[00:00:00] Foreign welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
[00:00:15] This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast.
[00:00:31] So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:40] So good morning. Welcome to the Oceanside Sanctuary. For those of you who might be new, my name is Jason Coker. I'm one of the co lead ministers here and we are starting today a new teaching series for the fall that we are calling unseen witnesses because we're going to visit and sort of celebrate and learn from those figures in scripture that maybe we don't hear from quite as often. Some of these stories may be familiar to you, maybe some of these stories will be stories you haven't heard before. But what we wanted to do was sort of dip into scripture throughout the fall and visit these sort of odd, unusual bits of scripture that maybe we sometimes don't quite know what to do with, or in other cases, as maybe the case is today, we usually know exactly what to do with them. But I want to try to throw a wrench into that if I possibly can.
[00:01:39] So if you would just with me, if you have a Bible, you can turn to First Kings, chapter 17. If you don't, we're going to put the words up on the screen here today.
[00:01:48] This passage is a great story from 1 Kings 17, about the widow who shares with a prophet of God who visits her sort of unexpectedly. So picking up in verse 8, here's what it says.
[00:02:04] Then the word of the Lord came to him, that is the prophet Elijah. The word of the Lord came to him, saying, go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there, for I've commanded a widow there to feed you.
[00:02:20] So he set out and he went to Zarephath. And when he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks. Now, we'll just pause there for a second.
[00:02:27] It's important for you to know that this trip to Zarephath was a trip beyond the borders of Elijah's tribe. Right? This is outside of the borders of what was then Elijah's kingdom, where Elijah lived and served Israel and the God of Israel and the king. And. And prior to this, of course, like any good prophet, Elijah has gotten into a bit of trouble for what he has said to the king. And this has produced a kind of exile for Elijah. So if we backed up and read a few passages before that. There's this great little bit about Elijah trying to escape from the consequences of the word that he's brought to the king. And one of the things he has to do is go out into the wilderness. And God says, don't worry. Go into the wilderness, and I will command a raven there in the wilderness to feed you.
[00:03:18] So there's a kind of pattern at work here, is my point. Right. He. He goes out into the wilderness, and there's this raven that literally brings him food every day.
[00:03:29] But then the. The creek dries up and the. The food goes away. The raven doesn't come anymore. And God picks up in verse 8 here and says, okay, go to Zarephath. That says, to a foreign land.
[00:03:40] And there I've commanded this widow to help you. So verse 10, he set out and went to Zarephath. And when he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks. And he called to her and said, bring me a little water and a vessel so that I may drink.
[00:03:57] Rude as she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.
[00:04:07] But she said, as the Lord your God lives.
[00:04:13] She seems to recognize that he's a foreigner. Right? As the Lord your God lives.
[00:04:19] I have nothing baked. Only a handful of meal in a jar and a little oil in a jug.
[00:04:26] And I am now gathering a couple of sticks so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and. And my son, that we may eat it and die.
[00:04:38] There's a very polite way of saying, hey, buddy, you know, take a walk, pound sand.
[00:04:47] I've got bigger problems.
[00:04:50] I'm not here to serve you and your needs.
[00:04:53] In fact, I have huge problems of my own. You think you're hungry? I'm hungry, and so is my child. And I'm on my way home to make our very last meal so that we can prepare for death.
[00:05:06] Elijah, being the sensitive and compassionate man that he was, said to her, do not be afraid. Go and do as you have said.
[00:05:16] But first, make me a little cake and bring it to me. This is something I say to Janelle all the time.
[00:05:26] Make me a little cake.
[00:05:29] Pie, preferably, actually. But okay. Anyway, that's not in my notes.
[00:05:36] Make me a little cake of it and bring it to me. And afterwards, make something for yourself and your son. Oh, okay, you guys are hungry. I get it. But first make me something. And then after you've made me some food, then you can make some food for you and your son.
[00:05:51] For thus says the Lord God of Israel, and this is where, understandably, a lot of you are already experiencing red flags.
[00:06:01] Thus says the Lord God of Israel, the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fall or fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.
[00:06:14] In other words, if you do this thing for me, if you make me a little cake first and then feed yourself and your son, I promise you, as a man of God, as a prophet of God, that, that that jug and that jar will replenish itself and that you will not run out of oil and flour until the rains start falling again. Because what we learned in the passage previous to this is that there's a famine caused by a drought, and so everybody is starving, right?
[00:06:46] And so he's making a promise that a miracle will save her until, you know, the world, the land is full of abundance again, she went and did as Elijah said.
[00:07:01] I don't know why.
