180916 Sermon on 1 Kings 17:17-24, September 16, 2018 (Trinity 16)

180916 Sermon on 1 Kings 17:17-24, September 16, 2018 (Trinity 16)

Last week I spoke about the opening words of Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”  Most Christians believe that these words could not possibly apply to them, because they are quite convinced that God exists.  But there’s a world of difference between saying that God exists and believing that he exists, and then living by that faith.  Far from believing in God, all people by nature believe that they will be blessed and happy because of the things that they do.  This is why greed and scheming and cheating are so common.  It’s assumed that there is no other way to get ahead.  But Jesus tells us that he is the one who gives us our daily bread.  Just as God feeds the birds and clothes the grass, so also he feeds and clothes us.  Fools might believe that this is technically true.  They have the head knowledge that God is the creator and preserver of life.  But they don’t really believe it and therefore live by it.

Last week we had a very good example of someone who was not a fool—the widow of Zarephath.  She was in dire straits because the drought and the famine had left her with only a handful of flour and a little bit of oil.  When the prophet Elijah met her, she was gathering sticks to make one final meal with her son, before they would die.  But Elijah told her to make a little bread for himself first, before she fed herself and her son, and the Lord would see to it that she did not run out of food before the drought and famine were lifted.  The widow believed the Lord’s promise.  And so she and Elijah and her household ate for many days and the flour did not run out and the oil jug did not go dry according to the word of the Lord that Elijah had spoken to her.  Because she believed, she was generous even though she had so little. 

As I mentioned last week, a lot of people would judge this widow as being foolish.  They might even go so far as to say that she was being immoral.  She was taking the food out of her dying son’s mouth and giving it to someone she didn’t know.  But she was not being foolish.  She believed that God exists and that he does stuff.  The real fool is the one that says in his heart that there is no God, so it’s all up to me to make the kind of life that I want for myself.  Such a one is an idolater who believes that other things besides God are what will provide blessing and happiness.  This widow, in contrast, hangs everything she has upon God even as her life and her son’s life is on the line.  She is wise.

And she continues to be wise even though she is struck with calamity and heartache as we heard in our Old Testament reading today.  Our reading today picks up immediately after last week’s reading left off, and we find out that this poor woman’s son became ill and his illness was so severe that he died.  The heartache that this woman had was terrible.  Very few have been afflicted like she was. 

But she remains wise, and in the same way too.  She continued to believe that God exists and that he does stuff.  In this case, though, the “stuff” that God has done is rather frightening, and you can hear that fear in the widow’s words.  When her son died she went to Elijah and said, “What have you against me, O man of God?  You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!”  When the widow addresses Elijah, she is seeing him as a representative and an ambassador for God.  That is why she calls him “God’s man”—a more definite and direct way of linking him with God than even by calling him a prophet.  God has come to her in Elijah and the miraculous flour and oil that she has enjoyed is proof of that.  But now this same God has brought about the death of her son.  She acknowledges this and speaks about it in a very direct way.  God has reminded her of her sins (a bold and humble statement) and killed her son.

We are not accustomed to this kind of talk, and so we have a lot to learn from this wise woman.  While we might speak about the good things in our life as coming from God, it is very rare to hear anyone say that the negative things in their life have come from God.  This is especially true when it comes to death.  Almost everybody, including most of the pastors and teachers in the Christian Church, will say that God doesn’t have anything to do with deaths.  Instead there is a kind of stoic philosophy that gets applied.  Death, together with taxes, is just one of those inevitable things.  It happens to everybody.  It’s random, and you just have to accept it, and let’s not talk anything more about it.

I think the main reason why we are so touchy about saying that God has anything to do with death is that we want to be able to have a God that we can like and that we can feel comfortable with.  If God is the one who has brought about the death of the people that we love, then it is quite possible that we might have some strong feelings towards God.  We might resent him.  We might be angry with him.  We might even hate him.  But we like to believe that we are pretty pious people who only say the nicest things about God.  So it makes sense—at least to the Old Adam—that we should be very careful not to attribute anything we don’t like to God’s doing.  It’s a way to keep everything on an even keel.  We don’t want any unpleasant thoughts towards God, so we will politely ignore him.  We’ll politely pretend that he doesn’t exist—at least not insofar as death or destruction is concerned.  We’ll say in our hearts, “There is no God in this situation,” and think that God should thank us for this, because we are doing him the favor of protecting him from a bad reputation.

