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VIDEO CLIP BEGINS THE SERMON…BE SURE AUDIO IS UP
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=> INTRO: Bill Collector Video. Taken from YouTube, a former bill collector talks about making harassing phone calls and threats.
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Slide: Woman holding child
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=> The Widow’s story to this point
Don’t you imagine that if we could speak to the widow, she would have some hard questions to ask.
Why MY family? - Her husband = prophet. Man of God. Godly family. Now he’s dead.
Why didn’t God answer MY prayers?
Wasn’t it enough to lose my husband? Why do I now have to lose my children?
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Slide: White documents with red writing
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=> Creditors Come Knocking
We heard some pretty extreme examples of what bill collectors are capable of.
Understanding that a creditor was coming to take her children away, I don’t think she was dealing with a friendly kind, if there is one.
I wonder how it all started?
With her husband being among the community of prophets, it’s not likely she was wealthy to begin with.
I wonder where the first loan came from?
Did they make her big promises? Did they make it sound like a great favor. (Just wait until harvest…I’m sure you’ll have more than enough to pay us back.)
Around her home, I imagine the pieces of furniture starting to disappear, one at a time. A table, a bed, even some of her treasured heirlooms.
Do you think she started to panic inwardly every time she heard a knock at her door?
But there wasn’t enough…and now all she had left were her sons, and a small jar of oil.
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Slide: Scarcity, Death, Limitations, Survival
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=> A culture of death
Part of us has to wonder what it is about the world that these scenarios even become possible.
Left to its own, the world creates a culture of scarcity.
We emphasize SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
If this world really is just one big game of the survival of the fittest, the weaker people of society become unimportant.
Those with power are focussed completely on maintaining power. Eliminating temporary threats.
In a culture of scarcity, we tend to believe that everything is completely locked in to place.
This is why even now we obsess over figuring out laws of the universe and laws of nature. We want them to be fixed, so that we can try and control all that falls within them.
We start to view human beings as mammals, rather than as image bearers of the divine.
And once a person is dead or dying, it matters little what becomes of them.
QUESTIONS If you want to examine the cultures your living in to discern whether you’re living in a culture of death, here are a few questions to ask:
1. How do we entertain ourselves? Do we find pleasure in violence? In stories of conquering and dominance? Is our entertainment driven by violence? Movies? Sports? Video games?
VIOLENCE ALWAYS DEVALUES
2. How do we treat the weakest members of our society? - What about a person who is drawing nearer the end of their life? Is our culture supportive of euthanasia? ASK: “How soon may we cease to think of these as fully human?” - What about the youngest and weakest people in our culture? Children in the womb? If you’ve been paying attention the last few weeks, this has been an important conversation. Planned Parenthood is involved not only in terminating the lives of unborn children, but in arranging for the distribution of their body parts. (The body parts are valued while the people are not.) ASK: “How soon must we consider them fully human?” These things are really ugly symptoms of a deeper problem. The problem is that our culture believes it is living in a story that is about the survival of the fittest, and that your own goals are too important to allow someone weaker than you to get in your way of what you want your life to be like. How do we treat the weakest members of our society?
3. - What kind of a God is a culture like ours willing to accept?
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Slide: Watchmaker
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The Kings of Israel and Judah loved to pay lip service to the true God of Israel, but unless he was going to swoop in and give them favors, they didn’t want him making any demands of them or getting in the way of them doing what they wanted to do.
When people today describe the kind of God they’re comfortable with, is it not the God of deism?
The benevolent watch maker? If God is there, he wound things up, turned them loose, and now he stays out of the way.
Our culture likes a God that doesn’t try to tell them how to live or what to do.
We’ve lost sight of the eternal. We no longer have the imagination to see people for their eternal significance. Instead, this is a relative world. All that matters is controlling as much of it as you can for your own benefit. It is in this kind of a culture that debt collectors come after widows to take their children into slavery. In this kind of culture, the elderly and the infants are only valued in terms of what we can do with their body parts.
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Slide: Elisha
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=> Elisha’s impact
And this is where Elisha enters the picture.
Surrounded by people who aren’t thinking about anything more than making some money, and protecting their family interests.
Elisha is the one in the story whose eyes are really open to what God can do and is doing.
OPEN EYES FOR STEADY HEARTS
He must have known her husband.
He sympathized with her hardship.
