Guests and Gifts
This is the first Sunday of Advent; it is the beginning of marking the weeks leading up to the celebration of the birth of Jesus. One of the best known aspects of Luke’s birth narrative is that when Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem “there was no room for them in the inn.” There also was apparently no one in Joseph’s family who was willing to share hospitality with their relatives. No one welcomed them as guests after their journey. That had to be disappointing.
November 27, 2011
1 Kings 17:8-24, Guests and Gifts
Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
Guests and Gifts from BBC on Vimeo.
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From Saturday, November 19th until Thanksgiving night this past Thursday our family spent a lot of time as guests and we were warmly welcomed everywhere we went. We left Brewster on Saturday and drove to Suffield, Connecticut for a family gathering with relatives from my mom’s side of the family. We had a great time visiting with everyone and then we got back in the car and drove to Jill’s parents in Pennsylvania. On Sunday we had Thanksgiving with Jill’s family which was nice. Monday morning we drove to Swarthmore, PA and Jill visited with her Aunt Ann, whose husband Ed died a number of years ago, while I cleaned out the gutters and did some needed yard work. Thanksgiving Day we drove from Pennsylvania to Leverett, in western Massachusetts, to share in a meal and visit with my cousin Chris and his wife and my sister. We left there that evening and drove to Wayland where Jill’s cousin, Susan and her family live and after dropping off a Lionel train from Ann and chatting, we finally drove home to Brewster. I’m sure some of you made similar trips or welcomed people doing the same.
This season of the year from Thanksgiving through Christmas is one in which at various times we are guests or hosts; we are visitors or we are those sharing hospitality. Most of the time this is with family or good friends we know well; we might feel differently if we opened our door and were greeted by someone we’d never seen before or even a person from a different country who asked to come into our home and eat a meal. We also might have more anxiety if we were in an unfamiliar place and, like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire; we “had to rely on the kindness of strangers.”
The next scripture is a story about the prophet Elijah and a widow and it is about a guest and hospitality and welcoming a stranger. It is from 1 Kings 17, beginning at verse 8. “8 Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, 9 “Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” 10 So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” 11 As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” 12 But she said, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” 13 Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son. 14 For thus says the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” 15 She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. 16 The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.
17 After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. 18 She then said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” 19 But he said to her, “Give me your son.” He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. 20 He cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” 21 Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” 22 The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. 23 Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, “See, your son is alive.” 24 So the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”
Let’s think about the details of this story for a moment. The prophet Elijah is living during the time of King Ahab, the very worst king Israel ever had. Just before the scripture I read, Elijah told Ahab that there would be no rain, not even any dew, except by his word. Then he fled for his life, first north, to the east of the Jordan River. Then the Lord tells him to go to “Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” This is not good news. This is not like being told, “Go to a beautiful seaside resort where all your needs will be met.” Elijah is fleeing his country, having to travel some distance to the northwest to a dot on the map between the cities of Tyre and Sidon. There, the Lord tells him, a widow, someone probably among the poorest of the poor, is going to feed him. “Great,” Elijah must have thought. “First, I have to rely on being fed by ravens sitting by a dying stream (1 Kings 17:4). Now I have to go to another country and depend on a widow to share her meager food, with me, a foreigner. I don’t know if that is better or worse. Thanks, God.”
Sometimes if life gets tough, we can relate to Elijah. He is trying to be faithful to the Lord, yet it seems each day brings a new test which stretches his faith, his physical ability to go on, and his hope. He believes he is hearing the Lord’s voice and seeking to do what he’s told, so he keeps going forward even though that means venturing into unfamiliar territory not knowing how he will be received or welcomed. He also has to trust that the same Lord who is communicating with him, is going to get through to a widow in Zarephath, in the region of Sidon, to the north of Israel. At least there on the Phoenician coast, Elijah would be beyond the control of Ahab.
Sure enough when Elijah gets to the gate of the town there is a widow gathering kindling to make a fire to prepare a last supper for her only son and herself so they can eat and then they will soon die of starvation. If you think Elijah was being pushed and having his faith stretched by what was taking place, think about this woman. She literally has nothing but the end of her meal and oil to make a final meal and then some stranger from down south she’s never seen before is asking her to feed him first before she and her son eat the very last of their food. Elijah asks her to do what the Lord basically asks us to do, to put the Lord first by giving a little to him, and then using the rest for her family. Elijah promises that if she puts the Lord first, “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” If the widow gives generously from the little that she has to her guest, the Lord will be more than generous in providing for her and her son until the drought ends and the rain returns. She is asked to trust the stranger, the guest, who while asking a lot of her, promises more than she can imagine.
