Sunday, June 5, 2016 | 8:00 a.m.

Hungry for Miracles

Matt Helms
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 146
1 Kings 17:8–24

There are two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

For as well known as he is, we actually don’t encounter the prophet Elijah very often in our three year lectionary cycle—texts about him appear in the lectionary just four times, and some of those are only listed as alternate texts. It’s not surprising on one level—after all, Elijah is present for only six-and–a-half chapters in the book of Kings before ascending to heaven and leaving the prophet Elisha in charge. But despite his relatively short footprint in the biblical text, Elijah has had an outsized presence in both Jewish and Christian thought and tradition throughout history. Despite more lengthy recorded traditions surrounding Samuel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and many other prophets within the Bible, Elijah is often lifted up as the prophet—a paragon of what it meant to live by God’s word. Traditions and rituals surround him in Jewish practice, and in the text of the New Testament we occasionally hear the people of first century Judaism naming Jesus as Elijah returned. During the Transfiguration, one of the climatic and revelatory moments of the entire Gospel message, Elijah and Moses appear alongside Jesus—with Moses representing the Law and Elijah carrying with him the weight of prophetic tradition.

With all of this transcendence and legend that has built up around Elijah, though, it’s easy to hear our texts today and miss how much of an outsider he is. This story marks our first introduction to Elijah and his prophetic work, along with a brief origin story about him surviving in the wildness some time before heading back towards the civilization of Zarephath, where the widow of our lessons lived. Far from being a transcendent figure, the Elijah of our story today is more akin to a John the Baptist precursor than any sort of polished prophet. He represents the wild, prophetic voice of God: an unexpected and seemingly spontaneous presence who is unsettling on many levels—and one of those levels is that his prophetic ministry begins outside of Israel to a lone widow.

There is not much known about the widow of Zarephath, but we can definitively say that she would also fall under the category of “outsider” in the biblical story as well. Widows in the ancient Near East often had no means of economic support, and our passage makes clear that she does not even have enough food to provide for her family. Beyond that, in the worldview of those who first heard this biblical text, she would have been understood as a Sidonian foreigner—one of the many countries with which Israel was often at war. Why would God’s prophet visit someone who was both an outsider as a widow and as a foreigner? Perhaps, to paraphrase a Derek Wolcott poem, ‘either [she was] nobody, or [she was] a nation;’ she was exactly the type of forgotten, quote-unquote “lesser” individual that God often worked through and spoke to. Perhaps in the story that God is writing there are to be no outsiders.

But regardless of why this meeting between two outsiders came to be, the message of these two scenes is profound. In the first scene—a story that can be read as a prefiguring of Jesus feeding a crowd of 5,000 from the gospels—Elijah appears out of the wilderness to the widow and asks her for water and bread after his travels. While it’s easy to forgive Elijah the first time reading through the text, subsequent readings tend to bring his request into a harsher light: unwritten cultural rules and norms around hospitality demanded that a person would provide food and drink, even at the expense of one’s family. And that’s exactly what is taking place in our scene today. When Elijah makes his request, the widow accepts but notes that this act of making food for him would be the end of her supply, leaving her and her son to starve. This can be read as something of a deplorable action on the part of Elijah—taking what little food she has for his own benefit—but instead he makes her a promise: until the fertile season of growing and harvesting returns and she can fill her baskets once more, her jar of meal and jug of oil will never be emptied. It is a promise of abundance—one that Elijah makes on behalf of the abundant and life-giving generosity of God, and one that bears out in the rest of this first passage.

In the second passage, though, the stakes become even higher. The widow’s son falls ill, nearing—and perhaps even at the point of—death. Once again the widow is understandably distraught. “What do you have against me?” she asks Elijah, as she views his prophetic presence as bringing judgment upon her for her sins. But Elijah immediately goes upstairs to see the boy and manages to heal him using an unusual method, eventually pleading with God for this boy’s life to return to him once again. Amazingly, the child’s breath is restored, and Elijah is able to share this joyous news with the widow. If the prior scene prefigured Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000, we can certainly see similarities between this scene and Jesus’ raising Lazarus or Peter raising Tabitha in the Book of Acts—which are astonishing miracles in their own right. These stories of people being raised from the dead defy logic and certainly enhance the esteem of the person who has performed the miracle. But Carolyn Sharp, an Old Testament Professor at Yale Divinity, offers another lens for viewing this story: “Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this story,” she says, “is not the resurrection of the boy but the intimacy of the prophetic presence. This wild Israelite prophet ends up dwelling with the Sidonian woman not just briefly, but for years. His choice to be present with her shows how we may embody the prophetic word in our own lives: in intimate solidarity with those at risk.”

