As we dive in, let me remind everyone that we are preaching through the narrative lectionary, meaning that we’re skimming through the Old Testament to be ready for Jesus’ birth at Christmas. And this, though we might not realize it, is the first mention of Elijah, one of the most famous of the prophets…
Now Elijah the Tishbite, of the settlers in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.”
Elijah doesn’t get much introduction, does he? There’s no genealogy or background or anointing or childhood. We hear that Elijah is from the settlers in Gilead, and by that can trust that he’s an historical figure, but then he’s immediately speaking to Ahab –apparently as the mouthpiece of God. “There will be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” Wow; that’s some audacity. And he even claims to be one who can stand before God–that is, to be familiar enough to stand in the presence of God’s majesty, rather than bowing or falling prostrate before the Lord God.
But this word from the Lord that Elijah brings is audacious in more ways than one: it is also the first time in a few generations that God is interrupting the worldly politics of Israel. The previous chapter of Kings describes the multiple dynasties that rose and fell in Israel, commenting that each was sinning and outdoing the previous in evil, but without any lengthy stories of prophets or attempts to bring back faithfulness. Judah, now a separate kingdom in the south with only a few of the original 12 tribes of Israel, is where David’s descendants were still kings in Jerusalem. But in Israel, where the majority of the tribes rebelled and broke off from David’s grandson, there hasn’t been a stable dynasty until Ahab’s father Omri built the new capital of Samaria, where King Ahab now rules.
(For those of us who are thinking of New Testament associations, Samaria is indeed where Samaritans live, and it’s the capital of Israel; the people of Judah were the ones who would become called Jews. Because this northern nation of Israel broke off from worship in the Jerusalem Temple and continued to mix with other nations, including Assyria, those in Judah saw themselves as separate from Samaritans, and the bearers of the real tradition. But both Israel and Judah, Samaria and Jerusalem, were originally united in the twelve tribes that descended from Abraham and Sarah.)
So in this history of political division, with cascading unfaithfulness to the God that had brought the people out of slavery in Egypt, a prophet like Elijah needs to enter the scene to call people back to faithfulness–and to their original unity. Although it becomes more clear in later portions of the story, which we won’t get to today, Elijah’s words and actions deliberately invoke history that would have reminded people of the fullness of the original twelve tribes, not complete unless Israel and Judah were united.
And as one final thing to notice, which isn’t very clear in our translation, the Bible is not being redundant when Elijah or others speak of “the LORD God”–with the word “lord” being made of all capital letters. Whenever we read “the LORD” written like that, we should remember that in Hebrew, it was spelled in letters that made the personal name of God, YHWH or Yahweh, and was read aloud with the phrase “the lord” or “the name” so that they wouldn’t even by accident take the name of “the lord” in vain.
If Elijah had simply said, “As the God of Israel lives,” Ahab might have presumed that Elijah, this previously-unknown man from out in the boonies, was invoking Baal-God, the god of the region of Palestine from before the Hebrew people, and the god of Queen Jezebel, the god for whom Ahab had hundreds of prophets in his direct employ. But Elijah is proclaiming a different God, Yahweh-God, the LORD-God, and declaring that the LORD-God is the God of Israel, despite Ahab and Jezebel’s establishment of Baal-worship as the chief religion of their nation.
Let’s read on…
2 The word of the Lord came to him, saying, 3 “Go from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the Wadi Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. 4 You shall drink from the wadi, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” 5 So he went and did according to the word of the Lord; he went and lived by the Wadi Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. 6 The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening; and he drank from the wadi. 7 But after a while the wadi dried up, because there was no rain in the land.
The wadi is such a good image for Elijah’s spiritual journey. A wadi is a riverbed that will sometimes have a stream through it, has occasional floods that gush through and reestablish it boundaries, and yet also regularly dries up, leaving only cracked dirt and stones, and the memory of the flowing water.
Elijah, in the first length of time after confronting Ahab, is alone. Elijah will frequently cry to God in loneliness. At one point, even after encountering someone who has sheltered a hundred other faithful to Yahweh-God, hiding and protecting them from Ahab, Elijah will still turn around and pray, “I alone have been faithful to you, o God!” It is as if this lonely time in the drying wadi sets into Elijah’s bones, and prevents him from ever really feeling connected with others faithful to God. Even the ravens who attend to him are symbolically connected to death.
And yet, also like the wadi, Elijah’s moments of power will burst forth in a rushing flood. He appears to have proclaimed truly that no rain would fall except by his word–and before the end of the drought, would also call down fire from heaven, giving Elijah triumph over all the prophets of Baal. Elijah’s human mouth became at points the mouth of God, proclaiming God’s covenant word, rushing like a flood.
In the epistle James 5:17, we read, “Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.” Importantly, Elijah’s word about the drought was precisely following the covenant words of Deuteronomy: this is what God proclaimed would happen as a result of unfaithfulness. But I imagine that James may also expect us to connect with Elijah in the dry season of the wadi: Elijah is human like us in his loneliness, and dependent on God to sustain him.
I think we can relate to that in a year where many of us feel alone, in a “drought” of touch and relationship, looking for a connection. But we keep reading…
8 Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, 9 “Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.”
Now, God could have provided water despite the wadi drying up. The Israelites of old were sustained 40 years in the desert, and multiple times God made water spring up from rocks in the desert.
