I Kings 17: 8-16 " A Dry Spell" - Pastor Paul Larsen

Have you ever been in a dry spell? Have you had those moments when you felt empty – like you were fresh out of resources? Maybe it was a time when the pressures at work were overwhelming and you couldn’t keep up. Maybe your commitments at home and work and church and school and other organizations just got to be too much for you and you felt drained.

Have you ever had a spiritual dry spell? A time when you felt distant from God – like God really wasn’t there? You sang the hymns in worship, but they didn’t move you? You tried to pray, but the words bounced off the ceiling?

A dry spell is when it feels like the water table has gone below the well line and you are waiting for the next rain to replenish your energy. It is those times when you feel sluggish for days and days. That is a dry spell.

In our I Kings text there is a dry spell - a literal one. Ahab has become king and he does what is evil in the sight of the Lord. He marries Jezebel, a Cannanite, and what is worse he allows her to introduce Baal worship. She doesn’t just introduce it, she begins to persecute God’s prophets and put them to death. God becomes angry and raises up Elijah as a prophet. Elijah announces that because of Ahab’s unfaithfulness, God is going to shut up the heavens and no rain will fall until God says so. There is going to be a dry spell.

Elijah is smart enough to know that Ahab will not be happy to hear this and he hightails it out of Dodge. God directs him to go to the Wadi Cherith – a little brook out in the desert east of Jordan. Elijah hides out there. He drinks water from the brook and God sends ravens to bring Elijah meat to eat. Now that all sounds idyllic and romantic but really – ravens are just big crows. They are scavengers. They eat road kill. I mean for Elijah, a devout Jew and a prophet of God, to be eating the dead, decaying stuff that big crows would bring him – that is a real dry spell.

Then the brook stops flowing and the ravens stop coming and God tells Elijah to go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon. Sidon is a foreign country. It is Jezebel’s home territory. It is where the people worship Baal. And, God tells him that he has commanded a widow there to feed Elijah. Now this doesn’t fit. Over and over again in the scriptures it talks about the community’s responsibility to care for widows and orphans - and now Elijah is supposed to have a widow care for him.

What was a dry spell has become a drought and it has encompassed the whole land. Elijah comes to Sidon and encounters this widow gathering sticks. He asks her for a drink of water and she starts off to fetch it. But he calls after her, Bring me some bread too. That pretty much tears it for this widow. The land may be dry, but the sticks she has been gathering are wet from her tears. She tells Elijah she can’t. She says she only has a handful of meal and a few drops of oil and she plans to prepare one last, meager bit of food for her and for her son and then they will starve to death. For her this is more than a dry spell. This is more than a drought. This is certain death.

Maybe you have been there. Maybe you have experienced the dry spells, the droughts, the feelings of death at your door. It is a desperate feeling. And what is worse – in those times you really want to have faith. You want to trust in God’s promise to be with you and provide for you, but during a spiritual dry spell you just don’t feel it.

Listen to these words from a letter to a confidant. The author is experiencing a spiritual drought. She writes, For me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that

I look and do not see,

listen and do not hear

the tongue moves in prayer but does not speak.

These are the words of Mother Teresa published in the book entitled, Come Be My Light. The book consists primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years. The letters reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever neither in her heart or in the Eucharist.

Mother Teresa was experiencing a dry spell, a drought. Actually it was more like what Church Father John of the Cross termed, The Dark Night of the Soul. Although perpetually cheery in public, Mother Teresa lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. She bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God.

After more than a decade of agony, Teresa seems to have begun regaining her spiritual equilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser, the Rev. Joseph Neuner. He told her the three things she needed to hear:

1. that there was no human remedy for it - that is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it;

2. that feeling Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and

3. her very craving for God was a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life; and that the absence was in fact part of the "spiritual side" of her work for Jesus.

This counsel granted Teresa a tremendous sense of release. She had always craved to share in Christ's Passion, but she had never anticipated that she might experience what Jesus experienced on the cross when he asked, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Neuner would later write, It was the redeeming experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart was the special share she had in Jesus' passion. And she thanked Neuner profusely saying, I can't express in words — the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me — for the first time in ... years I have come to love the darkness.