That is how God works sometimes. The Lord wants to see if we will trust even when it is difficult, yet when we do, we may be blessed in ways we cannot imagine. So both Elijah and the widow, have to be pleased when the meal and the oil miraculously do not run out and their situation seems to be stabilized. Then, of all things, the widow’s son dies. C’mon, man, you’ve got to be kidding. The widow says plaintively in her shock and grief, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” We have no idea what sin, if any, the widow may have committed or what she is thinking of, it is quite possible that this is merely a reflection of the belief that if something bad happens; someone must have sinned. This is not always true.
Elijah takes the boy upstairs to his room and does a kind of all-purpose, spiritual CPR. He lays him on the bed, prays fervently, stretches himself out on the kid three times, (warming him up and helping him breathe), and the boy revives and Elijah brings him downstairs and presents him to his grateful and impressed mother who can only say, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”
This healing is a model for several that we read about in the New Testament including Jesus raising a widow’s only son from the dead (Luke 7:11-17), and doing the same for the only daughter of a leader of a synagogue (Luke 8:49-56). The fact that in each case it is the parent’s only child heightens both the pain of the loss and the joy of the revival. In the Book of Acts Peter is used by God to bring the widow Dorcas back to life (Acts 9:36-42) and Paul revives a young man named Eutychus (Acts 20:9-12). Bringing life out of death is one of God’s specialties.
This Elijah story is significant, not just because of what it says about the power of God, the importance of welcoming guests and being open to discovering that a stranger may in fact bring the presence of the Lord and gifts we cannot imagine. Jesus also refers to this story in his introductory sermon in Luke 4:16-30. In that context, Jesus is making the point to the folks in his home synagogue that sometimes God’s mercy and grace are extended to people they might not expect. Jesus says God could have sent Elijah to stay with any widow in Israel during the terrible three and a half years of drought, God could have fed and provided meal and oil that wouldn’t run out for one of them, but instead, who received the blessing of God? A Lebanese or Phoenician woman and her son. This doesn’t make the people listening to Jesus happy at all. In fact, they are so mad they’re ready to kill the preacher at the end of the service.
The Advent season is a time to think about both guests and gifts. Not gifts that people sleep outside of stores and pepper spray and hit other people to get, but gifts that we bring and can receive from others. Sometimes these gifts are not immediately evident. Sometimes they may come in and through people we do not expect. Henri Nouwen in his book Reaching Out writes, “When hostility is converted into hospitality then fearful strangers . . . become guests revealing to their hosts the promise they are carrying with them. Then, in fact, the distinction between host and guest proves to be artificial and evaporates in the recognition of the new found unity.”
Listen to two stories about guests and gifts and new found unity. In October Medad Birungi of Uganda came and spoke to us at BBC and shared about his remarkable journey to forgiving his enemies who killed so many members of his family. Medad also spoke about his six-year-old son Jonathan Jabez Omega who had a brain tumor and needed surgery that required a huge amount of money they didn’t have and traveling to Great Britain. Through the loving interceding of BBC member Melanie Stone who connected the Birungi’s with her father, doctors removed Jonathan’s brain tumor at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee on Wednesday at no cost to the family. Patti Ricotta relayed through an email, “The Birungi’s want to thank Melanie Stone for contacting her dad Carroll who lives nearby and belongs to a Christian organization of doctors. He has connected many others, and on Monday (before the Wednesday surgery) a couple of people took the Birungi’s to the Memphis Children’s Museum. Medad said they had never seen anything like it in all their lives. The thought that there would be a museum just for children was a marvel to them. He was amazed at seeing hundreds of smiling children, all there to learn and have fun doing it. He said that seeing this made it clear to them that the reasons for America’s greatness is that we are willing to spend so much money on the health and education of our children.
Melanie’s dad connected the Buringi’s with a young mother of two named Natalie who came and sat with Connie all day during the surgery. Connie said, “God sent me and angel that day. Another mother who knew what I was going through. She prayed with me, read scriptures with me and never left my side. I don’t know how I would have made it without my angel Natalie.”
