Sermons

“The Stories We Tell”

I Kings 17:8-24 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – June 5, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might come to understand your presence as a blessing and your essence as mercy. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Humans are such fascinating creatures, aren’t we? For a lot of reasons, really, but today I want to focus on our obsession with meaning. We are meaning-makers and meaning-seekers. There are those who would argue that our need for and ability to contemplate meaning is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, though we really have no way of judging the truth of that position. We live in world that is far more chaotic and random than we are comfortable with, convinced as we are that things should happen because of reasons. When there isn’t an obvious reason, we will create one. Much of the time, this is not a problem. Indeed, having given the various aspects of our lives significance is often the only way we get through the day doing all the things that need to be done. But often, our need for meaning becomes a trap. It pushes us to assign motives to others, which may or may not be true. It even causes us to make things up about God. The stories we tell ourselves about what’s going on in our lives can become the lens through which we see the world, and often those lenses keep us from seeing things that don’t fit into the story we’ve been telling.

I’ve been re-reading the diary of Anne Frank lately. How many of you have read this book? Has anyone read it lately? I was amazed at how little I remembered about it, beyond the basic summary that it’s the diary of a young Jewish girl who lived in hiding with her family during World War II until they were finally discovered and taken away to a concentration camp. (I haven’t gotten that far yet, but the ending is already ruined.) I think I had the idea that they were stuck in a narrow closet the whole time, for one, which it turns out, was not the case. They had multiple rooms, spread over three floors above a warehouse. There was another family there, along with another single gentleman.

But what is most striking – and this feels weird to admit – is how vividly human Anne is. I mean, of course she is, but I have no memory of noticing that when I read this book as a child. What is really interesting about the development of Anne’s diary as a piece of literature is that every new version that has come out has included more of the diary. The version I’m reading has portions that had never been published before. Why? Because unlike any other 15-year-old girl in the history of the world, Anne Frank didn’t really get along with her mother. And she wrote about it in her diary. We have this image of her story as that of a vibrant young woman nobly facing her tragic, premature end, and the idea that she didn’t love her mother just doesn’t quite fit in. So for years, that part was left out. The stories we tell become the lenses through which we see the world. The way we assign meaning even affects the way we tell the stories on top of those stories.

There are a number of different stories floating about in the story we heard this morning from First Kings. In order to understand them better, we should look a little more closely at the context and the characters. Elijah, the prophet, is one of the main characters in the Book of Kings. But he’s only just been introduced earlier in this chapter. His name means “My God is the Lord,” which pretty much sums up his mission. He has appeared on the scene to combat King Ahab’s temptation towards worshipping Baal, the god of the Canaanites. A drought has come, and Elijah’s goal is to make sure that everyone understands that Yahweh is the one who controls the rains and the cloud, not Baal, who was considered the god of storm and rain by the Canaanites.

What is interesting is who God sends Elijah to, to bear witness to this truth. There is no reason to think the widow of Zarephath is a Hebrew. She was living on the Phoenician coast, in the heart of Baal country. And yet, that’s where God sent Elijah to wait out the drought. The widow herself is an interesting person. We never learn her name, and yet, we are given a fairly graphic depiction of how she is living her life. When Elijah first arrives, she is gathering sticks to build one last fire to bake a few small meal-cakes for her and her son to eat before they starve to death. At least, that’s how she describes it to Elijah. It’s a rather dire, fatalistic picture. Has she really exhausted all her options? Did she give up too easily?

Once Elijah arrives, things get even more complicated. Though there is no good reason she should trust him, when Elijah tells her to make him a meal-cake first and then to feed herself and her son, she does it without question. He has promised that if she does, her meal jar will never be empty and her oil jug will never fail, but why on earth would she have believed that? Once she does, and the meal and the oil have proved the truth of Elijah’s promise, we learn that not only does this woman have a son, she also has a household, though we don’t know what that means. If it was just referring to her son, wouldn’t it just say that? Are there household servants? Nieces or nephews? An aging uncle? We don’t know. But the mention of the household implies that the providence of God that Elijah’s presence has brought to this woman is more abundant than we might have imagined originally. Elijah takes up residence in the room upstairs. Everyone is getting enough to eat. Things are going well.

