord of grace and compassion, redemption and wholeness at the nexus of all our faiths if we will open ourselves to the best of God’s presence.

As you read these notes, we bid farewell to Rich and Pam Smith. After tomorrow, June 6, they will begin their own journey to a new place and ministry. We wish them the best and pray Godspeed. At the same time, like Elijah of old, we begin our own journey as people of Westmoreland into new territory. Just as the Lord had the compassionate widow waiting to help Elijah, we are persuaded that God has people out there to help us grasp the next phase of a grand plan for us. Our abiding, maybe daunting but certainly exciting task is to walk together into new territory. Like any community of faith we are many in one, one in many. We are not immune to confusion, differences of opinion. But our hearts beat as one in a genuine desire to serve God in our time. We have long lived and served through a unity born in and nurtured by our diversity. Part of our job these next months is to make the most of our past as a way to make stronger our future. As the Psalmists say, Selah!

We do not have class discussions tomorrow. Instead come to the fellowship breakfast in the Mabry Room beginning at 8:30 AM. Then worship with us as we celebrate Rev. Smith’s last communion as our pastor.

Robert L. Maddox