Sermons

Sunday 6th June 2010

I Kings 17:8-16

Some years ago there was a book written called "Your God is Too Small'. The point it was making is that many of us limit what God can do. We confine God to too small an area of life. We confine God to what goes on in church, for example, where we use "god" words in our prayers and hymns,.... &/or we confine God to special occasions in our lives: baptisms and weddings and funerals, for example .... &/or we confine God to times when we are in great crisis, times of need, when we cry out to God for help. But for the rest of our lives, God is on the margins -- or God is just ignored -- or it could be that we just think that God can not be there at all in those other parts of our lives.

I wonder how you feel about that. How big is your God ? Does God feature in every aspect of your lives ? Do you limit God ? Is God there in all your decisions about your family, for example... in all your decisions about your job, your socal life, the use of your money and resources and property. Is your God too small ? Is there a "God-sphere" that you live in for some of the time, but then, when you venture out of it, God is irrelevant, and there is no dimension of faith outside that "God-sphere" ?

This is a topic which I believe is tackled in our reading today: whether or not the true God is confined within limits.

We are talking about a period in the history of the Hebrews , about 9 centuries before Christ. There was a king in Israel, then, whose name was Ahab, and there were lots of kingdoms surrounding Israel. One of these other kingdoms was the kingdom of Sidon, to the north of Israel -- where the nation of Lebanon is today.

At that time in world history, in the Middle Eastern countries, each nation thought of itself as having its own god or gods. Ahab, and his ancestors in Israel, believed -- to some extent -- in the god they called Yahweh (sometimes mistranslated as Jehovah) -- also called "The LORD" . But many Hebrews were quite prepared to accept that there were other gods as well as Yahweh -- as well as The LORD -- and this Ahab was in a situation where he had married a princess from the kingdom of Sidon -- her name was Jezebel -- and she brought to that marriage her worship of the Sidonian gods and she influenced her husband to water down his belief in Yahweh, so that he kind of played both sides of the streets . In the story of King Ahab we see him picking and choosing when he would put his trust in Yahweh and when he would put his trust in the gods his wife, Jezebel, introduced him to.

The main god which Jezebel worshipped, was called Baal, and this god was thought to have authority over rain and the fertility of the land, and it was thought that from time to time this god, Baal , would submit to another god, MOT, the god of death, during which time there would be drought . But then Baal would reassert himself and the rain would come back.

Ahab got caught up in this complication of his belief system, and it all came to a head when the country of Israel was afflicted by a terrible drought. Ahab must have wondered, which god is in control ?

On to the scene came a man called Elijah. He was a strange character, an outsider, but with a great spiritual power about him. He ends up being the second most important person in the Hebrews' history, after Moses. But Elijah was one of those people who was single-minded -- so much so that his name identified precisely what he was all about. His name, Elijah, meant. literally, "Yahweh is the only god" -- THE LORD is the only god. And in his career we see him to be a prophet. Now a "prophet" in those days was not necessarily someone who predicted the future -- it was more that a prophet was someone who could discern what God was saying to the nation, or to a particular king or ruler, and that prophet would then speak that word, sometimes using dramatic actions, sometimes with the use of miracles, sometimes by means of the transformation of ordinary everyday things. The prophet would speak the word, no matter what the consequences.

During this drought, in Israel, when Ahab was king, and Jezebel was the queen -- and she had introduced foreign gods in to Israel -- Elijah confronted them with the view that Yahweh was the only God -- indeed Elijah's name said it all -- and that because Yahweh was the only God, that this God, Yahweh, had power beyond the borders of Israel. Yahweh was the only God, the universal god, for all people., It was this God, said Elijah, who was witholding the rain form the land -- it wasn't some god of death, MOT, and it was this God who would bring back the rain and the fertility to the land. Not the false god Baal. In other words, Elijah was saying to the king and queen that their gods were false and that Yahweh was the only God, and He, Yahweh, was not too small, He was big enough to be the God of the whole world.

Elijah could not find faith in this universal God in the nation of Israel. He certainly could not find that faith in the king or queen -- and worse than that, they persecuted him because he was constantly criticising what they were getting up to, in their moral and ethical behaviour.

The little story we hear in today's reading highlights this issue. Whereas Elijah cannot find faith in the palace of Ahab and Jezebel, in the heart of the nation of Israel, today's story tells us that he does find faith -- faith in the one true God -- but he finds it outside of Israel, he finds it actually in the very land where Jezebel came from, & he finds it not in a royal princess but in a destitute widow, from that land, a widow who is on the point of death.

Elijah goes to Zarephath. Apparently this is a town on the coast of the Sidon kingdom, and here he is led, by Yahweh, to this widow. Widows, in the bible, are people who are in the most precarious position. They have no secure means of support. They have no standing in society. They are insignificant people. And this particular lady is almost on the point of death, due to the drought.

As you heard in the story, Elijah calls forth from her ... faith ... faith manifested in generosity. For her to have given over to Elijah the last of her bread and oil was really a death sentence. But she did it because, even though she was from the land of Sidon... even though her background had been in worshipping the gods of that land ...faith in Yahweh was called forth in her ... faith in the god who transcended the boundaries of Israel ... the god who was not "too small".

That is surely the point of the story: that someone from outside Israel... someone who is the least significant person in a society that is outside Israel ... that someone who comes from the heartland of the false God, Baal ..... that someone who comes from the land where the Israelite queen had come from .... that this someone, this destitute widow, shows generosity to the prophet of God ... and thereby enables that prophet to be sustained with food so that he can continue his work.

The contrast is there between unfaithful and unrepentant Israel, which has not been brought to heel by the drought, and whose leaders have taken false gods on board, and who are persecuting the man who asserts that Yahweh is the only god ... the contrast is there between that and the "outsider" widow, who -- even though she is afflicted by the drought more than anyone else -- shows generosity to the prophet of Yahweh, and demonstrates her faith in that god's power.

After her generosity and faith are shown, the miracle of the jar of flour and the jug of oil then results as, you might say, God's stamp of approval.

The story is a statement that God -- the one true God -- is not confined to one race, to one kingdom, to one territory. From then on, in the bible, we read more about the universality of God -- culminating in the arrival of Jesus who is the Saviour of all the world, not just for one race or tribe or kingdom.

I believe that we have to appropriate that point to our lives by recognising that a universal God has dominion over everything that we are and everything that we do. This God must not be limited, must not be marginalised, must not be confined only to certain areas of our daily existence.

This is a God who finds significance in the lowliest of the lowly, who finds significance in the nobodies of our world. This is a God who cares for widows and orphans. This is a God who will sometimes use people from "outside the boundaries" to allow His word to be sustained and to continue. This is a God who may even use people, whose background is in other faiths... use them for His purposes.

Do you believe in a God that big ?