In
tonight’s Old Testament reading, the prophet Elijah is living on borrowed time. He’s challenged the authority of an evil king, so he lit out for the country to hide.
He’s been relying on food brought by the birds, and now his water source
has dried up. It’s not exactly a
sustainable model.
So God, who’s pretty good at
providing daily bread, tells Elijah to go ask a poor widow for food in the
midst of a drought. It’s kind of like
passing the plate at the soup kitchen. This
widow is down to her last handful of the meal she uses to make bread. But the prophet asks her to give up the last
little bit she has, all she has to live on, even in the face of famine. Elijah tells her not to be afraid – in fact,
to feed him first and then bake some bread for herself and her
child. To our ears, it sounds appalling. But Elijah brings God’s word of abundance
into this world of scarcity: The meal
and the oil will hold out until the
rains come, Elijah says. And they
do. Elijah, the widow, and her child –
they all eat happily ever after.
Trusting God’s abundance…. We see the same dynamic in the Gospel story
of the poor widow’s offering to the Temple treasury. Jesus and his followers are watching people put
their money in the offering plate, so to speak.
Jesus sees wealthy people giving large sums while the poor widow – the
lowest and the least in society, someone with no visible means of support – the
poor widow puts in small change, just a fraction of a worker’s daily wage. For us, think of it as a dollar. But Jesus recognizes value others don’t
see. He says to his followers that she
put in “everything she had, all she had to live on” – which, translated
literally, actually says, “She put in her whole life.”
Giving your life. That’s what both widows did. How scary is that?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not
so willing to give my life away. Sure,
there are things I manage to turn over to God, and that makes me feel good for
a while … right up until I see the next
part of my life that I want to hang onto and control. Whatever their motivations may have been,
these two widows trusted, in an astonishing way, that God was going to take
care of them. In such a situation, our
worldly wisdom says, “Great – but be sure you have a backup plan, too.” Jesus says, no – there is no backup
plan. It’s not, “Trust and verify.” It’s not, “Trust and plan wisely.” It’s just, “Trust.”
Now, I don’t think Jesus is saying
to us, literally, that we should put “all [we] have to live on” into anybody’s
offering plate. He’s actually asking
something harder. Put your whole life into the offering plate. Whatever you want to hold onto most, that’s
the offering he’s asking for.
We name that kind of deep trust
every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, even if we may not realize it. “Give us this day our daily bread,” we say. Give us today our bread for tomorrow. Teach us to rely on you, Lord. And whatever we need to part with, in order
to learn to trust … help us to let go of that.
In
your life, how is God asking you to
trust? What’s God asking you to give
away to make room for your daily bread?
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