But instead, God commands Elijah–who is functionally the chief religious authority in Israel as the mouthpiece of God–to go to a foreign country and live totally dependent on a Gentile woman who is the head of her own household. Let’s not skip past that. God does not say to Elijah, “Don’t worry, the good people in the suburbs of Samaria have the resources to finance your ministry.” Despite this being a time of patriarchy and xenophobia (that I used to think were much stronger than that of today), or perhaps because of it, God chooses a widow in Zarephath to save Elijah.
10 So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” 11 As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” 12 But she said, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”
Does she sound like someone God has commanded?
To me, it sounds like she is a mother who acts because she chooses. Although she acknowledges and even swears by Elijah’s God (not a god of her own!), she gives no indication that God told her Elijah was going to show up. And Elijah, for his part, sounds a lot like my kids, whining: “I’m hungry, give me something to eat.” And she responds with the facts: I’m about to cook my last meal, and then we’re going to die.
Even that acceptance of death gives us a glimpse into the strength of this woman: she is not afraid, she is not begging for alternatives. She has not stopped offering the generosity of a cup of water for a stranger, even as she expects that death is near for herself and her child. She is ready to face it. She says,
“As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”13 Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said;
And I have to interrupt again: Go and do as she has said–make her meal and then die? If we would keep reading, her son does come very near death, and yet is brought to life again by God, through Elijah. And yet not even Elijah is trying to tell her “go and do as God has said,” she’s going to do as she said. Anyhow,
…go and do as you have said, but first, make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterward make something for yourself and your son. 14 For 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 day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.”
Whatever God may have intended, Elijah seems to have missed the memo about overturning patriarchal expectations. Even as he is going to be dependent on this woman for a lengthy time, he expects himself to be served first.
And yet, he finally gives her a good reason to consider obeying this God of Israel. Now he’s speaking a language that makes sense to a single mother who along with her son is close to starvation. It’s almost like even in Old Testament times, trying to preach God’s commandments before taking care of someone’s basic needs didn’t work very well. But if Yahweh-God is ready to feed people and take care of their souls, then practical-minded folks start listening.
15 She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. 16 The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.
Once again, Elijah’s bold promise proves true: her flour and oil did not fail, and all in her household were fed through the drought. In the case of the drought, Elijah’s proclamation matched God’s covenant with the people in Deuteronomy, and the punishment forewarned for their unfaithfulness. In this word about the jar of meal and the oil, Elijah’s prayers were also in accordance with God’s covenant will: that Abraham and Sarah’s descendants would bring blessing to all nations, prioritizing those who were vulnerable such as orphans, immigrants, and widows (like this woman).
Whereas Ahab’s leadership of the people into unfaithfulness had made them a curse on surrounding peoples (since the drought-affected more than just Israel), Elijah’s faithfulness allowed his presence to bring the blessing God intended to the family that he sheltered with for the difficult years. God could have sustained Elijah alone in the wadi, but chose to save this family also, because God’s intention in electing and calling a particular people is always so that they will be a source of transformation and blessing for others.
In that way, Elijah–even when he’s lonely, or when he’s having a pity party pretending that he’s the only one left who’s faithful to God–can pray for things of God’s will and find that his astonishing proclamations are indeed upheld by God.
So what does any of that have to do with us?
Like I mentioned at the beginning when James looks back at Elijah’s example, James lifts up that Elijah was human like us, and yet when Elijah prayed that God would withhold rain, there was a drought for three and a half years. I don’t recommend that we pray for drought, even if it has been a dreary and rainy week. I would say, Elijah was human like us, and even when he was hungry and lonely and thirsty, God used him to save and to be saved by another family. And he didn’t have to do anything all that difficult: he just showed up! If God had chosen to keep providing for Elijah in the wadi, this widow and her son would have died, and Elijah would likely have lost it completely in his loneliness.
I don’t want to keep having COVID show up in our preaching week after week as the central theme, but if you haven’t started making those connections yet, you probably should. You can look back and always remember that this is the story where the prophet Elijah is told to be part of the quarantine bubble with this widow and son as the three of them ride out a multi-year natural disaster that impacts everyone.
But I want to move past that to focus on the blessing: Elijah didn’t have to be at his best to be a conduit for God’s blessing. Elijah showed up hungry and thirsty, and God actually used Elijah’s needs to be a means of bringing salvation to a household on the margins. I hope that we can learn from that and do the same.
Please be real with one another. Please do not refrain from sharing about needs. When the Deacons met this week, we spent time trying to think of families that might be struggling but who haven’t reached out yet: the Good Samaritan Fund has a pretty healthy balance, and that isn’t the only way that we support one another.
That said, do not refrain from sharing hopes and joys with others as well! Elijah’s loneliness, first in the wadi and then recurring later in his ministry, were the low points of his prophetic career. So do fun things, hopefully with other people, and talk about those too. Come out to the church later for a grab-and-go meal, and take home a Flat Mack as an excuse to do something fun-and then pass it along to someone who might not be able to get out as easily.
One way or another, God will provide as we get through this season. Because as each of us was called to follow Jesus, God intendeds us to be a blessing overflowing into the world. If things seem dry right now, remember that it’s only the draught of the wadi: there will be waters flooding through again!
Caleb Kragt is a minister 2/3 time and 1/3 stay-at-home Dad. He and his wife Allie have just moved into their first house with kids age 3 and 6. Caleb and Irvin Heishman are co-pastors for the West Charleston Church of the Brethren in Tipp City, Ohio.
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