June 9, 2013
Pentecost 3
1st Kings 17:17-24
Luke 7:11-17
(prayer)
In 1966, the Beach Boys recorded one of their California-based songs of longing and love for the album Pet Sounds.
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is a prayer-like hope of a young person on the edge of a new phase of life: dropping his date off at the end of the day, longing for the time when they wouldn’t have to part just because the day is over. The singer looks to the day when they would be married (okay, the “sixties – free love era” never quite made it into Beach Boys music).
Wouldn't it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long
And wouldn't it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong
Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true
Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do
We could be married
And then we'd be happy
Wouldn't it be nice
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While the hopes and dreams of the song's protagonist were quite realistic (it would not be that unusual for the young lovers to grow closer and wind up living together and married), some of our desired outcomes could be a lot more challenging to bring to reality. I might long to be able to flap my arms and just fly like a bird, but I'm not all that confident it will happen.
I might long that my dad had not died six days before Christmas, when I was 19 years old.
But... wouldn't it be nice.
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You may have noticed the common theme from today's two readings: in both passages, a widow's son is revived from death. These are stories of miraculous healings, unexpected recoveries, impossible revivals. They point to a power beyond the ordinary. In First Kings, the mother called Elijah "a man of God"; in Luke, it was said that Jesus was "a great prophet".
People's view of the healer changed - they were seen as having a more direct pipeline to God - when the woman held her living son, she proclaimed that the true word of God must be in Elijah's mouth; and in the wake of Jesus' actions it was said the God had looked favourably on the people.
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I believe in mystery; I believe that miraculous things happen that can't be explained away. I have faith that the heart at the centre of the universe is moved from time to time and lives are changed in ways that the best of our science and reason cannot explain. The best word I can think of for such an occurrence is "miracle".
Because such events are a seemingly normative part of the biblical history, we might be tempted to say that don’t biblical-like miracles are a thing of the past, if they every literally happened at all.
We could site several examples (including our two readings today) throughout the Bible of a prophet or Jesus or a disciple healing a person on a sick bed or even raising them from death.
I prefer to imagine that true occurrences of mystery is as rare today as they ever was – they seem more common in biblical times, because most of the occurrences were committed to some public memory. And maybe some of the miracles of biblical times, would not be viewed as such in our day.
In fact, if a person of biblical times witnessed the events of a modern trauma centre, the doctors and EMTs would likely be called great prophets and women and men of God as well. Last week I passed a course on Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation along with Automated External Defibrillators. I feel confident that if the place and timing was right and the equipment and emergency services were near by that I could be part of bringing a person back from the dead. But in 2013, that is not a miracle. It's a healing but it is not mystery anymore. And it would not make me any more of a prophet or person of God than I am right now.
Would it be fair to say that God engineered the recovery of a person who happened to fall ill near an AED and a CPR trained person?
Does God not care about those who have a cardiac arrest away from such circumstances?
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What about when the twists and turns of a tornado kills children in one school, but another nearby school has no loss of life? Was that’s God at work – picking a choosing who will live and die? Was that God guiding the tornado?
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I find it so hard to believe that God picks and chooses when and who to heal in a miraculous way. If so, the criteria by which God makes these choices seem to have no basis in fairness or compassion.
In the depth of my soul, I refuse to believe that God (who is said to be the very essence of love) is so heartless to withhold the means to elevate so much pain and suffering in the lives of truly good people, while doling it out to others. Especially, occasionally, when the miracle and mystery benefits the life of one who lives by creeds of selfishness, oppression and utter inhumanity.
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Several years ago, I met a woman in a church who had had two children who were in their late teen - early twenties. She was a very active person in her church; I witnessed (in her) an open and trusting deep faith. Her husband, who I had met a way from church was (in my experience) a man with a gentle spirit - and there was a honest spirituality about him, but I never saw him in church. One day, I has learned why. They had, in fact, had three children. The youngest had passed away almost a decade earlier from cancer when he was just five years old. The story is that a friend of the family at the time (who at one time had attended the same church, but after a congregational split now went to the breakaway congregation) had a similar experience with a young child a few years earlier. Only that child responded well to treatment and recovered.
"It's too bad that your faith wasn't as strong as mind, or your son would be alive too. You should have prayed harder"
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Two things happened with those words, this friend of the family was no longer a friend... and the woman's husband gave up on church.
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It was shocking to hear a story of such cruel and (I would say) bad theology. It is even more shocking that this theology is still quite common - just pray hard enough and God will bring you the healing you need, or the life change you desire or the riches you covet. If it doesn’t happen, you just didn’t pray right, or enough, or…
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I find it almost impossible to view God as a holy vending machine, who, when the right amount of prayer and faith is inserted and the right buttons are pushed in the right order, that God is mindlessly required to dispense the desired goodies.
