Scripture: I Kings 17:8-16
Given on 11/11/2018
Of all the things that dot the landscape of my recountings of growing up, perhaps, no single moment is as foundational to the development of the person that I am than as the time that we spent around the dinner table. Now, it was not because any of the food was particularly memorable, I cannot think of more than a handful of individual meals whose menus I could readily recount, nor was it because of momentous conversations that changed the course of my or my family’s life, those normally happened in other spaces and at other times. No, what remains firmly etched into the deepest recesses of my memory is the way that our house and dinner table were always a space with an open invitation for any and all to come and break bread with us. And seemingly, more often than not, folks took us up on that offering. My friends, my brothers’ friends, my mom’s friends, my dad’s friends, and sometimes more than one of those group at a time would find themselves gathered around table McLeod. And, again, it wasn’t because any of the meals were particularly fancy, we were at the end of the day a steak and potatoes, or meatloaf, or spaghetti kind of family, but rather, it was because no matter how many were invited, no matter how many were unplanned for, no matter which of my or my brothers’ friends just sort of arrived with nowhere else to be around dinner time, there was always enough for everyone to have their fill. There was always a place for the one who had no other place to be. There was always room within the familial space to welcome just one more person. Even when it seemed that our table could hold no more, we managed to always come up with a configuration that would welcome the one who needed to have their stomachs and their souls fed. Now, I don’t want to make our family seem as if we were perfect, for we certainly were not. There were times growing up, as I’m sure my parents would attest, when it was not clear that me and my younger brother would both survive one another through high school. But, in that space, that sacred space where, at the breaking of the bread, we were told that the disciples eyes were opened and they saw the risen messiah in their midst, in our own version of that Eucharistic moment, we learned how to see the presence of Jesus in the one sitting to our left and to our right. And there was always enough, there was always room for more.
I don’t know what it is like to face the threat of starvation to the point of death, at least not personally. Having had an opportunity to travel to some of the poorest parts of the world both as a pastor and a worker, I’ve seen that reality first hand and the struggle that comes with that awareness. Because in the aftermath of times spent surrounded by poverty only to return to abundance, you are forced to try to make some degree of peace with it because otherwise the guilt that you feel over having plenty when so many live in constant states of want and need simply eats you alive and makes it impossible to ever even get out of bed. And yet, when you’ve been there, when you’ve broken what meager bread they had with them, when you have slept in their beds, and walked along their well-worn roads and pathways, you become inexorably linked to them such that, in the back of your mind, whenever you see advertisements of television showing scenes from desperately poor countries and asking you to consider adopting a poor child, whenever you think about the plight of the poor in Africa, or Haiti, or the borderlands in between the US and Mexican border, or most of Latin America, or geographically most of the globe, you are, in an instant, transported back to those places. You are transported to that village on the coastline of Lake Malawi in which people who don’t always have enough to feed themselves, fed you a feast fit for a king, you are back on the soccer pitch with the school children that you played soccer with on a makeshift field with goals made of piles of construction concrete and rebar, or you see the one you read with, the one sang songs with, you think about the little girl living in the colonias who let you practice your broken Spanish with her when you were first learning to speak the language, you think about all these people who left indelible marks of kindness in your own life, who were Jesus for you in that moment even as you are forced to wonder what has become of each of them, being virtually that some of them did not survive their childhood. So while I don’t know what it is like to face starvation personally, I have known plenty of people who have and it is through this lens that I read the story of Elijah and the widow from our scripture for the morning.
Now as a way of framing the passage, it is essential to know that a drought has passed over the whole of Israel and most people do not have enough to eat, Elijah included. And so when the word of God comes upon him, Elijah has to wonder if he has heard the instructions correctly. God commands Elijah to go to a certain village and find a widow and her child and ask them for some bread to eat. This comes at a time within the history of Israel in which widows and their children occupied the bottom rung of the social hierarchy. Unable to keep any of their husband’s accumulated wealth or property, they are often left with a choice of returning to their family of origin and asking their families to take care of them or, if their families also did not possess the resources to take care of them, going out into the streets to beg for a living. In this case, the widow and her child have chosen the latter. So it is she who we have to believe is trapped in the poverty that is endemic to systems of social oppression while she is out gathering sticks as Elijah comes to her to ask for a drink of water and a small loaf of bread to feed himself. And here we see the internal struggle of the woman, and of the faithful in general. And you can almost picture the pained, maybe shameful countenance that passes over the woman’s face as she explains to the prophet of God that she herself is starving. That she has tried to make her meager flour and oil last through the harshest part of the drought, walking the line between alive and dead for herself and her son but has now realized that she and he are not going to make it. She has but flour enough for a final loaf of bread and then she is left to let nature run its course while she waits for the death of her child and then, I would imagine, mercifully, her own death. And yet here is this man, no one she has ever met before, no one she has ever even seen coming to her and asking her to take from her last loaf a portion for him. And so here is where we see that kindness, pure kindness, must be brought together with faith. Here is where we see that true generosity of spirit and resources must always be paired with a foundational belief that regardless of what happens to our earthly bodies, our physical existences, that it is forever and always God that is in control of God’s creation. Here we see that true love for one another includes an element of sacrifice that often comes with a weight that we cannot imagine bearing, and yet, bear it, too frequently, we must. There is no way that widow can possibly know what will come of this but she has to be of the belief that this action will hasten the death of her child, hasten her own death, and yet, there is a spirit of kindness that dwells deep within her, a spirit that believes that the time is always right to do what is right, a spirit that tells her that we are called to love no matter what the cost, to take care of the stranger in our midst no matter what happens next, to give all that we have in service to the one in need standing in our midst and trust that God will provide what we need to do so.
