The power of God made real
Commentary
Object:
Does our modern faith leave room for miracles? Not your ordinary “come here and be healed” kind of miracles; not the “I thought I was out of money, and then I reached into my pocket and I had the exact amount I needed for something” kind of miracles. Nor do I mean the kind of miracle that unfolds in the opening of a flower, nor the magic of seeing your baby for the first time on a sonogram. No, I mean the “I saw it with my own eyes, though it was impossible” kind of miracles.
Or do we want to put God in a lovely box, cushioned by tissue and tied up with a bow? Sometimes God seems to be as difficult to understand as quantum physics (you can measure the way the particle is moving or you can define exactly where it is in space, but not both at the same time). The miracles in the Bible seem too good (or too hard) to believe, so we try to find a logical explanation.
But try this one on for size: I was serving a rural church in central Wisconsin. The road on which the church and parsonage stood ran alongside a river, and in the depth of winter the road tended to accumulate ice rapidly as a result. Half a mile down the road there was an old mill, with a dam that used to make the mill wheel turn. A slight fog would rise from the water, making the 60-degree turn in the road treacherous from time to time. One day as I was driving toward the mill, a road crew truck crossed the river and started to turn onto the road I was on. But the road was icy, and the truck slid directly into my lane, coming directly at me. I could see the driver frantically trying to turn the wheels back into his lane, but there wasn’t enough space between us. I cried out, “Oh Jesus! Help!” I closed my eyes, expecting the impact, but when I looked again the truck was back in its lane, and the driver and I were looking at each other, eyes wide, confused about what just happened. There was no good stopping place, so I kept going for the three miles into town, shaking all the way.
Miracle? Good luck? Excellent snow tires on the truck? The way we answer that question reflects our faith, our belief system that governs how we live.
The two resurrection stories present us with that kind of miracle. But the Galatians reading is as much about faith as those two stories. Paul says that his knowledge about Christ and what God intends for the church came directly from God and his reading of the scripture, not from the leadership of the early church. In fact, he definitively states that he relied on a direct revelation. Magic? Superstition? The gift of the Holy Spirit, we might say. Like that truck on that icy road, Saul was heading for a crash as he persecuted the early followers of Jesus. But God grabbed him and he regained the lane God wanted him to be in. So Paul/Saul was turned 180 degrees, and became the apostle to the Gentiles. That’s you and me. Thank you, Saul/Paul, for doing what God wanted when all the world told you that you were wrong, that you were going against the scripture, that you were violating God’s Law revealed 1,000 years before your time.
1 Kings 17:8-16 (17-24)
The story we are considering this week comes at the end of a long story of the fall of the nation of Israel. King Jereboam came to power after the death of King Solomon, and his actions as king led to the split of the kingdom. Jereboam took control of the larger amount of land in the north and declared it to be the Northern Kingdom of Israel, while the Southern Kingdom came to be called Judah, under the kingship of Rehoboam. Jereboam was determined to keep the two nations from reuniting, so there were constant border disputes. To keep his people from making pilgrimages down to Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem he set up two centers of worship, one in Bethel and the other in Dan, both of which were focused on a golden calf, emulating the Egyptians, who usually depicted their gods on the back of a golden calf.
When Rehoboam’s son Abijah defeated Jereboam, the kings that followed him each moved further and further from the worship of Yahweh. The last of these was Ahab, who married a notorious Phoenician woman named Jezebel, who worshipped Ba’al. Ahab established Ba’al worship in Israel, which included fertility rituals and human sacrifice. In fact, the last thing we read in 1 Kings 16 is that “Hiel of Bethel built Jericho; he laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram his firstborn, and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke by Joshua son of Nun.” What this means is that he killed his own sons so that he could lay their bodies under the foundation and gates of the new Jericho, a city that the people had defeated as they began to take over the land of Canaan.
Elijah was called by God to a miserable task: to tell Ahab, king of Israel, that his marriage to Jezebel and his worship of her god Ba’al (meaning“The Lord”) in Samaria had offended Yahweh (the Lord of Moses) and that he needed to do away with this religion within his kingdom. If he did not, Elijah warned, there would be “neither rain nor dew” until he repented. Ahab, true to form, mocked Elijah -- saying that other prophets had warned of this and yet it still rained. Elijah replied that there would be no rain in the land until he himself called for it to rain.
Today’s story is the first miracle that Elijah performed. God sent him into Sidon, a Gentile country to the northwest of Israel, saying that he had commanded a widow to care for the prophet there. And there she is, gathering twigs to make a fire, as Elijah approaches the gate of Zarephath.
Elijah would appear to be completely self-centered if we hadn’t been told that God had arranged all of this. Here is this young widow, gathering fuel to cook the last bit of flour and oil into a small, round loaf of bread that she will split with her son -- and then they both will die of starvation; and here is this man, asking her to bake a bread loaf for him first. Even though he promises her a miracle (unending flour and oil until the drought ends), she would be forgiven for doubting him. Yet she does exactly as he asks. One might say, of course, that it really didn’t cost her that much. After all, what difference would a single loaf of bread make in the face of certain starvation? Still, it is a leap of faith to feed a supposed prophet rather than one’s own child.
Her faith gesture pays off. God comes through for all three people in this story. Elijah gets his bread -- a major sacrifice for the widow to make -- and still there is enough for the mother and child to have a loaf of their own, and not just that day, but throughout the drought.
