George A. Mason Thanksgiving Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 22 November 2015 Dallas, Texas The Mystery of Abundance 1 Kings 17:8-16; 2 Corinthians 9:6-12 There s an old African proverb that says, When elephants fight, the grass suffers. When we pick up the story of the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings 17, he is on the run. He has recently spoken truth to power, telling King Ahab of Israel that the God who made heaven and earth, not the pagan rain god, Baal, is the source of prosperity. God will therefore withhold rain from Israel to prove it. The palace and the people can make all the sacrifices to Baal they want to, but since Baal has no power to give rain or anything else, their sacrifices will do no good. So God and Baal fought, and the grass suffered. The drought first forced Elijah east of the Jordan River to a small creek, where God gave him water to drink and ravens brought him road kill to eat. When the creek dried up, God sent him west toward the Mediterranean coast, farther outside of Israel, to the village of Zarephath, which was in the heart of Baal-worshiping Phoenicia. Now this is interesting. Zarephath is in Sidon, where the king s daughter Jezebel is from. King Ahab married Jezebel, and she brought all her Baal worship with her, thereby bringing idolatry into Israel. Now God sends the prophet right into that enemy territory to find help. This is a foreshadowing of Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan. Elijah would find kindness and welcome outside his own people. Elijah, the desperate refugee, would be fed and housed by a widow whose people were Israel s enemies. What s old is new, don t you know?! We are told that God had commanded the widow of Zarephath to feed Elijah. In other words, a God she didn t know somehow suggested that she receive and care for a man she hadn t even met. Here s a chance for us to remember that God doesn t work just through Christians whom we know and trust. God is at work in the world in mysterious ways to save us and provide for us sometimes through people of different faiths and no faith as well as through people of like faith. This ought to inform us in these times that when we close
ourselves off from neighbors from around the world who are in dire need, it might be that we are closing ourselves off from the very people God has prepared to help us, too. The drought has not only struck Israel; it has struck Israel s neighbors because of Israel s sin. So when Elijah comes to the city gate of Zarephath, the unsuspecting widow is gathering sticks for kindling a fire to cook a final meal. Elijah has no way of knowing this, but he asks her first for water, which she is quick to provide. Then he asks her for bread. Here s where the story gets interesting. The woman tells him that she has only enough meal in a jar and oil in a jug for one last supper. She and her son will eat that and then die because nothing is left in the cupboard. Let s consider this woman. A widow in that time would have been incredibly vulnerable. She and her son would have had to rely upon family or the kindness of neighbors just to stay alive day by day. And when a famine hit, the poor would have been affected first. Yet notice this: God sends Elijah to the poorest of the poor to find help. The truth is, the poor tend to teach us the most about generosity because they themselves know what real need is all about. The woman s first response to Elijah is natural. She looks at what she has and sees scarcity and looming death. She wants to provide first for her own family. But God has already given her the idea to respond with kindness toward a stranger. It must be scary to her. She must think she is being a terrible mother. But she must feel a burden to help in her bones. Elijah says the magic words we hear in scripture over and over any time God enlists anyone into divine service. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Why do you think that s the first word? Because, I think, while some fear is useful to alert us to real danger, excessive fear turns us inward instead of outward. It makes us want to wall ourselves off from strangers. It fuels our worry about the future. It shudders at change. It clings to the little we have. It balls our hands up in fists. It immobilizes us. Fear shuts off the spigot of stewardship. You get the idea. But do you? I mean, isn t fear one of the reasons we don t give more to the Lord? God provides for us more than we can imagine, but when we 2
