Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
September 8th,
Year of Our + Lord 202
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer and
Hill City, SD
Don’t Worry! - Matthew 6:24 - 34, 1 Kings 17:8 – 24
Sermon Audio Available HERE.
Hymn LSB 760 - What God Ordains Is Always Good
1 What God ordains is always good: His will is just and holy. As He directs my life for me,I follow meek and lowly. My God indeed, In ev'ry need, Knows well how He will shield me; To Him, then, I will yield me.
2 What God ordains is always
good: He never will deceive me; He leads me in His righteous way, And never
will He leave me. I take content, What He has sent; His hand that sends me
sadness Will turn my tears to gladness.
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“Do not worry,” our Savior commands; God is on your side. He who provides food for the birds and arrays the lilies of the field more beautifully than King Solomon in all his glory will surely provide for all our needs. So don’t be anxious!
How does this Word strike you? Is it easy for you to avoid worrying about the future? Do you trust firmly and cheerfully in the Lord, or do you get your confidence, or your worries, from your job, your retirement fund, or your home? Does your optimism and lack of worry depend on your material and financial status? Be careful! What we worry about can easily become what we worship. And you cannot serve God and money.
We have comparatively little to worry
about, especially compared to the Widow of Zeraphath. She faces crushing problems. Imagine then, her reaction and thoughts when God
spoke to her about feeding Elijah, the prophet of Israel. Or when Elijah showed up, asking for drink
and food, and told her not to worry.
Fear not, just feed me. Elijah sounds
a bit like Bob Marley: “Don’t worry,
‘bout a thing, cuz every little thing is gonna be all right.”
Sure it is…
Our
Old Testament reading from 1st Kings touches on many parts of the
Doctrine of Christ. This is an outreach
story, about missions and evangelism. God’s
Word is extolled and held up as reliable and full of promise. And of course, along with Jesus’ teaching
from Matthew 6, the interaction between Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath
speaks to the proper Christian attitude concerning trust, confidence, and
avoiding anxiety. We Christians, we
baptized followers of Jesus are the winners, don’t ya know? So, we should always have a great
attitude. We should rejoice always,
overflowing with thanksgiving to God and love for our neighbors.
I imagine it was not so easy for our widow. She has lost her husband. Now, she and her only son are about to starve to death. She is a citizen of Sidon, a neighboring country to Israel, a nation where Baal is the ruling god. Sidon is a major source of conflict for the God of Israel and His faithful remnant. The wicked King of Israel, Ahab, had married Jezebel, the princess of Sidon, and she enthusiastically and violently promoted the worship of her idol Baal among God’s people.
In response to their idolatry, God stops the rain for three years, to punish Ahab and Israel, trying to bring them back to Himself. Sidon is also suffering from the drought and the famine it caused. Things are bad all over. Surprisingly, the LORD tells Elijah to go to the town of Zarephath, in Sidon, to ride out the famine with a widow there. God has already commanded her to feed Elijah.
It’s kind of like today. False gods abound, tempting God’s people, and our neighbors, to worship idols instead of Jesus. And yet God keeps sending out His Word, and His preachers, to call people back to Himself. But it’s hard to stop worrying and trust in Christ when life is going badly, when your children are hungry, or rebelling against you, or your nation seems to be circling the drain. Maybe we can learn something from the Widow of Zarephath.
We tend to connect outreach or mission work with mercy and charity, especially with providing for basic human needs. We often use mercy work as a bridge to proclaiming the Gospel. But in Zarephath, the Lord takes the opposite approach: He starts His outreach to this woman by demanding she feed His missionary, Elijah. Seems like a risky plan.
3 What God ordains is always good: His loving thought attends me; No poison can be in the cup, That my physician sends me. My God is true; Each morning new, I trust His grace unending, My life to Him commending.
4 What God ordains is always
good: He is my friend and Father; He suffers naught to do me harm, Though many
storms may gather. Now I may know, Both joy and woe; Some day I shall see
clearly That He has loved me dearly.
Our hymn might strike some as a bit optimistic, or even as naively hopeful. We are doing pretty well, in the area of food security, at least, so we may not worry like this Widow. Still, bad things do come into our lives. But notice, Jesus doesn’t say: “Don’t worry, when things are going well.” He commands us to not be anxious in every situation, period. Instead, we are to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and the Lord will provide for all our other needs as well.
Which is pretty much what Elijah calls on the woman to do. Trust me. Trust the LORD. Just do what I say, make me a little mini-loaf of bread first, and everything will be alright. I promise. God promises. In reply, the Widow of Zarephath lays out the facts: she has barely enough flour and oil left to make a final bite of bread for herself and her son. She has nothing to share with Elijah. To which Elijah replies: trust me. Do not fear.
The Word of God is living and active; it is effective. By God’s Word the universe was created, and is sustained. All those laws of physics, which keep the earth spinning and the sun shining? The biology that fills the fields with ripe grain? God maintains those. For our good. The Creator of heaven and earth sent His Word to this widow, and she heard and believed. Maybe not boldly, maybe not completely. She can, after all, see the harsh reality of her situation. Still, when Elijah calls her to obey the voice of God she has heard, she does it. Could our mission and outreach efforts learn from Elijah? Should we learn to speak God’s Word with more confidence? Do we ever simply put the Word of God in our neighbors’ ears, and then call on them to obey it?