The intimacy of the prophetic presence is a fascinating lens through which to view both of these stories, particularly when we view Elijah’s initial request for bread and water as a type of reverse metaphor for the sustenance of God’s word. Our encounters with God’s word, whether it be through reading scripture, in church, or outside these walls, often ask things of us. Sometimes these things are easy to give. Other times, like in the case of Elijah requesting the widow’s food, those requests pose a danger or risk to us in how we are to live our lives. God’s prophetic word may ask something of us that we’re not ready or willing to give—and yet sometimes in taking a risk and giving of parts of ourselves where we may be hesitant, of being willing to open up all of ourselves, hosting God’s prophetic word has the ability to completely transform and remake us. This widow is no longer an outsider in God’s kingdom, but a blessed part of it—and that transformation is perhaps an even greater sort of miracle than the more tangible ones taking place in this passage.

Approaching miracle stories like these is always a difficult task, because we as a people are hungry for the type of seismic miracles in our world that we see in our texts today. There is a pervasive sense—or at least there seems to be a pervasive sense—that all is not how it should be in our world. The reasons for this are many—and, to be fair, I’d imagine that a sense of dissatisfaction with the present has been a common sentiment throughout much of history—but those feelings leave us wanting dramatic and swift resolutions to large-scale problems. We want complicated problems like hunger and poverty to be solved like Elijah’s promise that the widow’s basket would never go empty. We want new life even in the midst of death. Wanting these things is not wrong by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes we spend so much time longing for transcendent and all-encompassing miracles that we miss recognizing the individual miracles of transformation that are going on right in our midst—the transformations that occur when we invite God’s prophetic word into our midst.

I’m always amazed, even though I shouldn’t be, at some of the many stories of transformation from folks who come through this building—many of whom our country views as “outsiders” just like Elijah and the widow were viewed. There are powerful stories about men and women who were guests with our church’s Social Service Center, having been homeless for a decade or more, who through hard work and dedication and through the assistance of our EDSSC staff were able to find stable housing and a stable jobs. There are powerful stories from our Urban Farm of kids finding refuge from neighborhood gangs and finding mentors who helped them achieve all of their potential. Heck, I don’t know if this qualifies as a miracle, but earlier this year one of our kindergarteners was playing with his toys at home and decided that he had too many and he wanted to donate them to other kids who didn’t have any toys to play with it. That may be a different type of miracle—but it’s one that I’ll take nonetheless. We are surrounded by examples of small but significant miracles in which lives are being reborn, but sometimes each of us need reminders that they are taking place.

My reminder came earlier this year when I got a call out of the blue from a man who was on his way to work. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me—he had just called the church and asked to speak with the pastor who was on call for that day. After a little bit of banter, the man shared that the reason he was calling was to pass along a word of thanks to the church for compiling our monthly devotion booklets. He didn’t attend the church very often, he said, but when he passed through on occasion during the week, he always made sure to grab one of those booklets for something to read. And it was at that point that he shared that he had been in a dark place for the last year, struggling with depression and even contemplating suicide. These thoughts had been hanging with him, preventing him from living fully. But he shared one of the devotions that he read about Jacob wrestling with God—and he couldn’t even remember who the author was—had given him a ray of hope. It was a message that he had heard many times before, but something about the way this particular devotion was written clicked with him—and as the days went by he began to feel the weight of his depression slowly being lifted off of him. “It was still there”, he said, “but your church gave me the chance to continue on,” sharing as well that his thoughts of suicide hadn’t appeared in the past three days.

I was floored after our call together ended; even though I enjoy the process of writing devotions, I never would have referred to them as life-saving. Yet it helped me to recognize that God’s miracles are taking place all around us, often in the most unexpected of ways. Elijah was well regarded as a transcendent prophet, but some of his greatest miracles came from just a quiet meeting with a poor widow beyond the nation of Israel. We don’t need to look only at the transcendent for our miracles—if we take the risk of hosting God’s prophetic word, we will be asked to encounter and participate in transformational miracles in our ordinary, everyday lives—sometimes transforming others in ways that we never expected or even realized were possible. Sometimes the simple act of a kind word, of donating your time, or writing a devotion about hope can be a spark that brings about life in the midst of death. But in order to participate in that type of transformation, we must first be willing to risk hosting that wild, prophetic word of God in our lives. So what might that voice be saying to you? And are you indeed willing to live your life by it? Amen.