3rd Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 5C (8:00 am service homily)

3rd Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 5C June 9, 2013; 8:00am “[Elijah] called to [the widow] and said, ‘Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.’ But she said, ‘As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug. I am not gathering a couple of sticks so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” A severe draught hangs over the land. The widow and her son are at the end of their resources—only a handful of meal at the bottom of the jar and the remaining dregs of oil in the bottle. They are literally at the bottom of the barrel. And this wild and wooly prophet wanders up from out of the wilderness and demands that they feed him. He (and God) seem to be asking the unreasonable, the unthinkable from them. They barely have anything left, and he asks them to share the last of it with a stranger. But they do it, and God promises them that the jar of meal and the jug of oil will not run out, and it doesn’t. And when the widow’s son takes ill and dies, Elijah embodies God’s compassion and works with God to raise the child from the dead. They were all at the bottom of the barrel…One of the lessons from Vacation Bible School this week that we taught the kids was “Trusting God helps us stand strong.” That’s a great lesson, easy to preach and to say in our brightly decorated Sunday school classroom, where it’s hard to imagine anything bad ever happening. But it’s not as easy to practice when it seems too much is asked of us, when it seems we have too little left, that we are all at the bottom of the barrel. I read a story this week about how a man named Rufus Watson loved this story of Elijah and the widow and her son. Rufus lived to be 99 years old, was the son of former slaves. He served his country in the military, pitched in the Negro professional leagues, made some money investing in real estate. He witnessed lynchings and spent a lifetime wondering how people could commit such atrocities and still go to church and call themselves Christian. He found comfort in the story of Elijah and the widow. He said if his life wasn’t proof enough, this story showed that God meets people at the bottom of the barrel. He said, “That’s where God meets us…at the bottom of the barrel. God meets us when we’ve gone so low that all we can do is look up.”i. i. From the Homiletical Perspective by H. James Hopkins. Feasting on the Word Volume 3 Year C. Ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor . Westminster John Knox: 2010, p103.