It is remembered that Rufus Watson loved this story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.  Rufus Watson lived to be ninety-nine years old.  Rufus Watson was born in Texas, the son of former slaves.  He served his country in the military.  He pitched in the Negro professional baseball leagues.  He made some money investing in real estate when that was still a wise investment.  But he also witnessed lynchings and spent a lifetime wondering how people commit such atrocities and still go to church and call themselves Christian.

As life went on Rufus Watson found comfort in the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.  He said that if his life was not proof enough, this story showed that God meets people at the bottom of the barrel.  “That’s where God meets us, at the bottom of the barrel,” he said to a friend who tells his story.  “God meets us when we’ve gone so low that all we can do is look up.” 

This story of injustice and heartbreak is for many of us, too.  Too many of us and around us are that widow or that child, literally or figuratively.  Many of us have felt or feel now the pangs of being lost, hopeless, hungry, and thirsty for something beyond the tangibles of daily living; for more than meager leftovers or scraps of food, indeed for true love, and real justice. 

I think of the people along the coast of Louisiana just now, people who watch helplessly as the livelihood of generations of their families becomes strangled in slimy gook washed ashore as the result of human error and malfeasance.  It is a disaster beyond imagining, growing only worse by the minute through day after day of tortured witness.  We all share in the crime and should be on our knees in confessional prayer for the abuse of nature that has occurred through our sin of gluttony and greed, always wanting more, not calculating the catastrophic risk of reckless behavior.  So I say to our brothers and sisters in Louisiana, and Alabama, and Florida, and who knows where else the oil will drift and settle, “This story’s for you.”

To the victims of economic injustice this story also cries out.  I think of the undocumented aliens of our land, particularly now in Arizona, under the probing scrutiny of a law born of frustration and fear, caught in the intricate web of systemic injustice.  People lured and seduced to cross the border for survival, then victimized again as unwanted aliens.  To strangers who escape a land of known despair and seek a new land of unknown hope, we ought to offer more than rejection and imprisonment.  God has always commanded shelter and comfort for the aliens in the land, for the lost, the oppressed, the poor, the forgotten.  Frustration in the face of a difficult situation ought not yield merely to the knee jerk reaction of condemnation.  God promises good to those who receive the stranger and the poor.  To all those who suffer alienation and despair in our land, I say, “This story’s for you.”

And this story’s for you, too, my friends.  This story’s for you who mourn the loss of someone you have loved long and deeply.  This story’s for you when the pain of loss muscles its way through the door, uninvited and unanticipated, bringing you to your knees just when you were learning to stand again.  This story’s for you.

This story’s for you who have been stung by the betrayal of a friend or partner in business.  You suffer perhaps not only the loss of material goods but also, and even more importantly, the breach of the bond of trust with which you had shared your lives in presumed harmony, honor, and respect.  This story’s for you.

And for you who have been broken in pieces by the pain of marital infidelity, losing your bearings, your sense of self, caught in the confusion of not being able to fathom the meaning of the places you have been and the experiences you have shared in your marriage, not knowing how you will survive.  Friends, this story’s for you.

And the unbearable agony of infertility.  Or the child born that brings challenges too great for a couple to endure.  This story’s for you.

In a world torn by conflict and urgent need, we thirst for miracles that will heal and make whole.  The story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath dramatizes the miracle of divine compassion that unfolds when we dare to invite the prophetic word of God’s providence into our midst.  The unnamed widow of Zarephath did not exactly invite the prophet Elijah into her home, but she did trust the prophet’s promise of God’s care for her.  In using the last of her meal and oil to make bread for Elijah and her household, she found that the jar of meal and jug of oil continued to provide for her, her son, and Elijah.  By her trust in the word of the Lord through Elijah, all were fed.  It was a miracle we pray for.  And a miracle that often happens in ways we would not expect when we open ourselves to God’s healing balm.

Elijah was the prophet of God when Ahab was king of Israel.  The Bible tells us that “Ahab did more to provoke the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him.”  Of course, there would be other bad kings after Ahab (I don’t personally think Israel is doing too well right now with its governors), but at that time Ahab was the iconic unfaithful king.  His wife Jezebel – and if you don’t remember all the reasons why Jezebel became Elijah’s chief nemesis – you do remember the name.  Queen Jezebel has leant her name over time to the image of a wicked woman, a woman of lowest repute.