But despite what every political leader would tell you about what you’ve got to do in order to get results, we learn that the Living God isn’t interested in working within our systems.
In a world that wants to lock things down into finite knowledge, God doesn’t mind breaking their rules.
In a culture that devalues the poor and the week, God ignores the wealthy, but performs a life-saving miracle for this poor widow and her two sons.
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Slide: Jars
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=> Oil’s purpose
Oil had several uses in the ancient world.
The first oil of every harvest was anointing oil.
Oil was used as an ointment for healing and health.
There were also the obvious uses for cooking and food, depending on the type and preparation of the oil.
But as much as she might have lost everything else. She said to Elisha, “I have nothing left except a jar of oil.”
When you serve the living God, even a jar of oil, committed to the purposes of God, is not nothing!
Can you imagine how silly she must have felt sending her sons to all the neighbors’ houses to ask for jars?
Did they think she was going to steal them or keep them?
Can you imagine the faith it must have taken to start pouring? - Did she start with a small one? Then a bigger one? Did it start flowing with a drip, but then start shooting out like a faucet? Don’t you know that once she had filled the last container, and saw that she would not only pay her debt, but now have money to live on…she must have broken down and cried. Anyone else would have told her that she was out of luck and out of options. There was no saving her family. BUT ELISHA’S VERY NAME MEANS, “MY GOD SAVES.” God hadn’t forgotten her.
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Slide: Green field with abundance, life, flourishing, options, hope
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=> A culture of life
What God was trying to create in ancient Israel is the same thing Christ has tried to create in his church: A community of life.
We don’t begin by looking at the world and assuming that the stuff we can see is all there is to it.
We see God in every flower, in every tree, in the waves of the ocean, and in every person, made in the image of the eternal God.
QUESTIONS
1. In a culture of life, what brings us entertainment and joy?
- Is it not the sharing of love and encouragement?
Is it not a dedication to purity and honor?
- Are our happiest moments not in the times where we’ve done something truly generous and kind for another person, knowing they can’t materially repay us?
2. In a culture of life, how will we treat those who are weak or outcast? it is the weakest parts of our community that receive special honor.
We honor the elderly. We treasure our little ones.
3. In a culture of life, HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND THE GOD WE SERVE? We believe all life comes from God, and one of the delights of our heart is finding God at work in surprising ways.
At all times and in all places, God is at work, desiring that all things would be made new.
In every person’s life, God desires to be known and loved.
God is anything but impersonal, and God’s vision for his beloved community is anything but isolated.
We have love, we have hope, we have what we need to flourish, and we aren’t limited to the world’s solutions
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Slide: Burning Jar of Oil
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=> The healing “oil” of the Gospel…Jars of Clay
2 Corinthians 4:6-7
6 For God, who said, “Let light shine, out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.
MUCH OF THE WORLD LIVES LIKE THE WOMAN IN HER TIME OF DESPAIR. Always lacking, always afraid, always worried.
Because of Jesus Christ, we are living as children of BLESSING AND ABUNDANCE.
We have become like the woman whose jars were overflowing with oil.
By the time her story was finished, her problem was NOT that she didn’t have enough oil. Her problem was that she didn’t have enough CONTAINERS.
That’s what it means to be a Christian. The more we connect ourselves to the source of all life, just like this beautiful, aromatic, healing oil, we have all we could possibly need, and even more to share.
We don’t live in a state of fear and scarcity. We find it within ourselves to be generous, to share, to show compassion, because we know it is God who supplies all our needs with even more than we can ask or imagine.
The question we need to ask is not whether we have enough of what we need…the question is whether we are making ourselves available as vessels to carry the healing oil of Christ, to live into his vision of this culture of life and plenty.
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Slide: Cookies on a pan
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=> ILLUS: Nelly Garrett’s story
Nelly was a widow. Couldn't drive. Wasn't wealthy.
Taught sunday school. Called her children every week to encourage them to read their Bible lesson.
Made cookies for neighborhood children who came to her house.
She read them Bible stories.
Using a phone and an oven, she did more to show Christ's love than many people do who have considerably more material resources.
One of God’s great mysteries I’ve seen in my life many times is that often, a person who has less than I do will give me more than I could possibly give back.
When we understand who the Lord is that we follow, we know that he is our life. He is our hope. He is our salvation. We don’t have to be afraid, even in the hard times.
