Dear Friends,
HERE IS our text: I Kings 17, beginning at verse 11. The central figure in the account is Elijah, the prophet of the Lord, the God of Israel. The time is during that of King Ahab, but Elijah is not directly in Israel, but a distance away, on the Phoenician coast. God is not pleased, there is a famine in the land, and after delivering the word to the King that these two facts are the condition for the present AND the foreseeable future, Elijah is sent away.
Where he goes, to the distant Phoenician coast, not Israel, Elijah happens upon a widow and her son. They too have fallen victim to the famine; the few crusts the widow has managed to scrape together will do no more than postpone the inevitable end. The prophet asks her to bake him a small cake! With the added promise, should she do so, her resources shall not fail. She does, and they don’t!
Then her son falls ill, becomes unconscious, and looks to have died. This is not a happy story. The minister for God has performed an unpleasant task. The widow, with precious little promise, has jeopardized her own survival, and that of her child. Momentarily there is relief; but even that is cruelly crushed in the affliction to the widow’s son.
What comes next could happen only in the Bible: Elijah asks the widow to give him her son! I think maybe he has done enough. I think he would think he better exercise some caution. I think he would fear to come anywhere near the child. I think wrong.
Elijah takes the child into his own arms, goes to his chamber, and appeals to God; loudly; several times. He prays hard, soul-searching, heart-felt, life-requesting words, to God. And God, who provides meals for adults and a child from a crust of bread, exerts power that brings life. The child is returned to his mother. And the child is very much alive.
The point of our reading accounts like this in the Bible is not to see if it is relevant to anything in our world, if it explains what happens in the world. The point, as Tom Long says, is to hear the account so clearly that it redefines what the real world is and questions what we believe can happen and cannot happen. The point is to tell ourselves and keep telling ourselves what happens in the world where God is alive and at work. The point is that in this account and in our own accounts the central figure is God. Even our own story is not primarily about us. A truth that is good news.
Sincerely,
Pastor Condon
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