Elijah’s job as a prophet of God was to deliver God’s word of judgment to Ahab and his court.  Of course, such a critical word never sets well with a person of power.  Did you notice the warning our psalmist gives us this morning?  Do not put your trust in princes,/in mortals, in whom there is no help./When their breath departs, they return to the earth;/on that very day their plans perish.  But the word of the Lord stands forever, another psalmist would remind us.  Yet people who have grasped power think they can hold it forever, even in spite of God’s judgment upon injustice.  So to those persons, I presume it is also safe to say, “This story’s for you.”

In judgment of King Ahab’s unfaithfulness God sent a drought upon the land.  This act was in direct defiance of Jezebel’s god, Baal, who was presumed to be the god among many gods whose particular function was to control the amount of rain to fall upon the land.  Well, rain – or no rain – falls on the just as well as the unjust, and Elijah himself was forced to find water for survival.  That’s how he came upon the widow of Zarephath.  God sent him to her because God knew that she was a person who would respond to the word that saves.  And, as I said, she dared to feed Elijah with the very last provisions she had, in that way trusting God’s presence in her life and the potential for her salvation.

She couldn’t have known then, of course, that she would be struck with one more calamity.  Having survived the threat of starvation, she watches as the breath goes out of her ailing son.  How much more can this woman take?  I’ve asked myself that question in the face of the misery some of you in this congregation have faced.  How much more can this woman take?  How can this man survive? 

But this story tells us that the one who delivers God’s word can also be an angel of God’s deliverance.  In this story the prophet Elijah throws his own body over the body of the dead child and calls out to God to give the gift of life.  God listens and the boy is restored.  “See, your son is alive,” Elijah proclaims to the grieving mother, the vulnerable widow trying to survive in a man’s world.  And she believes in the wonder and mystery of God.

It’s like the other story this morning, the one only Luke tells about Jesus restoring to life the young man in the town of Nain.  He was his mother’s only son and she, like the woman of Zarephath with whom Elijah found food and comfort, a widow, among the most vulnerable of all people in those times.  Jesus has compassion for her and reaches out to the funeral bier, commanding the dead man to rise.  And Luke tells us simply that “the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.”  What greater gift than that?!  And does it not foreshadow the scene on Calvary’s hill when the dying Christ reaches out in compassion to his mother and asks that his friend John take care of her, and her of him.  The love between a mother and her child cannot be equaled, and Jesus as the greatest prophet of God knows that.

What these two stories tell us this morning is that God lives through God’s prophets, God’s messengers, God’s angels.  And those who bring God to us are those who are filled with compassion for those who suffer.  Those who bring God to us are filled with the divine power of life and death.  Those who bring God to us are healers through whom God visits us.  God visits us with compassion and mercy.  The indwelling Jesus, sent by God, transforms the deaths of our existence into new life.  In Him, “the dead are raised.”

Every day those who suffer pray for miracles such as the widow of Zarephath and the widow of Nain prayed for.  We cannot stop ourselves from praying for even the most impossible of miracles, especially when the miracles we seek concern the lives of those we love the most.  We cling to a central message of the gospel: in Christ Jesus all things are possible.  But in reality, our lives are filled with messy unfinished edges, not the nice tidy endings that the widows in our stories experienced.  And yet the miraculous working of God in our experience is often beyond our imagining, and certainly beyond our own power to effect.

These stories invite us to recognize miracles that come in other and various ways to us, perhaps on the surface not what we would call dazzling, yet transformative and life giving nonetheless.  Indeed, we are invited to recognize and accept the many moments in which God’s compassion reaches into our lives to hear, touch, and stand in the chaos of life, helping us to find new meaning even in the greatest tragedy.  Jesus can hear the cries hidden in the deepest crevices of our despair, just as he heard the heart of the grieving widow.  He touches us in the place of our greatest pain, just as he reached into the place of death upon the funeral bier.  Jesus steps into the chaos of our unpredictable, overturned, or shattered world to bring meaning from even the most desolate suffering. 

And it is in that moment of miraculous revelation that each of us can say in our own ways, and in certainty and trust, “This story’s for me.”