Agents of God?
1 Kings 17:8–24 Luke 7:11–17
Preached by the Reverend Kathy Peters
June 6, 2010

In a recent article in the Hartford Courant’s magazine USA Weekend entitled “How Spiritual are you?,  Rabbi Jamie Korngold is quoted as saying “We are sacred space on legs.” (USA Weekend April 2-4, 2010 p. 7) Do you think of yourself as sacred space, as a place where the spirit of God dwells, as a vehicle for God’s spirit at work in the world, as an agent of God? Pretty powerful stuff to think about and when you couple that with these two stories of the mega faith figures Elijah and Jesus, we ordinary humans might be tempted to declare that none of this has anything to do with us.  But the truth is each one of us can be a vehicle for God’s Holy Spirit in this world.
Let me first set the back scene for our first story about the prophet Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. “Most of us know the name Jezebel, but we may not know the name of Jezebel's husband, Ahab. Ahab was the King of Israel. Most of us also know Jezebel was "a bad person," but we probably couldn't say why, except that she was some kind of temptress.  Just before today's story, in the book of First Kings, we find out that King Ahab had taken Jezebel, a foreign, pagan woman, as his wife. But that's not all: he also started worshipping her gods, and he even built a temple to Baal right there in Israel, and led the people astray. Now Baal was the storm god, and the people believed that he provided the rain that made the land fertile for crops. We know how we feel when we go a few too many days without rain, how the lawns start looking a little wilted and everything starts to feel dusty and dry, maybe a wildfire or two breaks out. Can you imagine then how it must have felt in that part of the world, in an agrarian economy, surrounded by desert and trying to eke out an existence and a crop without rain? So maybe Ahab was susceptible to his wife's suggestion that he cover all his bases and make nice with the (false) god she brought along in her dowry, in case Baal could lend a hand in the precipitation department. Onto the scene comes the prophet Elijah. Elijah is not happy with Ahab because he knows God is not happy with Ahab, and this false god worship has got to stop. So he speaks truth to power, like any good prophet, and tells Ahab he's in big trouble, and there's a major drought coming. We'll see who's really in charge of things, Elijah says to the king – not your wife's petty little god, Baal, but the One True God of Israel.       Right away, the very next line, the One True God of Israel says to Elijah, "Better get out of town, Elijah, way out of town." So Elijah heads out into the wilderness, and there God provides everything he needs: food and water, at least for awhile. Then comes today's story. God now tells Elijah to head to, of all places, Sidon. Sidon is where Jezebel came from, a place of pagans and foreigners, not Elijah's own kind or his own people. Go take refuge among a bunch of strangers, God says, in fact, go stay with a widow there in Zarephath. (Zarephath was sort of a suburb of Sidon.) Well, you can't get much closer to a nobody than that. An unnamed woman (as we usually are in Scripture) in enemy, foreign territory, and a widow, of all things! Widows lived right on the edge of survival. If a woman in that time didn't have a husband or son or father to protect and provide for her, she didn't have many alternatives. She would have to turn to prostitution or begging or maybe, if she was lucky, the community would provide for her. So this seems like an odd choice for God to make when Elijah was in need, but the prophet went where he was told to go. (background story adapted from Kate Huey’s sample sermon in S.A.M.U.E.L. ucc.org 6/6/2010)  And you know how the rest of the story goes. Despite all good sense, Elijah and the widow and her son are provided with all they need and then as the story continues through prayer and pleading and one might even say challenging God, Elijah brings the widow’s son back life. Centuries later Jesus echoes Elijah’s story in the saving of another woman’s only son and word of that powerful deed travels throughout the land. Two awesome agents of God’s power and compassion, Elijah and Jesus, two sacred spaces on legs.
So now, what in preaching technique is called the “so what question”…what does this have to do with us sitting in the pew today?…not many of us I would venture to say consider ourselves in the same league as Jesus or the prophet Elijah…do we?  Yet there is another strong agent of God’s power and compassion here, another sacred space on legs that we might more easily relate to….the widow!  The widow of Zarephath was desperate. Let’s face it she was preparing a last meal for herself and her son, a final meal before they went off to die. As one commentator put it perhaps "desolation" fits the widow's situation even better than desperate, because desolation means "emptiness," and when there's nothing left, and you're totally empty, there is room for all sorts of grace to move in, and grow. (S.A.M.U.E.L. ucc.org 6/6/2010) The widow is empty, so she has room in her heart for hope. And hope comes in the person of Elijah, a person needing help himself and the widow is able to share, she is able to trust in something even in her hopelessness. She is open to being the agent of God’s love and care. There are all sorts of wonderful things swirling around in these stories: the power and love of God, the rains of mercy on parched earth and dried-up lives, hopelessness and death not being the final answer, the generosity that transforms the worst of situations, the blessings of God multiplying in unexpected and unimagined ways and the power of one unlikely woman to make a difference.
Henri Nouwen puts it this way,  (the believer) “keeps saying that a new way of being human and a new peace are possible"   (quoted by Rebecca Kruger Gaudino in New Proclamation 2007 in S.A.MU.E.L. ucc.org 6/6/21010) ). 
We are “sacred space on legs” my friends!  Imagine if we like the widow were open to being God’s agents, God’s vehicles of changes. Imagine if we really believed that God’s spirit dwelled within our hearts, within our church, at this very table.  Can we even envision the difference we could make?  Amen