How different this is from the way that the widow of Zarepheth handles things!  She’s not a fool.  She knows that God exists and that ultimately he is always behind everything that happens.  And so she opens her heart wide to God and doesn’t hold back: “Why did you come to me God?  Why did you bring this prophet to me?  All that it has accomplished is that I should be in terror of you.  I’m a sinner, and this is why you have done this to me!”  Her words are raw, and there is so much pain and anguish in them.  Instead of being polite she is being honest.  Instead of being careful to guard herself and her own sense of piety she becomes completely vulnerable.  She collapses in desperation before God.  Only he can help her, even though he is the one who has brought this pain upon her.

I hope that you can see that we have a lot to learn from this very wise woman.  We’ve taken up the ways of the world and believe in luck and chance for whatever happens.  There’s way too much empty philosophy used to comfort people and direct talk about God is avoided.  For example, it is said of the deceased that they lived a good life, or that they lived a long time.  Perhaps they got to experience all the things that they wanted.  But is not life more than pleasure?  Is not life more than whatever it is that you might have wanted to accomplish?  The heart and soul of our existence is being ignored.

You are a creature.  God has made you.  He has a will and a way of living that you are supposed to follow.  You are answerable to him for how you have lived.  You will come into his presence one day when you die or when Christ comes again in glory.  These are stupendous truths that nobody wants to talk about!  And there’s at least one good reason for that too. 

The devil doesn’t want us to think or talk about such things.  The devil wants to keep us fools who say in our hearts that there is no God, that this present life is the only thing that matters, so let’s concentrate only on that.  The devil doesn’t want us to pray like this widow, and to open our hearts wide to God.  The devil knows how powerful prayer is.  He knows how God is moved to pity and compassion, like Jesus is in our Gospel reading when he sees the widow’s dead son who was being carried out of the town of Nain.  He wants us to remain shut up in our own hearts with our stupid, powerless philosophies and to take what comes to us stoically and silently.

And the devil will tell some good lies to bring about his ends too.  Nobody is so good at lying as he is, and so these lies have a ring of truth to them.  So he says that believing that God does all things in heaven and on earth makes God into an evil, blood-thirsty ogre who is responsible for all the evil that has happened over the centuries.  The truth, of course, is that it is not God who is responsible for this, but the filthy devil himself. 

He will tell you that your life is going to be awful if you believe that all things are in God’s hands.  You will always be afraid, and have no peace.  He will tell you that the comfort philosophy gives you is enough.  Plus it’s much safer and milder—no disturbing thoughts about what God might do.  And it is true that God will not let us have peace so long as that peace is in anything but himself.  That can make for a wild ride through life as we read about with all the saints’ lives that are described for us in the Bible.  But it’s not true that we do not have peace.  We have a peace that the world cannot give.  We have a peace that surpasses all understanding.  When we take refuge in Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the God of power and might and also the God who loves us so much that he suffered and died in our place; when we take refuge in Jesus, then nothing can touch us, nothing can harm us.  Sin, death, and hell—these awesome, powerful forces, are beneath our feet as conquered foes, because they lie beneath Jesus’s feet to whom we have been joined.

So don’t be tricked by the devil.  His first and preferred strategy is to keep you ignorant and apathetic about God’s existence and that God actually does stuff.  He’d like to keep it so that you just go with the flow and believe all the empty (but safe and mild) things that the world says about life, death, and the meaning of it all.  But if that won’t work, if you start to think about God and how he acts in your daily life, and how all things are brought about by him, then he will try to frighten you away from such thoughts.  Believing that God is directly involved in your daily life—that you are the object of his blessings and his punishments—is a bold thought. 

But do not be afraid.  Open wide your heart to God and speak to him honestly and plainly like the widow of Zarephath.  The One who sent her sadness, turned her tears to gladness.  The cup she was given to drink in the death of her son savored of bitterness, but she took it without shrinking, for she believed that after grief, God gives relief, her heart with comfort filling, and all her sorrow stilling.  What God ordains is always good.

It is foolish to say in your heart that there is no God, or that God doesn’t do stuff for you and to you—some of which is unpleasant, as we heard about with the widow’s death.  Ignoring God never helped anybody.  Learn from the wise and wonderful woman of Zarephath, who waited upon the goodness of the Lord, and also cried to him with anguish in her distress.  True piety is not polite.  True piety is bold and reaching—wrestling and holding on to the Lord until he gives you his blessing.  Therefore, do not be afraid. You know the goodness of the Lord.  He has given you his promises of forgiveness, life, and salvation which never fail.  And so do not give up.  In due time you will reap.  Therefore, open wide your heart to the Lord with honesty and vulnerability.  Call upon the Lord in the day of trouble and he will deliver you.  He will deliver you, even it should happen that you fall asleep in what the world calls death, because Jesus is the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in him will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in him will never die.