The Circumstances of our Lives

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

June 5, 2016

5 Proper C

          Last Sunday night I had the pleasure of attending our Welcome Table for the first time.  If you are unfamiliar with this ministry, the Welcome Table is a place where everyone is welcome to gather in our Parish Hall on the last Sunday of the month and enjoy a meal together.  The tables are set with real plates and flatware along with flowers taken from the Sunday morning arrangements.  Because last Sunday was during Memorial Day weekend, the group was only a dozen or so folks, but they had come from surrounding communities as they do the last Sunday of every month.   The people who come have formed their own little community around the tables in the parish hall.  Each person is welcomed by one of our parishioners by name and those who are not there are missed by name.   The community includes both our guests and our parishioners who serve them, and I was welcomed into the community by our guests who told me their stories and asked me about my life in Hudson as easily as if I had been coming to Welcome Table for years.

          As I was chatting with one woman who was there with her two grandchildren, her husband, and her mother, she told me about something she had read recently.  She had read that we should interpret the circumstances of our lives through the lens of God’s love, rather than interpret God’s love through the lens of our circumstances.  She and I talked a bit about what a difference that makes in our attitude and in our faith. 

          I thought about this conversation when I read our scripture lessons for this week.  In the story from I Kings, the widow’s son becomes so ill that there is no breath left in him.  In the story from Luke, the body of a widow’s son is being carried to his grave.  In both cases, the loss of the son meant not only heart break and grief, but also the loss of the widow’s only source of support.  In the story from I Kings, the widow was preparing to fix her last meal and lay down to die when she meets Elijah.  She was already in desperate straits.  The widow in Luke’s gospel was likely in no better circumstances. In both cases, the son was brought back to life. 

          When I read stories like this one through the circumstances of my own life, I can easily think “Why did my loved one have to die?  Where was Jesus then?  Where was my miracle?”  We have all lost loved ones who we had prayed and prayed for.  Or we lost them suddenly without a chance to pray for their healing.  But when I read the stories through the lens of the love of God, I see things differently.

          In the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, the obvious miracle is that the son was brought back from the dead.  But there is another miracle that we can easily miss.  In the beginning of the story, the widow, who is not an Israelite, is gathering sticks to prepare a final meal for herself and her son before they lie down to die.  When Elijah appears on the scene, he has been on the run in the wilderness.  He is dirty, smelly, and obviously lacking in the social graces.  Think John the Baptist, but worse. When the woman tells him that she has only enough oil and meal to make a bit of bread for herself and her son before they lay down to die, we might expect a word of encouragement from this man of God. But no, he asks her to first make him a little cake of bread and bring it back to him.  Elijah makes what to me would have sounded like a ridiculous, empty promise: that her jug of oil will not be emptied and her jar of meal will last until the drought, caused by the evil actions of King Ahab, has ended.  The easily overlooked miracle in the story, especially if we are interpreting the story through the lens of our own circumstances rather than the love of God, is the miracle of hospitality.  That the widow was willing to engage Elijah, then did make him some bread from her scarce amount of oil and meal, is nothing short of miraculous. 

          When we see our lives through the lens of the love of God rather than vice versa, we see miracles in unlikely places.  I know this to be more than hypothetically true.  My friend Rachel was diagnosed with ovarian cancer 21 years ago.  Her children were young.  The youngest was in kindergarten.  She set her mind and heart on seeing all 4 of her daughters graduate from high school.  She endured more chemotherapy and surgery than one person should be able to tolerate and she did so without complaining and with deep gratitude.  Before all four daughters had graduated from high school, the cancer spread to her liver.  More surgery. More chemo.  More setbacks and more painful procedures. And more gratitude for the medical people, the support people, and another chance at life.  All four daughters did graduate from high school, went to college, got married, and three of them now have children.  And there was more surgery and more chemo and many more setbacks.  And more deep and constant gratitude.  Rachel saw miracles where most of us would only see misery.  Before the last set back which finally took her life, Rachel told me that all of life was icing at this point.  She was savoring every moment.  This while she could barely breathe, was pretty much confined to a wheelchair, and could do almost nothing for herself, and yet gratitude was oozing out of every pore of her being.  God had been so good to her.  When she died last week, her death was not due to the lack of a miracle.  Her life, hard fought though it was, was a whole series miracle and she knew it.  She interpreted her circumstances through the lens of God’s love, and not vice versa.

          This morning the Psalmist calls upon us to praise the Lord as long as we live, and reminds us that God gives justice to those who are oppressed and food to those who hunger, opens the eyes of the blind, cares for the strangers and sustains the orphan and widow.  If we look at the world through the lens of the circumstances of our lives and the lives of those around us, God’s work is sometimes hard to see.  We can get cynical about the words of the psalmist and praise can be hard to come by.  But if we look at the world through the lens of God’s love, we will see the many ways God is at work, often in places we would never have noticed, and praise will be the obvious response.

                                                Amen.