[00:07:06] Maybe she thought, what do I have to lose?
[00:07:12] Maybe he was insistent and she thought, this will shut him up.
[00:07:21] In any case, she went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well and he and her household ate for many days. And the jar of meal was not emptied and neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke to Elijah.
[00:07:35] All right, that's our story.
[00:07:39] Would you pray for me?
[00:07:42] God, we thank you for today, for this opportunity for us to gather as summer comes to a close and we enter into the busyness of fall and the back to school season and renewed season of work.
[00:07:59] Amid a lot of uncertainty in our world and a sense of scarcity and threats of famine and hardship in the future and the turmoil that we see every day in our news feeds, we ask that you would maybe give us a bit of the widow's faith, that we wouldn't react to the uncertainties of the world in a way that forecloses the possibilities for abundance in our lives and in our community.
[00:08:37] And we pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:08:40] I told you guys this before, but Janelle and I have a little camper trailer. We like to go out on occasion, you know, three or four times a year. And some of you have heard this before too, and I apologize, but just bears repeating. For some reason at this season of our life, we really love the desert. So we go to the desert a lot, you know, often out to, like Palm Springs or Borrego Springs or, you know, Wonder Valley.
[00:09:03] If you haven't been to Wonder Valley, it's the San Bernardino of the high desert.
[00:09:07] That's a joke.
[00:09:10] San Bernardino's not a place you'd want to go anyway. So I see this joke isn't landing. I'm from San Bernardino. Don't be offended for people from San Bernardino.
[00:09:21] Anyway, we like going to the desert. And this is a change for me growing up as a kid, I love the mountains. I love lush, green, abundant life in my environment.
[00:09:34] I loved going up to, like, you know, Idlewild and Big Bear and the LA Mountains. I loved going to the Rocky Mountains. It was my favorite thing. So much so that in 1993, I moved our whole family to the mountains of Utah because I thought, like, that's the sort of environment I wanted us to live in. But at this stage in life, for some reason, Janelle and I both just really crave the desert. Like, we crave the emptiness of it, right? Like, the clarity that it brings because you're surrounded by, like, nothing.
[00:10:02] Or when you look at it, you realize that there is abundance in the scarcity of the desert. And that's an amazing sort of realization. One time we were in Yucca Valley, right? Because sometimes we go to the desert and we'll camp and then we'll drive to town, right? That's Yucca Valley, and there's some cool little thrift stores there. And one time we were in a thrift store shopping around. And on this table was a book that caught my attention because sometimes I like to shop for books. And I picked up the book and I thumbed to the opening page in the introduction to the book, which was sort of a chronicle of the desert, right? It was sort of like a coffee table book about the California desert.
[00:10:43] And the introduction was written by Josh Homme, who is the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, Queens of the Stone Age. Now you know everything you need to know about me as an aging Gen Xer. But anyway, one of my favorite musicians, one of my favorite bands, so it caught my attention. And the first line of his introduction on the first page of this book about the desert was, people come to the desert to die.
[00:11:10] And I was like, what now? Josh Homme and Queens of the Stone Age. And, like, you know, the little musical circle that they're a part of, they're sort of based in the desert out there. That's why he was writing this.
[00:11:25] But, like, in that moment, I was kind of struck with a little bit of, like, an existential crisis. What does it mean that I love the desert at this point in my life? Does it mean that I'm about to die, does it mean, like, I'm entering into the final season of my life? Like, what is it about the desert that I'm drawn to what's going on here?
[00:11:41] But it did cause me to reflect a bit on what Janelle talked about earlier when she spoke about desolation, about how places of desolation can bring an important perspective and an important comfort and an important insight into life at certain stages and seasons of your life.
[00:12:05] And it caused me to reflect on the fact that there are certain seasons in our lives when we need to be in places of richness and abundance, surrounded by greenery and life and goodness, to the point where we feel overloaded by it. And. And then, consequently, there are seasons when we need to be in the desert, when we need to be distant from the noise of life and abundance.
[00:12:32] And this rhythm, I think, is so obvious in our lives, right? It's the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling. It's the rhythm of work and rest.
[00:12:45] It's the rhythm of life and death.
[00:12:52] And the story of Christianity adds resurrection to the end of that because it restarts the cycle.
[00:12:59] So the rhythm of life and death and then resurrection leads to new experiences of life and death and resurrection.
[00:13:11] And that maybe this is a bit of an insight into how life works.
[00:13:19] So here we have the story of the widow.
[00:13:22] Elijah goes to a foreign land.
[00:13:24] He sees a widow, just as God instructed him.