This story was so important to Luke that he placed Jesus’ commentary on it in his story of Jesus’ first appearance as a teacher in his local synagogue (Luke 4:26-27). Jesus had already gained a reputation in the Ten Towns area as a prophet and healer. But he had not had much success in Nazareth, because they didn’t expect miracles from one of their own. [Today this is recognized as the “50-mile rule” -- you’re only an “expert” if you live at least 50 miles away from the people you’re talking to.] “There were plenty of widows in Israel in those days,” Jesus said, “but Elijah was sent by God to a widow in Sidon.” The idea that God could go to the Gentiles rather than the Jews, due to the lack of faith in the nation, so enraged his listeners that they tried to throw him over a cliff!
It is hard for us post-resurrection Christians to imagine the impact of what Jesus had said. Probably what the people were thinking at his words went like this: “WE are the people of God! WE are the children of Abraham and Isaac! WE are part of the Chosen People. OUR ancestors followed Moses out of Egypt and into this land of milk and honey! How insulting can you be? No Gentile can be part of the Kingdom of God. They are unclean!” The men started talking to each other instead of listening to what Jesus had to say, or asking him questions about his teaching, which was perfectly acceptable behavior amongst the men gathered in the synagogue. And the less they listened and the more they talked among themselves the angrier they got, until they tried to toss him off a cliff. But he slipped out of their grasp and walked through the midst of the crowd and out of town.
The story of Elijah and the widow is not over, however. This woman’s bad luck seemingly has no end. No sooner has Elijah moved into her house then her son falls sick. The description in 1 Kings 17 makes it sound like the boy had pneumonia: “he was so sick that there was no breath left in him.” For children who live in the hot areas of the world, like Sidon, respiratory infections can quickly cause death. The constant high temperatures they are already having to cope with weaken their immune systems, so any fever saps their strength and can kill within 24 hours, even today. Naturally the mother becomes distraught and asks Elijah, “What have you against me?” This was being said to the prophet, but she can be understood to be asking this question of God, just as people will attack their pastor when they are angry at God.
It would be a shame to pass over this “second” story on the basis that the lectionary marks it as optional. We’re living in hard times too. Floods, violent storms, landslides, and the other effects that global warming is having on our weather are having a negative impact not only on those directly in the path of the event, but also on food supplies, raising the price of food. Our current election has shown how many Americans lack jobs that pay enough to live on; the high price of health insurance, medications, and hospitals; and the undependability of pension funds and Social Security, especially for the disabled. These are the realities many of our parishioners are facing, causing them too to ask God, “What do you have against me?”
This is not a question people ask lightly. Nor is it a question limited to the poor. Families who considered themselves to be middle-class a few short years ago are having to cut back, have lost their homes, and worry about how they will provide well for their children. Where they used to gladly pay for sports equipment and musical instruments, many families are having to do without enrichment classes for their children. Plus, so many of our popular television shows portray “average” people living in luxury, which leaves many people jealous and frustrated at their inability to live the same way. Is it any wonder that our presidential candidates are looking for scapegoats and the voters are cheering on those who promise to fix all of our problems?
This widow has the sense that her son’s death has been brought on by her sins, a common belief in her day (and often, still in our own time), but in her own way she is appealing to this man of God, hoping that he might have a solution. This refers to the ancient belief that there is a certain quid pro quo to the workings between God and humans, and Elijah is working as a part of this contract.
Elijah takes her child out of her arms and carries him to an upstairs room that has been turned over to him by the widow. (Upper rooms are usually turned over to guests as they are more likely to catch the evening breeze, making sleep much easier, and offering a view as well.) The process he uses to revive the boy is striking in the way it parallels today’s CPR: Elijah lays him on the bed and asks God to heal this boy. Then the prophet lies on top of the boy three times. When he gets up the third time the boy is breathing, and Elijah hands him back to his mother. This convinces the widow that Elijah really is a man of God. In Elijah’s ministry, as in Jesus’, the healing is done out of compassion -- and not just for its own sake, but also to elicit faith and hope.
Galatians 1:11-24
This passage from Galatians is headlined in the NRSV as being “Paul’s vindication of his apostleship.” For the Gentile reader (you and me), it seems backward to think that his vindication could possibly rest on the fact that he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from those who had known him in life. Paul is resting his bona fides on the idea that he received a direct revelation through Jesus. Today that’s not a good way to get people to pay attention, despite the fact that there are many of us pastors who do, in fact, learn much directly from God. But we tend to not share that thought with our congregants, for fear that they’ll think we’re crazy! Or as one woman said to me, “Sometimes you seem to be positively psychic. So why weren’t you psychic when I really needed you?” Who can pretend to know the answer to that question?
Paul begins by confessing that as a well-educated Pharisee (he had studied with Gamaliel, one of the most important rabbis in history, at the Hillel school, which is like saying he had graduated from Harvard Divinity School) he had been “violently persecuting” the early church, admitting that he was “trying to destroy it.” This is a confession, not a boast. He is trying to tell the Galatians why he is, in some important ways, in opposition to the teachings of the central core of the apostles in Jerusalem.
This is all about the question of the nature of the church. The Letter to the Galatians handles several important points of disagreement that were going on in the early church.
First, who are the apostles? Paul claims that title for himself, even though he never knew Jesus in the flesh. Up until then, the title of apostle was confined to those who had followed Jesus in life. He met with Peter only after he had gone into Arabia for three years (v. 17). He says that he was accepted by those who “seemed to be leaders” (2:2). So this first question is answered that the apostles are those who are called by Jesus to fulfill the role, not just those who knew Jesus before the crucifixion.
