• I Kings 17: 8-16, (17-24)

Having told the King, Ahab, what he did not want to hear about a coming draught, and having infuriated the Queen, Jezebel, for humiliating the priests of Baal, Elijah is forced to flee for his life.  The Lord miraculously provides raven to feed him, (17: 1-7).  Now that the draught has reached its most devastating impact, Elijah’s survival seems to be even more at risk.  The Lord instructs Elijah to go to Zarepath where he will be fed by a widow with little or nothing left for herself and her son.  Elijah encounters the widow, asks for bread and she responds that she has just enough to scrape together one last meal for herself and her son before they die of starvation.  Elijah insists she prepare a meal for him and for them, because “thus says the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail” until the drought ends with rain.  She complies and the prophet’s words are fulfilled.  But after this miracle, the widow’s son dies.  In her anger and remorse, the widow lashes out at Elijah: “what have you against me, O man of God?”  Elijah took her dead son, “stretched himself upon the child three times,” cried out to God, and the child “revived.”  He returned the child to his mother, who declares: “Now I know that you are a man of God, and the word of the lord is in your mouth.”

• Psalm 146

The psalmist finds she must irrepressibly sing the Lord’s praises while “I have breath.”  She contrasts trust in “princes,” who always disappoint, with “Jacob’s God, who is “maker of heaven and earth” and “does justice,” especially for the itinerant, the widow, the orphan, and all who are oppressed, hungry or the blind.

OR

• I Kings 17: 17-24

(See comments, above.)

• Psalm 30

Having somehow come very close to dying, the psalmist now gives thanks that the Lord rescued him.  The Lord allows him to “go down weeping” but get up in the morning singing.  The Lord turns his “dirge” into a dance!

• Galatians 11: 11-24

In this excerpt, Paul reminds his readers of his own personal history as a devout Jew and his transformation as a witness to Christ: “But when God, who had set me apart before I was  born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might” have a unique testimony.  After his life-changing experience, Paul writes, he went to Jerusalem where he stayed with Peter/Cephas and “James, the Lord’s brother.”  From there he launched his missionary travels;  “and they glorified God because of me.”

• Luke 7: 11-17

Having healed the son of a Roman centurion at the behest of the local Jewish leaders in Capernaum (see last Sunday’s gospel, 7: 1-10), Jesus moved on to another town, Nain, followed by his disciples and “a large crowd.”  In an episode unique to Luke’s narrative, as they approached the city gate, they encountered a funeral procession of the only son of a widow.  When Jesus saw her, Luke writes, he had “compassion.”  He told her not to weep and addressed the corpse: “Young man, I say rise!”  The young man sat up and spoke.  Jesus returned him to his mother.  All who witnessed this event were filled with fear, which then became praise to God: “A great prophet has risen among us!”  This is a sign of God’s favor.  Word spread like wildfire “throughout all Judea” and the surrounding countryside.

Like the best story-tellers, the creator of the story of the encounter between Elijah and the widow in Zarapeth keeps ratcheting up the stakes right up to a breaking point.  Elijah is on the run to escape the agents of the King. As the drought worsens, a widow, who would have been particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal society, is down to the last bit of food she can muster for one final meal before she and her son die of starvation.  The Lord’s prophet makes an outlandish announcement and saves their lives.  But the situation turns bitter again when the widow’s only son suddenly dies.  Once again, the Lord’s prophet says and does outlandish things and her son is restored.

Luke is another among the best story-tellers.  In his own unique variation on Elijah’s encounter, he tells how Jesus met a woman in a funeral procession for her only son.  She, too, would be particularly vulnerable.  Jesus inexplicably tells her not to weep, issues an outrageous command to  the corpse and her son is restored.

Such stories engage our empathy or perhaps elicit painful memories of our own desperate times when personal tragedy has  struck a devastating blow and exposed our vulnerabilities.  Having resigned themselves to despair and loss, each woman in each story hears unexpected words from unlikely people.  God’s prophet, on the lam himself with no visible means of support or resources declares, “Do not be afraid….”  He then instructs the widow to return to the task of preparing the next meal with the Lord’s promise she will never lack enough until the rains come and the drought is over.  Jesus stops a funeral procession, speaks to a grieving widow and mother of her dead son whom he has never met before and outrageously tells her “Do not weep.”  He calls on the young man to sit up and returns him to the embrace of his mother, restored to life.  Powerful words of hope in seemingly impossible situations.

Paul Ricoeur reconsiders the biblical origins of the power of spoken words of hope in impossible situations in his collection of essays gathered together in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination.  He writes:

“For seen from the standpoint of hope, life is not only the contrary but the denial of death; this denial relies on signs, not on proofs.  It interprets in a creative way the sign of the superabundance of life in spite of the evidence of death.”  He then adds a personal note: “For my part I should say that freedom is the capacity to live according to the paradoxical law of superabundance, of denying death and asserting the excess of sense over non-sense in desperate situations.”  (pp 206-207)

What if God’s representative, Elijah, had not spoken and interrupted the downward spiral of the widow of Zarapeth?  What if Jesus had not stopped the funeral procession coming out of the town of Nain and spoken those unexpected words of a certain “logic of hope as opposed to the logic of repetition”?  What if these men of God had remained silent or just repeated homilies, or cliches, not willing or able to speak God’s word of hope in such presumably impossible situations?

In another essay in that same collection, Ricoeur decides, “it is the function of preaching to reverse the relation from written to spoken [word]….”  “…[T]he text has to be reconverted to word….” (p. 71)  Preachers and those who hear them are already familiar with the stories of Elijah and the widow of Zarapeth and Jesus and the widow of Nain.  The task/opportunity/privilege of the preacher is to “reconvert” those texts to spoken word; to declare the possible in situations that already have been assumed to be impossible.  So that, with Paul, the preacher might say, “And they glorified God because of me.”  Or, the preacher might hear from others as Elijah did, “Now I know that you are a person of God and the word of the Lord is in your mouth.”