[00:13:28] He tells her, make me a little cake. She says, all I have left is enough for my son and I to have our last meal and die. And he says, bring it to me instead, and if you do, there will be enough for you that will last until the rains fall again. And she does. And that's what happens. The jars and the bowl are suddenly full of resources again, and they're able to eat and miraculously subsist.
[00:13:54] And maybe the worst interpretation of this passage of all is that God performed a miracle for a widow who obeyed God's prophet.
[00:14:06] And that's sort of the obvious lesson here.
[00:14:09] Check it out.
[00:14:11] We have this story of a woman who was asked to sacrifice a widow who was asked to give, a woman who was impoverished and close to death. And the person representing God asked her to give everything, and she did, and she suddenly had everything she needed.
[00:14:32] Therefore, let's pass the offering tray.
[00:14:38] Dig deep. Give of everything that you have. As soon as you have given so much that it feels like too much, I'm going to ask you to give just a little bit more so that you can exhibit the faith of the widow at Zarephath. And if you do, if you do, then your jars will be full forever.
[00:15:01] Checks will arrive in the mail.
[00:15:06] And that, I think, is not just a terrible interpretation of this passage. I think it's an abusive interpretation of this passage.
[00:15:17] It's abusive first and foremost, because that's not how life works.
[00:15:20] And just so you know, I've tried it.
[00:15:25] No amount of giving and generosity on your part towards people who look like me in buildings that look like this will reliably result in checks arriving in your mailbox.
[00:15:41] I spent the better part of my 20s and early 30s in churches that explained, explicitly, promised that, and I can show you the tax returns. I did not get wealthy.
[00:15:55] That's not how life works.
[00:15:59] But it's also, I think, abusive because it takes this passage and translates it in a way that faith, which I think is the point of this story, faith becomes a commodity.
[00:16:14] Commodity is something that you can create and then reproduce at scale.
[00:16:21] And then once you've reproduced it at scale, and therefore it costs you less and less per unit, you can then sell it and reliably expect a return, a profit.
[00:16:35] And I think what happens is that churches recognize the power of these kinds of narratives and the truth that underlies these kinds of narratives. And it's extraordinarily easy to spin that tail in a way that makes your faith a commodity for places like this.
[00:16:53] It's a very powerful way to raise money.
[00:16:58] So generosity, then faith, becomes a way of capitalizing on your very real needs for the benefit not of you, not for the benefit of people in the community who are in need, not for the benefit of the production of equality, equality and peace and justice, but for the benefit of a few who are in power.
[00:17:24] Now, what I do love about this story, despite sort of the pitfalls, I love that this story just echoes in so many ways some of the patterns that we see in other sort of folktales and myths, not only in scripture, but across cultures as well. So one of those, I'm sure you've noticed, this is there is kind of the pattern of the stranger test in these sort of cultural tales. The stranger test goes something like this. A foreigner shows up, and that foreigner is actually a person of power in disguise.
[00:18:00] Might be a God or it might be a political leader, but that person in disguise essentially is testing the hospitality of the person that they are visiting or the community that they are visiting. In Norse mythology, Odin wanders the world disguised as an old man.
[00:18:20] And those who receive Odin with hospitality are blessed, and those who reject and refuse Odin because they are disgusted by the smelly, vile, poor old man are cursed.
[00:18:34] In West African tales, there's the trickster figure who exists across cultures. But in West African tales, this is more likely Eshu, or sometimes takes on the role of a spider. And in those kinds of stories, the trickster again disguises himself and shows up in communities and then rewards those communities who receive him or punishes those communities who don't.
[00:18:59] In Second Kings, chapter four in the Bible, we see the story of Elisha and the Shunammite woman. Exact same story.
[00:19:05] Will Elisha be received with hospitality? Or In Luke, chapter 24, if you prefer, Jesus on the road to Emmaus, the disguised stranger shows up and walks with disciples, the very disciples who were with him for three years. And yet they don't recognize him because they receive him, because they talk to him, because they're willing to learn from him. At the end of the long walk, Jesus reveals who he really is. And there is an exchange of hospitality at the end of that story and blessing.
[00:19:38] This is why in Hebrews, chapter 13, verse 2, the writer of Hebrews says, do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by entertaining them, you may be hosting angels without realizing it, right? Angels unawares. The wisdom contained in this story is that hospitality, the willingness to receive strangers, people you don't know, people who are foreigners, people who represent fear, a kind of risk to you and your family and your community, the willingness to take them in and meet their needs and treat them with kindness in the face of their need is something that produces blessing for everyone.
[00:20:20] And this is a risk.
[00:20:22] It's a risk to receive people who are strangers and foreigners.
