Little things count
Commentary
As our universe becomes larger (ala the Hubble telescope), our interests can become smaller. Ethnocentric fanaticism infects the Balkans; rabid tribalism plagues Africa; racial superiority poisons America and Germany. What difference can one person make in the expanses of galaxies and against the virus of narrow-mindedness? Are there models of relationships and behavior that can inspire us to a higher plane of life together? How does God deal with our humanity, what Mark Twain called "a basket of pestilent corruption"?
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
The period of the Judges in Israelite history was replete with war, politics, and intrigue. Yet, there emerges within this setting a gentle story of friendship and love. Naomi and Elimelech and their two sons emigrate to Moab, because of a famine in their own countryside. Wives are found for their two sons. But, in time both her husband and two sons die, leaving the women to fend for themselves. In an understanding gesture, Naomi encourages the younger women to return to their homes and remarry. Ruth was determined to remain with Naomi.
Set against the theme of savagery and lawlessness of this period, this is really a remarkable counterpoint score to perk our ears to something better. For a while, scholars were convinced that the Book of Ruth was written against the backdrop of post-exilic reconstruction and the tenacious perspective of keeping pure the Israelite blood line. Ruth, a foreigner no less, is quietly welcomed into the family which will produce King David and eventually the Messiah. God deals very graciously with this fine young woman, who shows such devotion to Naomi and her people. Ruth is provided for as she gleans the fields. She enters into marriage with Boaz. With simple faith and dedication to the chores of life, Ruth becomes the handmaiden of the Lord (as Mary was also to be generations later).
God is able to take the simple, unassuming things in life and make something wonderful of them. Such friendship that was demonstrated between Naomi and Ruth has also been reflected in the relationship between David and Jonathan ("Your love to me was wonderful" -- 2 Samuel 1:26) and also Paul and Barnabas ("son of encouragement" -- Acts 9:26-27) and Barnabas and Mark (Acts 15:36-41). Daily life becomes enriched, like a fertile field, when friends live out their love for one another in simple, yet pertinent ways. The storms of life only strengthen their resolve to care for one another. Through the friendship of Ruth and her marriage to Boaz, God was able to tend to Naomi's grief of losing her family. For a while she must have thought that her name, which means "my pleasantness," was a sick joke foisted upon one who was enduring the bitterness of three-and-a-half griefs. (There was the death of her husband and her two sons, following the migration to Moab. The Russian Germans of the Ukraine and the Volga River area had a saying, "Immigration is half a death." They had moved from Germany to Russia at the invitation of Empress Catherine the Great to farm the land.) But, in the unfolding of common life of work and love, Naomi was rewarded with a grandchild whom she could nurse and help raise to the glory of God; for from his descendants would come the Messiah!
Hebrews 9:24-28
The Letter to the Hebrews provides an apologetic for the sufficiency and finality of Christ, namely the Judeo animal sacrifice system. Rather than right temple worship, the people of God are called to right spirit worship. The focus is no longer on the priest and the place; the focus is on Christ and the cross.
This is a good thing, because the "sanctuary made with hands" is no more. In fact, the very spot on which it stood is now covered by the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest shrines in Islam. The Temple Mount, approximately the size of thirty football fields, is now the playground for archeologists to uncover the secrets of the past, like: How was the temple situated on this plot of ground? and Are these depressions in the earth where the ark of the covenant rested? Bless the archeologists, but the answers to these questions have no salvific value. That is why the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews is quick to point out that Jesus entered into heaven on our behalf to appear directly before God. For, as we know, only in heaven do neither moth nor rust consume.
Christ's sacrificial death is final (once) and sufficient (for all) for the atonement of our sins to reconcile us to God. His own blood supplied what was needed. The seeds of Anselm's objective theory of the Atonement are found in these verses and others like them in the Letter to the Hebrews. Although Gustaf Aulén takes Anselm to task in Christus Victor, there is still room to appreciate this understanding of the Atonement in the context of our legal system of justice, where we will sacrifice our money (for the best lawyers) or our reputation (to plea bargain) in order to deftly satisfy the requirements of the law without losing our freedom or long-term goals, if we can at all help it.