look at what we have, all we see is little instead of much. And when we do that, we miss out on so much more that is possible for us to experience about life. Morris and his wife, Esther, went to the state fair every year, and every year Morris would say, Esther, I'd really like to ride in that helicopter. Esther always replied, I know, Morris, but that helicopter ride is fifty dollars, and fifty dollars is fifty dollars. Later in their lives Esther and Morris went to the fair as usual, and Morris said, Esther, I'm 85 years old. If I don't ride that helicopter, I might never get another chance. Esther replied as she always had: Morris, that helicopter ride costs fifty dollars, and fifty dollars is fifty dollars. Well, it turns out the helicopter pilot overheard the couple and said, Folks, I'll make you a deal. I'll take the both of you for a ride. If you can stay quiet for the entire ride and don't say a word, I won't charge you a penny! But if you say one word, it's fifty dollars. Morris and Esther agreed, and up they went. The pilot did all kinds of fancy maneuvers, but not a word was heard. He did his daredevil tricks over and over again, but still not a word. When they landed, the pilot turned to Morris and said, By golly, I did everything I could to get you to yell out, but you didn't. I'm impressed! Morris replied, Well, to tell you the truth, I almost said something when Esther fell out, but you know, fifty dollars is fifty dollars! Some of us are more like old Esther and Morris than we want to admit. We hold on so tight to that last fifty dollars that we end up sacrificing life itself in homage to it. But what if the way God works in the world is precisely to show us God s provision only as we participate in the mystery of faith? Most of you know that giving is essential to the Christian life. You may even understand that the biblical principle of tithing is the benchmark of a life of giving. Tithing is an act of thanksgiving. It is giving back to the Lord the first 10 percent of your income out of gratitude for what God has given you. You make it the first thing you do with your money, not the last. You trust that if you give back to God the first 10 percent, God will continue to provide everything you need, and more, in order that you may always experience God s abundance. You know these things, and yet you have a hard time practicing them. Why is that? It isn t because you haven t got something to give. No one could have had less than this widow, and yet she gave. Some of you see only what 3
you don t have instead of what you do have, and it scares you away from giving. But again, what if the only way you can experience the mystery of God s abundance is by giving of what you have? Also, our failure to give doesn t occur because God hasn t called us to give. Notice that God commanded the widow to give before Elijah arrived. His arrival was the moment for her to act on the faith God had already put in her. No, it wasn t easy. We are schooled by the world in a scarcity mentality that makes us scared. By the way, do you hear the linking of sounds scarce and scare? But what God requires of us, God provides for us. God had been preparing her heart even before the occasion had arisen. And Elijah was simply the one to call out a faith from her that she didn t know existed. First give me something to eat, Elijah says. First take care of God s prophet, he is saying. First answer the need of the stranger in your midst. First give. Then you will find that you can t out-give God. Then you will discover that there will always be enough. Then you will learn about the mystery of abundance. Our senior adult minister, Jessica Capps, and I were visiting an elderly widow woman this week in an assisted-living facility. She has been a friend and a faithful Wilshire member for many years. She wanted to get her affairs in order and talk about her funeral plans, that sort of thing. We reminisced for a while, the way you can do when you are as lucky as I am to be the pastor of a church for more than a quarter of a century. And then I asked her if she had any regrets, anything we might pray for her about. She said she regretted that she hadn t been giving as generously as she would have liked to, and she confessed that it had to do with fear. I asked her why. She said she was worried that her money would run out, but it bothered her to think that way. Then she told me that she had shared her fear about running out of money with her son. He immediately called his wife, who looks after the money for her mother-in-law. He asked her how much money his mother had. She told him, and he reported the amount to his mother, who was shocked to hear how much there was. She wondered how that could be. And then he confided to her that for many years, he and his wife had been contributing secretly to her retirement account so that she could continue to give and live as she wanted to and her money would never run out. 4
You see, in the circle of life, she had given generously to them, and now they were giving generously to her. In this way, they were sharing in the mystery of abundance by their mutual giving. Tears welled up in her eyes as she told us the story. I believe I know what those tears meant: gratitude for her children was filling her heart, and thanksgiving was rising up to God at the same time. And the jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah. You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God though us. I don t know everything I want to know about God, but I do know that God is a generous God. You simply can t outgive God. But the mystery of God s abundance can be known only through a faith that gives even in the face of fear. Amen. 5