Second, to whom should the church be preaching and teaching? There were those in the company of the church in Judea who thought that they should confine themselves to their Jewish brothers and sisters, following the first half of the Great Commission (Acts 1:8): “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (compare Matthew 28:18-20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations...”). The problem in reaching out to the surrounding culture was (and still is) that most of those people were not like the apostles and the early Jewish Christians.
Paul was the son of a Pharisee who was also a citizen of Rome (an unusual combination) and surely of a mother who was evidently also Jewish (since a child can only be born Jewish if the mother is). This gave him an unusual outlook: a man who could easily argue as a Pharisee but also with an understanding of the Gentile mindset. So when he went out preaching, he tended to talk to the Gentile seekers as comfortably as the Jewish seekers. He understood how to frame his teaching so it would make sense to those who had been brought up outside the Law. He pared down those things that would be stumbling blocks for those coming to Jesus who were not Jewish nor interested in Jewish thought and culture.
This was offensive to the Pharisees in particular and to most Jews in general. The argument was particularly heated in Christian circles as it applied to how a Gentile might become a Christian. For the Jews who had followed Jesus, everything had been changed -- and yet not, because they saw him as the promised Messiah. The belief that Jesus had died and then was resurrected fit right into the belief system of the Pharisees, but not the Sadducees, because they did not believe in life after death in any form.
This was the problem: when a man became a Jew, he had to, by the Law, do three things:
1) he must first agree to keep the Law in its totality;
2) he must be immersed in a ritual bath (this is what John the Baptizer was doing at the Jordan River, sidestepping the cost of a mikvah at the Temple);
3) and he must be circumcised -- no exceptions. (Women who converted underwent the ritual bath only.)
And Paul saw this as exclusionary. Adult males are reluctant to submit themselves to the pain and personal humiliation involved. (And even male babies scream if circumcised without anesthetic.) And while the business of whether converts should be subjected to circumcision was the focus of the discussion, it is also clear that they were arguing about whether the Torah was to rule over Christianity as it did Judaism, and how literally were the Christians to take what we today call the Old Testament.
So this is the point at which Paul’s mixed upbringing comes into play. As a Pharisee, he ought to require circumcision. But with his father’s Roman contacts, he understood that those men who were Hellenists (accommodating the Greco-Roman mindset) would tend to reject the requirement as being really strange... and uncomfortable... and possibly opening themselves to infection, which could be fatal. And so Paul took the attitude that circumcision, being part of the Jewish Law, was superseded by the New Covenant that Jesus brought.
Did this conform to the Pharisees’ teaching? No.
Did it conform to the Law? Most decidedly not [seeGenesis 17:9-14 andJoshua 5:2]. Therefore, Paul had stepped outside the Law. And he admitted that this is true in the previous paragraph, where he said he is trying to please only God, not people. It was only after he had had this revelation from Jesus Christ and done his three-year study on it that he returned to Jerusalem and met with Simon Peter and James, the Lord’s brother. It sounds as though he is rejecting the Law, the authority of the apostles, and the root of Christianity in Judaism. In a way, he is. He is basing all of his teaching and evangelism on a direct revelation, rather than the tradition he spent years learning from Gamaliel.
This whole discussion may seem archaic, but actually the Church is experiencing a similar controversy today. In fact, there are several controversies, but they all add up to the same thing: How are we going to reach those for whom churchgoing, worship, prayer, and even the idea that Jesus was raised from the dead are alien ideas, activities, and beliefs they don’t own and of which they have only the faintest understanding? We have serious disagreements within the church about how to read the Bible -- literally, metaphorically, or with an eye for the original intent of the writers. We have serious disagreements about the existence of hell, heaven, angels, demons, even God. We disagree on what the meaning is of Jesus’ death on the cross. We fight over whether “sinners” can be church members if they continue to sin [may I point out Romans 3:23?]. The communities to which we need to be reaching out ask why our congregations aren’t diverse, when their friend groups are. It is too easy for us to shrink back from change, but unless we do change, we will lose what some call “the culture wars.”
So the question we might ask is: “What would Paul’s words mean for those discussions?”
Luke 7:11-17
The town of Nain still exists today, only now spelled as Nein. It lies in the Lower Galilee just a short distance from Nazareth, and about 20 kilometers from Capernaum, so it is in the general area of the bulk of Jesus’ ministry. Its only appearance in the Bible is in this passage from Luke. That in and of itself is unusual. There are a small number of towns and cities that feature in both the Old and New Testaments, and some that are found only in the New Testament but are found often. However, the town became famous for a specific reason: this is the first time Jesus raised someone from the dead.
The feature of the story I want to hone in on is Jesus’ motive for this resurrection. This is found, ostensibly, in v. 13, where Luke says “[Jesus] had compassion for her...” However, the previous verse tells us a good deal about why he feels compassion for her: “He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow.” The deceased is not a child, but a man. So his mother is not young, possibly beyond childbearing age, and she has just lost her last protection in this world. A woman in that time and place was at the mercy of whatever male relatives she had. She had no livelihood that could not be taken from her if her nearest male relative considered it a nuisance, or unsuitable for a woman in his family. The house she lived in might very well be part of a familial compound, so she could legally be put out of it to make way for a younger generation who needed the space, and resettled in a single out-of-the-way room. While her child was alive, she had a status and someone to care for. No longer. She had many reasons to weep.
