The American writer and theologian Frederick Buechner has described a vocation as a calling by God, where one’s deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.[1] It takes two to tango, claims Buechner. You can love the work you are doing, but if it does nothing to satisfy a need in the world, then something is missing. And vice versa: you might be fulfilling a great need while hating every minute of it.
Buechner’s understanding of vocation recognizes the importance of relationship. God’s calling is far more complex than a mere desire to do something that you are passionate about. A calling matches your own enthusiasm and gifts with one of the world’s hollow cavities yearning to be filled. Your deep gladness must fit inside the world’s deep hunger, like a hand in a glove.
This nice fit does not seem to be the case when the Lord sends the prophet Elijah to Zarephath to find a widow, who will supposedly feed him. True, Elijah has a deep need of water and food. We have been told earlier in this chapter that God has caused a drought to come upon the land, presumably because of the wickedness of the people who have disobeyed the Lord and worshipped other gods. Not only is Elijah bringing a challenging, prophetic word to a recalcitrant people, but he is trying to do so while also navigating a dearth of food and water.
So, why not send him to a poor widow, who clearly doesn’t know where her own next meal will come from? This does not seem to be a match made in heaven. Both the widow and Elijah are hungry. This scenario does not appear as if it will end well. Something is amiss here.
The pairing of prophet and widow is almost cruel. The Lord sends Elijah to demand water and food from a woman who has only a couple of sticks with which she can prepare a final meal for herself and her son. No wonder that she tries to politely excuse herself from Elijah’s charge. She has resigned herself to the sober reality that she and her son will soon die from hunger. She might as well already be dead.
And Elijah’s response is almost comical. We all know in a horror film that if someone says, “wait, don’t be afraid,” the opposite is true. That’s always what someone says when you should run and fear for your life. Telling a poor widow who cannot find enough food in a forsaken land not to fear is laughable, if not downright mean.
But things in this story are not at all what they seem. Things don’t seem to add up. We have been told that God’s punishment on the people is a severe drought. But could it be that the drought represents the spiritual aridity of the people? The Lord has supposedly sent Elijah to Zarephath so that the widow can feed him. But is that the real reason he has been sent there? The widow believes she will die, but are things really that bad for her, or has her own sense of scarcity simply focused her eyes on death? And is this whole episode really about two very different people being hungry or about something else?
The seemingly misaligned paths of the widow and Elijah might echo our own experience. We find ourselves being drawn to certain people or places or occupations, convinced that there is something in it for us until we are sorely disappointed. The world seems full of people talking past one another, naming their own passions and needs but not hearing the hungers of the other. There is a great polyphony of voices and actions, but so often, the overall piece seems to be in a dozen different keys.
This is the case with Elijah and the widow. They are playing in different keys, or so it seems. The widow is focused on gathering whatever meager provisions she can find for herself and her son’s final meal. Elijah is responding to God’s confounding call and searching for some food. But it’s not really about any of this. Nothing seems to add up, and so we must go a little deeper until the mystery of this story begins to open up.
It is finally Elijah who speaks the prophetic word that unlocks the solution to this puzzle. He utters the words spoken throughout Scripture, words voiced into situations that make no sense. “Do not be afraid,” he says. These words are, again, almost laughable, for the widow has every reason to be afraid. These are the words later echoed by an angel to a young teenage girl in Nazareth who learns she is to bear the Son of God, although she has never known a man. Should she laugh, like Abraham’s wife Sarah, when God tells her she will bear a child, although she is well past childbearing years? Or should Mary cry for fear of the unknown? But when Elijah tells the widow not to fear, what has been named is precisely what now unlocks the riddle of this story.
Until this point, fear has prevented any real communication between the widow and Elijah. It’s all too easy to pin fear solely on the widow. She is told not to be afraid by Elijah, even though she has every reason to be afraid. But don’t you think Elijah is also afraid? Don’t you think he, too, fears that he will not find the widow to whom God directs him? Does he, like the widow, fear that he will die of hunger? Does he fear that no one will listen to his strange prophetic words?
It is with the naming of this horrible monster of fear that a wall is broken down, and suddenly it begins to become clear why Elijah and the widow are meant to be speaking to one another. There is a hunger and a deep passion meeting and starting to fit together like a hand in a glove. Yes, the widow is physically hungry, but it is she who feeds Elijah. And Elijah is more than physically hungry; he is passionate about God’s truth. And the widow eventually recognizes that he is a man sent from God.
And although the widow provides for Elijah’s physical hunger, she meets a man who will go on to raise her own son from the dead, later in the chapter. This woman also needs assurance of God’s faithfulness, and at the end of this chapter, when her son has been brought back to life by Elijah, she receives that assurance. All along, fear is the only thing standing between the widow and Elijah.
Doesn’t this sound familiar? It’s fear that turns us inward on ourselves, so that when we are desperately hungry, we can only see what we need rather than what we might offer. When we are utterly satiated, we are blind to our own hunger and think we should only be helping others. There are times when we are thrust into situations that make no sense to us until we realize that we can only understand them by overcoming our own fear. We are afraid that we are not enough. We are afraid that we don’t have enough to do what God calls us to do. We are afraid that we will lose what little we do have. We are so, so afraid.
And it seems laughable, even cruel, to utter these words, “do not be afraid,” to the millions of people on this planet who have every reason to be afraid. How can we discourage fear among the impoverished widows and women of third world countries? How can we exhort the homeless simply to have greater courage and faith? How can the words “God will provide” comfort those for whom a simply stroll to the corner store at night could end in death? None of this seems to add up, like Elijah and the widow before they began to communicate. There is something else to this story that we have not yet figured out.
The charge “do not fear” is not a charge to rise above misfortune but a naming of what obscures the blessings of God’s abundance. It is fear that stands between the privileged and the under-resourced. The rich fear the poor’s demands on their possessions. The poor fear the suffocating squeeze of those wealthier than they. The powerful fear the loss of their power, and the weak fear being stamped out by the strong. And each group retreats into its own corner, with nothing to talk about, and only fear stands between them.
But when fear is recognized as the enemy that it is, everything opens up. Then, we begin to see the meaning of vocation and God’s call on our lives. We comprehend why God has brought us into a particular circumstance or to a particular person. And the key to unlocking the solution to that puzzle is understanding how needs meet up, how gladness and hunger intersect, how another’s presence in our lives is so often more than meets the eye.
The only thing standing in the way is fear. It is an enemy, like sin and death. It is, in many ways, the root of all sin. But if we can learn not to fear fear itself but to look it in the eyes, we might see through to the other side. On the other side, is the hunger that can open up our self-absorbed gladness. On the other side is the gladness that can satisfy our deep hunger. Underlying it all is the knowledge that, so often in the mystery of God, nothing is quite what it seems on the surface. And in this glorious mystery and providence, with even two sticks gathered together, God can build a fire and prepare for us a feast.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
November 7, 2021
[1] https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2017/7/18/vocation