But, for those who put their trust in the Lord's work on the cross, salvation awaits. All the human efforts we are prone to concoct and implement can be set aside as fruitless and life-draining in terms of satisfying our sense of guilt. Only what Christ does for us is enough to cover the enormity of our sin. For this really to be accomplished, real time and real effort were needed. As Emil Brunner states, "It is not forgiveness deduced from a conception of God, but forgiveness which has been mercifully revealed in history. Forgiveness is an element within that history of God's coming to man, God's entering into, God's intervening in the human situation" (The Scandal of Christianity).
Mark 12:38-44
The context in which these words appear is probably more important than the words themselves. After all, Jesus is basically ragging on the scribes and then sitting around "watching all the girls go by," bothering only to talk about a poor widow. These two brief episodes are placed by Mark after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which means he is on his way to the cross. They are surrounded by his reflective parables about the wicked tenants and the watchful door keeper. This means that Jesus is thinking about his purpose and how he fits into the will of God. Is the cross his true way? Will his death truly initiate the end times, the apocalyptic rending of heaven and earth to usher in the kingdom of God? These two incidents may pale in comparison, but they are still worthy of our notice.
The scribes represent a religious elitism that is also shared by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They should know better than to "lord it over others," since they are the learned ones in the Torah and in the skills of academic, political, and economic life in the community. This was the noble profession of scribe from ancient Egyptian times through Babylonian times and now Roman times. Such talents in these Jewish scribes were to equip them to serve God's people. But, instead, they elevated themselves. Jesus, himself, will model just the opposite as he goes barely clothed to the cross to the jeers of the people after being placed in the seat of scorn in the courts of Caiaphas and Herod and finally uttering only one-sentence statements, half prayers, half cries in his dying hours.
The poor widow catches Jesus' eye because of her giving response to God. According to Jesus, she presented more than a proportionate gift, more than a tithe. In her poverty, she "put in everything she had." Later, Paul would describe how the Macedonian Christians, in response to the famine in Jerusalem, "overflowed in a wealth of liberality," despite their "extreme poverty" (2 Corinthians 8:2). For now, Jesus elevates this poor woman above the wealthy contributors to the treasury. What God wants is a whole-life response, just like what Jesus was to offer in a few days on the cross, contributing his life's blood and breath for the sake of the world. Jesus helps us notice that the little things do count in God's scheme of things: two copper coins and the life/death of one person, namely himself.
Application
From a human point of view, we could talk about the value of friendship and love, the value of the life of all God's creatures (Save the whale and don't step on the centipede! -- Bless those animal rights activists), and the value of even a small contribution to a larger cause. But, what distinguishes Christian discourse in these matters is its focus on Christ: to whom all friendship and love long to find their completion; in whom all human systems of self-righteousness, self-justification, self-satisfaction are overturned and replaced by the One who alone can finally and sufficiently provide what is needed; for whom all contributions are offered as a symbol of a whole-life response of thanksgiving for such amazing grace.
William Seymour had it right! He was the unsung pastor of the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles at the dawn of the twentieth century. His ministry served as the catalyst for the Pentecostal movement in the United States and even around the world. His preaching, his teaching, his publication, his disciples (black and white) helped to generate adherents throughout the century, until today the 500 million Pentecostals and charismatics comprise a Christian family second in size only to the Catholic church. Seymour said repeatedly, "Don't go out of here talking about tongues; talk about Jesus." He is the one person who makes all the difference in the world!
