June 6th Sermon

Here is this week’s sermon.
To go along with it-consider this video on time perspective.
It points out that people are often past oriented, present oriented, or future oriented, and that we are raising children to be present oriented, while we have a society that rewards future oriented people who plan carefully. Thinking about caring, (the topic of the sermon) one thing I notice is its often easier for me to care in the immediate sense-care for the people in front of me who need help-than to care in the future sense-notice who is being neglected, who might like a pastoral call, planning ahead so that everyone is well served. Do you notice how your time sense changes you?

Elijah and the Widow of Zarapheth
Good morning, God be with you today. I hope that you are feeling God’s spirit with you this morning.
I wanted to start out this morning by thanking you for renewing my call to minister here for another three year term on Friday night. I am pleased to continue serving as your pastor. As part of this process, everyone was invited to fill out a pastoral review, and I have received the collated results from the surveys that were returned from the LCG, and after looking them over, I agree wholeheartedly that my office could use more organization, and I will work on it. More importantly, I want you to know that I take feedback very seriously, and those of you who revealed more personal concerns are in my thoughts and prayers as I envision what it means to be pastor here. I would welcome anyone who expressed these types of criticism to talk with me, or with members of the LCG, in person, because I would like to have a better understanding as to how I might better serve you and this congregation. Now, to something completely different.
You may wonder how the people who construct the lectionary arrived at these texts this week-these scriptures are not the most famous stories from the Bible, by any stretch of the imagination. You might recognize the widow of Zarephath , because whenever we focus on Jesus’ first sermon in Luke, where he explains that there were many widows in Israel, and Elijah came only to the widow of Zarephath (a moral for the story that the Old Testament does not even begin to engage), but I think its worth thinking a little more specifically about these stories of resuscitation (I prefer the term to resurrection in cases like this, where the time of death was short, and there is no sense that there was a fundamental transformation in being after the person came back to life). These are the most extreme example of the healing story genre that are so common throughout the Biblical text.
For me, these stories are always somewhat difficult, particularly in times of grief, or when talking with people who are suffering, since most people don’t receive these types of miraculous healings, and the constant pattern of life and death in the world has gone on uninterrupted despite these stories of temporary deviations from inexorable mortality. Because of this, I wrestle with what exactly I’m supposed to do with this. So I want to acknowledge that at the beginning of this meditation.
However, I think, difficulties aside, there are all sorts of things going on in these stories. You have God’s plans within plans, sending Elijah to a widow that supposedly has been warned of his coming, but clearly has no idea she is going to host him, you have this sense that the presence of God is both something to be celebrated, and something to be feared, because if God is close by there is both the chance to be blessed, but also the chance that your sins will be remembered, and punishment ensue, we can remember that while we usually think of raising people from the dead like this as evidence of Jesus’ divinity, Luke tells us that the people claimed him as a prophet, in the tradition of Elijah.
But what I really want to talk about is that in these stories, we learn something more about what God is doing in the world, which should be of particular concern to those of us who claim ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done’ in the Lord’s prayer, and who have voluntarily chosen to follow the path that Jesus set before us.
These stories very much are stories of God’s mercy and new life breaking into broken situations. It goes without saying that in almost all cases human beings would rather that death might be delayed, all things being equal, and even in those rare times when we might consider saying ‘it was time’ there remains deep grief in the hearts of those left behind. But in this case, there is something more going on. In ancient Israel, the position of widow without children was one of the most vulnerable in all of society. As a result of entrenched patriarchy, women were largely dependent on men for income and status. Your husband defined both your wealth and power. If you lost your husband, your status dropped dramatically, and someone else would need to take care of you. Usually, this would be your children, who hopefully were old enough to take over the work of the family farm. If you were childless, however, you would lose control of your land, and then other, less close relatives would be expected to keep you alive. This would leave you without a secure home, or firm ties to the community.
