Elijah and the Woman of Zarephath

Elijah and the Woman of Zarephath: Sermon for Proper 27, option 2 (11 November 2018) 

Scripture Readings: 1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

The story of Elijah the Tishbite is a great story, but it takes work to get the full value out of it, and in particular you have to read each episode in the context of the larger story. Like so much of the Bible, casual reading of this passage by itself can yield bad fruit, but put the effort in and it will nourish you. The story goes that God was angry with Israel’s king Ahab because he had married a Phoenician princess from the port city of Sidon, named Jezebel. This secures an alliance with Ahab’s northern neighbor, but involved him in the worship of Canaanite gods, which is the Israelite kings’ quintessential fault. The fact that Jezebel comes from Sidon is important to this morning’s little bit of the Elijah story, as we’ll see in a moment.

Before we get into it, it’s worth admitting that there are at least five ways in which this story is difficult for us modern westerners to hear. First, we no longer believe, indeed I’d argue we CAN’T believe, that the gods send rain or snow, or withhold it, in response to human beings. So to begin with, we have to engage in a little voluntary suspension of disbelief in order for the story to work. Second, we find here a God who punishes the whole people of Israel for the sins of the king. As a portrayal of God, this isn’t easy to swallow since it seems to make God arbitrary and unfair. Third, of all the people God could have chosen to take care of Elijah, God chooses a foreigner from Jezebel’s people, a woman without food to give Elijah food, a woman without a name to contrast with the notorious Jezebel. Fourth, it’s not like Elijah is starving — God has been sending ravens to bring him food, using the same language to describe that feeding as the story we’re reading today — which makes the widow’s situation all the more poignant. She barely lives hand to mouth, like birds, but is asked to make provision for Elijah. And fifth, the city gate is a terrible place to gather firewood, even just “two sticks.” The city gate was the public square, where trials and business deals were conducted. Who gathers sticks in such a place? These five things are genuinely odd. Some of them just have to be accepted as part of the story world, but some of them offer real insights into how ancient Israelites would have heard the story. So let’s dig in.

The little town of Zarephath lay between the larger cities of Tyre to the south and Sidon to the north on what is today the coast of Lebanon. Another 25 miles past Sidon and you’re in Beirut. God didn’t send Elijah to the people of Israel, but to a Canaanite woman. Earlier in chapter 17 we’re told that God “commanded” (צִוִּיתִי) the ravens to feed (לכלכל) Elijah. Now ravens are unclean (Lev 11:15), and God not only gives them a command but also requires Elijah to eat bread and meat brought by them, which probably would have made any Israelite squirm. In this morning’s reading we heard that  God had “commanded” (צִוִּיתִי) the woman to feed (לְכַלְכְּלֶךָ) Elijah, the exact same expression. So the unclean birds and the widow of Zarephath stand in the same relation to God and to Elijah.

The woman must accept Elijah’s proposal before she can receive God’s gift. She had been planning to cook for herself and her son, but Elijah calls her to care for himself, who in her eyes was just foreign beggar, first. When she stops living her life of scarcity and begins to share with him, abundance opens up. Her handful of flour doesn’t run out and her little juglet of olive oil doesn’t dry up until the drought is over. The narrator concludes with a “happily ever after” moment showing that everything the prophet promised got delivered. But it doesn’t last. The story goes on with the child becoming sick and dying, with the widow complaining to Elijah, and with Elijah complaining to God and the boy being healed. The first resurrection story in Scripture is not God raising an Israelite but a Canaanite child! The result of this astonishing act of God is that the woman comes to believe what Elijah says is God’s word. So in the larger context, we have a Canaanite woman whose response to Elijah is the correct one, contrasted with Ahab and Jezebel’s incorrect response that tried to shut Elijah up.

Now it’s a real danger in stories like this that particular readings of them can be antisemitic in the worst sense, using Jewish texts against Jews. Nothing could be more remote from Scripture’s intent. Admittedly we see Elijah taking God’s grace to foreigners while keeping the Israelites in drought and it’s so easy to slip from there into a narrative in which Israel is more unfaithful than other people, or somehow deserves bad treatment in the modern world. Such interpretations are unfortunately widespread among some Christians, and there’s a fairly direct pipeline that runs from such interpretations to horrible things like the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last week. We Christians have more to repent and make amends for in that regard than Jews ever did.