FIRST LESSON FOCUSBy Elizabeth Achtemeier
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
Why should we be interested in the story of Ruth? After all, she is an obscure Moabite maiden, whose story is told in a short little book, set in the early days of the eleventh century B.C., when the Judges ruled in Israel (Ruth 1:1). To be sure, most of us know the famous saying of Ruth, which is sometimes read at weddings: "Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you. Whither thou goest, I will go" and so forth. That's not appropriate at weddings, of course, because those are the words of Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi, after the husbands of both of them have died. But people do all sorts of strange things with biblical quotations.
The only mention of Ruth outside of the book that bears her name is found in Matthew 1:5, where she is listed as one of the forbears of Jesus and that is what makes Ruth important. Ruth is the mother of Obed, who is the father of Jesse. Jesse is the father of the great king David. And Jesus of Nazareth, you see, is born of the lineage of David. Jesus of Nazareth is the davidic Messiah, which means that he is the anointed davidic king, promised through the ages to Israel and to all people as the one who saves us from our sins.
But what a complicated story it is that places Ruth in the ancestry of Jesus! It begins with a famine in Judah that causes a resident of Bethlehem named Elimelech to take his wife Naomi and to move across the Jordan to the land of Moab. There Elimelech and Naomi have two sons, and when the sons grow up, they marry Moabite women. But Elimelech and the sons die, leaving Naomi and her daughters-in-law without husbands and heirs. That is disastrous, because widows have no means of support in that ancient society, and worst of all, there is no son to carry on the family name -- the only form of immortality known to Israel then. Naomi is very bitter. She says, "Call me Mara, (which means "bitter"), for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me." She urges her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab and to find husbands there, but Ruth insists on returning to Judah with Naomi, and so the adventure begins.
In order to support herself and Naomi, Ruth goes into the barley field of Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi's, to glean after the reapers, picking up any stray grain that they have left. Because of her diligence, Boaz notices her and learns of the loyalty she has shown to Naomi, even to the extent of adopting Naomi's worship of the Lord. So Boaz takes her under his wing, protects her from the young men who might assault her in the field, gives her extra food, and even feeds her at his table. When Ruth tells Naomi what has happened, Naomi exults. Boaz is kin, and the law of levirate marriage in Israel stipulates that if a husband dies, his kinsman (actually his brother, according to Deuteronomy 25:5-10) should father a child by the widow. As the story develops, however, it is the law of "redeemer" that is at first operative. The nearest kinsman has the duty of buying (that is, "redeeming") the deceased's property (Leviticus 25:25). But included in the deal is the levirate obligation also of marrying Ruth (Ruth 4:5).
Naomi therefore hatches a daring scheme, which seems to us quite immoral. Ruth is to go to the threshing floor, where Boaz guards his crop, and when Boaz has eaten and drunk and is asleep, Ruth is to lie beside him and uncover his lower body, proposing that he take her in marriage as her kinsman -- a proposal signified by his spreading his cloak over her. The startled Boaz awakes and in great kindness agrees to the proposal if there is not a nearer kinsman who will marry her. When the nearer kinsman refuses to act the role of redeemer, Boaz takes Ruth as his wife, and together they have a son, whom they name Obed. So Obed grows and becomes the father of Jesse, and Jesse is the father of David, and the davidic line that finally gives birth to our Lord Jesus is continued.
The amazing thing about this complicated story is the role of God in it. He never appears in person, does he? But the Lord is behind it all and uses it all. Naomi's bitterness, Ruth's loyalty to Naomi, Naomi's sexual scheme, Ruth's diligence in the harvest field, Boaz' kindness, and the near kinsman's refusal to marry Ruth -- all are used by God to carry on that davidic line that will finally result in the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior and Redeemer of us all.
Do you ever think God is not at work in this world, carrying out his purpose? Or do you think that he is not using the most difficult circumstances to bring about his will? If you ever have such thoughts, then go back and read the story of Ruth and learn how the Lord is working in your life and mine. God's purpose moves on toward its fulfillment, and nothing will deter that movement.
