Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading
is one of my favorites in the Old Testament. It's a kind of hidden gem,
and I've been drawing inspiration from it for years,
sharing it in talks and retreats and so on. And it's one that's
not super well-known. It's an odd little
quirky tale; it has to do with Elijah
and the widow of Zarephath. Typical of biblical narratives,
it's very laconic. It's very understated. You never get in the Bible hundreds
of pages of character development and psychological exploration. You tend to get things
suggested in very deft strokes. And this is a very
good example of this. But let me give you a bit
of background to understand the story for today. So Elijah, the great prophet,
in some ways the greatest of Israel's prophets,
has gone to King Ahab. He's challenged him
because of Ahab's idolatry. When the king
refuses to listen, Elijah pronounces that a great
drought will descend upon the land. Now I'm from California. I know about droughts and
how devastating they can be. What I want you to see
first of all is this sort of thing is never
arbitrary in the Bible, as though God is just
in a bad mood and he's been offended,
so he is going to send this arbitrary punishment. No, no, here's the formula. We have to unpack
the symbols. Connection to God
leads to life. Connection to God is like having
a garden of flourishing life. When we sever the
connection with God, what happens is drought,
is lifelessness. So that's what's happened because
of the idolatry of King Ahab, which is spreading
to the country. Well, Elijah himself,
like everybody else in the country,
falls victim to the drought. He's told by God, now listen, “Go to the Wadi Cherith.” That means like
a little river. “You shall drink
from the wadi, and I have commanded the
ravens to feed you there.” Okay, what's going on? Here's Elijah basically helpless. It's drought,
nothing's growing, water's drying up. He's going to starve. He's going to die. But he trusts in the Lord,
not in his own resources, but he trusts in the Lord,
and the Lord promises that he will care for him. And so indeed he drinks,
and the ravens do indeed come and feed him. Here's a great spiritual
lesson everybody. There are times in life —maybe someone listening
to me right now is going through one of these— when you feel
pretty much dried up. The sources of life,
they're no longer there. You're worried. How are you going to survive? Maybe not in the
physical sense, but in the psychological
and spiritual sense. How is God feeding you,
or better, whom or what is God
sending to feed you? It's an odd thing. Go to this little river. Is that the optimal way
to slake your thirst? Probably not. And ravens are going
to bring you food. Is that what you
would've chosen? Probably not. But God responds
sometimes in mysterious, unexpected ways when
we're in dire need. Elijah's great virtue is
that he trusts in the Lord. Well, the story goes on. The drought continues,
and in time the wadi, this little stream, dries up. Can you imagine
Elijah's fear, as he's dependent upon
this stream of water? I think of up here
in the hills above my house in California. When it rains,
which is very rare, they run in fact with water,
but then very quickly they dry up. They're just dry
rock river bed. How is Elijah feeling as the
river's getting smaller and smaller, as his source of
life is drying up? A lot of you maybe hearing
me right now feel that way, that the sources of
life are drying up. You wonder how you're
going to survive. But Elijah
continues to trust. He doesn't panic. He trusts in
God's providence. Eventually now he hears
a message from the Lord. Listen, “Go now to Zarephath which
belongs to Sidon and live there. For I have commanded a
widow there to feed you.” Now, this is a very
strange command. The words mean
probably little to us, but for someone in this time,
it meant, first of all, he was being summoned out
of Israelite territory. Now I put to you —I've traveled the
world a little bit— leaving one's country is
always a little bit dicey. It's a little
bit frightening. When I went to study
in Paris years ago, and you realize I'm leaving
my own country behind. I'm in this foreign land. My own language is
not being spoken. I'm not sure how
things are working. It's always challenging
to leave your, as we'd say today,
comfort zone, but Elijah's called out of
Israel into a foreign land. And more to it,
he's being called to a foreign city and
to visit a widow. Now, in the society
of his time, there was practically nobody at a
lower social level than a widow. First of all,
women were looked upon as very much
second class citizens. And then a widow was someone without
financial and emotional support. She was kind of on her own,
at the bottom rung of the social ladder. So here's Elijah. “Lord, I'm worried. I'm running out
of food and water. Lifelessness is threatening me.” “Okay,” says the Lord, “I got a solution.