Jesus was traveling, Luke says, with a large crowd, including his disciples. They had just reached the gate of the town when this funeral cortege came out of the city. In-town cemeteries were unheard of, the body of a dead person being intrinsically unclean.
The woman also was surrounded by “a large crowd from the town.” It may be that she or her son were popular. It may be that he had been important. It may be that they were rich and the crowd was paid to come along and mourn his death. But at this moment, all she was focused on was the loss of her son. Evidently she was crying, since Jesus said to her, “Do not weep.”
Presiding over the death of a child is one of the hardest tasks of ministry. Everyone wants to know “Why?” “Why did this child die?” “What kind of a God takes the life of a child?” Some people will use metaphors, such as “Well, she’s one of God’s little angels now.” Or a personal favorite: “God needed a lovely flower in his garden, so he plucked her out and planted her there.” (As though God couldn’t create or re-create that flower!)
Luke says the son was “a man,” but just because the child has reached adulthood doesn’t mean we aren’t losing a child. All the mourners might be asking themselves “Why did this man die before his mother? His father is already dead.” The loss of a spouse, as we all know, can be a horrible loss, and not just because of the loss of the income the husband/father generated. Everyone in the household depends on him. As the man of the house, he has to make hard decisions. From childhood on, he was told that the welfare of his family would rest on his shoulders. Many a wife leans on her husband for emotional comfort. His son would come to him for advice and learning, especially in a society where education was not free. The father had to teach his son what he needed to know to earn a living, to know how to raise his children, to know how to make his wife happy. To have lost all that is hard.
And now this woman has lost the one other man in her home. She has lost not just a family member, not just a source of income for the household, but her future. She may have doted on her son. She may have despaired of her son. It makes no difference. She had hopes, just as we all have. She hoped he would be a great man in his town. She hoped he would be a good man. She hoped others would admire him. She hoped he would be successful. Whether or not her hopes had yet been realized, as long as he was alive she could hope.
But no longer. He is dead, and whatever her hopes were they have shattered. Because the Jews bury their dead on the same day that they die, she had not yet had the chance to process her misfortune. She hasn’t yet begun to worry about all the bad things that might happen. She was still numb. But she was crying, crying fresh tears, those that come when the doctor stands in front of us and says, “We did everything we could, but -- I’m sorry, your son is dead.”
Jesus knows all this. For one thing, according to legendary material that has passed down to us, Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph, was already dead. His mother was having to get along without him. He has brothers, according to Matthew 12 and 13, so his mother is well-looked after, but she may well still miss her husband. And Jesus may well miss his earthly father. Just because he understood God to be his father doesn’t mean he didn’t love and respect Joseph. In any case, he had compassion, and that compassion, given his power, could spell real help for this woman. He walks over to the bier (a stretcher-like carrier, used so the bearers don’t have to touch the body) on which the shroud-wrapped body is resting and simply says, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” And he does.
Luke says, “Fear seized all of them.” And I can’t help but say, “I bet it did!” No one expects the dead to sit up and start talking. In fact, I’d be surprised if the men carrying him out of the city didn’t drop him. If this happened today people would be in even more of a panic, and would set about trying to prove that this was a hoax cooked up by the mother and Jesus. Or the son and Jesus. Or...
But in Jesus’ day, people could still believe in miracles. Their nation might be under the control of Rome, their temple might be days away, the economy might fluctuate, their leaders might be corrupt, but they hoped for prophets, a Messiah, the End of the World, when God would put everything right. And here, right in front of them, “A great prophet has risen among us!” Of course, this word about Jesus spread throughout all the surrounding country.
Later on, Jesus would resurrect the daughter of the leader of a synagogue. But then he said the child was just sleeping. The people were certain she was dead but Jesus said she was sleeping, so when she sat up and said she was hungry there could be speculation about what had actually happened.
Later still, Jesus would resurrect his friend Lazarus. And this time there could be no doubt. He had been in the tomb for three days. His own sister said, when Jesus told them to roll away the stone that covered the burial cave, “Lord, he’ll stink!” So when Lazarus shuffled out of the cave the people were amazed, and word of the act went right up to the high priest by the next day. The authorities theorized that Lazarus had been put in the cave alive, and there was enough air in the tomb that he could stay alive this long if he just laid still. It was a trick... an obvious trick. And therefore the authorities decided to arrest both Jesus and Lazarus (cf. John 12:9).
This story, then, is the beginning of the end of Jesus’ ministry. The authorities could tolerate his miracles as long as there might be some ordinary explanation. They could brush away healing stories; there were many “magicians” touring the countryside who did much the same thing. They could explain away ordinary “miracles” like the loaves and fishes by arguing that undoubtedly most people had brought food with them, just like the young boy who offered his lunch; but they were unwilling to take out their food in case those sitting near them would not have anything to eat. Jesus’ breaking up of the bread and fish into baskets to be passed around gave everyone permission to bring out whatever they had carried with them, putting any extra in the basket rather than taking out, so everyone had something to eat.
But resurrection is an insidious business.
As we noted in the discussion of Galatians, there were disputes between the various divisions of the first-century Jews as to whether there was life after death at all. The balance of power was about to shift, and we have enough modern-day examples of what happens when power shifts take place: economies rock, nations fall, war breaks out, there are riots in the streets, even forms of government change. God forbid such things to happen! We would far rather keep everything as it is. Except for the rabble-rousers, of course. They don’t want to keep everything as it is. So get rid of the rabble-rousers if you want to be safe.