Lutheran Option -- 1 Kings 17:8-16
Our scene is the ninth century B.C. and our text has to do with a cosmic battle between the Lord and pagan gods and goddesses. The protagonist on the Lord's side is the prophet Elijah, and his pagan opponent is Jezebel, the queen of King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel. Jezebel, you see, is the patroness of the fertility gods of Baal religion, that form of nature worship that believed that the practice of sacred prostitution in the cult would, by sympathetic magic, coerce the gods of nature to bring forth fertility in human beings and families and agriculture. So the struggle between Elijah and Jezebel had to do with the question: Who furnishes life with its food and goods? Who is the source of prosperity and vitality, the Lord or Baal?
That is much like the questions that we face in our time, isn't it? From whom or what comes the source of your life and good? Do we rely just on the things we get from nature and this world -- our genes, our medicines, our crops, our diets, our herbal remedies, our nutritionists and scientists, our markets and manufacturers -- to give us abundant life? Some people even think they are totally the products of nature's ways, dependent on all the vital forces in the natural world. Or do we have our lives and welfare from the Lord's hands, and do we rely on him, in life and in death?
Our text for the morning is concerned with those questions. Who rules the world of nature and hence from whom does true and abundant life come? Immediately preceding our text, the prophet Elijah has commanded that there be no rain on the territory of Israel except by his word, which is the Word of God, and a three-year drought and famine settles upon the territory of Israel. But to make the contest even more decisive, the Lord commands Elijah to travel northward to the land of Sidon. And that's Jezebel territory! She is from Sidon. So who rules over nature in that pagan land? That is the question.
In that northern territory, Elijah meets a poor widow and asks her for food and drink. But she is running out of meal and oil to bake any bread, and she expects to die. "Not so," says the prophet. "From this time until the end of the drought your jar of meal will never be empty and your cooking oil will never be spent." And so it was for all of the days that followed. So who controls the world of nature that gives food according to this story? Clearly it is controlled by the Lord, whose word Elijah speaks. And all the stories that follow about Elijah show that to be true.
It reminds one of a teaching by our Lord Jesus. "Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on -- your heavenly Father knows that you need them all" (Matthew 6:25, 32). There is only one Lord of nature, and there is only one God. And our lives are in his loving hands.
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
The period of the Judges in Israelite history was replete with war, politics, and intrigue. Yet, there emerges within this setting a gentle story of friendship and love. Naomi and Elimelech and their two sons emigrate to Moab, because of a famine in their own countryside. Wives are found for their two sons. But, in time both her husband and two sons die, leaving the women to fend for themselves. In an understanding gesture, Naomi encourages the younger women to return to their homes and remarry. Ruth was determined to remain with Naomi.
Set against the theme of savagery and lawlessness of this period, this is really a remarkable counterpoint score to perk our ears to something better. For a while, scholars were convinced that the Book of Ruth was written against the backdrop of post-exilic reconstruction and the tenacious perspective of keeping pure the Israelite blood line. Ruth, a foreigner no less, is quietly welcomed into the family which will produce King David and eventually the Messiah. God deals very graciously with this fine young woman, who shows such devotion to Naomi and her people. Ruth is provided for as she gleans the fields. She enters into marriage with Boaz. With simple faith and dedication to the chores of life, Ruth becomes the handmaiden of the Lord (as Mary was also to be generations later).
God is able to take the simple, unassuming things in life and make something wonderful of them. Such friendship that was demonstrated between Naomi and Ruth has also been reflected in the relationship between David and Jonathan ("Your love to me was wonderful" -- 2 Samuel 1:26) and also Paul and Barnabas ("son of encouragement" -- Acts 9:26-27) and Barnabas and Mark (Acts 15:36-41). Daily life becomes enriched, like a fertile field, when friends live out their love for one another in simple, yet pertinent ways. The storms of life only strengthen their resolve to care for one another. Through the friendship of Ruth and her marriage to Boaz, God was able to tend to Naomi's grief of losing her family. For a while she must have thought that her name, which means "my pleasantness," was a sick joke foisted upon one who was enduring the bitterness of three-and-a-half griefs. (There was the death of her husband and her two sons, following the migration to Moab. The Russian Germans of the Ukraine and the Volga River area had a saying, "Immigration is half a death." They had moved from Germany to Russia at the invitation of Empress Catherine the Great to farm the land.) But, in the unfolding of common life of work and love, Naomi was rewarded with a grandchild whom she could nurse and help raise to the glory of God; for from his descendants would come the Messiah!
