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Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider

If you step back and think about it for a minute, you cannot help but be struck by how odd some Old Testament stories—like the one we find in 1 Kings 17, for instance—really are.  Or maybe it’s not so much that these stories are “odd” as that they are striking in terms of how freely they toggle back and forth between the stunningly divine and miraculous and the typically mundane.

What I mean is that things just “happen” in these “Bible Stories” in ways not so very different from how they “happen” to us in our lives (and often in ways that make no sense to us either).  So in the early verses of 1 Kings 17, God directs the prophet Elijah to Brook Cherith (or Kerith) where the prophet’s life is nourished and sustained by the fresh water and the miracle ravens who bring Elijah bread.  Oh, but wait, then a drought hits the region and the very same brook that had been such a providential source of sustenance dries right up.  Why didn’t God keep the brook replenished with water? 

Then Elijah ends up in Zarephath and lives with a widow and her son.   Elijah’s presence is quite literally a Godsend to the woman.  As the story opens, she’s gathering sticks to build a fire over which to cook the last meal she and her little boy will ever eat before starving to death.  It’s a bleak picture right out of some Russian novel or something.   A foreboding pall of tragedy is cast over everything.  But then God’s servant shows up and, ta-da!, all is saved.  The flour and the oil go on and on during those bleak times of drought and famine and so the widow, her boy, and their special houseguest remain well fed.

Oh but wait, then one day the little boy gets sick and dies after all.  Well, at least he was well-fed up until the day he dies at a tragically young age!

But if God had been able to keep the flour and oil going all that time . . . wouldn’t you think he could prevent an otherwise healthy kid from growing suddenly ill and then dying?   It reminds you of those awful stories you read in the newspaper sometimes of the miracle child who beat the odds in overcoming leukemia only to get killed by a drunk driver while the child pedaled her bike down her street one afternoon.   What’s up with that?   All those answered prayers and then, boom, tragedy after all.  The child’s funeral everyone thought they had blessedly avoided takes place anyway.

It doesn’t make any kind of sense.  How can stories in even the Bible—stories that are otherwise so shot-through with a sense of God’s presence—still include the inexplicable events of everyday life with which we all struggle in our lives?   And let’s not forget the real sting behind that question: because in our lives, things don’t always turn out as happily as they do for the widow in Zarephath.  In fact, more often than not, the tragedies that inexplicably come seem to get the last word.

Of course, there is one way to get at these questions and that is the pious (and possibly correct) answer that all of it is divine action.  God dried up the very brook he used to keep Elijah alive so as to drive him to Zarephath where, in turn, God intended to do other great things through Elijah, one of which was the miracle of raising a child from the dead (and so this death, likewise, was planned and used by God to achieve a greater end result).

Perhaps.  Of course, it’s hard to see how the quiet miracle of the flour and oil going ceaselessly on created much of a stir at the time in ways that bolstered both Elijah’s reputation and the glory of the God of Israel.   And although the raising of the child no doubt got noised around Zarephath eventually, it is difficult to know for sure just how much of a greater effect even that had on anyone alive at the time in that whole region (much less on wicked King Ahab back in Israel).  True, it makes for a great Bible story now and that is worth a lot but at the time . . . it’s difficult to know.

Another possible angle on this is that in the lives of biblical characters—no less than in our own lives today—things happen in this world that we cannot explain.  Sometimes the inexplicable events are profoundly good things—blessings we didn’t see coming, successes we don’t deserve.  But then there are those other events—and sometimes they take place in the midst of blessings—that are inexplicable in grim and terrible ways, sudden illnesses and deaths among them.  These things just happen, and the people of God are left to make sense of them, crying out to God for an answer and for help but not always getting either one.   Things happen.   Blessings follow tragedies.  Tragedies sometimes follow blessings.   Sometimes the very thing we had been sure for so long had been a gift of God gets taken away in such a manner that we’re left to wonder if we had been right all along in thinking this had been from God at all.

It may not be comforting exactly to see our own situations and difficulties reflected in the lives of biblical figures like the ones we encounter in 1 Kings 17.   It may be true that “misery loves company,” but that’s a cold comfort at best.  Still, there may be some hope and good news to be discerned in realizing how similar our lives are to these biblical figures after all.  No, God does not always swoop in the way he did for this Zarephath widow and undo the tragedies that come our way but we can draw comfort from knowing that the presence of such events does not mean God has abandoned us.  The ins and outs of why once-good circumstances turn sour—why a one-time good working of God gets reversed—are at best difficult to discern.   Yes, it may be that the day will arrive when we can connect some dots and realize how God did work for a greater good despite all that seemed bad to us at the time.   But we all know people who sought in vain for years for just such a parsing out of tragedy only to go down to their graves without having a clue. 

But what we cannot doubt is that God remained with those good folks during those years and decades of confusion and earnest seeking.  Even Elijah in this story seems blindsided and bewildered by the events in which he himself was caught up.  His initial question at the death of this young boy was the same plaintive question the boy’s mother asked: Why!?   Did God bring Elijah to her just to bring suffering?   After that neat trick with the neverending flour and oil, is the boy’s death where it had been headed all along?  How can that be?   Elijah didn’t know.   The mother didn’t know.  And although Elijah raised the boy back to life and so restored life to this hapless woman, the ultimate answers to their initial questions are not revealed here.

What is revealed is that God is present.  God is listening.   And God can act.

Miracles in the Bible—like the one in this week’s gospel reading in Luke 7—never mean that all suffering will end in the here and now but point to God’s dearest intention of bringing about a kingdom where all will be well.  Such miracles are indeed signs, arrows, pointers to where the heart of God is.  And God’s heart is fixed on a return to shalom.

Illustration Idea

Whether it is because you lived through it or because you've seen plenty of documentary footage of it, the odds are that most people here this morning pretty well know what the term "Beatlemania" means. Throughout much of the 1960s this phenomenon swept over people wherever John, Paul, George, and Ringo went. The Beatles were the twentieth century's single most amazing musical and pop culture phenomenon. Even learned scholars and psychologists have rendered serious analyses of just why it was that so many people became engulfed in hysteria wherever those four lads from Liverpool appeared.

Beatlemania went well beyond simply lining up early to buy new records or purchase concert tickets. Instead we remember the images: girls screaming and crying at the top of their lungs, girls tearing their clothes off, concert workers carrying out the girls who had literally fainted dead away, crowds chasing limousines down the street, long lines of police officers linking arms to form a human barrier to hold back the surging throngs.

Most of us know all about that. But there was something else that happened as part of Beatlemania. Apparently there were many parents over the years who brought their crippled and sick children to Beatles concerts, hoping against hope that maybe the Fab Four had so much power as to be able to heal their children's ailments.

Ours is a sad world: sad, confused, mixed up. So many are so desperate for healing. Each year untold millions are spent on quack medicines, alternative therapies, and other latter-day snake oils. People will fork over cash, let their bodies be pierced and manipulated, or drink down large volumes of bad-tasting tea all in the vain hope that maybe this, this at last, will bring them healing. I cannot substantiate this statistically, but I would guess that if you eliminated all the parts of religious TV broadcasting devoted to various promises of miraculous healing, a pretty big percentage of religion on television would just disappear.

Life is full of hurt, full of tragedy with the result that we seek healing and restoration.  Because so very often we find the same words escaping from our lips as we hear from the lips of the widow of Zarephath and even from Elijah in this story: O God, why?