Or do we want to put God in a lovely box, cushioned by tissue and tied up with a bow? Sometimes God seems to be as difficult to understand as quantum physics (you can measure the way the particle is moving or you can define exactly where it is in space, but not both at the same time). The miracles in the Bible seem too good (or too hard) to believe, so we try to find a logical explanation.
But try this one on for size: I was serving a rural church in central Wisconsin. The road on which the church and parsonage stood ran alongside a river, and in the depth of winter the road tended to accumulate ice rapidly as a result. Half a mile down the road there was an old mill, with a dam that used to make the mill wheel turn. A slight fog would rise from the water, making the 60-degree turn in the road treacherous from time to time. One day as I was driving toward the mill, a road crew truck crossed the river and started to turn onto the road I was on. But the road was icy, and the truck slid directly into my lane, coming directly at me. I could see the driver frantically trying to turn the wheels back into his lane, but there wasn’t enough space between us. I cried out, “Oh Jesus! Help!” I closed my eyes, expecting the impact, but when I looked again the truck was back in its lane, and the driver and I were looking at each other, eyes wide, confused about what just happened. There was no good stopping place, so I kept going for the three miles into town, shaking all the way.
Miracle? Good luck? Excellent snow tires on the truck? The way we answer that question reflects our faith, our belief system that governs how we live.
The two resurrection stories present us with that kind of miracle. But the Galatians reading is as much about faith as those two stories. Paul says that his knowledge about Christ and what God intends for the church came directly from God and his reading of the scripture, not from the leadership of the early church. In fact, he definitively states that he relied on a direct revelation. Magic? Superstition? The gift of the Holy Spirit, we might say. Like that truck on that icy road, Saul was heading for a crash as he persecuted the early followers of Jesus. But God grabbed him and he regained the lane God wanted him to be in. So Paul/Saul was turned 180 degrees, and became the apostle to the Gentiles. That’s you and me. Thank you, Saul/Paul, for doing what God wanted when all the world told you that you were wrong, that you were going against the scripture, that you were violating God’s Law revealed 1,000 years before your time.
1 Kings 17:8-16 (17-24)
The story we are considering this week comes at the end of a long story of the fall of the nation of Israel. King Jereboam came to power after the death of King Solomon, and his actions as king led to the split of the kingdom. Jereboam took control of the larger amount of land in the north and declared it to be the Northern Kingdom of Israel, while the Southern Kingdom came to be called Judah, under the kingship of Rehoboam. Jereboam was determined to keep the two nations from reuniting, so there were constant border disputes. To keep his people from making pilgrimages down to Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem he set up two centers of worship, one in Bethel and the other in Dan, both of which were focused on a golden calf, emulating the Egyptians, who usually depicted their gods on the back of a golden calf.
When Rehoboam’s son Abijah defeated Jereboam, the kings that followed him each moved further and further from the worship of Yahweh. The last of these was Ahab, who married a notorious Phoenician woman named Jezebel, who worshipped Ba’al. Ahab established Ba’al worship in Israel, which included fertility rituals and human sacrifice. In fact, the last thing we read in 1 Kings 16 is that “Hiel of Bethel built Jericho; he laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram his firstborn, and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke by Joshua son of Nun.” What this means is that he killed his own sons so that he could lay their bodies under the foundation and gates of the new Jericho, a city that the people had defeated as they began to take over the land of Canaan.
Elijah was called by God to a miserable task: to tell Ahab, king of Israel, that his marriage to Jezebel and his worship of her god Ba’al (meaning“The Lord”) in Samaria had offended Yahweh (the Lord of Moses) and that he needed to do away with this religion within his kingdom. If he did not, Elijah warned, there would be “neither rain nor dew” until he repented. Ahab, true to form, mocked Elijah -- saying that other prophets had warned of this and yet it still rained. Elijah replied that there would be no rain in the land until he himself called for it to rain.
Today’s story is the first miracle that Elijah performed. God sent him into Sidon, a Gentile country to the northwest of Israel, saying that he had commanded a widow to care for the prophet there. And there she is, gathering twigs to make a fire, as Elijah approaches the gate of Zarephath.
Elijah would appear to be completely self-centered if we hadn’t been told that God had arranged all of this. Here is this young widow, gathering fuel to cook the last bit of flour and oil into a small, round loaf of bread that she will split with her son -- and then they both will die of starvation; and here is this man, asking her to bake a bread loaf for him first. Even though he promises her a miracle (unending flour and oil until the drought ends), she would be forgiven for doubting him. Yet she does exactly as he asks. One might say, of course, that it really didn’t cost her that much. After all, what difference would a single loaf of bread make in the face of certain starvation? Still, it is a leap of faith to feed a supposed prophet rather than one’s own child.
Her faith gesture pays off. God comes through for all three people in this story. Elijah gets his bread -- a major sacrifice for the widow to make -- and still there is enough for the mother and child to have a loaf of their own, and not just that day, but throughout the drought.
