The Marathon Miracle--March 11, 2020

The Marathon Miracle--March 11, 2020

Then the word of the Lord came to him, 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. [1 Kings 17:8-16]

Some resurrections take just an instant to happen, like the voice calling, "Lazarus, come out!" or the jolt of an AED that puts someone's heart back in motion.  

This one unfolded over years.  And it is absolutely divine--the God of Israel revealing characteristic compassion for the folks on the margins and bringing life for those on the verge of death.

I find myself both increasingly challenged and yet somehow more in love with the God who acts in this story, the more I spend time with it.  Maybe both are at the same time and for the same reasons.  I say I am challenged by this story for a couple of reasons.  One is that (as Jesus will also later point out in his famously unpopular sermon in his hometown synagogue in Luke 4) the prophet Elijah is sent to... a foreigner.  She's a single mom living in Zarephath, which is a town, as the text here says, "belonging to Sidon," which is to say, she is not an Israelite, and neither is her son.  Elijah is sent outside the border of his own country to help some of "those people."  And more than that, Sidon is the home country of Jezebel, whose worship of Canaanite gods like Baal and Asherah were the very reason that God had sent a drought on the land of Israel in the first place.  In other words, this widow isn't just a "foreigner"--she is a member of the enemy nation whose idolatry had provoked God's judgment.  She likely doesn't worship the God of Israel (notice how she refers to YHWH as Elijah's God, rather than hers), and she is almost certainly the wrong nationality, wrong culture, wrong ethnicity, and wrong religion.  But God sends Elijah to her and her boy all the same.  And, again as Jesus himself will note, there were surely plenty of other people in Israel who considered themselves more "worthy" than this foreigner lady.  But God sends Elijah to this household, saving their lives and bring them back from the brink of certain starvation for the years of the drought.

Just let that sink in for a moment.  We who are so quick to insist, "We have to take care of our own first" and who are sure that this is the only sensible way to run your life, we have this story in our Scriptures, of God's knowing and deliberate choice not to prioritize "the chosen people" but instead to care for someone on the margins, someone easily regarded as a dangerous foreigner, someone even you might have called an "enemy."  We hear lots of loud public voices these days saying, "Everyone needs to look to their own group's self-interest first; that's just the way of the world!" But here is the God we confess to be our Lord doing just the opposite, and directing the greatest of the prophets to do the same.

For that matter, it seems noteworthy that God's life-giving, sustenance-providing power isn't used on propping up the markets, or keeping King Ahab and the royal court stocked up with appetizers and good wine, but rather in just the slow and steady provision of a cup of flour and a few tablespoons of olive oil every day for one widowed mother and her son.  In our day, the pundits are all shaking their heads over the rocky ups and downs of the stock market and so many of the big names are only interested in shoring up wealth in light of the coronavirus... but when a big public disaster like the drought in Ahab's day happened, God didn't sent Elijah to help boost the markets--God sent Elijah to feed a sigle mom from a foreign country and her son.  The God of the Scriptures always seems to have a thing for raising up the most forgettable people to fuller life, and leaving the fortunes of the well-heeled to fend for themselves.

And, to be honest, that challenges me, because it reminds me that God's priorities are way off from where the priorities of the loud voices in our day are pointed.  It tells me that God is always more interested in people than in profits... that God does not beleive the lie that you have to "look out for your own group's interests first"... and that God looks out for the folks on the margins.  And we live in a time where those priorities are often either laughed at or treated as ungodly, rather than being the very heart of God.  That's tough to deal with.

But at the same time, it is these very things about God that make me fall in love with the God of the Scriptures all over again.  This is a God worth worshiping, a God worth giving our lives to.  This is a God whose greatness comes from God's goodness--that the livelihood of a single mother and her son are worth the long-running wonder of a marathon miracle like the jar of flour and the jug of oil that do not run out until the drought is over.  As much as it challenges me to see God's priorities, I am glad to see that God indeed loves a woman whose name has been forgotten to history more than just keeping the third-quarter profits steady.  I love that God loves people more than profits, even as that news challenges me to love people more than my money or my stuff, too.

This is the kind of work I want to give myself to--the kind of work God does here, that seeks out the folks who have been otherwise left behind and brings them to life.  This is the kind of life that is worth living.  Let's be about such enduring resurrections today.

Lord God, send us out like Elijah to bring life to those most in need, even if they were not even on our radar before.