Sermon Notes — August 31, 2025
August 31, 2025
1 Kings 17:8-16
“The Jar Will Not Run Dry”
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
In 2012 I took a group of youth on a weeklong mission trip to New York City where we partnered with a program called the Youth Service Opportunities Project, or YSOP for short. I chose YSOP for our youth that year mostly because they wanted to go to New York, but also because YSOP includes a unique educational component in their work. Each day we traveled to a different agency in the city to work, and in the evenings we learned about and reflected on issues like homelessness and food insecurity.
One particular day sticks out to me. Our group caught the M116 early in the morning and rode to East Harlem. Our assignment for that day was to join the sisters of Fraternite Notre Dame at the Mary of Nazareth Soup Kitchen. Our contact at the soup kitchen was Sister Mary Renee. She and Sister Mary Benedict lived above the soup kitchen and spent every waking moment of their days feeding hungry people.
The soup kitchen itself was impossibly small. There were just two long tables each seating sixteen guests, and at the peak of the lunch rush many of the guests had to take their trays outside and eat on the sidewalk. It was 94 degrees inside. In the few moments that we had to talk to Sister Mary Renee we learned that she makes all of the meals herself – we served 271 guests that particular day – and that they serve lunch every Tuesday through Friday. On Fridays they extend their hours past 1:00 and give pantry bags to people in the neighborhood to last them until the soup kitchen opens again the next Tuesday.
Here’s what I remember most: Sister Mary Renee and Sister Mary Benedict made it clear to us from the beginning that no one was to leave the soup kitchen hungry. We were to serve the guests as much as they wanted. No one was going to be hungry on their watch.
I thought about them as I read the story of the widow at Zarapheth. These women took no salary, lived where there was room, and used all of the resources at their disposal to make sure that their neighbors had food – good, warm, nutritious, comforting, filling food. Their generosity was an inspiration; their trust that there would be enough for everyone to leave with a full belly helped us trust in God’s provision. It was a day where we truly saw the work of God, ensuring that everyone had enough
Will you pray with me and for me?
Thank you, Terry, for giving us the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the life and times of Elijah last week. I hope that everyone did take the opportunity to start back at I Kings 17 to get the fuller story, but if you didn’t, don’t sweat it, because that’s exactly where we’re starting this morning!
Actually, we’re going to back up for just a second to set the scene for Elijah’s appearance in today’s text. Just a quick detour into I Kings 16, where we read, as Terry told us last week, King Ahab became the ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel.
This is what we know about King Ahab. I Kings 16:29 tells us that Ahab ruled over Israel in Samaria for twenty-two years and did evil in the Lord’s eyes, more than anyone who preceded him…He served and worshiped Baal. He made an altar for Baal in the Baal temple he had constructed in Samaria. Ahab also made a sacred pole and did more to anger the Lord, the God of Israel, than any of Israel’s kings who preceded him.
Just to be clear, Baal was a Canaanite god, not the God of Israel. And although Ahab was himself an Israelite, he worshiped Baal because his wife Jezebel worshiped Baal, and as we know, happy wife…
Then, in chapter 17, with no fanfare and hardly any introduction, Elijah enters the story. God has commissioned Elijah to confront Ahab and tell Ahab that his God, who is also Elijah’s God – Yahweh – is sending a drought. The drought is God’s punishment for Ahab’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh. It’s also kind of a flex because Baal, the Canaanite god that Ahab and Jezebel worship, is the god of rain and storms. But Baal will be powerless in this matter.
Once Elijah has delivered his message to Ahab, he takes off to the place that God has prepared for him, and in that place God ensures that Elijah has enough food and water to keep him alive. But when the water in that place dries up, God sends Elijah to another location, this time in enemy territory.
Zarapheth. Zarapheth isn’t just any old place. It’s Baal country. It’s Jezebel’s home turf. God sends Elijah to the very hometown of the woman who will eventually want him dead. But that’s all in the future. Right now Elijah is just trying to stay alive in the midst of a devastating drought.
And God is providing.
Go and live in Zarapheth, God tells Elijah. Make your home there, because I have commanded a widow there to feed you. And that’s what Elijah does. He gets up and goes to Zarapheth. But surely he wonders…how exactly is a widow going to take care of herself and me? With no one to provide for her – and in the middle of a drought – how is this going to work, exactly?
But he goes. And before he ever even enters the city he sees a woman gathering sticks. We’re not sure how Elijah knows that this woman is the woman that God has commanded to feed him, but he does, and he calls out to her and asks her – maybe he tells her – to bring him some water.
