Hespeler, 7 November 2021 © Scott McAndless – Communion, Remembrance Sunday
1 Kings 17:8-16, Psalm 146, Hebrews 9:24-28, Mark 12:38-44 (Click to read)
Just put yourself for a moment in the mind of that poor child, the son of that widow in Zarephath. Ever since your father died unexpectedly, you and your mother have been living on the very edge of survival. But that all got so much worse over the last couple of months as the entire countryside has suffered under a drought. Everyone has had a hard time, of course, all of your friends have been struggling. But many of them have, at least, a few resources to fall back on – some small savings or perhaps the ability to borrow – but you and your mother have had nothing at all.
Nothing, that is, except for one small jar of cracked barley grains and a little jug of olive oil. And so, you have watched day after day as your mother very carefully takes out the smallest amount of grain possible and just barely moistens it with a little bit of oil before frying up the resulting cake. The cake is so small that it barely requires even two sticks of wood to build a fire big enough to cook it. Your portion of the cake hardly does anything to take an edge off your hunger, but that is not what alarms you the most. What alarms you the most is to watch how that small store of meal and of oil grows ominously smaller every single day. You know very well that there will be no more when that is gone.
The Very Last Cake
And finally there comes the day when you watch your mother very carefully divide the remaining supply in half. Tomorrow is going to be the very last cake and you both know it. The next morning, probably because she cannot even face the possibility of looking you in the eyes, she gets up even before you awake and goes out to gather some wood in order to build a fire to prepare your very last meal. And so you awaken alone, wash and get dressed and sit and wait for her to come back.
But then, after she’s only been gone for about an hour, she returns. And everything looks different. She is carrying her usual two pieces of wood, but she is also flushed and excited like you haven’t seen her since your father died. And she breathlessly announces to you surprising news: “I have met a man of God!”
She explains to you that she is now going to take the meal from the jar and the oil from the jug and she is going to make a small cake to take to the prophet. After that, the prophet promises, everything is going to be just fine for you and your mother.
How do you Feel?
And my question for you today is how do you react and how do you feel? I suspect that most of us would be immediately suspicious that our mother has just been taken in by a charlatan. There is a man out there in the woods who is taking advantage of poor widows by talking them into giving him their very last meals! And we would have all logic and reason on our side in thinking such a thing, wouldn’t we? I mean, isn’t that just the sensible way that all of us look at the question of scarce resources. When there is a stock of something that is in limited supply, something that we find to be essential or desirable, everyone seems to assume that the sensible thing to do is to save it and ration it and spend it as sparingly as possible.
Not Just a Miracle
And there is no denying that what the prophet Elijah asks of that poor widow defies all of those sensible assumptions we make about limited resources. He invites her to be extravagant and generous with the very little that she has with the promise that this is what will prevent what she has from running out. But of course, you might say that this story is all about defying logic and reason because it is, after all, a miracle story. Miracles are not supposed to make sense. Miracles require faith which is the opposite of reason, isn’t it?
And of course it is true that, on one level. This is a story about how amazing the prophet Elijah was and how God miraculously provided for him and helped some other people along the way. But I think it is actually a mistake to look at this as just a miracle story. Because if it is just a miracle story, then it would really only be something that applied to our lives under extraordinary circumstances. And I believe that there is a principle at work in this story that does not just apply to extraordinary circumstances. I think that this story applies very directly to your life right now and today.
Two Ways to Look at it
Because there are in fact two ways to look at the jar of meal and jug of oil in this story. There’s the way we are all inclined to look at it, as a limited resource. Whenever you look at something that way, you will naturally fall into scarcity tactics. When you are living with scarcity, you will save and ration and worry about what you don’t have. But the problem with scarcity tactics is that they form a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. When you assume that things are going to run out and act accordingly, things eventually run out.
But in this story, Elijah comes along and invites this woman to look at what she has from the totally different point of view. Rather than a scarce resource, he invites her to look at it as possibility and potential. And I would suggest to you that that simple change in perspective can actually make an enormous difference. Even though the practical number of resources available to you does not change, it will change the outcome. And, what’s more, though such a change in attitude may require a great deal of faith, the change in outcome does not always require a miracle to pull off, though it may feel that way.
A Church Story
This is a lesson that the Christian church always needs to keep learning. When I was first called to my second church, I spent some time talking to the people who had been there a long time to discover the real people’s history of that church. (This is always time well spent.) They told me that there had been a time, not all that long before, when the church had been poor. Membership had been stagnating or dropping, money always seemed to be in short supply and so that church had been doing what Presbyterian churches in particular seem to be so good at. They carefully cut all of their expenses to the bone, they put off repairs and they were very good at saving money. They were poor and they responded with scarcity thinking.