Medad and Connie Birungi, wrote me on November 24, 2011
“Doug, Thank you for all your support and prayers. Jonathan Jabez Omega had a very successful surgery and the tumor was completely removed. He is now talking and eating. Thank you for all your prayers and contributions. He will need 2-3 weeks for recovery and needs more prayers. Thank the church for their love.”
Then he wrote a prayer quoting largely from Ephesians 1, “Father in heaven, to whom the impossible become possible…and the one who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we are able to think of, talk of, pray for, according to the power that worketh within and among the believers…to you be all the glory, the honor, the majesty, the splendor and all the dominion forever and ever…for Jonathan’s complicated but successful surgery, recovery and life now and forevermore…Amen..Amen..Amen.” Medad and Connie.
I want to close with one other email that is hopefully an encouragement to those joining BBC today as well as another example of how God can provide in amazing ways as in the days of Elijah. This email came to me on November 10, 2011, from former BBC member Jack Tripp who along with his wife Dale moved to Eugene, Oregon to take on a new challenge of leading a Gospel Rescue Mission. I have Jack’s permission to share it with you. “Doug, I pray that you, Jill, and your family are doing well. Thank you for the blessing Brewster Baptist was to us for the few years we lived on the Cape. You and I didn’t talk often, mainly because I was so busy at my secular job. However, I reaped so much from the sermons you sowed as well as Bev’s bible study and our small group. I often remember a conversation from the bible study or small group while reading scripture and it puts a smile on my face as well as being a blessing from a knowledge standpoint. Cathy Kroeger took Dale and me under her wing and I miss her so much as I am sure you do as well. It is so interesting and not surprising that the Eugene Mission has close connections with a group in Eugene called CAFA (Christians as Family Advocates) whose President was a good friend of Cathy since they both are concerned about family abuse in the Christian home. Cathy’s impact was so widespread.
In any case, I wanted to stop and thank God for you and the environment of learning and growing we experienced at Brewster Baptist that has helped me so much at this Gospel Rescue Mission. Dale and I went to Jill prior to moving here to serve and she gave us a great piece of advice which was “If you see God’s love there then go and if you don’t then be careful.” As it turns out, God brought me here to be used by Him to get rid of a lot of weird institutional like 1960”s hit me over the head Fire and Brimstone Gospel stuff. By a lot of God centered sweat equity the changes here have been pretty remarkable and fairly miraculous and I thank God every day for being used by Him to show His love.
One quick story about God at work here: The previous Executive Director was here for 50 years. I realized quickly through prayer that we needed to re-center the Mission on God and then to implement a lot of practical things to show that change, which included putting in computers, high speed internet lines and the first website to communicate the God centeredness of the Mission. Yes, they had no computers or website or internet. The total cost would be $40,000 and I wasn’t about to start off by asking the Board if I could immediately take $40,000 out of the budget. So after a long 3 month interim period with the previous director I started May 1 moving in to his former office. He moved NOTHING out so he had 50 years of stuff in the office. I start opening envelopes on his desk and the second one I opened was a Trust Fund check donated to the Mission for $39,000. He had lost the check on his desk and this was the LAST DAY we could deposit it. Thanks to God we now have computers, high speed internet and a new website as of last week. Please go to www.eugenemission.org to see what we are all about.
I know sometimes we look at what God has us doing and wonder if we are making a difference. I send this email to confirm that God used you and Brewster Baptist Church to grow me in my Christian maturity. Therefore, every day I am used by Him to serve “one of the least of these brothers and sisters” (400 on any given night plus 200 who just use our day facilities) then you and Brewster Baptist are right there with me. Hey, isn’t the Body of Christ just so glorious!!!
Blessings for the Holiday season and don’t hesitate to look us up if you are ever in the Pacific Northwest, Jack Tripp, Executive Director, Eugene Mission”
I close with this thought, sometimes we are in the place of the widow in the Elijah story – feeling we have nothing to offer, nothing to share, nothing to give to a guest or anyone else. We feel in a place of need rather than a place of sufficiency, much less a place of abundance. Yet we still have things we can share – including words of appreciation, encouragement, or prayer, or our gracious hospitality. Sometimes we are in the place of Elijah – feeling lonely, hungry for community, longing for rest, yet also bearing the word and spirit of God which can bless other people. Keep your eyes open for guests and gifts this season and throughout the year.