Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid….”
When I realized that I would be preaching on the Sunday immediately following the national election, I thought to myself, O, Lord, what will I say? I wrote this sermon just before I left for my 10 day visit to the Living School symposium in New Mexico. But I had no idea of how difficult preaching it would be. And it is clear to me that the events of this week raise some fundamental questions about who we are as followers of Jesus.
So let us look at that.
A Stark Alternative to the Kingdom of Caesar
Jesus lived within the kingdom of Caesar. Such kingdoms, in all their forms including our own, will always be volatile. The power of a Caesar is always based in the use of coercive force. Its consummate values of power, privilege and status means that there will inevitably be a few winners and a lot of losers. Thus Caesars are always insecure, prompting behaviors that are designed to protect the power and the privilege of the beneficiaries of the empire, inevitably at the expense of its most vulnerable members. That is as true today in this empire we call America as it was in Jesus’ time.
But Jesus articulated a different vision and called his followers to live into it. He called it the Kingdom of G-d. And it’s little wonder that the Caesar of his time felt compelled to respond to that vision by crucifying the one who articulated it.
The Kingdom of G-d offered a stark alternative to the kingdom of Caesar. In contrast with Caesar’s empire, with its tiers of power and status, Jesus’ Kingdom was based in a value of the good Creation that included everyone beginning with those at the bottom of the heap. Jesus’ kingdom was not based in power. It was based in the Hebrew notion of shalom, right relation of all the members of the kingdom. And we see that pattern in today’s lectionary.
The Example of the Poor Widow
Howard Lyon, “All That She Has”
In today’s Gospel Jesus reacts to a poor widow who offers her last pennies to the Temple as a means of meeting her obligations to the communal worship center. Jesus contrasts her humble piety to “the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets!” Of course, in a kingdom based in power, privilege and status, scribes have every reason to strut around expecting admiration.
But Jesus points to the widow, who offers her last two pennies, no doubt believing that G-d would sustain her even in her abject poverty. And Jesus says to his disciples, “For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
The Values of the Way of Jesus
This focus on the widow is consistent with the ethical values of Hebrew scripture. Jesus was highly selective in the Hebrew Scripture he relied upon. He was particularly prone to quote the prophet Isaiah, as he did in Luke’s telling of his reading of the scroll in the synagogue, and the Psalms such as the one we read this morning. Through that selective reading, Jesus laid out the values of what came to be known as the Way of Jesus. Today’s psalm articulates those values:
6. [The Lord] gives justice to those
who are oppressed, *
and food to those who hunger.
7 The Lord sets the prisoners
free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind; *
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
8 The Lord loves the
righteous;
the Lord cares for the stranger; *
he sustains the orphan and widow,
but frustrates the way of the wicked.
So what are the values to which Jesus points his followers? What attitudes and behaviors distinguished the Way of Jesus, which our retired Presiding Bishop called the Jesus Movement, from the attitudes and behaviors engaged by the Kingdom of Caesar?
The Way of Jesus insists upon justice for those who are oppressed. This is more than mere tolerance of social outcasts. It is embracing those whom our world would say have no value – like the widow in our Gospel lesson - and helping them to discover the image of G_d they bear. That justice making happens in our daily lives and it happens at the ballot box in determining social policy.
The Way of Jesus values feeding the hungry. That includes physical hunger in a world where there is more than enough for every human being to eat and thus starvation and malnutrition exist only as a result of self-focused human decision making. But it also includes the raw hunger of wounded souls seeking places to belong, hoping for affirmation of their very humanity.
The Way of Jesus
seeks to set prisoners free, from those wrongfully accused of crimes to those
imprisoned by inherited prejudices and fearfulness. The Jesus movement seeks to
open the eyes of the blind including those blinded by crippling
self-denigration, those who have trouble seeing their own value as human beings
because of the blinders they have unwittingly internalized.