Hebrews 9:24-28
The Letter to the Hebrews provides an apologetic for the sufficiency and finality of Christ, namely the Judeo animal sacrifice system. Rather than right temple worship, the people of God are called to right spirit worship. The focus is no longer on the priest and the place; the focus is on Christ and the cross.
This is a good thing, because the "sanctuary made with hands" is no more. In fact, the very spot on which it stood is now covered by the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest shrines in Islam. The Temple Mount, approximately the size of thirty football fields, is now the playground for archeologists to uncover the secrets of the past, like: How was the temple situated on this plot of ground? and Are these depressions in the earth where the ark of the covenant rested? Bless the archeologists, but the answers to these questions have no salvific value. That is why the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews is quick to point out that Jesus entered into heaven on our behalf to appear directly before God. For, as we know, only in heaven do neither moth nor rust consume.
Christ's sacrificial death is final (once) and sufficient (for all) for the atonement of our sins to reconcile us to God. His own blood supplied what was needed. The seeds of Anselm's objective theory of the Atonement are found in these verses and others like them in the Letter to the Hebrews. Although Gustaf Aulén takes Anselm to task in Christus Victor, there is still room to appreciate this understanding of the Atonement in the context of our legal system of justice, where we will sacrifice our money (for the best lawyers) or our reputation (to plea bargain) in order to deftly satisfy the requirements of the law without losing our freedom or long-term goals, if we can at all help it.
But, for those who put their trust in the Lord's work on the cross, salvation awaits. All the human efforts we are prone to concoct and implement can be set aside as fruitless and life-draining in terms of satisfying our sense of guilt. Only what Christ does for us is enough to cover the enormity of our sin. For this really to be accomplished, real time and real effort were needed. As Emil Brunner states, "It is not forgiveness deduced from a conception of God, but forgiveness which has been mercifully revealed in history. Forgiveness is an element within that history of God's coming to man, God's entering into, God's intervening in the human situation" (The Scandal of Christianity).
Mark 12:38-44
The context in which these words appear is probably more important than the words themselves. After all, Jesus is basically ragging on the scribes and then sitting around "watching all the girls go by," bothering only to talk about a poor widow. These two brief episodes are placed by Mark after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which means he is on his way to the cross. They are surrounded by his reflective parables about the wicked tenants and the watchful door keeper. This means that Jesus is thinking about his purpose and how he fits into the will of God. Is the cross his true way? Will his death truly initiate the end times, the apocalyptic rending of heaven and earth to usher in the kingdom of God? These two incidents may pale in comparison, but they are still worthy of our notice.
The scribes represent a religious elitism that is also shared by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They should know better than to "lord it over others," since they are the learned ones in the Torah and in the skills of academic, political, and economic life in the community. This was the noble profession of scribe from ancient Egyptian times through Babylonian times and now Roman times. Such talents in these Jewish scribes were to equip them to serve God's people. But, instead, they elevated themselves. Jesus, himself, will model just the opposite as he goes barely clothed to the cross to the jeers of the people after being placed in the seat of scorn in the courts of Caiaphas and Herod and finally uttering only one-sentence statements, half prayers, half cries in his dying hours.