Until they aren’t. And here’s where we start to see the different stories this woman holds within her heart. Her son becomes deathly ill. She is desperate to make meaning of what is going on. ‘My son is ill. He wasn’t ill before. What changed? This man came onto the scene. It must have something to do with that. He calls himself a man of God, so this must be God’s doing. Elijah’s presence here must have attracted God’s attention and he’s noticed what a sinful person I am, so now he’s punishing me.’ So she lashes out at Elijah, demanding to know why it had to be her household he drew attention to. You can see how she gets there, and yet— Why is it so easy for us to believe the worst about God? Why is it so easy for us to believe the worst about ourselves? Why is it easier for us to assume that the tragedies of our lives are punishment and that God is a punishing God, than to accept that sometimes illness comes and that death is often cruel and meaningless? In her desire to make sense of what is happening, this woman is telling herself a story that casts everyone in a horrible light, herself, Elijah and God, while making her son a mere pawn in her tragic tale.

Her story is so convincing even Elijah is tempted to believe it. He carries the boy upstairs and cries out to God, demanding to know if God has done this to the child and begging God to breathe life back into him. And here there is a little nuance to the story. Elijah doesn’t assume that God took the child’s life – he asks without accusing – but he does believe that God can bring life back to the boy. And the narrator agrees. Without admitting that God took the child’s life, the story tells us that God hears Elijah’s frantic prayers and revives the child. This story about God is not the same one the widow was telling herself. What is interesting is that it opens things up so that the widow herself can tell a different story too.

Because there is another story in her heart. In her grief, she reached out for whatever she could grasp. We all know that grief can make anger and blame the easiest things to grab hold of. But once her son’s life is restored, the widow’s heart can see more clearly, and she is able to remember the story she’d been experiencing before. The God whose presence Elijah made real for her has been providing for her and her household for many months. This is not a cruel, capricious God who gives only to snatch away later. When she sees that God has restored her son’s life, she realizes that the God Elijah proclaims is a God of life and mercy and healing, not a God of punishment and cruelty. “Now I know,” she testifies to Elijah, “that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”

The true thing is that Elijah’s God is a God of mercy and healing, a God of life and gracious abundance. That other story she was telling herself isn’t the truth. God didn’t see her sins and decide she must be punished by losing her son. This is very important to recognize. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are lies. Sometimes we lie to ourselves about whose fault things are, and sometimes we lie to ourselves about God. We are so desperate sometimes to make sense of things that we tell terrible stories, stories that contradict everything we’ve learned about God’s love and grace, but that make things make sense and so we accept them. And those stories, even and perhaps especially, then become lenses through which we view the world, and they can keep us from seeing God’s blessings. They can keep us from receiving God’s grace.

All of our hearts have the capacity to hold both of these stories. Any of these stories has the power to influence how clearly or honestly we see what’s going on around us. There are frequently realities in our lives that don’t fit into the narratives we’ve constructed for ourselves. We are better off if we loosen our hold on the story, rather than living in denial of the full complexity of life. Even now, we may wish to believe that if Anne Frank had been allowed to live into adulthood, her relationship with her mother might have improved. But if we’re going to live honestly, we must also admit that it might not ever have gotten better. Sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn’t. The tragedy of Anne not getting that chance compounds the deeper tragedy of the Holocaust, even as it helps us understand the tragic depth and human particularity of every life lost to war.

Like the widow of Zarephath, we all have the capacity for different stories about God in our hearts. Which ones we choose will affect how we make meaning of our lives. Which ones we choose will determine how easily we’ll be able to recognize and accept God’s blessings into our lives. May we choose with bold faith and open, loving hearts! Alleluia and Amen!