One unfortunate thing about being human over, say, a bird, or a dog, is that humans tend to forget whose we are and who we are. The prophet’s job is to remind us. They create a kind of the hammock of trust suspended between recalling God’s faithfulness in the past, and premembering the future God is bringing. The is essential, because there is nothing more destructive in all the earth than human beings who’ve forgotten their belonging to God and each other.
The prophet Elijah appears out of nowhere, bursting on the scene fully formed, ready to show the people of Israel who is the real God. In those days, in the other lands, prophets were a dime a dozen. People who delivered messages between the divine realm and the world of humans camped out in temples near idols like buskers with their hat on the ground.
So when God calls prophets in Israel, one scholar says, we can think of God ‘using the technology of the day’ – people understood the idea of prophets. But the prophets of Israel weren’t street performers; they were honored guides, whose words were collected and recorded (the Israelites basically invented scripture). Messengers of Yahweh who spoke truth to power, the prophets reminded the kings that God’s covenant calling and the law of Moses applied equally to all people, kings included.
Also, just to be clear, the prophets were weird. Pretty much all of them. The stories are wild, all performance art and poetry, confusing and disruptive. Not really the buttoned-up lawyer-type, they were more the off-the-grid, loud and raving type, the blunt objects God uses to break through the status quo and tear it all down when the people of God lose their way, imaginations dulled and senses numbed into accepting the unacceptable. This story of unbuilding and rebuilding repeats again and again. So, the Hebrew prophets were both revered and a little bit feared, because they were unpredictable and a little bit dangerous, not quite housebroken, demonstrating Yahweh couldn’t be domesticated either.
There are 133 named prophets in the bible, 16 of them women. Many spoke God’s words, but some of also performed miracles, these were known as ‘men of God’. Elijah, and his apprentice Elisha, were the most well-known ‘man of God’ types, conduits of the Divine who demonstrated God’s power with works of wonder.
Elijah is most famous for two incidents that follow today’s story– one is a face-off with the prophets of Baal Hedad, a Mountaintop Battle of the Gods that lasts a whole day, during which Elijah taunts them relentlessly, and the Baal fails to deliver even a spark. Yahweh and Elijah come out on top when Yahweh’s fire from heaven vaporizes Elijah’s waterlogged sacrifice, altar included. Then Elijah takes things too far and slaughters the prophets of Baal. He immediately goes from speaking for God to cowering from the empire when Queen Jezebel threatens him and he flees for his life, bringing us to the second story Elijah is most known for. Wandering desperate and terrified through the wilderness he ends up in a cave, crying out to God. God sends a great wind, and a storm, and an earthquake, but God is not in the wind, or the storm or the earthquake, and then there is the sound of sheer silence. And this is where God meets Elijah. Speaking to him in the still, small voice.
Those seem like significant stories, and the public showdown between Yahweh and Baal is a real boon to Elijah’s prophetic reputation. But the story we have today seems minor and unimportant. A miracle, for certain, but why is it recorded in the annuls of Kings? Why is it placed alongside stories that shaped the direction of history?
It helps to know something about the Ancient Near East. That there were many gods was simply accepted as fact, there was no alternative to polytheism, that’s just how it was for all peoples everywhere. When people groups mingled, they welcomed in each other’s gods and added them to their own collections. Different gods for different things, hierarchies of gods or their exact names—you might quibble about those details, but you would never question the array and assortment of deities. Scholars tell us that shifting from worshiping many gods to worshiping only one God was gradual – going from worshiping many gods to acknowledging them but worshiping only Yahweh, to not mentioning other gods at all, to finally saying only Yahweh is God and always has been, and there are no other gods—that process takes time, like, hundreds of years of gradual shifting.
So, Elijah is part of this shifting, moving people from worshiping many gods to worshiping Yahweh alone. King Ahab loves worshiping Yahweh, but he just mixes Yahweh up into his collection of other gods and can’t see what’s wrong with that. Only the Israelite kings did this, by the way. Outside of Israel, Yahweh was wildly unpopular, because a god who claims to be the only one does not play well with others.
So when God tells Elijah to tell King Ahab it won’t rain for three years until Yahweh says so, Yahweh is stepping into the realm of the Canaanite god of rain, fertility, growth, and increase- Baal Hedad. In the way of the empire, the peasants work the land, the king reaps the benefits, and everyone behaves, accepting the way things are, and staying in their proper place. The temples to the rain god are in the cities where it matters, so the rain will fall specifically on the farms of the king, to feed his crops and increase the wealth of the wealthy.
But Yahweh is the God of all, with no distinction or preferences – except perhaps for the overlooked and undervalued. So, Yahweh turns off the faucet.
