Dedication Sunday
November 10, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 146
1 Kings 17:8–16

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We live in a world of words. If you walked but one block in any direction of this space, you would encounter hundreds of printed words — signs, cars, peoples’ tattoos perhaps — before you got to the next intersection. You would hear people speaking words in all kinds of languages. Words are all around us.

Our worship is words, words, and more words: preached words, sung words, prayed words.

And we are trailed by digital words wherever we go. What is a phone anymore but a fountain of words?

The words you speak into it and hear out of it, yes, but also the words you type into it:

The words you read — the Facebook posts, the tweets, the emails.

The words shouted at you inside YouTube videos and TikToks.

The words you consume in podcasts or audiobooks.

The words sung for you through Spotify with the lyrics displayed on your screen for you to read along.

It would be a very challenging experiment to try to go a day without encountering any words. Words make up our reality.

In all that clutter of words, though, are we not listening and looking and longing for a word, for the word that will cut through all the other words to speak truth to us, that will move us, even shake us out of the trance of the nonstop stream of all those other words?

Last week I was listening to an interview with a couple of journalists who were discussing the political situation in America, the feeling that a lot of people have that the affairs of our country are hopelessly polarized, that resentment and retribution feel more and more like the order of the day and how does that ever change, and one of them said something that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

She said, “There are words out there like anxious, afraid, apathetic. I don’t feel any of those things. I feel alert.”

Alert. That word got to me. All this week I’ve been repeating it in conversation. Alert.

A word can do that, can find us and reach us in a hard place. It may not be the word we’re looking for, the word we think we need, and it may come to us from a source we would have never thought to consult.

The widow of Zarephath hears a word, the word, from Elijah, a person she doesn’t know, who is not one of her own people, in a time of utter desperation. She is out here trying to find two sticks to rub together before she dies. She and her little boy have come to the end of their road. Drought has bled them dry. She has pinched every penny and overturned every stone in search of life, and what she holds in her hand is the last of it.

And precisely here “The Lord says” something to her through Elijah.

And Elijah, for his part, hears the word too. This is the word that births the story: “The Lord’s word came to Elijah.” Elijah is a prophet, though, so the Lord’s word is more his stock and trade; the word has come to him before, and it will come again.

His calling is to speak the word of the Lord, but that requires that he hears it first, and the good news is that it is looking for him in a desperate place, just like it’s looking for the widow.

The good news is that a word from God may find us in whatever kind of desperate place we find ourselves in our own lives, in our life as a church, in a moment of reckoning for an entire people. In the waterfall of words, a word, the word, may yet find us and change everything.

I think what has worked on me about the word alert in this moment is that it demands something that is as yet uncertain. You know what I mean?

Alert is not the same thing as defensive. It’s not resigned. Alert is risky, because it means we are paying attention and are open to being moved in a way we can’t predict from where we’re standing right now.

Jesus said, “Be alert, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

The word that Elijah and the widow hear is risky too. I wonder if this story and all the other stories in the Bible that involve people hearing the word of God show us that the way we know that the word we’re hearing is actually a word from God is precisely this: it calls for risk.

But more precisely than that, it calls for the risk of relationship.

There is hardly a less powerful, more vulnerable class of people in all the Bible than widows. Widows are often cited alongside orphans as those in need of special care and protection.

The law of the Israelites required a tithe or produce every third year to be given to orphans, resident aliens, and widows.

The prophet Isaiah condemned his contemporaries because they didn’t defend the orphan or take up the cause of the widow.

And the Christian epistle of James, in the New Testament, calls care for widows and orphans “religion that is pure and undefiled.”

Yet the word sends Elijah to a widow —and not an Israelite widow — not to take care of her and defend her cause but to be taken care of by her.

Sometimes the riskiest task of being in relationship is letting another provide for you. Life-giving relationships are reciprocal; all the parties involve both give and receive, and it seems to me that receiving can sometimes be the riskier part of relationship.

And yet relationship is what the word calls for.

We sometime sing a hymn in here called “The Servant Song” that goes “Won’t you let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you. Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”

I wonder if an element of all those other words, the ones the journalist I mentioned cited —anxious, apathetic, afraid — is a lack of reciprocal relationships.

