Text: 1 Kings 17:8-16
Let’s imagine…
Imagine you are a poor single mother. No education, no income, nothing to live on. You have enough on hand to feed yourself and your child for one more meal. Things are really getting desperate. You find yourself thinking, “Just this one meal, then we’ll lie down and die.” And then there’s a knock at the door… Who’s there? A wild and crazy man—long beard, tattered clothes, looks like he’s been sleeping rough. “Can you give me some food?” he says. You’re about to slam the door in his face, but he says, “You won’t regret it. You won’t run short.” You think, “Yeah, right!” But wait—there’s something about him… And he’s hungry, just like you and your boy. “OK, come in. We don’t have much, but I guess we can share it with you.”
How many of us would take the risk of sharing our last meal with a stranger? That’s exactly what happened in today’s story from 1 Kings.
Let’s set the stage…
The historical books, Judges through II Kings, were probably put into their final form during the exile. They are in part an attempt to answer the question—why did God desert them? The books’ compilers were concerned with demonstrating the sovereignty of the God of Israel, and the evil of following other gods—
As part of one of these alliances, Omri had married Ahab to a Phoenician princess named Jezebel. Jezebel brought her religion with her—the old Canaanite gods, chief among them the fertility god Baal. Many people today know about mixed-faith marriages, and know that a choice often has to be made. Ahab made the choice of indulging his wife in her religious preferences. But the prophet Elijah told him he had made the wrong choice, and therefore God would send a drought. He then retreated to live in his home territory, where ravens fed him and he drank from a brook. But in time the stream dried up (after all, there was a drought!), and God sent him off to Zarephath, a village in Phoenician territory, where the people worshipped Baal. At the village gate he met a widow, one of the poorest of the poor, among the most affected by the drought, who was preparing to make a last meal for her and her son.
The widow could have said, “No, this is all we have. Leave us alone to die.” But instead she believed Elijah’s fantastic promise, and did as he asked. And she was repaid many times over for taking the risk of generosity with this strange man.
The widow had oil and meal throughout the drought, a powerful if private demonstration of God’s sovereignty even in “foreign territory,” evidence for the reader that Elijah truly did speak the word of the Lord. Nonetheless, the “miracle” depended on the widow’s generous response.
We can’t know what “really happened” at Zarephath, but that is not the point. The point for me is that God acted through Elijah to demonstrate his sovereignty, and that the action began with a human response. No response—no miracle. Here, as so often, God acts in the world through human agency.
The widow responded in generosity: “We don’t have much, but … we can share it with you.” Elijah might have been nothing more than what he appeared to be, a wild man spouting religious slogans. But she took the risk of believing that the God of Israel would do for her as Elijah said.
We may not be a single mother with one meal in the cupboard, opening our door to a homeless stranger. But every one of us is challenged in other ways to take the risk of generosity, opening our hearts, our homes, and our wallets to other people.
Why would we take the risk of giving? Only because God has been there before us, taking the risk of giving to us all that we have—our lives, our livelihoods, our possessions, our friends and families. God knows that it is risky—it is all too likely that we will misuse his gifts to us. We call that “sin,” to which none of us are immune. But God also took the ultimate risk of giving us his Son to be the healer of all sin.
Whether it is as little as a bit of meal and oil or as great as the wealth of Bill Gates, all that we have comes from God. God has taken the risk of sharing so much with us. All that God asks is that we take the risk of sharing what we have.
Even the smallest act of generosity counts for much. Elijah went on from Zarephath to do mightier works, but his story began with a small step, as a widow shared what little she had.
Every day we are presented with opportunities large and small to share God’s blessings with others, to take the risk of generosity to God’s people. Every time we respond it is an act of faith, a response to God’s infinite and risky generosity to us. May God continue to give us grateful and generous hearts, and may we step forward in faith, knowing that we are blessed so that we may be a blessing.