The law of Moses says God has called each person to know and follow God. All shall be given land, and if they don’t have it, then land and resources should be redistributed so everyone has what they need. People are commanded to look out for each other, and especially to take care of the oppressed and those on the margins, lifting up the poor, the widow and the orphan. Every person is part of God’s story and God has claimed them to be a blessing to the whole world.
But this empire structure King Ahab slides into props up the few by oppressing the many, consolidates power, tramples the weak, plunders the land, dehumanizes human siblings in the insatiable pursuit of more and more in a structure of fear and dominance, competition and scarcity, what we’ve called the way of fear.
Not only is the one true God too big to be just one of many self-serving deities of the empire that we capitulate to, but the way of God is is in direct opposition to the whole empire thing altogether. Humans are made in the image of God to care for one another, to steward and tend the earth and its creatures, to enjoy life together in the presence of God, in an intricate and astounding world of interdependence, held in a relationship of trust and promise. Yahweh alone is God.
So, against that backdrop, here comes this little story. After delivering his message of drought to the King, Elijah is sent by God to hang out by a drying up wadi (or creek), and told God will provide. And indeed, God does – never without a sense of humor, using ravens, an unclean bird, to bring food to him, because, remember? God is Lord of all, not even captive to our ideas of God, and is free to do what God wishes. So why not shake it up? Ravens it is! When the creek dries up God sends Elijah some 50 miles away to find this one, particular widow, whom God says will provide food and water for him.
But when he finally gets there, famished, the lady seems not to have gotten the message. She’s willing to give him a bit of water, but when Elijah asks for food she says, (more bluntly than the Peace Table puts it), “I have enough oil and flour to make my son and me one last scrap of food and then we will lay down and die.” And Elijah has the nerve to ask her to feed him first. He promises the ingredients won’t run out. So, she does, and they don’t.
And when I hear this, I don’t think, how wonderful! I think, how dare he ask her for that? She’s poor! She needs it way more than he does because she has a kid to feed too! There is only so much to go around! And to give it to some you must deny it to others. If he were really a good person, really from God, he would never demand something from someone who has so little!
And there is the voice of the empire within me! The empire imagination that keeps the peasants in their place and views the world through scarcity and competition. Exactly what the prophetic imagination comes to confront and expunge.
Why does this story matter? Here’s why: Because we too have been coopted by the empire to accept the unacceptable. We’re terrified when the status quo gets rocked and shaken, and the built gets unbuilt, because while it might not be perfect, at least it feels stable. It may be rotten with injustice and inequality, but at least we know how much eggs will cost. And the many gods we worship – gods of security and protection, gods of image and achievement, gods of wellness and longevity that we sacrifice to to keep the world from shaking so we can eek our way forward without much tumult or upheaval – when they fail us, and our 401Ks plummet, it’s terrifying. We don’t want an unbuilt and rebuilt reality. As much as we call ourselves Christians, we don’t actually want a death and resurrection kind of God, a God who comes in weakness and shares suffering and invites us to see one another and share life with each other come what may and trust that God will meet us there and hold us fast. We want the empire, plain and simple.
But this little story calls us back to the way of God, not by the prophet’s bold declaration but by his hunger and need. Yahweh is a God who provides. A manna in the wilderness God gives enough for the next meal, and the one after that, if we share it with one another. Not enough to increase and hoard, to rely on our own strength, power or cunning over and against one another. But enough to keep us operating in the currency of covenant, that is, trust and promise.
The widow must trust Elijah, and must trust the promises of Yahweh through him. Elijah must trust God to provide and the kindness of this woman. He must entrust himself into God’s hands by entrusting himself into her hands. And she seems an unlikely source of security, indeed, not who you’d expect to provide for your needs because she apparently can’t even provide for herself or her son. But when Elijah asks ‘the least of these’ for help, he elevates her from irrelevant object of pity to Provider of Hospitality. He comes to her in need of care, and sees her as able to care for him, even if she can’t at first see herself that way. And suddenly they are both freed from the empire. They are living the law of Moses, where all are neighbors, siblings in the human family, looking out for each other, and Yahweh is God of us all, promising to hold us and uphold us.
And so, Elijah gets to live the message he will go on to proclaim: There is only one God, this one, Yahweh, alone, who provides all we need and brings life out of death. This is whose we are. And we are called by this God to be a blessing to the world in our mutual care for one another. That is who we are.
There is nothing more destructive in all the earth than human beings forgetting our belonging to God and each other. And very often we just mix up Yahweh into our collection of other gods and get on with our empire-living. But we are the prophetic community, called to recall God’s faithfulness in the past, premember the future God is bringing, and join right now, from our weakness and need, in the kingdom of the living God unfolding here among us and between us, trusting the God of resurrection to meet us in our places of death.
So, dear ones, may live the message we proclaim, hear within the silence the still, small, voice, and rest in the hammock of trust.
Amen.