Try to imagine reading this story as a Jew in Jesus’ time, a good 700 years or so after this story was written. In Jesus’ day, Tyre and Sidon were part of the Roman province of Syria despite being close to the Galilee. We’re told in Mark’s gospel that Jesus visited Tyre and Sidon at least twice, though that’s not mentioned in the other gospels. Luke actually records Jesus interacting with our story directly. Jesus says “There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah … and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow” (Luke 4:24-26). The saying illustrates how Israel resisted its prophets, necessitating that God should send His prophets elsewhere. I’m sure you can appreciate the antisemitic potential in that. The people of Nazareth, on hearing Jesus say this in the synagogue, tried to lynch Jesus right then and there! If this story could be so offensive when spoken by a fellow Jew, I’m pretty sure it would be deeply offensive from Christians. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that any reading of the Jewish scriptures in which Jews are held up to ridicule or scorn cannot be correct.

Instead, let’s pay attention to what GOD is doing here. God tells Elijah to leave his raven-fed hideaway in Jordan and go to Zarephath, assuring him, “Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you” (1 Kgs 17:9). When God gives people a command, it is always for their good. God commands Elijah twice, and commands the woman once, to the end that both Elijah and she and her son may eat. What seems at first like a hopeless act — a last meal before curling up to die — becomes the very means by which hope comes in. Her obedience to the prophet’s word results in her receiving God’s provision of food as well as, later on, the life of her son. But Jesus’ observation is still apropos: God might have sent Elijah to any number of Israelite widows to save them, but instead sent him to this foreigner to save her. What do we learn about God by observing this? We learn what Israel needed to learn, too, that God is not only the Lord of us and our people, but the Lord of aliens, legal and otherwise, and even the Lord of other nations regardless of whether or not they know it. God loves and cares for the unclean as well as the clean, the sick as well as the whole, the addicted as well as the teetotalers, the Canaanites as well as the Israelites. In the words of Psalm 147 God delights to feed the ravens when they cry out. We can see in the Elijah story the beginnings of the idea that Yahweh, Israel’s God could and did save  other peoples, which would eventually evolve into the idea of Yahweh as the universal God. In the process of Israel’s discovery of God’s Oneness, stories like this one played an important part.

The season after Pentecost is a time when we typically talk about evangelism (though because we’re Episcopalians we may use a different word) and the spread of Christianity throughout the world, and this story weighs in on that matter. We may be tempted to make people convert before we give them help, but in this story it’s precisely the miraculous provision of food that leads to the widow’s conversion. Like all Jews and Gentiles, she is presented with a command from God obedience to which will make her live. That command, which we also receive multiple times in Scripture, is that she care for the stranger living in her vicinity. Even this Phoenician woman can recognize the truth of that command and obey it. Will we?

A Tale of Two Daughters: Sermon for Proper 8

Sermon by Loren Crow, Ph.D., preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 1 July, 2018.

Readings: Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 2:23-24; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43

You may have noticed that Jesus sometimes commands people not to tell others about him, and especially about the miracles that he does. Mark is the gospel that contributes this theme to the tradition. In Mark, when Jesus casts out a demon, he silences the creature before it can spill the beans about His identity. He heals a leper, then commands him not to tell anyone. After Jesus is transfigured in front of some disciples, He commands them not to tell anyone until after the resurrection. Now that strikes most people as odd, because we’re used to thinking of Jesus’ life-work as sort of like a Billy Graham crusade with its goal being to convert as many people as possible. The other gospels say that after Jesus’ resurrection He commands His disciples to spread the Gospel far and wide; but by way of contrast, Mark presents Jesus as keeping his head down, trying to go unnoticed … as he goes about doing all kinds of crazy things which are not exactly designed for stealth. It raises the question: if Mark’s Jesus is so keen to keep a low profile, why is he constantly on the move, healing and casting out demons everywhere he goes?

Scholars over a century ago dubbed this the “Messianic secret” in Mark, and developed two explanations for it, one historical and one theological. Historically, if Jesus was as obviously the Messiah as he is made out to be in the Gospels, then why didn’t most Jews at the time believe it? To that question Mark provides an answer: maybe Jesus commanded His disciples to keep his true identity a secret until after the Resurrection. This explains why Jesus’ following during his lifetime was negligible, but afterwards quickly spread. More important than the historical reason, though, is a theological concern. Mark wants to reveal one of the central mysteries of faith: that the power of Jesus is already at work in the world, secretly, bringing life and healing and salvation. Usually Jesus goes unnoticed, working behind the scenes, underneath perception, almost like it’s a secret. Like a little yeast that works its way into the whole batch of dough and voila, the whole batch is leavened! Or like a farmer who scatters seed in her field and waters it, and then it just grows; it’s a mystery. Actually it shouldn’t be too surprising that Mark’s Jesus stays hidden: He comes to us hidden, too, in sacramental forms of bread and wine and in the persons of our fellow Christians; He comes to us hidden whenever we meet people who seem of no account — the sick and the dying, the poor, the hungry, prisoners. The whole world regards such people as dismissible. Only with eyes opened by God’s Spirit do we begin to be able to see Jesus walking in our midst; only with the ears quickened by the Holy Spirit can we hear and obey Jesus’ voice.