This story was so important to Luke that he placed Jesus’ commentary on it in his story of Jesus’ first appearance as a teacher in his local synagogue (Luke 4:26-27). Jesus had already gained a reputation in the Ten Towns area as a prophet and healer. But he had not had much success in Nazareth, because they didn’t expect miracles from one of their own. [Today this is recognized as the “50-mile rule” -- you’re only an “expert” if you live at least 50 miles away from the people you’re talking to.] “There were plenty of widows in Israel in those days,” Jesus said, “but Elijah was sent by God to a widow in Sidon.” The idea that God could go to the Gentiles rather than the Jews, due to the lack of faith in the nation, so enraged his listeners that they tried to throw him over a cliff!
It is hard for us post-resurrection Christians to imagine the impact of what Jesus had said. Probably what the people were thinking at his words went like this: “WE are the people of God! WE are the children of Abraham and Isaac! WE are part of the Chosen People. OUR ancestors followed Moses out of Egypt and into this land of milk and honey! How insulting can you be? No Gentile can be part of the Kingdom of God. They are unclean!” The men started talking to each other instead of listening to what Jesus had to say, or asking him questions about his teaching, which was perfectly acceptable behavior amongst the men gathered in the synagogue. And the less they listened and the more they talked among themselves the angrier they got, until they tried to toss him off a cliff. But he slipped out of their grasp and walked through the midst of the crowd and out of town.
The story of Elijah and the widow is not over, however. This woman’s bad luck seemingly has no end. No sooner has Elijah moved into her house then her son falls sick. The description in 1 Kings 17 makes it sound like the boy had pneumonia: “he was so sick that there was no breath left in him.” For children who live in the hot areas of the world, like Sidon, respiratory infections can quickly cause death. The constant high temperatures they are already having to cope with weaken their immune systems, so any fever saps their strength and can kill within 24 hours, even today. Naturally the mother becomes distraught and asks Elijah, “What have you against me?” This was being said to the prophet, but she can be understood to be asking this question of God, just as people will attack their pastor when they are angry at God.
It would be a shame to pass over this “second” story on the basis that the lectionary marks it as optional. We’re living in hard times too. Floods, violent storms, landslides, and the other effects that global warming is having on our weather are having a negative impact not only on those directly in the path of the event, but also on food supplies, raising the price of food. Our current election has shown how many Americans lack jobs that pay enough to live on; the high price of health insurance, medications, and hospitals; and the undependability of pension funds and Social Security, especially for the disabled. These are the realities many of our parishioners are facing, causing them too to ask God, “What do you have against me?”
This is not a question people ask lightly. Nor is it a question limited to the poor. Families who considered themselves to be middle-class a few short years ago are having to cut back, have lost their homes, and worry about how they will provide well for their children. Where they used to gladly pay for sports equipment and musical instruments, many families are having to do without enrichment classes for their children. Plus, so many of our popular television shows portray “average” people living in luxury, which leaves many people jealous and frustrated at their inability to live the same way. Is it any wonder that our presidential candidates are looking for scapegoats and the voters are cheering on those who promise to fix all of our problems?
This widow has the sense that her son’s death has been brought on by her sins, a common belief in her day (and often, still in our own time), but in her own way she is appealing to this man of God, hoping that he might have a solution. This refers to the ancient belief that there is a certain quid pro quo to the workings between God and humans, and Elijah is working as a part of this contract.
Elijah takes her child out of her arms and carries him to an upstairs room that has been turned over to him by the widow. (Upper rooms are usually turned over to guests as they are more likely to catch the evening breeze, making sleep much easier, and offering a view as well.) The process he uses to revive the boy is striking in the way it parallels today’s CPR: Elijah lays him on the bed and asks God to heal this boy. Then the prophet lies on top of the boy three times. When he gets up the third time the boy is breathing, and Elijah hands him back to his mother. This convinces the widow that Elijah really is a man of God. In Elijah’s ministry, as in Jesus’, the healing is done out of compassion -- and not just for its own sake, but also to elicit faith and hope.
Galatians 1:11-24
This passage from Galatians is headlined in the NRSV as being “Paul’s vindication of his apostleship.” For the Gentile reader (you and me), it seems backward to think that his vindication could possibly rest on the fact that he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from those who had known him in life. Paul is resting his bona fides on the idea that he received a direct revelation through Jesus. Today that’s not a good way to get people to pay attention, despite the fact that there are many of us pastors who do, in fact, learn much directly from God. But we tend to not share that thought with our congregants, for fear that they’ll think we’re crazy! Or as one woman said to me, “Sometimes you seem to be positively psychic. So why weren’t you psychic when I really needed you?” Who can pretend to know the answer to that question?
Paul begins by confessing that as a well-educated Pharisee (he had studied with Gamaliel, one of the most important rabbis in history, at the Hillel school, which is like saying he had graduated from Harvard Divinity School) he had been “violently persecuting” the early church, admitting that he was “trying to destroy it.” This is a confession, not a boast. He is trying to tell the Galatians why he is, in some important ways, in opposition to the teachings of the central core of the apostles in Jerusalem.
This is all about the question of the nature of the church. The Letter to the Galatians handles several important points of disagreement that were going on in the early church.
First, who are the apostles? Paul claims that title for himself, even though he never knew Jesus in the flesh. Up until then, the title of apostle was confined to those who had followed Jesus in life. He met with Peter only after he had gone into Arabia for three years (v. 17). He says that he was accepted by those who “seemed to be leaders” (2:2). So this first question is answered that the apostles are those who are called by Jesus to fulfill the role, not just those who knew Jesus before the crucifixion.