Leave the country, go to a foreign land
you know nothing about, and while you're there
visit with a widow, and she's going to feed you.” What, are you joking? What's God up to here,
everybody? I think what he's
very often up to, summoning us out of
our comfort zone, inviting us to trust
in his providence, following not our
own instincts, not our own
projects and plans, but his project
and plan for us. When you're in these
lifeless times, be attentive to the people
God is sending to you. Be attentive to the people
to whom God has sent you. It's not your life
and your projects, but God's project for you. Think too, everybody,
how often in the Bible the great heroes
of salvation history are called out
of their comfort zone. Moses is a prime example,
called out of Egypt into the desert,
but time and again, it's the summons to trust. So, Elijah makes his way
to Zarephath and the widow. So everything I've said to
this point is an introduction to our reading for today. That's the setup for
what we read at Mass. Listen. So Elijah comes upon
the widow in her town. Like everybody else,
she's suffering the effects of the famine. And mind you,
we're in ancient times. There was no social
means of support. There were no government
programs to help the poor, especially if
you're a widow and you're running
out of food and water. I mean, you're in pretty
desperate straits, and that's the
shape that she's in. Well, the prophet,
trusting in God's command, goes up to her and he says, “Look, I need a drink of
water and a morsel of bread.” And here's her response: “As the LORD,
your God, lives, I have nothing baked;
only a handful of meal in a jar and a
little oil in a jug.” She's down to her last food, her last resources. And then, just to rub it in,
she specifies, “You know what I'm doing? I'm going right now
to gather some sticks to prepare a fire
and I'll make a meal for my son and myself,
and then we're going to die.” In other words,
she's at the absolute, absolute, total limit
of her resources. And Elijah must be thinking, “This is the woman to whom
I've been sent to solve my problem of starvation?” This is the most unlikely,
crazy solution you could imagine. But, he trusts. Again, everyone,
especially those who are suffering right now,
those who are going through a rough time,
a time of drought, to trust in the
Lord's providence, the people to
whom he sends you, the people he sends to you,
to trust. And so Elijah, hoping against
hope you might say, almost in a wild fantasy,
he says, “Go and do as you propose. But first bring
me a little cake.” Well, I've always felt that line is
something almost out of Mel Brooks. There's something very
Jewish in its humor. Imagine the woman saying, “Look, buddy,
I just told you, I'm dying here. We're making one more meal
and then I'm going to die. And you're asking me
to make you a cake?” We have these two
desperate people meeting: Elijah, who's got nothing,
sent to the widow, who has next to nothing; but at that decisive moment, trusting in what the Lord
has called them to do, he asks her to give. And now this is the
spiritual fulcrum, everybody. This is where the
story really turns. So she trusts. Okay.
Okay. I'll do as the prophet asks, and she does prepare
him this little cake. And then
we hear marvelously that the oil and the flour
do not run out. She gave away
the very little she had and then found
her resources multiplied. Yes, enough food now to sustain
her and her son and the prophet. Why did it work? Because at the
moment of truth, both these desperate
people trusted in the Lord, and with Elijah's prompting the
widow of Zarephath stumbled upon, I've often talked about it,
what John Paul II called the law of the gift. You want to sum up
this story spiritually, it's right here. Your being increases in the
measure that you give it away. Put that on your
screen saver, put that on
your refrigerator. Live by it. Your being increases in the
measure that you give it away. Every instinct in us says, “No, no.
Take things to yourself, hang onto them, hoard them,
keep them, make sure you've got enough. People want some,
keep them at bay. That's your possession.” But that runs counter to the
basic logic of the universe, because the Creator of
the universe is love. We say, God is love. Love isn't something God
does from time to time. It's not one of
God's attributes. It's what God is
right through. Love therefore,
is the secret. Love is the great mystery, the hidden truth
of all things. And the way it works is the
more you give of your life —that's what love means,
to will the good of the other— the more the divine
grace increases in you. This little story, everybody,
it's a secret of all the saints. Saints are all different —personality, background,
everything— but they're all the same
in this basic regard. They've all understood
the law of the gift. And that's why they
become sources of life. You see how this story
is so fascinating. Both of these people are
in desperate straits. The sources of
life have dried up. How do you open
up those sources? Is you give even the
little that you have, and you'll find it
increasing in you thirty, sixty, and one-hundred-fold,
as Jesus put it. So, spiritual lessons. When you find yourself,
maybe some of you right now, in a time of
drought and famine, when the sources of life
seem to have dried up, trust in the Lord. Trust in his providence. Don't give up. Listen by means of the
things that happen to you, the people you meet;
listen to what he's telling you. Be attentive,
especially to the people he sends your way, the people to whom
he sends you by the circumstances
of your life. And then, when you're in
your greatest distress, give in love even the
little that you have. And you're going to find that
the resources don't dry up. In fact, they multiply. Again, maybe especially those
who are going through a dry time. I want you to hold in
your mind's eye now these two figures,
Elijah and the widow, and how together they
discover the law of the gift. And God bless you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video,
I invite you to share it and to subscribe
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