The two “daughters” in Mark’s story constitute the yin and yang of Christian life, the passive and the active reception of Jesus’ presence. Jesus tenderly calls the daughter of Jairos “talitha,” “little girl” or “sweetie.” She’s either dead or so close to it as to fool everyone, so clearly she does nothing to receive Jesus’ gift of new life. Her father, though, humbles himself before Jesus and pleads with him to come and heal his daughter. Oddly, Jesus does not commend the man’s faith. Here's another oddity, Jesus does commend the faith of the woman in the little story that interrupts the narrative flow, inserting between the beginning and end of the Jairos-and-his-daughter story this story about a woman who has battled not only the physical hardships of twelve years’ blood loss but also the religious impurity that a flow of blood produces. As a practical matter, this woman would have been unable to move among other people without causing hardship, and would almost certainly have been shunned as a result. Yet she brazenly steps forward and touches Jesus’ clothes in the belief that doing so would cure her. And she’s right. Jesus immediately senses power go forth from him and uncovers the truth of her action. Then he speaks a word of such grace to her, “Daughter, your faith saved you.” Think of it! Instead of relegating her to the status of just some random person in the crowd, Jesus calls her “daughter,” a close family member, someone important, establishing with one word a whole relationship of care. I imagine them embracing as Jesus tells her to go in peace.

Such a structure where one story is sandwiched inside the beginning and end of another story, is called an inclusio. It’s quite common in Scripture and Mark is an acknowledged master of the form. The key to understanding these inclusios is to look for ways in which the two stories explicate and comment on one another. The inclusio is set up in the first place by the change of location, crossing the sea at the beginning and then returning to His home end of the narrative. The parallel is highlighted by calling both women “daughter.” Jesus is to heal Jairos’ daughter by laying his hands upon her (5:23), and the other unnamed woman reaches out and touches Jesus’ robe. The little girl is twelve years old; the woman has experienced her affliction for twelve years. The young daughter is a passive recipient of mercy because of her father’s pleading and because of Jesus’ grace and power. The woman with the flow of blood actively presses her claim upon Jesus, not because she thinks she has a right but simply because her need is so deep. Both women, the passive and the active, receive what they need exactly as they need it. Both women receive from Jesus a term of endearment. The older woman is called “daughter” to remind us to look at the story of Jairos’s daughter. These two women symbolize the power death has over humanity. Both of them are saved by Jesus from death, literal death and figurative death in the form of debilitating sickness. Jesus invades the world and throws down its powerful evil rulers, who conquers them all with his Truth and his poured out lifeblood. That blood has been shed, that Truth proclaimed, that Kingdom of God is growing up secretly alongside the apparently powerful kingdoms of the world. But sometimes it sure doesn’t feel that way. We’re supposed to be the victors in this crusade, so why does it sometimes feel like we’re losing ground?

“In the midst of life we are in death,” says the Burial Office. All of us are somewhere on the path that our physical bodies are taking through the world, and death lurks we know not when or where, and so we seek the shelter of the God who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. Come back to the Gospel: both of these daughters were in the midst of death at the beginning and then are delivered from it by the end. In the midst of death, we find that Jesus is our life. When we’re stricken by terrors and wickedness and disease and war, we find that Jesus is our life. When we’re bleeding for twelve years straight and half starved and fully starved of human contact, and we feel like God is off somewhere listening to harp music, we see Jesus and we hear his cry from the cross and we know that he’s right there crucified beside us, showing us how to live. In the mist of death we are in life, if we are in God; but also in the midst of life we are in death, unable to provide life for ourselves, dependent absolutely on God’s bounty. Sometimes we may feel particularly energetic or focused, so we reach out in prayer and touch Jesus’ clothing; sometimes, though, it’s all we can do just to wait because we’ve tried every solution we can think of and now we’ve no choice but to leave ourselves and our world in God’s hands. And then he sends us out into the world to become part of his work. And what does that work look like in actual practice? “your abundance at the present time should supply their needs, so that their abundance may also supply your needs.” Not by converting others at big “crusades,” but by the slow, steady conversion of our minds and our wills to the claims of the Gospel. When others see the Gospel played out authentically in our lives, their own hearts and minds will begin the process of conversion. The secret is out: wherever you encounter goodness and beauty, wherever you witness acts of mercy and healing, whenever you find yourself aware that you have succeeded in being kind, where refugees and families endure uncertainty and hatred, and especially when we gather ourselves together in this place and especially around this altar, in all our brokenness and neediness, Jesus is right here among us doing what he always does, and showing us how to do likewise. Pay attention, and I bet you’ll meet Him soon; keep paying attention and Lord knows what can happen. 