Second, to whom should the church be preaching and teaching? There were those in the company of the church in Judea who thought that they should confine themselves to their Jewish brothers and sisters, following the first half of the Great Commission (Acts 1:8): “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (compare Matthew 28:18-20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations...”). The problem in reaching out to the surrounding culture was (and still is) that most of those people were not like the apostles and the early Jewish Christians.
Paul was the son of a Pharisee who was also a citizen of Rome (an unusual combination) and surely of a mother who was evidently also Jewish (since a child can only be born Jewish if the mother is). This gave him an unusual outlook: a man who could easily argue as a Pharisee but also with an understanding of the Gentile mindset. So when he went out preaching, he tended to talk to the Gentile seekers as comfortably as the Jewish seekers. He understood how to frame his teaching so it would make sense to those who had been brought up outside the Law. He pared down those things that would be stumbling blocks for those coming to Jesus who were not Jewish nor interested in Jewish thought and culture.
This was offensive to the Pharisees in particular and to most Jews in general. The argument was particularly heated in Christian circles as it applied to how a Gentile might become a Christian. For the Jews who had followed Jesus, everything had been changed -- and yet not, because they saw him as the promised Messiah. The belief that Jesus had died and then was resurrected fit right into the belief system of the Pharisees, but not the Sadducees, because they did not believe in life after death in any form.
This was the problem: when a man became a Jew, he had to, by the Law, do three things:
1) he must first agree to keep the Law in its totality;
2) he must be immersed in a ritual bath (this is what John the Baptizer was doing at the Jordan River, sidestepping the cost of a mikvah at the Temple);
3) and he must be circumcised -- no exceptions. (Women who converted underwent the ritual bath only.)
And Paul saw this as exclusionary. Adult males are reluctant to submit themselves to the pain and personal humiliation involved. (And even male babies scream if circumcised without anesthetic.) And while the business of whether converts should be subjected to circumcision was the focus of the discussion, it is also clear that they were arguing about whether the Torah was to rule over Christianity as it did Judaism, and how literally were the Christians to take what we today call the Old Testament.
So this is the point at which Paul’s mixed upbringing comes into play. As a Pharisee, he ought to require circumcision. But with his father’s Roman contacts, he understood that those men who were Hellenists (accommodating the Greco-Roman mindset) would tend to reject the requirement as being really strange... and uncomfortable... and possibly opening themselves to infection, which could be fatal. And so Paul took the attitude that circumcision, being part of the Jewish Law, was superseded by the New Covenant that Jesus brought.
Did this conform to the Pharisees’ teaching? No.
Did it conform to the Law? Most decidedly not [seeGenesis 17:9-14 andJoshua 5:2]. Therefore, Paul had stepped outside the Law. And he admitted that this is true in the previous paragraph, where he said he is trying to please only God, not people. It was only after he had had this revelation from Jesus Christ and done his three-year study on it that he returned to Jerusalem and met with Simon Peter and James, the Lord’s brother. It sounds as though he is rejecting the Law, the authority of the apostles, and the root of Christianity in Judaism. In a way, he is. He is basing all of his teaching and evangelism on a direct revelation, rather than the tradition he spent years learning from Gamaliel.
This whole discussion may seem archaic, but actually the Church is experiencing a similar controversy today. In fact, there are several controversies, but they all add up to the same thing: How are we going to reach those for whom churchgoing, worship, prayer, and even the idea that Jesus was raised from the dead are alien ideas, activities, and beliefs they don’t own and of which they have only the faintest understanding? We have serious disagreements within the church about how to read the Bible -- literally, metaphorically, or with an eye for the original intent of the writers. We have serious disagreements about the existence of hell, heaven, angels, demons, even God. We disagree on what the meaning is of Jesus’ death on the cross. We fight over whether “sinners” can be church members if they continue to sin [may I point out Romans 3:23?]. The communities to which we need to be reaching out ask why our congregations aren’t diverse, when their friend groups are. It is too easy for us to shrink back from change, but unless we do change, we will lose what some call “the culture wars.”
So the question we might ask is: “What would Paul’s words mean for those discussions?”
Luke 7:11-17
The town of Nain still exists today, only now spelled as Nein. It lies in the Lower Galilee just a short distance from Nazareth, and about 20 kilometers from Capernaum, so it is in the general area of the bulk of Jesus’ ministry. Its only appearance in the Bible is in this passage from Luke. That in and of itself is unusual. There are a small number of towns and cities that feature in both the Old and New Testaments, and some that are found only in the New Testament but are found often. However, the town became famous for a specific reason: this is the first time Jesus raised someone from the dead.
The feature of the story I want to hone in on is Jesus’ motive for this resurrection. This is found, ostensibly, in v. 13, where Luke says “[Jesus] had compassion for her...” However, the previous verse tells us a good deal about why he feels compassion for her: “He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow.” The deceased is not a child, but a man. So his mother is not young, possibly beyond childbearing age, and she has just lost her last protection in this world. A woman in that time and place was at the mercy of whatever male relatives she had. She had no livelihood that could not be taken from her if her nearest male relative considered it a nuisance, or unsuitable for a woman in his family. The house she lived in might very well be part of a familial compound, so she could legally be put out of it to make way for a younger generation who needed the space, and resettled in a single out-of-the-way room. While her child was alive, she had a status and someone to care for. No longer. She had many reasons to weep.