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I believe in mystery, but I don't profess to understand it.
Bible-like miracles are rare and mysterious and they seem to follow no pattern of prayer or faithfulness. I won't (and don't) believe in a God whose heart is 'hard' most of the time.
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Is it possible to believe that "mystery" is simply part of a complex relationship we have with the divine, but that God does not micromanage how mystery is made manifest from time to time? Maybe what is mystery to us is part of an order to God's creation - but my heart and mind tells me that it is beyond our influence. And I will trust in what John the Elder believed was true: that God is love.
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So, I think that if we only examine today's bible readings from the "prophet performing miracle" perspective, we are selling these rich texts far too short.
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The context of how Elijah met this woman and her son is very interesting.
Elijah ran a-foul of King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel and his wife Jezebel. There was a long drought, which the king blamed on Elijah's God (probably because Elijah kept challenging Ahab's tolerance of Jezebel's worship of the Canaanite god, Ba'al).
Elijah met the woman in the today's passage as he was in a self-imposed exile in the wilderness near the Jordan River (he'd run away to get away from Ahab and Jezebel’s wrath).
The woman and her young son were starving to death due to the drought. As a widow, she would normally be cared for by her son, but he was just a child (her husband must have died young). And she must not have any other family members nearby who could assist her.
The little stream that sustained Elijah for a while dried up and so he went to a nearby town and saw the woman gathering a few sticks of firewood, just outside the city gate. Elijah was used to being in the royal court: tended to by servants. So, ignoring her needs, he tells the woman to fetch him some water and something to eat. She tells him that what she had nearly run out. She only had enough left for a final meal for her and her son. The sticks were to cook her last meal. Then she was resigned to the fact that she and her son would starve and die.
But - in miraculous selflessness - she is willing to give food and drink to Elijah.
Enter the mystery. Amazingly, each time she reaches in her jar to fry up a simple grain cake - the last meal - there seems to be enough for just one more. The little bit of meal and oil fed them all - day after day. Elijah promised that the little she had would last until the drought ended.
The young widow and her young son were brought back from near death. Their future, again, could be hopeful.
Until (that is), as we read today, the son caught some illness. His breath labored until, at last, he stopped breathing. In the mother's grief, she became angry at Elijah: why save my son from the drought if this illness was going to kill him anyway?
Enter the mystery once again. Even Elijah is amazed when the boy is revived. The future for this young widow is hopeful again.
//
That's the real recovery in the story. In that day and age, a woman rarely could support herself. She would rely on the resources provided by her father or her husband or her sons: depending on her station in life.
Beyond the patriarchal responsibilities, the wider society's only real social safety net for widows and orphans (and refugees) was available only at certain times of the year: when there were ritual offerings brought in at harvest times. And during a devastating drought, there would be nothing to distribute to the needy. This is why the widow and her son were near-starving when Elijah arrived.
It was not enough that the woman survived through the drought. As a widow, her future was dependent on having a son who could provide for her.
The big picture of this passage is not that one person was mysteriouly healed, but that a the potential for a good future for a whole family was made possible.
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The exact same big picture exists in the Luke story - the son in that story was older (a man according to the text), but the impact was that the future of the whole family was given new hope and potential.
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This all makes me think one of the most impactful ways mystery can be made manifest is when we can bring something to desperate situation that impacts the hopefulness and good potential of the future.
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In a time where we feel a miracle was deserved and warranted, we can cry the very faithful prayer of lament "why?".
“Why?” is the most desperate and deeply faithful of prayers. It is important to ask because that question can help us discern what might be most true about the nature of God and how God interacts with the world.
When we ask why?, we should also then ask, what now?
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The truth is that our lives and consciousness are wonders and mysteries in and of themselves. One of the realities we all know too well is that, at least physically, we are finite beings.
Although resilient and adaptive, our physical nature is fragile. There is only so much illness or trauma or time our bodies will endure. Some lives will be long and we celebrate all that has been done; other lives will be short and we will lament what potential is lost.
Our accumulated knowledge of the arts of healing improves our expectations with each new generation, and situations will occur that we might call a miracle for the moment, but the simple truth that has always existed, still exists: "from dust we came and to dust we shall return" (Ecclesiastes 3:20).
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And so, we owe it to ourselves and to the one who gave us the privilege and potential of this life, to do what we can to improve the good quality of the lives of those in our midst. Isn’t that basically what Jesus did?
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A wide message of the scripture stories today is that healing is more than a medical miracle. God's love is boundless and is geared toward the long term, wide spread impact.
May we seek ways to be caught up in this.
(prayer)
#619VU "healer of our every ill"
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