[00:20:28] We inherently don't trust people we don't know, and. And for good reason. Sometimes people we don't know hurt us.
[00:20:38] The truth is, most of the people who hurt us are the people we know really well.
[00:20:45] I heard recently, I don't know if this is true.
[00:20:48] Feels true, but it's the statement that the most dangerous person a woman will meet in her entire life is her husband.
[00:21:04] It's nice to have some therapists in the room because they can be like, that's true and sobering.
[00:21:13] And if you're a dude in the room who's married, I'm not saying you're a bad guy, but I am saying that more often than not, the irony of our xenophobia, our fear of the other, our fear of strangers, is that most of the time in life, the people who are a real threat to us are the ones we're most intimate with.
[00:21:35] And so these tales, these kinds of stories, are meant to teach whole communities that not only is it okay for you to welcome people who are strangers, welcome people who are struggling, welcome people who look strange and odd and uncomfortable to you. Not only is that probably okay, but actually the world depends on our hospitality.
[00:22:03] Goodness depends. Blessing depends on kindness.
[00:22:10] So these stories help us to take the risk to provide those kinds of experiences.
[00:22:17] Another pattern is the the widow in the story as a kind of liminal figure. This is pretty common in folktales across cultures. There are often widows in these stories. And what widows seem to represent in these stories is the vulnerable, struggling, marginalized character in the story through whom, ironically, blessing flows.
[00:22:47] The person in the story who appears to be the weakest, the person in the story who appears to have no business whatsoever being a source of wealth and abundance and goodness, is exactly the person through whom it comes.
[00:23:03] And being a widow, I think it's really important to recognize that the vulnerability, the weakness, the struggle that she represents is. Is death.
[00:23:16] She has been desolated.
[00:23:18] I'm so grateful for that word today. She has been desolated by death.
[00:23:25] The normal source of her security, of her abundance, especially in ancient Near Eastern cultures, is the man that she's married to, the one who's allowed to own property, the one who is just given all of the power politically.
[00:23:41] When that person dies, she's utterly bankrupt. And yet in these stories, when they put a widow at the center of it, what they're saying is that this person who has been desolated by death is somehow, mysteriously, magically, the person through whom that goodness flows. Which leads me to the third pattern that we see in here, and that is emptiness as sacred.
[00:24:07] And then I think this is sort of the hardest one for us as Americans.
[00:24:13] But the widow as a representative of the desolation of death also represents a person who is empty, a person for whom everything has been vacated. They have nothing left. And in the story, she literally has almost nothing left.
[00:24:33] Just a little bit of flour and a little bit of oil left in the bottom of her jars, enough to make maybe one cake for her and her son to split.
[00:24:44] And yet out of that emptiness comes abundance.
[00:24:48] And this idea, the idea that in order for abundance to come, in order for goodness to come, in order for riches, and we should probably define that term, right?
[00:25:00] In order for riches to come, you have to first start with emptiness.
[00:25:08] We see this in all kinds of traditions. Of course, in Japanese Zen Buddhism, emptiness is the sacred condition of openness and receptivity you have heard me say in here before that the beggar's bowl of Zen Buddhist monks in the east literally represents openness to the blessing that comes. It is the essence of faith.
[00:25:33] Thomas Merton, American Catholic monk, famously wrote about that after touring around Japan and being struck by the truth that in order to receive, you have to have an empty vessel.
[00:25:51] Native American stories over and over again demonstrate these are rituals where an empty bowl or an empty basket is put forward forth, symbolizing openness to the gifts of the holy, of the spirit.
[00:26:03] Again, Western African tribes have these folk tales that describe gourds, empty gourds that become endless sources of food.
[00:26:16] We see these same stories in the Bible.
[00:26:19] Genesis, chapter one, verse two.
[00:26:22] God creates the world, the cosmos, you and me, and all of life out of tohu va vohu.
[00:26:31] The formless void, not just emptiness, but anything lacking any semblance of order whatsoever, becomes the conditions out of which God creates all things. In Genesis chapter 1, in Exodus 16, manna falls from the wilderness. And every single day the Israelites are commanded to gather what they need for that day, and only what they need for that day. The condition for them to receive manna the next day day is for them to be utterly emptied of the man of the day before. If they don't, it will rot.
[00:27:05] Paul famously sort of interprets that. Later in 1 Corinthians, chapter 8, I think, or 10, I should know this, he interprets that story to be a story of sharing.
[00:27:22] He says God commanded everybody to go out in the wilderness and gather up the manna that they needed for that day. But of course, inevitably some people would have gathered more than they actually needed. And inevitably some families would have gathered a little less than they actually needed. But at the end of the day, everybody had what they needed.