Jesus was traveling, Luke says, with a large crowd, including his disciples. They had just reached the gate of the town when this funeral cortege came out of the city. In-town cemeteries were unheard of, the body of a dead person being intrinsically unclean.
The woman also was surrounded by “a large crowd from the town.” It may be that she or her son were popular. It may be that he had been important. It may be that they were rich and the crowd was paid to come along and mourn his death. But at this moment, all she was focused on was the loss of her son. Evidently she was crying, since Jesus said to her, “Do not weep.”
Presiding over the death of a child is one of the hardest tasks of ministry. Everyone wants to know “Why?” “Why did this child die?” “What kind of a God takes the life of a child?” Some people will use metaphors, such as “Well, she’s one of God’s little angels now.” Or a personal favorite: “God needed a lovely flower in his garden, so he plucked her out and planted her there.” (As though God couldn’t create or re-create that flower!)
Luke says the son was “a man,” but just because the child has reached adulthood doesn’t mean we aren’t losing a child. All the mourners might be asking themselves “Why did this man die before his mother? His father is already dead.” The loss of a spouse, as we all know, can be a horrible loss, and not just because of the loss of the income the husband/father generated. Everyone in the household depends on him. As the man of the house, he has to make hard decisions. From childhood on, he was told that the welfare of his family would rest on his shoulders. Many a wife leans on her husband for emotional comfort. His son would come to him for advice and learning, especially in a society where education was not free. The father had to teach his son what he needed to know to earn a living, to know how to raise his children, to know how to make his wife happy. To have lost all that is hard.
And now this woman has lost the one other man in her home. She has lost not just a family member, not just a source of income for the household, but her future. She may have doted on her son. She may have despaired of her son. It makes no difference. She had hopes, just as we all have. She hoped he would be a great man in his town. She hoped he would be a good man. She hoped others would admire him. She hoped he would be successful. Whether or not her hopes had yet been realized, as long as he was alive she could hope.
But no longer. He is dead, and whatever her hopes were they have shattered. Because the Jews bury their dead on the same day that they die, she had not yet had the chance to process her misfortune. She hasn’t yet begun to worry about all the bad things that might happen. She was still numb. But she was crying, crying fresh tears, those that come when the doctor stands in front of us and says, “We did everything we could, but -- I’m sorry, your son is dead.”
Jesus knows all this. For one thing, according to legendary material that has passed down to us, Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph, was already dead. His mother was having to get along without him. He has brothers, according to Matthew 12 and 13, so his mother is well-looked after, but she may well still miss her husband. And Jesus may well miss his earthly father. Just because he understood God to be his father doesn’t mean he didn’t love and respect Joseph. In any case, he had compassion, and that compassion, given his power, could spell real help for this woman. He walks over to the bier (a stretcher-like carrier, used so the bearers don’t have to touch the body) on which the shroud-wrapped body is resting and simply says, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” And he does.
Luke says, “Fear seized all of them.” And I can’t help but say, “I bet it did!” No one expects the dead to sit up and start talking. In fact, I’d be surprised if the men carrying him out of the city didn’t drop him. If this happened today people would be in even more of a panic, and would set about trying to prove that this was a hoax cooked up by the mother and Jesus. Or the son and Jesus. Or...
But in Jesus’ day, people could still believe in miracles. Their nation might be under the control of Rome, their temple might be days away, the economy might fluctuate, their leaders might be corrupt, but they hoped for prophets, a Messiah, the End of the World, when God would put everything right. And here, right in front of them, “A great prophet has risen among us!” Of course, this word about Jesus spread throughout all the surrounding country.
Later on, Jesus would resurrect the daughter of the leader of a synagogue. But then he said the child was just sleeping. The people were certain she was dead but Jesus said she was sleeping, so when she sat up and said she was hungry there could be speculation about what had actually happened.
Later still, Jesus would resurrect his friend Lazarus. And this time there could be no doubt. He had been in the tomb for three days. His own sister said, when Jesus told them to roll away the stone that covered the burial cave, “Lord, he’ll stink!” So when Lazarus shuffled out of the cave the people were amazed, and word of the act went right up to the high priest by the next day. The authorities theorized that Lazarus had been put in the cave alive, and there was enough air in the tomb that he could stay alive this long if he just laid still. It was a trick... an obvious trick. And therefore the authorities decided to arrest both Jesus and Lazarus (cf. John 12:9).
This story, then, is the beginning of the end of Jesus’ ministry. The authorities could tolerate his miracles as long as there might be some ordinary explanation. They could brush away healing stories; there were many “magicians” touring the countryside who did much the same thing. They could explain away ordinary “miracles” like the loaves and fishes by arguing that undoubtedly most people had brought food with them, just like the young boy who offered his lunch; but they were unwilling to take out their food in case those sitting near them would not have anything to eat. Jesus’ breaking up of the bread and fish into baskets to be passed around gave everyone permission to bring out whatever they had carried with them, putting any extra in the basket rather than taking out, so everyone had something to eat.
But resurrection is an insidious business.
As we noted in the discussion of Galatians, there were disputes between the various divisions of the first-century Jews as to whether there was life after death at all. The balance of power was about to shift, and we have enough modern-day examples of what happens when power shifts take place: economies rock, nations fall, war breaks out, there are riots in the streets, even forms of government change. God forbid such things to happen! We would far rather keep everything as it is. Except for the rabble-rousers, of course. They don’t want to keep everything as it is. So get rid of the rabble-rousers if you want to be safe.
