CProp5
I Kings 17:8-24; Psalm 146; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
June 10, 2007
O God, from whom all good proceeds:
So begins our collect for today.
There once was a king whose best friend’s response to everything was
“This is good.”
One day the king came back from a battle
And when his friend saw that the king had lost his thumb
He said, “This is good.”
The king was so mad that he had his friend locked up in prison.
A year later the king was hunting and was captured
by fierce enemies hiding in the woods.
They took the king and bound him to a stake
And were going to sacrifice him to their god
When they noticed that he was missing a thumb.
They took him down and let him go
because they could only sacrifice persons who were whole and unblemished.
When the King got back to the castle,
He went to his old friend in prison, released him,
and begged his forgiveness.
“Why aren’t you angry with me?” said the king.
“You’ve been in prison for a whole year because of me,” the friend said.
“If you hadn’t put me in prison, I would have been hunting with you
And they would have sacrificed me!”
In a country on this good earth some terrible things have happened.
The leaders of the government use terror
as an instrument of fear and control.
The use of torture and abuse on human beings is routine.
Ruler upon ruler is overthrown as new faces try to take power-
leading to endless cycles of conspiracy;
There is murder upon murder; mass murders of people.
Destruction of buildings and people is accomplished by strategic suicide;
A holy site, honored and revered for generations,
is now a large secular city where people have nothing but contempt
for what the holy place once represented.
Hmmm – does any of this sound familiar?
You don’t have to tune in to your favorite news channel
to hear about these terrible things.
Just pick up your bible and read I Kings!
What I have just described was the state of affairs in the 8th century B.C.
found in the 16th chapter, all of that in only one chapter!
of I Kings in the Old Testament.
And following all of this a new king, Ahab, rises to power
and is worse than all the rest.
Ahab marries a woman. Her name was Jezebel.
He leaves Yahweh behind and sets up an altar to Baal,
the ancient god of fertility,
Enter the prophet Elijah, who predicts that
in response to the enormous evil of Ahab,
Yahweh is going to send a draught.
As soon as Elijah announces to King Ahab, that this is what will happen,
he has to flee for his life.
Elijah lives by a river until it dries up because of the draught.
And then he is led by Yahweh to the widow in our reading today.
She welcomes Elijah into her home
and shares the very last morsels of her food with him,
even though she fully expects that this will be their last meal
and she and her son will soon die of starvation.
This gets us partially through our reading from I Kings today.
Then we have the closely matched pair of miracle events:
of Elijah bringing the widow’s son back to life
and Jesus also bringing a widow’s only son back to life.
In these stories there are all the assumptions we have
about what happens to people
when they are good and when they are bad.
God sends draught upon a whole nation because of the evil of King Ahab.
God sends ravens with food to Elijah
and leads Elijah to a compassionate woman who shares with him.
because of Elijah’s faithfulness.
God does not let their food run out because of the woman’s generosity,
The woman thinks her son has died because of her past sin.
Elijah turns aside to God and let’s God have it
because he thinks God has brought this terrible thing upon the woman.
The woman believes her son is alive because of God’s favor upon Elijah.
When Jesus raises a widow’s son from death,
the people take that as a sign that God has looked favorably on them.
My mother used to say, “I must have done something good today,”
every time she got a parking place close to the entrance of a store.
We wonder who God is punishing when terrible things happen.
We win the lottery or get all the way home without one red light,
and we think we must be in good favor.
We make an A on a test and we thank God for hearing our prayer.
We make a C on a test and we wonder why God did not answer our prayer.
The richest, most powerful nation in the world must be on God’s side
because of its prosperity.
A war torn or disease infested nation
thinks that surely God will finally one day justify them
against that evil, richest, most powerful nation in the world.
God’s involvement with us can get very confusing.
It helps to sort out what we do believe,
so that we can be clearer about what we do not believe.
One thing we can count on in our belief about God
is in our collect of the day:
O God, from whom all good proceeds:
Everything that God created, came forth from God’s goodness.
God said, “Let there be…light, stars, moon, sun!
animal, vegetable, mineral!
And God looked at each part and saw that it was good.
While all good proceeded from God in his creating.
It is clear that God acknowledged the existence of “not good”.
It is not good for you to eat of the tree in the center of the garden.
It is not good that Adam should be alone.
All of creation, by virtue of being made distinct from God,
has the capacity, the freedom to be not good.
It’s like conceiving a child.
A human is a complete being.
And yet, when a child is created,
It does not simply become a new body part of its mother.
The child becomes someone other than its parents.
We find that out when our children turn out so very different from us.
I was flabbergasted as Daniel was growing up
that he didn’t love the foods I had loved as a child.
I was puzzled when Laura grew up to favor business and political science
rather than the ‘helping’ professions her mother chose.
Daniel Bearl is Not Dena. Laura Bearl is Not Dena.
And, in order to bring creation forth,
God let go of it, so God could relate to it,
And though all good things proceed from God
In our being Not God, there is in creation
the freedom and the capacity to be Not Good..
When we draw this information from the creation story,
we find that there are some things that, though we do tend to believe them,
just are not true to our Christian faith.
Some folks think there is no such thing as evil,
that it is only good disguised or misunderstood.
It was God’s will that the automobile accident happened.
One day we’ll understand.
That somehow the accident must actually be good.
But in reality the accident can simply be not of God.
Some folks believe that evil only happens
as a consequence of someone being bad.
Plagues, AIDS, hurricanes, invasions, draught.
Somehow God is angry and something not good at all.
is proceeding from him.
Somehow they must have deserved it.
Conversely, that good fortune in one’s life must mean they are good.
Oh, they sure did deserve it.
God helps us to learn and mature from bad situations.
But badness, evil, simply does not proceed from God.
Some folks believe that God must not be involved his creation.
That God has stepped back and is watching from a distance
with hands tied behind back.
and all bets are on as to whether good or evil will finally win.
God has dominion over everything God made
and is actively involved in the goodness of his creation.
That is what we understand in Jesus.
God comes to save, redeem, restore.
Some folks have come to the conclusion that God is involved
but is not trustworthy after all-
How could God do that?!
With a God like that, who wants to be in heaven?
We can always trust in God’s steady, steadfast goodness.
Though it may be overshadowed for a time,
God’s goodness will always make its way to us.
The second line of the collect:
Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right
and by your merciful guiding may do them.
The widow had compassion for Elijah and goodness proceeded from her
as she shared her food and her home with him.
When Jesus saw the widow following her son’s casket to the cemetery…
He had compassion for her and all goodness proceeded from him.
We might not understand the way of evil and bad things
and their presence in our world,
But we have been shown the way of God
and by his merciful guiding,
we can take part in the One from whom all goodness proceeds.