Sermons
October 27, 2024 (Proper 25)
Hopeless
1 Kings 17:1-24
Humanity has historically had trouble when our knowledge and technology advance, but our morality and ethics lag behind. The law of unintended consequences, which I’ve talked about many times, figures into this; but there’s more to it than just that.
In the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution in England, with new technology making many things faster, easier, and cheaper to produce, a lot of people embraced the new technology without considering how it would effect people. So you had some people getting incredibly wealthy, while the people who actually worked to produce the goods fell further and further behind. I’ve heard horror stories of entire families—both parents and all the children down to toddlers, who worked as chimney sweeps—working hours we today would consider inhumane but not earning enough to keep body and soul together. And these families would get more and more desperate, until finally the situation was hopeless; and they would “take to their bed,” the whole family in one bed, starving to death.[1]
In those days everybody in England was considered a member of a church—most generally the Church of England—and everyone was expected to tithe to that church. So some folks who were associated with John Wesley when he was still an Anglican priest went out to collect tithes from their parish.
As they knocked on doors of the desperate, hopeless people who were being chewed up in the cogs of the Industrial Revolution, they realized they could not in good conscience collect tithes from them. They said, “We should be giving to them, not the other way around!”
And when Wesley and his associates set up their “Method,” it wasn’t just people’s spiritual well-being they were concerned about. They organized parishes into small groups known as “class meetings,” where people studied and prayed together, and supported one another as they sought to “go on toward perfection”—always a work in progress; Wesley thought a person who believed they’d actually become perfect was now guilty of the sin of pride and needed to start back at square one. But these meetings also became a way for members to share what they had with one another—if someone had food or money or whatever to spare, they gave it to help someone else who was hungry or suffering.[2]
I’ve heard it said that it was the Methodist movement, with its commitment to living in community and helping one another when in need, that kept England from having a revolution like France had in the late 1700s, a revolution that seemed at least in part to be sparked by extreme economic inequality. The Methodist system kept people from starving, kept them from losing all hope, till England’s morality caught up with industrialization.
The widow and her son in today’s Scripture were in a similarly hopeless situation to that of the desperately poor folks in early industrial England, although for a somewhat different reason.
In that time and place, women didn’t have jobs outside the home. We’re so far removed from the realities of that world that we may not even realize that there were no jobs to be had for women, other than perhaps prostitution. A woman would have been entirely dependent on a man—first her father, then her husband, and then, God willing, her son.
The woman in today’s story was a widow and her son wasn’t yet old enough to support the two of them. It would have been a desperate situation even without a long famine. With that famine—which Elijah had announced to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel as punishment on them and their people because of their idolatry—the situation was hopeless.
It turns out this widow wasn’t even an Israelite, and I have a hard time with the idea that God’s punishment on Israel and its rulers extended out to people of other countries. I don’t like it at all. But the text doesn’t deal with this issue at all, and I’m not sure why, other than that this story provides an opportunity for a foreigner to come to know God’s loving-kindness through the prophet. That’s not entirely satisfying, I’m afraid.
But back to the story: Elijah encounters this widow as she’s out gathering a few sticks of firewood. God has told Elijah to find her and that she would take care of him. But it doesn’t seem like she got the memo.
When Elijah comes to her and says, “Give me a drink and some bread,” she says, “I’m fresh out.” She says that she has just enough flour and oil to make a tiny meal for her and her son, and after that they intend to take to their bed and die, because they’ve run out of food and out of hope.
Elijah tells her to do what he asks, and that everything will be fine; she won’t run out of flour or oil as long as the famine lasted. And that is what happened.
But the boy, probably weakened by malnourishment, became sick and died. Things had just started to look up, and then this happened. The widow must have wondered if she’d ever see better days.
As you’d expect, she lashed out at Elijah. She accused him of causing the boy’s death as God’s punishment for her sin.
But Elijah simply takes the boy and raises him back to life. As a result, the woman recognized that Elijah was a man of God, and that God’s word as spoken by this prophet was true. Times may still have been hard, but she now had hope, because God was with her.
These aren’t Elijah’s only miracles, according to the historian. But the other ones—like the defeat of the prophets of Baal in the next chapter of 1 Kings—were a whole lot more spectacular.
The ones in today’s reading happen in a very private setting, and benefit only a couple people who probably never crossed their rulers’ minds. But they were two people who were desperate, who had given up hope, who were getting ready to die because there was nothing left for them to do.
Elijah came to them and filled their empty stomachs and brought life out of death. He gave them back their hope.
I do believe that miracles still happen today. I believe things sometimes occur that can’t be explained—a person is diagnosed with a terminal condition, for instance, but then further tests reveal it’s gone.
But I don’t think something has to be spectacular or unexplainable to be a miracle—in fact, one way to define a miracle is something perfectly ordinary that happens at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place. It can be as simple as offering a kind word to the checker at the grocery store. It can be as small as giving a can of soup to the food pantry. Or it can be bigger—like all of us who work together, week after week, to provide free meals at Community Café.
God works through people—through individuals and through groups of us who come together to try and do some good in the world. And that means we each can be somebody’s miracle. We don’t have to be a prophet or an especially holy person, and we don’t have to go (too far) out of our way; all we have to do is go about our business looking for ways we can make someone’s day a bit brighter, their path a bit less rocky.
So that’s my assignment for us this week: Let’s be miracle workers, wherever, and whenever, and however we can.
[1] My Papa would say, “That’s why you need a union.”
[2] This is all vastly oversimplified, I know; but there’s obviously not time to go into great detail about Methodism and the history of English industrialization in a sermon.