The Spirit of God leads this woman to obey God’s Word, and then provides her with a minor miracle. The Provider who causes the grain to grow and the olives to plump with oil took a short cut, skipping over the sowers and reapers and millers. Day after day she made bread for her son, Elijah and herself, but her jar of flour was not spent, neither did the jug of oil become empty, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.
All of us today eat far better than just cakes made of flour and oil. The variety, quantity and quality of the food that fills our refrigerators and pantries, all the money we have in banks, our homes, our clothes, all our stuff, these material gifts are amazing. Jesus is asking us to understand that the same LORD who provided miraculous flour and oil to the Widow of Zarephath is also the One providing every good thing we have. Do we know this? Do our neighbors outside the Church know this? Have we ever simply told them this truth of God’s Word?
Knowing God as the generous Giver, the Provider of every good thing, is important. It’s wonderful, really. Seeing that God can work miracles is also a positive start. But saving faith is not created by earthly bread, nor by minor miracles. For true faith in God and His salvation, we must get to the heart of the matter. So, God kept working in the Widow’s life.
5 What God ordains is always
good: Though I the cup am drinking Which savors now of bitterness, I take it
without shrinking. For after grief, God gives relief, My heart with comfort
filling And all my sorrow stilling.
6 What God ordains is always good: This truth remains unshaken. Though sorrow, need, or death be mine, I shall not be forsaken. I fear no harm, For with His arm, He shall embrace and shield me; So to my God I yield me.
God keeps working in the Widow’s life… through the death of her son.
That’s rough. A very bitter cup. The Widow has lost the two best gifts she ever received from God, her husband, and now her only son. In her sorrow, she maintains her directness and clarity about spiritual realities. “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!” The wages of sin is death. For a father or mother, far worse than the experience of their own death is the death of a child. Before her son fell ill, I assume the Widow had been feeling pretty good about life, with the never depleting jar of flour and jug of oil. But now, her crash is brutal, hard even to read about.
Our Hymn of the Day is true and faithful. But a little incomplete. Stanza 4 hints at the reason we should optimistically accept all that God ordains, but it isn’t very explicit.
What God ordains is always good: He is my friend and Father; He suffers naught to do me harm, Though many storms may gather. Now I may know, Both joy and woe; Some day I shall see clearly, That He has loved me dearly. Can you hear the reason for your hope in these lines? Who is it that we will see clearly, and so finally know just how dearly we are loved, and that we are free from sorrow forever?
I wish this hymn were more explicit about the reason for our hope. More like the foreshadowing in the raising of the Widow’s son. Like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, Elijah takes the dead body of the only son and hides him away, not in a rocky tomb, but into an upper room. Elijah’s salvation-seeking ritual is oddly intimate, very physical and human, much like God’s ultimate plan of salvation, when God’s Son took on human flesh and joined it to His divine nature. Elijah, a mere human, can’t do that. But he can stretch out his own body over the dead boy, three times. As he does, Elijah cries out three times, begging the Holy, Holy, Holy Lord for mercy, pleading that life be returned to the only son of the Widow.
Not after three days, but after the third
time, The LORD listened to the voice of Elijah and returned life to the
child. Mother and son are reunited, and
she confesses her faith: “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the
word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”
Now, come what may, the Widow of Zarephath believes the truth of the
Lord’s care for her and her son. Now,
she can rest in His promises.
There is only one miracle greater than the resurrection of a lost child. That is the death and resurrection of the Child who is also the Holy Lord, also the eternal Son of the Father. Ascended on high, ruling over all things, He now prepares a place for us in His Father’s house. He intercedes for us, before the heavenly throne. That resurrected Son is the reason we can accept whatever God ordains for us.
Let’s look at stanza 4
again.
What God ordains is always good: He is my friend and Father. God is our Father because Jesus became a man to serve us as our best friend. He got as close to us as possible, taking on our human flesh, and loved us like no one else, by laying down His life for us, so that His Father could be our Father.
He suffers naught to do me harm, Though many storms may gather. There are no storms as bad as the darkness that gathered around Christ Jesus, hanging on the Cross at Golgotha. But, we need not worry, because in that darkness Jesus has swallowed up all our sin. And, three days later, the Light of Christ burst forth from the Tomb to reveal forgiveness, life and salvation for us.
Now I may know, Both joy and woe; Some day I shall see clearly, that is, on the day when we see Jesus, our Savior and God, face to face in glory, with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
This is how I know,
That He has loved me dearly. I can
see the proof in the scars on His hands, feet and side, the scars He still
bears in glory as trophies of love and salvation.
The Lord’s final Word, to the Widow of Zarephath, and to all people, is through the death of His Son. Your heavenly Father did not wait for you to be worthy of His love. He did not ask whether you wanted to be saved. To have you for His very own, the Father gave His very best, His only begotten Son, given into death, for you.
Your loving Savior did not scorn to be born into poverty, to be persecuted and rejected by His own people. He did not hesitate to give His flesh as the bread from heaven, and to shed His blood to washs away our sin, and so remove our every worry. His new life guarantees a joyful eternity for all who believe. Jesus rejoices to share His righteousness with all. And so, we truly can stop worrying, because our eternal tomorrow is secure, in God’s promises.
One last thing: You are not saved by not worrying. Neither are you condemned by your anxiousness. Rather, knowing the sure salvation you have in Christ Jesus gives you hope and confidence. We should not worry, but we are still sinners, and God knows this. So, He invites us to return to Him, day after day, to lay our worry, and all our other sins, at His feet, and receive again the blood-bought forgiveness of Jesus.
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