Proper 5, Ordinary Time, Year C

I gasped on Friday afternoon when I read the Facebook status update of a friend of mine who serves at a parish in Mobile: "It smells like lighter fluid outside." The oil has apparently arrived in Mobile. It's beginning to arrive on the beaches of the Florida Panhandle. If a tropical storm or hurricane comes ashore from the Gulf and works its way north, will the oil arrive here later this summer? Earlier that morning, I had read BP's CEO, Tony Heyward, admit that "what is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit."

We Americans are an optimistic people. And what we are most optimistic about is the ultimate success of hard work. We have faith that there is no limit to what we can accomplish through hard work. But after weeks of hearing that this plan for stopping the gushing oil had a 70 percent chance of success, then that plan had a 60 percent chance of success, we are now forced to consider that failure may be the only option. We are being forced to consider that there are limits to our engineering skills, our ability to produce energy, the money we can make.

Behind the story of drought and starvation in today's reading from 1st Kings is the question of control and the limits of human power. Who is in control of nature, man or God? The ultimate point of the prophet Elijah was to remind the people of Israel that they could not control the rain by sacrificing to manmade idols. The widow in today's Gospel reading had lost all control of her life through the loss of her sole source of support. She had reached the limit of her very survival. Jesus looks on her in a compassion that is as deep as his bowels, and gives her what she needs. In the Word of God we hear today, we hear that what we should strive for is not unlimited power and control, but compassion.

The story we hear of Elijah today is part of the greater story of the prophet's confrontation with King Ahab of Israel. Ahab had married a Sidonian princess named Jezebel. She brought with her to monotheistic Israel the polytheistic worship of many gods. And the greatest of her gods was Baal, the god of rain. Ahab built temples to Baal all over the land of Israel. Now the only reason the people of Israel had not wasted away under Egyptian slavery centuries earlier was that the LORD, the God of Moses, had delivered them from slavery. But now they were encouraged to make sacrifices to the manmade idols of Baal, in order to guarantee rain for their crops. After all, isn't a god you can see easier to trust than a God you can't?

And so, at the beginning of chapter 17, Elijah proclaimed to King Ahab, "As the LORD the God of Israel lives..there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word." It was that drought that forced Elijah to go to a foreign land that led him to the widow of Zarephath and her son. So, on one level, what's going on here is a big smack down, Baal vs. the LORD, although it's actually Elijah who proclaimed the drought in the name of the LORD. Who really controls the rain? Which god is more dependable in a crisis? On another level, we're reading about the folly of human beings supposing that they can control God's creation. The means by which we attempt to manipulate God's creation to our will today may be much more sophisticated than sacrifices to idols. But what was foolish 3,000 years ago is foolish today. Be it Jezebel or Tony Heyward, the arrogance is the same.

So, are we just "collateral damage" in some big smack down? Or are we just the victims of the winds of chance? The answer we hear in both the Old and New Testament readings today is no. We are the recipients of God's compassion. There is no one more powerless than this widow. She owned no property. Whatever her husband had owned when he died had been inherited by her son. Whatever her son owned when he died now reverted to the family of her deceased husband. She had nothing, nothing with which to feed herself.

No wonder Jesus's compassion is for the grieving mother, not the son who no longer suffers. And that compassion is as deep is Jesus as his bowels. The Greek word for "compassion" literally means, "to be moved in the bowels." In our culture, we associate deep emotion with the rapid beating of the heart and the excitement we feel with that speedy heartbeat. The people of the ancient, but perhaps wiser world, associated the deepest emotions with that intestinal churning which has you at its mercy until you relieve it. To have compassion for someone is truly to feel pain on their behalf. You aren't really close to anyone until you can feel something of their pain. Jesus felt the widow's pain. He couldn't move forward until he relieved her pain. And so in his compassion, Jesus gives her the relief she needs.

Of course, by raising her son, Jesus does not exempt her or her son from any further grief. Both will die. One will be left grieving. What Jesus does is to extend their journey together for a little while longer. He hands them along in their life journey, entrusting them to his Father. But not even the Son of God can guarantee a pain-free life. If human beings make bad choices, God cannot undo what has been done. If ill winds blow into our lives, the damage cannot be undone. But we do know that God is moved in the bowels for our pain. Our pain is his pain, and his compassion. So what, or who, in the world around you moves your bowels? Might a part of that be God's compassion moving in you? I confess that while Laura and I were traveling, I felt that churning every morning. It ceased when I came back home to you. That is one sign of God's compassion for you all, and the Good News for today is that Jesus Christ will, in time, give us the relief we need.

The lesson that God's creation is trying to teach us, the message of the prophets from Elijah to Jesus, is that we must learn to accept the limits of our power, and our need for God's compassion. In that compassion lies the power to receive whatever we need to continue our journey with each other.