Out in internet land (where I spend far too much time), a colleague asked about this morning’s readings: How come he didn’t remember ever having preached on them? The answer is simple: depending on when we celebrate Easter determines where we pick up in the lectionary cycle for this long season of Pentecost that stretches from last week through to the end of the month of November. Looking at my preaching records back to 1994, we have not started this early in the third-year cycle of readings. So if you are not particularly familiar with the story of the widow of Zarephath, do not despair!
Since we are going to be spending the rest of the year hearing from the gospel according to Luke, I thought it would be interesting to focus this morning on the story from the First Book of the Kings, since it is probably less familiar. The end of the first book contains stories about the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Herbert O’Driscoll describes the setting thusly: ‘We are in the Israel of nearly a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Life is almost totally rural. Small villages and towns, few and far between, are fortified. The rule of local kings is unpredictable and tends to weigh on the backs of the people. Above all, there is great tension in this region between two kinds of reality, two ways of living, two views of understanding how the universe works. In the language of the time, there is a war between competing gods. These gods have names. One is called Ba’al and the other Yahweh. One is a god of nature; the other is the God of history. To believe in Yahweh is to believe that there cannot be any worship of other gods in one’s life.’(1)
The story we hear this morning begins with a widow who initially feeds Elijah out of her poverty: she only has a little meal and oil. However, she recognises that it is a prophet in her midst so she gives her all to him. God provides abundantly and she, Elijah and her household even eat for many days.
Suddenly, the scene shifts and the woman, having escaped one disaster, famine, now faces another: her son is no longer breathing. She accuses Elijah’s presence for this turn of events: somehow with his staying with her, some unknown sin has been brought to the present and it is on account of this sin that her son has died. Her response is as common now as then: when tragedy strikes, people think that God is punishing them.
Elijah does not defend himself. Instead, he takes the son, lays him on his own bed and goes as far as to ask God if his presence really was the cause behind the child’s death: ‘O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon this widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?’ Elijah questions this theology and shows, through God’s actions, that this theology is bankrupt. He combines prayer and ritual and somehow God hears him and brings the child back to life.
The widow then changes her opinion of the prophet (and God). She utters a confession that witnesses both to the power of the word of God and its mediation through the ‘man of God.’ The activity of both prophet and God bring about the restoration of the son. The story climaxes with the widow’s profession of faith: ‘Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.’
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There are many ways to approach this story but since the whole question of why is there suffering and why it happens to good people is on my mind, I am going with that.
The injustice of snatching a son away from a widow demands comment (insofar as answers to such questions are never readily available). It raises some of the questions people ask God, such as, “Why were we created if this is what happens to us?”
Questions of loss—be it of a child, a dream, a hope—are raised by this portion of the biblical passage. Certainly the sudden illness and possible death of the son seems a cruel turn of events for a woman whose identity is found through him. How many women know the difficulties of the widow of Zeraphath? How many women know what it is like to raise a child single-handedly? How many women know the despair that comes when the well-being of the person or thing dearest to their heart is suddenly threatened?
Oh, the prophet revives her son. This he does, and mother and child are reunited. This is a happy ending to a potentially tragic story, but how does one approach such a story in the context of real life when the prophet does not miraculously appear and bring back to life one’s beloved? How does one speak to that sort of pain which demands answers when one knows that one cannot find them? Like the widow, are we not tempted to say: ‘What have you against me, O man of God?’
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I think of these questions because in two weeks I will be part of a team who will be spending four days with the clergy and their families of the Episcopal Church of Haiti. During this four-day period, called, Strength for the Journey (Kouraj pou vwayaj la), we will begin to address three main topics: the human condition, life as a journey, healing and moving forward. On the second day, we will discuss briefly questions of theodicy:
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Why do the innocent/children/elderly suffer?
Where is God in all of this?
Does God care about me? Is suffering a test? a punishment?
Where is hope?
Where do you stand on these questions? Do you think God makes people suffer in order to test their faith (that is the Job story)? Do you think God punishes people for their sins by making them suffer? This line of thinking always seems to come to the fore after some disaster — people preached this post 2001-earthquakes in El Salvador, post 2005-Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and now in Haiti. Do you think God abandons us in our suffering? Do you think God accompanies us in our suffering? How much is suffering part of the human condition, that is, our finitude, the fact that we are mortal? How much of suffering is related to the choices we make? Some of choices can be labelled as sinful insofar as they do not respect God’s creation — be it people, animals or the earth. Where is hope when we are confronted with a disaster of inconceivable proportions?
I am still working on a theology of suffering. My heart has a two-word answer when confronted with suffering: God weeps. Expanded: God weeps with us. The implications of this statement are great: what I am saying is that God does not have utter control over the earth, over what happens on it and to it any more than God has control over us. My statement clearly goes against any concept of predestination, e.g., that the people of Haiti were predestined to suffer such devastating loss and there was nothing they could do about it.
My belief does imply that we human beings do have a lot of options — whether we choose life or death, of ourselves, our families, our societies and our world. This past week, my heart has ached seeing the photographs of the birds that are so gunked up in oil from the Deepwater disaster that they are unrecognisable. The life of a brown pelican or a laughing gull should be as precious as one of ours. And, so, we have to make drastic changes in our way of living. We have to make choices that favour life. I do not think in this example of the disaster happening in the Gulf of Mexico that God is punishing us for sin. We brought this one upon ourselves.
This sort of example is perhaps easier to confront than those where choice does not play into question, such as when an infant dies or when people’s worlds come undone through earthquake, hurricane, flood, or war. We are left with more questions than answers in these moments, with sighs too deep for words.
What I do know in my heart is that God is with us in the tomb. God is with us in the suffering. God is not going to take that suffering away from us, through sometimes that suffering will disappear through reasons we cannot explain which we may well call miraculous. I know in my heart that the accompaniment of others through prayer, communion, tears, talking, and (as contradictory as this might seem to what I have said above) handing over that which I cannot control to God, while taking responsibility for that which I can control, that somehow I can bear some of the suffering that comes my way. And I know that I need the community of faith for prayer and support.
In the bottom of my soul, I know that if I go to the depths of the sea God is there with me, if I go to the heights of the mountains, God is there with me, that wherever I go, God is there.
We may not have a clear answer to the ageless question of why there is suffering but we can pray that God be with us in that uncertainty.
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Saint Patrick’s words sum it up well:
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. (Hymn 370)
END NOTES
(1) Herbert O'Driscoll, The Word Among Us, Year C, Vol. 3 (Toronto, ONT: Anglican Book Centre, 1998), 16.
(2) Terence E. Fretheim, Proclamation 6: Pentecost 1 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 28-29.
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