If You Know Hunger

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Here is a sermon for the Lutheran Church of Tokyo preached by my plus-one Dr. Ken Sundet Jones:

2 Kings 4:42-44

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our Old Testament reading this morning about the miracle of Elijah feeding a hundred people with twelve barley loaves and a few stalks of wheat foreshadows the. Oracle of our Lord feeding thousands in the gospel reading. The committee that put together our assigned calendar of readings, the Revised Common Lectionary, decided to use the Elisha story to provide background to Jesus’ miracle. But I think that the story has integrity all on its own and that, even though he’s not mentioned explicitly, Jesus’ fingerprints are all over the narrative in 2 Kings. In fact, Elisha’s oracles make more sense if you know who Jesus is.

Elisha was the young follower of the great prophet Elijah during the time after King Solomon when God’s chosen people, the Israelites, were ruled over by wicked and faithless kings. These kings had let the Israelites drift into worship of false gods like Baal, and God called out prophets, not to tell the future, but to tell the truth.

Before he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire, Elijah literally placed his mantle on Elisha’s shoulders as a sign that his calling as prophet and his miraculous abilities as a channel for God’s word and power was being handed on. In this section of Kings, we see evidence that God is indeed present and accounted for in Elisha

But if God is indeed the one speaking and acting through Elisha, then this is the same God who created order out of the shapeless chaos “in the beginning.” This is the same God who promised a nobody from the banks of the Euphrates River that he would give him an heir, a land, and descendants — all so they could give witness to his glory and might. This is the same God who cleared the way to bring those people out of enslavement in Egypt into the freedom of the land promised to them, all so they must get worship him. And this is the same God of whom Moses sang in Deuteronomy 32 (:39),  “See now that I myself am he! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.”

The God who works through Elisha is the God,who consistently and faithfully executes his will not with worldly glory and power but instead in the face of weakness, indignities, grief, and death.

This is what each of the stories in this section of 2 Kings has in common with the others and with Jesus’ miracle of feeding the hungry crowds. God puts on his work gloves and steel-toed boots to go to work in the low places that Mary sang of in the Magnificat. God makes his own face known where human power is exhausted, where human resilience and grit no longer suffice, where all things bright and beautiful are taken away. God comes to bring life in the midst of death.

This runs directly counter to the way the world and we sinners expect and even demand that God should work. The late Episcopal writer Robert Capon, in his books on Jesus’ parables, talked about right-handed and left-handed power. Right-handed power functions like Isaac Newton’s laws of physics, where force is wielded to produce results. It works by coercing the creation and human creatures into doing God’s will through the law’s demands. But this method, while effective for making Tokyo’s trains run on time or getting people to put things in proper Japanese recycling bins, cannot create love or change people’s hearts.

But left-handed power is the kind of power that empties itself for the sake of another. When my wife and I first met, I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, though I’d tried to exert my will power to quit many times. I’m no longer a smoker, not because my wife told me to quit that nasty addiction. Instead of right-handed power, she came at me with left-handed power. I quit smoking, because she said three little words: “I love you.”

In the same way, in the miracles in this section of 2 Kings, God works this kind of self-giving power not to show mastery over the elements, but to show up in life’s “thin places” where hunger, fear, and death are the order of the day. A destitute widow fears her creditors are coming to enslave her sons as payment on debts owed. The only things has to her name is a small cruet of oil. She has no more options, and the situation is killing her. Elisha bids her to collect every jar and jug from her own household and from her neighbors. He tell her to port he oil from her small jar into the bigger jugs, and the oil lasts until the very last receptacle is full. Now she can sell the oil and have a life.

Later, a childless Shunammite woman well past child-bearing age welcomes Elisha into her home. With no son, she’ll have no security when her husband dies, so Elisha promises her a son. She tells him not to get her hopes up, but a year later she has a babe in her arms. Later, when her beloved boy dies and her hopes are dashed, Elisha returns and raises the lad from his deathbed, quelling the mother’s grief and anguish.

Then, when there’s a famine, the people are starving and children cry out for bread, Elisha makes a stew out of plants everybody knows are poisonous. The people cry out, “That’s a pot of death you’re trying to feed us.” But Elisha promises otherwise. The people eat, and not only is no one harmed, but they eat their fill and have life.

Finally, our miraculous feeding of a hundred in 2 Kings brings the same message: God works best where our need is great and our power exhausted. So it is with Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the 5000. The focus is not on the Kord’s ability to manipulate the first century equivalent of soba noodles and unagi, but on his spending himself for the powerless, the weak and heavy-laden, the hungry and the dying.

So for you today—If you know hungerIf you cannot make life workIf managing life’s is beyond youIf you know the limits of your own powerThen Jesus lays another self-sacrificing meal before youAnd bids you to come and be filled.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. You lowly, you lost, you lame and limping souls, be lifted up by his mercy, by his pouring himself out for you. Experience the miracle that the Almighty God makes himself present for you in bread and wine, that you might eat and live. Amen.

And now May the peace which far surpasses our human understanding, keep our hearts and minds and bellies on our Lord Jesus Christ who will not dash our hopes but give us everything needed for life. Amen.

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