The poor widow catches Jesus' eye because of her giving response to God. According to Jesus, she presented more than a proportionate gift, more than a tithe. In her poverty, she "put in everything she had." Later, Paul would describe how the Macedonian Christians, in response to the famine in Jerusalem, "overflowed in a wealth of liberality," despite their "extreme poverty" (2 Corinthians 8:2). For now, Jesus elevates this poor woman above the wealthy contributors to the treasury. What God wants is a whole-life response, just like what Jesus was to offer in a few days on the cross, contributing his life's blood and breath for the sake of the world. Jesus helps us notice that the little things do count in God's scheme of things: two copper coins and the life/death of one person, namely himself.
Application
From a human point of view, we could talk about the value of friendship and love, the value of the life of all God's creatures (Save the whale and don't step on the centipede! -- Bless those animal rights activists), and the value of even a small contribution to a larger cause. But, what distinguishes Christian discourse in these matters is its focus on Christ: to whom all friendship and love long to find their completion; in whom all human systems of self-righteousness, self-justification, self-satisfaction are overturned and replaced by the One who alone can finally and sufficiently provide what is needed; for whom all contributions are offered as a symbol of a whole-life response of thanksgiving for such amazing grace.
William Seymour had it right! He was the unsung pastor of the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles at the dawn of the twentieth century. His ministry served as the catalyst for the Pentecostal movement in the United States and even around the world. His preaching, his teaching, his publication, his disciples (black and white) helped to generate adherents throughout the century, until today the 500 million Pentecostals and charismatics comprise a Christian family second in size only to the Catholic church. Seymour said repeatedly, "Don't go out of here talking about tongues; talk about Jesus." He is the one person who makes all the difference in the world!
FIRST LESSON FOCUSBy Elizabeth Achtemeier
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
Why should we be interested in the story of Ruth? After all, she is an obscure Moabite maiden, whose story is told in a short little book, set in the early days of the eleventh century B.C., when the Judges ruled in Israel (Ruth 1:1). To be sure, most of us know the famous saying of Ruth, which is sometimes read at weddings: "Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you. Whither thou goest, I will go" and so forth. That's not appropriate at weddings, of course, because those are the words of Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi, after the husbands of both of them have died. But people do all sorts of strange things with biblical quotations.
The only mention of Ruth outside of the book that bears her name is found in Matthew 1:5, where she is listed as one of the forbears of Jesus and that is what makes Ruth important. Ruth is the mother of Obed, who is the father of Jesse. Jesse is the father of the great king David. And Jesus of Nazareth, you see, is born of the lineage of David. Jesus of Nazareth is the davidic Messiah, which means that he is the anointed davidic king, promised through the ages to Israel and to all people as the one who saves us from our sins.
But what a complicated story it is that places Ruth in the ancestry of Jesus! It begins with a famine in Judah that causes a resident of Bethlehem named Elimelech to take his wife Naomi and to move across the Jordan to the land of Moab. There Elimelech and Naomi have two sons, and when the sons grow up, they marry Moabite women. But Elimelech and the sons die, leaving Naomi and her daughters-in-law without husbands and heirs. That is disastrous, because widows have no means of support in that ancient society, and worst of all, there is no son to carry on the family name -- the only form of immortality known to Israel then. Naomi is very bitter. She says, "Call me Mara, (which means "bitter"), for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me." She urges her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab and to find husbands there, but Ruth insists on returning to Judah with Naomi, and so the adventure begins.
In order to support herself and Naomi, Ruth goes into the barley field of Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi's, to glean after the reapers, picking up any stray grain that they have left. Because of her diligence, Boaz notices her and learns of the loyalty she has shown to Naomi, even to the extent of adopting Naomi's worship of the Lord. So Boaz takes her under his wing, protects her from the young men who might assault her in the field, gives her extra food, and even feeds her at his table. When Ruth tells Naomi what has happened, Naomi exults. Boaz is kin, and the law of levirate marriage in Israel stipulates that if a husband dies, his kinsman (actually his brother, according to Deuteronomy 25:5-10) should father a child by the widow. As the story develops, however, it is the law of "redeemer" that is at first operative. The nearest kinsman has the duty of buying (that is, "redeeming") the deceased's property (Leviticus 25:25). But included in the deal is the levirate obligation also of marrying Ruth (Ruth 4:5).