When I look at those blue and red maps that seek to explain the results of this week’s elections, I suspect that those of us who identify with the blue parts don’t think the people in the red parts have anything to give us or to teach us.

And I suspect those in the red parts don’t imagine they have anything to gain from being in relationship with the blue parts.

The word is “get up and go,” and, especially this week, I hear in that an urgent command to pursue relationship, reciprocal relationships, especially with people who I have been conditioned to think don’t have anything of value to offer me.

“Go” is the word to the widow in this story as well, but for her “Go” feels much more life-or-death than it does for Elijah. For her to “go” would mean to speed her already near-certain death by giving some of hers and her son’s precious resources to this kooky stranger.

“Go … make a little loaf of bread for me first. You can make something for yourself and your son after that.”

Can you even imagine? Why would she do that?

For the same reason that Elijah honored this poor widow with a request for hospitality in the first place: because the word comes attached to a promise.

God promises Elijah, “I have ordered a widow there to take care of you.” And God promises the widow, “The jar of flour won’t decrease and the bottle of oil won’t run out until the day the Lord sends rain on the earth.”

The life of faith is a life of promise, a life of standing on promise. Standing, standing, standing on the promises of God my savior; standing, standing, I’m standing on the promises of God.

The promises of God to us are too many to name. In the pages of scripture God’s promises point to rainbows and milk and honey as much as to babies and descendants more numerous than the stars of the sky.

God promises freedom, and God promises restoration.

The promise of God is for justice that rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream and then forgiveness when we fall short.

Jesus is God’s promise to us of new life, his life, an eternal kind of life where the poor and meek are blessed, the last are first, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

That life, promised to us in the bread and the cup of communion, is Christ’s body and covenant available to us here and now.

Elijah stood on the promise as he made his way to enemy territory to be cared for by a stranger without the means to even care for herself. And she, for her part, stood on the promise as she went home with her two sticks resolved to share some of her desperation with someone who appears to have even less than she does.

The desperation isn’t the end of the story, we know, because God’s word speaks possibility into desperation, and because God’s people stake their lives on the promise of that word to bring new possibility to life.

They took action, Elijah and the widow. They did more than hear a word from God. They did more than speak a word from God, even, more than preach it or teach it or shout it from a street corner. They lived it.

To use a phrase from the New Testament letter of James, Elijah and the widow were not “merely hearers who deceived themselves,” but “doers of the word.”

Our story is filled to bursting with the accounts of those doers of the word who have come before us. We revere them and resolve to follow their example, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day and Desmond Tutu and Mother Theresa.

And that story happens here almost every day as you and I and people whose names will never appear in a book do the word to care of getting up and going to their neighbors, to be with them in reciprocal relationship.

It occurs to me that all of us are responding in some way to the word we’ve heard every single time we set foot in this place, whether it’s to join in worship or to gather at table with friends and strangers to break bread.

Amidst all the big and less-big desperations we face every day, we’re nonetheless, it seems to me, pursuing the promise and doing the word.

I suspect that the days ahead will demand a lot of getting and going for the sake of following the word and standing on its promise.

I heard from a lot of friends and colleagues this week who are deeply worried about the future, concerned in particular about neighbors who were targeted in campaign ads and speeches: LGBTQ people, immigrants, women, the unhoused.

What do we do with that worry? I’m sorry to say there’s not a guidebook for the coming days. But there are watchwords for us: alert, get up, go, and do.

Can we dedicate ourselves to doing the word in this way, when we’re away from one another scattered God-knows-where throughout the week, as well as when we are here?

Yes, we can, which is why our worship always involves offering, an invitation to us to respond to the word we’ve heard in giving that supports the work of the word in this place.

Today is also our Dedication Sunday, when we pledge our support — financial and otherwise — to the ministry of Fourth Church in the coming year. If you wish to make a financial pledge, I invite you to use one of the cards in the backs of the pews and place it in the offering in a moment.

I also invite you to pledge to do the word in the coming days. What is one way you can commit to getting up and going for the sake of relationship? To whom can you reach out? How can you help them, and how can you allow them to help you?

Gestures of commitment like this are what great faith is made of. Amen?

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church