In addition to the immediate and severe economic challenges there was a theological struggle for childless widows-so much of the promise of life was tied up in progeny. Children were your heirs, your promise, your connection to God’s promise of the land and descendents for Abraham. If you look at Deuteronomy 25, there is a law concerning Levirate marriage, where if a married man died without a child, his brother was supposed to marry his widow, and Deuteronomy says “And it shall be, that the first-born that she bears shall succeed in the name of his brother that is dead, that his name be not blotted out of Israel.” So to have a son, and see them pass away before bearing children, and to know that you will never have another child was in a deep way to be cut off from the community-to be quite literally blotted out. You can get a sense of this despair, when Naomi, in the book of Ruth, returns home to Bethlehem, and tells the people there "Don't call me Naomi, [b] " she told them. "Call me Mara, [c] because the Almighty [d] has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty.” (Ruth 1:20).
So, these miracles, to have a son who was lost brought back is a story not only of grief undone, these are also stories of people woven back into the fabric of community, whose futures no longer would be defined by desperate poverty, who found themselves once again with hope.
And this I think is where these stories have something to offer us. Because if we are called to be the loving face of God in the world, then I these stories should shape how we offer love and care and support and encouragement, such that people who face suffering, and poverty, and loss of community, and even deep grief feel that they have a place to go, and a people to care for them.
Now, that’s a pretty high calling-there is a lot we cannot do, and there are a lot of people that we are not going to be able to help, but the story of the Widow of Zarephath in particular gets me thinking about how we participate over time in the lives of people we love and create beautiful things with one another.
And the thing I’d like to call out in particular here is the repeated need for miracles. The widow is in need every single day. Every day she uses the last of her oil, and the last of her flour, and every day there is a little more left. This is living on the edge, and it is a daily reality for many people in this world. And like many people on the edge, sometimes it feels like the whole world is against you. She has braced herself for the worst, to starve to death with her son, only to discover a miraculous salvation in the person of Elijah. Then, when the drought breaks, and things finally seem to be getting better, another catastrophe, and she is back, worse off, maybe than when she had started.
Our lives are like that sometimes, and we have the old sayings to prove it-bad things come in threes, when it rains it pours, why is it always, always me, things of that nature. We face a world where it can feel like there is never a horizon or a break in the clouds. So we as a church have to both be ready to help people over time-to be present again and again when people face long term illnesses, or poverty, or other life struggles there are rarely quick fixes, and to help people in the moment, when they face a one-time problem or crisis.
So I want to celebrate the ways in which we claim this roll of loving presence, doing what we can to be the face of God in the world, whether its visiting Mary Elise in the hospital, making sure that people without transportation get to church every week, supporting MCC’s efforts at relief work in Haiti, or longer term educational ministry through school kits, not to mention the very personal, even private ways that we offer communities of love and care to our friends and family who find themselves in need of both sustained support and crisis intervention, because I think it is in these places where brokenness is restored and people find new life that God is at work today.
We can hear these Biblical stories and wonder about the mystery of miracles, or our own inability to transform the world, but what I would invite you to consider instead are the ways in which we participate in resurrection, helping individuals, families, whole communities transform through our love, our advocacy, and our persistent patience offering what we have to those in need.
One of the most beautiful images of this resurrection, of our renewal and transformation is the way that seeds grow into flowers, in the way that living things pass on and still create the next generation. You may have noticed the Coneflowers up at front, which Jane has been so kind as to provide this morning. They are not just for decoration. What I’d invite you to do is after I’m done here, to come up while Sheila plays, and take a small envelope, and fill it with a few coneflower seeds. They should be ready to plant if you’d like. If getting up is difficult, don’t worry we’ve got some envelopes ready to go for you as well. As you take them, think about the ways that God is inviting you to participate in the world, to be resurrected, to celebrate community, to love those around you so that the world might reflect your care, and may you again and again be reminded that you are a people of God, and may the word of God be always in your mouths.
Amen.