Now we know that in the ancient near east hospitality was the ultimate virtue. We see it in the story of Abraham in Genesis 18. Abraham was sitting outside his tent in the heat of the day when he notices three men standing nearby – three men that he does not recognize. He nearly falls over himself running to them and asking if he can bring them some water to drink and to rinse their feet, and some bread to renew their strength. They agree to allow Abraham to show them hospitality, which, as it turns out, includes far more than some bread and water. Abraham prepares a calf and gives it to a servant to be roasted so that the visitors can have meat to eat, and the bread was baked fresh by his wife Sarah. This was the model for hospitality.
So while we might have wished that Elijah had asked nicely for some water, his request of the widow was certainly not odd, and neither was her response. She turns to go and get him some water, but not before he adds to his request.
And would you bring me a little bread, too?
This is one request too many, it seems, because the widow turns around and declares to Elijah that what she is actually doing out there is gathering some sticks to make a fire so that she can use the last of her flour and oil to make a meal for herself and her son before they die.
Sensing her hopelessness, Elijah encourages the widow. Don’t be afraid, he says. Go and use the flour and the oil to make a meal for yourself, and bring some to me, too. God has promised that you will not run out of oil or flour until the day that the drought ends and God sends rain to the earth.
And it is just as Elijah says to the widow. The three of them – Elijah, the widow, and her son – have enough until the drought is over.
In her commentary on this text, seminary professor and scholar Sarah Koenig describes Elijah as living on the edge of trust. God does not give Elijah everything he needs all at once, nor does he reveal the long game to Elijah. God simply provides Elijah with the next needful thing and Elijah, in turn, trusts that whatever God gives him is enough for now.
When God sends Elijah to the place that God has prepared for him, God gives Elijah enough food and water for now, and when there is no longer enough water, God sends Elijah to the widow, who will make sure that he has enough for now.
We’re so used to hearing stories of abundance from scripture, and those are my favorite. The ones where Jesus shows up and the people in the story end up with more than they could ever imagine or ever even use. Jesus feeds five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, and there are twelve baskets of food left over. After the disciples spend a whole night fishing and catching nothing, Jesus tells them to cast their net on the other side of the boat and there they catch so many fish that they can’t even haul them back to shore.
This is not one of those stories. This is not a story about abundance. It’s a story about enough. Enough for now.
God didn’t overwhelm them with flour and oil, nor did God give them more than they needed. God gave them enough for now, enough until the rain stopped and they could feed themselves once again.
Elijah shows us what it means to live on the edge of trust, to receive God’s good and powerful provision that is enough for now, still knowing that we will have to trust again and again and again, each time trusting that God will give us enough for now.
And if Elijah is the model of how we can trust God to give us enough for now, the widow is the model of the hospitality that ensures that everyone has enough.
Throughout the Hebrew scriptures God makes it abundantly clear to the Israelites that they are to demonstrate their faithfulness and love of God by taking care of three groups of people: widows, orphans, and immigrants – sometimes the scripture calls them strangers – because those three categories of people had no social safety net, no one to care for them or provide for them, no one to protect them. And so God gave that responsibility to his people – to take care of the widows and the orphans and the immigrants.
Ironically, in this particular scenario, when Elijah has left the security and provision of the place that God had prepared for him and is going into enemy territory, the widow that he encounters is actually in better shape than Elijah himself is. She has a place to live, a family, and enough food in the house for one more meal. But would any of us have blamed her if she had turned Elijah away? If she had ignored him and left with her sticks to go home and build a fire and make her last meal?
Of course we wouldn’t blame her. But because Elijah is willing to live on the edge of trust he invites her – he gives her the opportunity – to share what she has with him. And she accepts the invitation. She could have held on tightly to what she had that day, keeping what she had left for herself and for her son, enough for one more meal. But she stepped to the edge of trust and stood there with Elijah and shared what she had with him.
And the miracle was not that they had enough oil and flour for the whole town, or that they feasted sumptuously every night. The miracle is that because the widow shared what she had, there was enough.
God’s invitation to us today is to live with an open hand even when our instincts tell us to hold on tightly to what we have. Generosity in the face of scarcity – whether that’s perceived scarcity or real scarcity – generosity in the face of scarcity has the power to change us and to change the world. Generosity in the face of scarcity only makes sense in God’s kingdom, in God’s economy, and that means that every time we turn to our neighbor with an open hand rather than a closed fist, we are embodying the Kingdom. We are demonstrating what the world looks like when it operates as God intends it to.
With that invitation in mind, these are the questions that I invite you to consider this morning and throughout the week:
What small act of generosity is God calling you to this week?
Who can you invite to your table — even if you feel like you have little to give?
Thanks be to God for the invitation to share what we have – even when it feels like so little – so that everyone can have enough.