Changing Names: Sermon for Lent 2B, 2018.

Changing Names

Sermon by Loren Crow, Ph.D., preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 25 February, 2018.

Scripture Readings: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

I’d like to begin this sermon with a poem by one of the great theological poets of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot. 

The Naming of Cats, by T. S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,

It isn't just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter

When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,

Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,

Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—

All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,

Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:

Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—

But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,

A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,

Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,

Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,

Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-

Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,

And that is the name that you never will guess;

The name that no human research can discover—

But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

His ineffable effable

Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name

I am fascinated by the power of names. Adam gave names to all the animals, and whatever he called a thing, that was its name. Naming is about understanding things, classifying them into groups that have some kind of meaning in our world view, a mystical, almost magical ability that we human beings all have. We would be unable to understand anything at all if not for this power. What a marvelous ability!

But it has a dark side. As fascinated as I am by our astonishing ability to divide the world up and name it, I am disturbed by how often naming has the effect of hiding the truth, shaming heroic efforts, justifying evil, demeaning the beautiful. I once heard it said that the subject of Da Vinci’s famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was a prostitute, a name that carried shame with it like dirty car grease and fouled the speaker’s perception of the painting’s beauty. If you’ve ever been at the receiving end of this kind of naming, the kind that makes you feel worthless and hopeless, you won’t soon forget it. I confess to you now that I am guilty of that kind of naming more times than I can count. Maybe you are, too. Sticks and stones do break bones, but names can injure people’s deeper selves in places untouched by mere physical injury.

But names don’t just have the power to degrade and demean. Their mystic potency is able to summon, as if from nothing, nobility and glory previously unobserved. Before Adam ever named anything, God called every good thing into being by naming it. And God renames people in Scripture often enough that it becomes almost cliché: Hosea’s children get renamed twice, the first time for judgment and the second for reconciliation; Jesus’ disciple Simon becomes Kephas (or its Greek form, Peter). Sometimes it doesn’t matter much, but most often we would be making a serious mistake in reading if we failed to think of those renamings as anything less than world-changing for the characters. Imagine Jacob’s paradigm shift when the angel he’s been wrestling with names him Israel because he’s really been wrestling with God. Think how jarring it must have been for Peter when Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan” — sternly correcting Peter’s mistaken belief in a Messiah who triumphs without suffering. 

We heard another one of those stories this morning in the Old Testament reading, when God renames Abram and his wife Sarai, giving them the names Abraham and Sarah. They are old and childless, and reconciled to their fate. I mean, as St. Paul says, who ever heard of people having children who are so old as to be practically dead themselves?! But God renames the both of them, makes a new covenant with them, and promises that they would become the ancestors of a multitude of nations. Into what seemed like their dying gasps, God spoke a new word that set them on a new path that made what had seemed like the end of their story into their story’s middle. All that with a name.

A name is never exactly the same as the thing to which it points; sometimes it’s lesser, and sometimes it’s greater. This is why, like the cats in Eliot’s poem, there remains a deep ineffability to God’s true Name that we cannot ever know, let alone utter. God lets us use various names of our own making or even ones that God tells us to pray and theologize. But when we use names like “God” and “Jehovah” and “Jesus,” and even “Trinity,” we make a mistake if we think that such words articulate the fullness of God’s Self. They allow us to address God as “Thou,” in Martin Buber’s terminology, but they do not define or limit God’s Being. God’s character is strong enough and transcendent enough that God is unfazed by and resistant to all our attempts to pin it down.

But we do not have the strength of character that God has: we are susceptible to the ways we are named by others. True, humanity, made in the image of that God’s Being and after God’s likeness, is also much more than the names we give and receive. But with the names we give to one another — the labels we use to designate people’s character, the things we highlight and downplay about one another, the aspects of our fellow human beings that we deplore and that we cherish — we shape our experience of them and we contribute to their experience of themselves. For my part, rather than criticizing where there is deficiency, I want to encourage and strengthen where there is goodness. I want to expect and summon the best in myself and others by the names I use. My Lenten meditation, and my earnest desire and prayer, is to work on naming my neighbors and myself in ways that summon beauty and goodness and strength, and that can set us all moving with hope and faith into the new story to which we are called in Christ. That story takes us through Lent and Good Friday, but it brings us into Easter and gives to all of us the shining name “Saints.” That’s the name God gives us, calling us into a new kind of life. When you leave this place, go out and give the name “saints” to those you meet, trusting God to make it true. Amen.