The Way of Jesus cares for the stranger, those wandering through life without people to know them, to learn from them, to love and be loved by them. And the Jesus movement begins with the most vulnerable members of our society, orphans and the widows and widowers. As liberation theologians taught us, the followers of Jesus are called to focus on the most vulnerable because these are the ones most in immediate need of our attention.
Finally, the Way of Jesus is called to confront ways of thinking, speaking and acting that harm other living beings and the good Creation itself. This is no small undertaking. It first requires us to become aware of our own Shadows, owning our own darkness even as we know there is no part of us that G-d does not love, and thus resisting the temptation to project our darkness onto others.
Clearly the values of Jesus’ Kingdom of G-d stand in stark contrast to those of any version of the Kingdom of Caesar including our own. As retired Presiding Bishop Michael Curry states in his book Crazy Christians, a Call to Follow Jesus:
“Being a Christian is not essentially about joining a church or being a nice person, but about following in the footsteps of Jesus, taking his teachings seriously, letting his Spirit take the lead in our lives, and in so doing helping to change the world from our nightmare into God’s dream.”
That should sound familiar to you. Our mission statement here at St. Richards is “to discover G-d’s grace, change our lives and change the whole world.”
No small undertaking on a good day.
A Trust in G_d That Proves Existential
This is where the Hebrew Scripture lesson for today comes into the picture. The prophet Elijah has just appeared in I Kings where he confronts Ahab, king of the northern kingdom of Israel, because the king has rejected Yahweh and turned to the worship of Baal. When Elijah proclaims a drought will seize the kingdom, he becomes a wanted man. G_d tells Elijah to seek refuge with a widow in nearby Phoenicia.
Bernard Strozzi, Prophet Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta (1630s)
The widow and her son are starving. Elijah asks her to take the last of her remaining meal for bread and feed him. When the woman says she had planned to feed her son and herself and die, Elijah tells her not to be afraid, that G_d will provide enough meal for them to eat until the rains resume. To her credit, the widow trusts Elijah and his G-d and the supply of meal and olive oil continued for the duration of his stay with them. In the end, their willingness to trust G-d saved all three of them.
Like a prophet on the run from an insecure king’s wrath, like a widow and her young son slowly starving to death in isolation, and like the poor widow surrounded by privilege and status, depositing her last mites into the Temple treasury, it is very easy in the grips of fearful isolation to feel that one is alone in their suffering. And that brings us to the present day.
You Are Not Alone
We do not know where our country and our world are going in the wake of this election. It is hard for me to look down the road from last Tuesday and not believe that we could well be in for some very rough times. There are many people who are hurting in this country, no doubt, a number of them sitting here and watching by Zoom this morning. The pain is palpable. But, if you hear nothing else I have to say this morning, I hope you will come away with something I heard over and over at my Living School symposium:
You are not alone.
One of my Living School teachers, a sage of contemplative prayer, is Jim Finley. He is prone to say “God is the presence that spares us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things.” That’s a startling declaration. But he continues,
“God depends on us to protect ourselves and each other, to be nurturing, loving, protective people. When suffering is there, God depends on us to reach out and touch the suffering with love that it might dissolve in love.”
If there was ever a time when we needed to hear that, I believe it is now. Such wisdom will be particularly important to us as we seek to live out Jesus’ call to be agents of his kingdom of G-d in this time of crisis. Our willingness to reach out and touch the suffering with love may well be the difference in the survival of many in a time of darkness.
But G-d is ever with us, even in the darkest hours. Especially in our darkest hours. May we be conscious of that divine presence this day and in the days to come. May we continue to be a healing presence for others in our times of suffering. And may we depart this place in peace this day knowing that while G-d spares us of nothing, G_d will sustain us in all things. We are not alone. Thanks be to G-d. AMEN.
“The Values of the Way of
Jesus,” Proper 26 B, preached on November 10, 2024 at St. Richard’s Episcopal
Church, Winter Park, FL Images of natural landscape taken by author at Chaco Canyon Cultural Center October 28-28, 2024.
You may watch the delivery of this sermon at the link provided below starting at 24:30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpXkDVik6jQ
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston, 2024
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