Naomi therefore hatches a daring scheme, which seems to us quite immoral. Ruth is to go to the threshing floor, where Boaz guards his crop, and when Boaz has eaten and drunk and is asleep, Ruth is to lie beside him and uncover his lower body, proposing that he take her in marriage as her kinsman -- a proposal signified by his spreading his cloak over her. The startled Boaz awakes and in great kindness agrees to the proposal if there is not a nearer kinsman who will marry her. When the nearer kinsman refuses to act the role of redeemer, Boaz takes Ruth as his wife, and together they have a son, whom they name Obed. So Obed grows and becomes the father of Jesse, and Jesse is the father of David, and the davidic line that finally gives birth to our Lord Jesus is continued.
The amazing thing about this complicated story is the role of God in it. He never appears in person, does he? But the Lord is behind it all and uses it all. Naomi's bitterness, Ruth's loyalty to Naomi, Naomi's sexual scheme, Ruth's diligence in the harvest field, Boaz' kindness, and the near kinsman's refusal to marry Ruth -- all are used by God to carry on that davidic line that will finally result in the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior and Redeemer of us all.
Do you ever think God is not at work in this world, carrying out his purpose? Or do you think that he is not using the most difficult circumstances to bring about his will? If you ever have such thoughts, then go back and read the story of Ruth and learn how the Lord is working in your life and mine. God's purpose moves on toward its fulfillment, and nothing will deter that movement.
Lutheran Option -- 1 Kings 17:8-16
Our scene is the ninth century B.C. and our text has to do with a cosmic battle between the Lord and pagan gods and goddesses. The protagonist on the Lord's side is the prophet Elijah, and his pagan opponent is Jezebel, the queen of King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel. Jezebel, you see, is the patroness of the fertility gods of Baal religion, that form of nature worship that believed that the practice of sacred prostitution in the cult would, by sympathetic magic, coerce the gods of nature to bring forth fertility in human beings and families and agriculture. So the struggle between Elijah and Jezebel had to do with the question: Who furnishes life with its food and goods? Who is the source of prosperity and vitality, the Lord or Baal?
That is much like the questions that we face in our time, isn't it? From whom or what comes the source of your life and good? Do we rely just on the things we get from nature and this world -- our genes, our medicines, our crops, our diets, our herbal remedies, our nutritionists and scientists, our markets and manufacturers -- to give us abundant life? Some people even think they are totally the products of nature's ways, dependent on all the vital forces in the natural world. Or do we have our lives and welfare from the Lord's hands, and do we rely on him, in life and in death?
Our text for the morning is concerned with those questions. Who rules the world of nature and hence from whom does true and abundant life come? Immediately preceding our text, the prophet Elijah has commanded that there be no rain on the territory of Israel except by his word, which is the Word of God, and a three-year drought and famine settles upon the territory of Israel. But to make the contest even more decisive, the Lord commands Elijah to travel northward to the land of Sidon. And that's Jezebel territory! She is from Sidon. So who rules over nature in that pagan land? That is the question.
In that northern territory, Elijah meets a poor widow and asks her for food and drink. But she is running out of meal and oil to bake any bread, and she expects to die. "Not so," says the prophet. "From this time until the end of the drought your jar of meal will never be empty and your cooking oil will never be spent." And so it was for all of the days that followed. So who controls the world of nature that gives food according to this story? Clearly it is controlled by the Lord, whose word Elijah speaks. And all the stories that follow about Elijah show that to be true.
It reminds one of a teaching by our Lord Jesus. "Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on -- your heavenly Father knows that you need them all" (Matthew 6:25, 32). There is only one Lord of nature, and there is only one God. And our lives are in his loving hands.