In our Thursday morning group, we have spent the last couple of months studying Martin Luther King’s Strength to Love, a collection of sermons he preached in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the white-hot portion of the Civil Rights movement in this country. And one of the central issues that King spends much of the time in his sermons trying to work out for himself is how to reckon with the cost of sacrifice that comes from interacting with others in a peaceful, nonviolent, and loving manner. So whether it is the person that cuts you off in the grocery store line or the person who releases the dogs on your community of the faithful while you are silently knelt in prayer, both of those persons, just as are you, both of them are beloved children of God worthy of your love. But it is the second half of that equation that we have returned to time and time again that we have found the most challenging. It is the reality that we, as loving followers of Jesus, can only control what we do, how we act, how we interact with the one in front of us. We can never control how they react to us. Aware of this challenge, King arrives at a robust understanding of redemptive suffering. Suffering at the hands of those who do not love. Suffering at the hands of those who would do us harm. Suffering at the hands of those who do not see our common lineage, humanity, or personhood. History tells of a story in the life of Dr. King in which, early on in his efforts to be a leader in the Civil Rights movement, while he is speaking before thousands at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery his house is bombed with his wife Coretta and their oldest child, Yolanda, at home. While neither were hurt the message, from those who sought to silence him was loud and clear. That evening he stood among the wreckage and spoke to those that gathered and pleaded for them to continue their practice of nonviolence, to not return evil for evil, or an eye for an eye, but rather to ground themselves all the more in the transformative power of love. Even later into the night, sitting in the dining room on the cusp of morning staring at a half-consumed cup of coffee, King recounts that this event, this attack had shaken him to his core and challenged the fundamental things that he thought he believed about the world and in his physical, mental, spiritual exhaustion, he screamed out at God, for calling him to this place and time. At that moment, King recounts, he felt a calming presence, a strong reassurance that, no matter what happened over the course of his life, he would forever be in the hands of a loving God and with that reassurance, he could courageously move into an uncertain future with suffering, sacrifice, and immolation forever uniting his deep sense of love and concern for all people with a deep and abiding faith that all the world, all creation, all the cosmos is forever held by God.
Returning to the scriptures for this morning, we see the widow of Zarapheth in a new light, through a new lens, deciding to offer Elijah the last of their bread, the last of their sustenance, the last of their security and yet, she gave it freely without a moment’s thought. And because of her willingness to share, because of her concern for the one in hungry in her midst, because of her kindness, we see that God, gives her all that she needs to live, to sustain herself and her child, that no matter what else happens, she will not be deprived of food. Because she combined her impulse towards kindness with faith in God, she had her needs addressed.
It has never ceased to amaze me that those with the least are often also the kindness. In Africa, upon arriving at the village on the coast of Lake Malawi, we were treated to a meal the likes of which I have never experienced before or since. We were seated at the front table in the sanctuary and brought all kinds of homemade African dishes, stews, fruits, fish. Houses that either didn’t have electricity, running water, or a single bulb powered by a single solar panel, took us in, gave us the only bed in the house, treated us like honored guest. In Mexico, out of houses, though to call them houses is being extraordinarily generous, emerged plate after plate of homemade beans, rice, tortillas, guacamole, kindness on top of kindness in the form of food, sustenance, love. Not knowing from whence their next meal might come, they gave what they had to show appreciation to those of us there building house. Love, when guided by kindness becomes the hands and feet of Christ in the world. Kindness when brought together with faith give us a vision to bravely more into the next moment giving of our material good and corporeal selves knowing that God uses each act of sacrifice to redeem the world just a little bit more. Vision, faith, kindness, and love, when united into a singular moment becomes an unstoppable force within history. The only force that has ever brought about a lasting and reconciling change.
Now, if we cast our sight across the expanse of time and space seeing all the brokenness, violence, and disunity that overwhelms the children of God, any hope for a brighter tomorrow obliterating the darkness seem unattainable, impossible, overwhelming and such hope and naïveté leaves us facing the temptation to retreat back to our little comfortable enclaves were we know that at least we can take care of ourselves and the ones we are closest to. To be overwhelmed in the face of such challenge is not only ok, it’s human. But it also misses what is being asked of each of us. Such hope can only come to fruition when we see that it takes steps, not leaps. It takes the simple act of reaching out to your neighbor and asking if they are ok, or a shared smile with a complete stranger, or reaching out to the impoverished one in your midst and giving her a dollar, five dollars, whatever you have. It is in the simple acts of the moment that the love of God as experienced in Jesus Christ is conveyed. Moreover, it is the moment that you see the one of different skin tone, different belief structure, different socio-economic status as your sister or your brother that the oneness of Christ is born witness to and embraced as a calling on our lives. And in turn, bit-by-bit, excruciating inch-by-excruciating inch that those little moments grow into bigger ones. It is but seeds planted in a moment that may not come to bear fruit for generations and yet, eventually, they do. It is acts of kindness with the faith that God works through acts of kindness to change people’s lives and to change the world. It is the kindness found in this moment, and this one, and this one, that will create the history shaping moments that eventually turns all of creation away from the darkness and into the light. It is this moment and this one and this one. All we have are moments. How will we use them? Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, amen.
*-Image is: By Giovanni Lanfranco - J. Paul Getty Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48327676