[00:27:43] And the reason Paul says for that is because they shared those who had more shared out of their abundance with those who had less.
[00:27:54] And in that way, equality is achieved.
[00:27:59] He goes on to say in that same chapter, you should operate the same way just as Christ became poor, so that you could become rich. Your job now out of your abundance, if you have abundance in brackets right out of your abundance, is to share with those who don't have enough so that by your poverty they can become rich.
[00:28:26] There is a kind of like cosmic redistribution of wealth at the heart of the life of faith.
[00:28:36] It's very Bernie Sanders ish, don't you think?
[00:28:41] I sort of see Elijah as Bernie Sanders in this story.
[00:28:45] Bring me a little cake.
[00:28:56] The point, of course, is the act of emptying ourselves according to this spiritual tradition and other cultural traditions, the act of emptying ourselves becomes the condition by which we are filled.
[00:29:16] And this, I would suggest to you, is how life works.
[00:29:23] This is how life works.
[00:29:26] If you want to be filled, if you want to be abundant, if you want to have riches, if you want to have blessing, we can define all of those things in very important ways. But if you want to be blessed in that way, then you have to empty yourself.
[00:29:45] Whatever it is that you've been given.
[00:29:48] You have to give away whatever inspiration you've received. You have to share whatever manna you have collected for today, whatever you have left that you can't consume. If you don't give it away, it will rot and become full of worms, just like manna in the desert. And that is a metaphor for the rot in your soul if you hoard too much wealth.
[00:30:19] That's exactly what's happened to our culture.
[00:30:23] We are a culture of increasingly a very small number of people who have hoarded fantastically ridiculous amounts of wealth and an enormous group of people who are killing themselves every single day just to get by.
[00:30:45] I think what the wisdom of this passage tells us is that we have interrupted the way the world is supposed to actually work, and the result is that our society is rotting from the inside out.
[00:31:03] So it turns out this is a lesson about giving.
[00:31:11] Well, yes and no.
[00:31:14] It's not a principle of generosity or giving or abundance or emptiness for my benefit.
[00:31:25] This isn't a lesson about how if I just, like, give enough of my crap away, that checks will magically appear in my inbox.
[00:31:35] It's not a lesson about how you can personally benefit from the magic of emptying yourself just enough so that God will finally pour out his riches on you.
[00:31:51] Instead, this is a story of community abundance, how communities, how families, how societies, how cultures actually can be rich in the face of scarcity and difficult and famine and trouble.
[00:32:12] We do that by being open with each other, by not hoarding the things that we have, but holding the things that we have loosely enough to provide for each other's needs in the midst of those difficulties. Yes, just like the widow did. This requires faith.
[00:32:34] Faith to receive scary people in your life when they show up in need. Faith to give of what you have, to meet the needs of people who don't, and to trust that if you do that, if you're a part of a community that actually has this kind of faith, that they will be okay and you will be okay, that we will all have exactly what we need and in that way, we will be wildly rich.
[00:33:08] That is how life is supposed to work.
[00:33:12] But that requires letting go of control.
[00:33:16] And the way this passage is usually interpreted is to try to recognize the logic of the gift and giving and generosity and seize control of it for the benefit of a few.
[00:33:32] The opposite of faith, it turns out, isn't doubt.
[00:33:37] It's control.
[00:33:40] Faith requires doubt.
[00:33:43] If faith is the consolation that we experience every time we're comforted by the possibility of the mystery of life, then doubt is the desolation that helps prune and strip back those unhelpful constructs that we have perpetuated.
[00:33:59] It's another one of those rhythms.
[00:34:02] Faith, doubt, life, death, work, rest, inhale, exhale, poverty and riches.
[00:34:16] This is life.
[00:34:18] And it requires us to trust that there may be some quality of life, some aspect of the cosmos that is at work, knitting us together in ways that will bless us if we trust it, if we believe it.
[00:34:38] I think the widow at Zarephath is a witness to that.
[00:34:43] Amen.
[00:34:45] Would you pray with me?
[00:34:46] God, we thank you for just the challenge of these kinds of passages.
[00:34:52] We ask that you would bless us today as we go out into the world. And we try to cultivate an eye for seeing the ways in which we have been provided for, the ways that we have received, the ways that we have been given abundance.
[00:35:13] And then give us the courage to let go of all of that, to share the resources we've received, to empty ourselves, knowing that your filling is coming again.
[00:35:30] We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:35:39] Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
[00:35:44] To learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
[email protected] We hope to see you again soon.