The Door
But the church that I had gone to did not feel like a poor church. Yes, they did sometimes struggle to balance their budget as most churches do, but they didn’t act like they were poor, so I asked them what had changed that for them. It had started, apparently, with a door. It was an old wooden door that led out to the street. It was drafty and broken and had long seen better days. But they couldn’t afford to replace it. They didn’t have the money. As that door was the main entrance for anyone coming into the church from the community, it was almost like they had put a big sign out front for everyone to see: we are poor.
But one day they were just cornered into a decision. They went ahead and replaced the old door with a brand-new glass door. They were terrified. They could never afford such extravagance! They were sure it was going to ruin them. But then something amazing happened. Almost overnight, without even trying, the door was paid for. And that experience opened them to a very different possibility. Maybe they weren’t as poor as they thought they were. In fact, maybe they were only poor because they thought they were.
Scarcity Tactics are Uninspiring
If they were just surviving and carefully doling out their scarce resources, somehow people didn’t find that to be something that was inspiring and that they were excited about supporting. But if people could see the church doing something, even something as small as a new door, they looked at supporting that in a very different way.
And so that church learned a very important lesson from that, and it was a lesson that they applied to much more then just keeping the building up to date. They learned to stop thinking about their church as poor and as having scarce resources. And, as a result of that, the church went on to take some amazing risks and do some very exciting things in the community.
It Matters How We Look at it
And that is a lesson that I have tried to carry with me ever since. For there are indeed many times when churches take a look at their little jar of barley meal and their tiny jug of oil and come to the conclusion that they had better hold on tight to what they’ve got, save it for themselves and cut back on any ministry and mission to the people around them. This scarcity thinking is what we always will fall into when we are motivated by anxiety and fear. And it always seems sensible, but it is not how the economy of God’s church is supposed to operate. God sent the prophet Elijah to that widow at Zarephath to break her out of such thinking. Who will God send to our churches to break us out?
So I do fervently wish that our churches would learn what that widow learned from Elijah. But it is a lesson that also applies in many other places. It certainly has applications in national economies and government policy.
Global Economics
Now, I am no expert on such matters, and I realize that they are all very complex, but I have at least noticed that slashing and freezing government spending does not always have the effect of balancing budgets and eliminating deficits that we think it should. In fact, such scarcity tactics will often make things much worse. The classic example of that, of course, is the Great Depression but it has happened again and again throughout history. In the Depression, governments and just about everyone else fell into the habit of thinking that resources and money were limited, and that they need to be rationed out, this led to a self-fulfilling prophecy as the belief that money was scarce made everyone hold onto what they had and that made everything become scarcer.
It spiralled out of control until the realities of a global war meant that there was no choice but to start spending enormous amounts of money. The number of resources available had not changed but the attitude about what was worth lavishing resources on did. Only a dramatic change of thinking like that was able to break North American society out of its spiral of scarcity.
And what about you?
But finally today, I don’t want to focus on government spending or on Church spending, but rather I want to focus a little closer to home. I believe that we all, at least in certain areas of our lives, have a habit of behaving like that woman and her son. What I mean by that is that we all have some resource in our life that we treat like that woman treated her jar of meal and jug of oil. We live in fear and anxiety that whatever it is is going to run out soon and so we ration it and share it with others only grudgingly if at all.
Now, I do not know what that resource might be for you in your life. Do you live in anxiety about money? Or maybe it is time that you just never have enough of. Others find that they struggle with a lack of options or of appreciation or of love.
These are all good things, necessary to life and you certainly deserve to have such good things. God wants you to have them. But God has sent Elijah to you today to challenge you to consider your problem is not really how little you have of such a thing; your problem is how you look at that scarcity. You are, after all, the child of the King of kings and Lord of lords. You should never think of yourself as poor. God will always give a person of faith not only enough, but enough to share in some powerful and life changing way.
Final Challenge
So here is my challenge to you today. This week I want you to act extravagantly and generously with something in your life. I want you to give something away – time, treasure, talent, whatever it may be. But this is the key point: I want it to be something that you do not feel that you can spare. If you are a free spender of money, if money doesn’t mean everything to you, then that is not what you need to be giving. You need to be extravagantly generous with something that you don’t think you can afford. Do it because it is something you can only do by faith. If you do it, I think God may surprise you with the news that you are not as poor in that resource as you thought.