I am amazed that Mother Teresa could work through all of that. She was an incredible woman and a true saint. She could smile her way through the dry spells and serve people and in places I would never want to be. I like things bright and light. I don’t want to face the dark night of the soul, dry spells or droughts. The problem is they come anyway. They come whether we like it or not.

I am a big time Gopher basketball fan. I have had season tickets since 1973 – I know that is before some of you were born. I was really excited about this season. I mean, Tubby Smith had a terrific recruiting year, but then one recruit got arrested for assault in Florida and won’t play until after his trial and he is declared innocent. Tubby’s best recruit was recently busted for shoplifting and has been suspended. And another player has been suspended for violation of team rules. This is not good! But Tubby was quoted in the paper as saying, Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.

It might sound like a platitude or a clique, but it is true.

The widow of Zarephath and her son survived because she had enough faith to trust in Elijah. Elijah told her, Do not be afraid. And he promised that God would provide for them. And God did. The jar of meal and the jug of oil did not run out, sustaining the widow, her son and Elijah until the drought ended.

Mother Teresa continued to serve the dying even though she felt the absence of God. She trusted that God was present despite how she felt.

Coach Smith will hang in there knowing that even though kids will mess up, Tough times don’t last – tough people do.

Philip Yancey, in his book Disappointment With God, gives us some insight into enabling our faith to survive despite suffering.. He tells about a modern-day Job, a man named Douglas. Douglas seemed righteous, in the sense of Job: Not perfect, of course, but a model of faithfulness. He left a lucrative career in order to start an urban ministry. Douglas' troubles began some years ago when his wife discovered a lump in her breast. Surgeons removed that breast, but two years later the cancer had spread to her lungs. Douglas took over many household and parental duties as his wife battled the debilitating effects of chemotherapy. Sometimes she couldn't hold down any food. She lost her hair, and always she felt tired and vulnerable to fear and depression.

One day, in the midst of this crisis, a drunk driver swerved across a center line and smashed head on into his car. Douglas suffered a massive blow to the head. After the accident, Douglas never knew when a headache might strike. He could not work a full day, and sometimes he would become disoriented and forgetful. Worse, the accident permanently affected his vision. One eye wandered at will, refusing to focus. He developed double vision and could hardly walk down a flight of stairs without assistance. Douglas learned to cope with all his disabilities but one: He could not read more than a page or two at a time. All his life, he had loved books.

Philip Yancey interviewed Douglas. He described the book he was writing on disappointment with God, and asked, Could you tell me about your own disappointment? Douglas was silent for what seemed like a long time. Finally he said, To tell you the truth, Philip, I don't feel any disappointment with God.

Yancey was startled and waited for him to explain. Douglas said, I learned first through my wife's illness and then especially through the accident, not to confuse God with life. I'm no stoic. I am as upset about what happened to me as anyone could be. I feel free to curse the unfairness of life and to vent all my grief and anger. But I believe God feels the same way about that accident - grieved and angry. I don't blame him for what happened. I have learned to see beyond the physical reality of this world to the spiritual reality. We tend to think "Life should be fair because God is fair." But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life-- by expecting constant good health, for example-- then I set myself up for a crashing disappointment.

He went on to say, God's existence, even his love for me, does not depend on my good health. Frankly, I've had more time and opportunity to work on my relationship with God during my impairment.

For months Yancey had been absorbed in the failures of faith, having sought out stories of people disappointed in God. He had chosen Douglas as his modern-day Job, and had expected from him a bitter blast of protest. The last thing he had anticipated was a graduate course in faith.

Douglas continued, If we develop a relationship with God apart from our life circumstances, then we may be able to hang on when the physical reality breaks down. We can learn to trust God despite all the unfairness of life. Isn't that really the main point of Job?

Suddenly, Douglas glanced down at his watch and realized he was late for another appointment. He hurriedly stood up to leave, and then leaned forward with one final thought for Yancey. I challenge you to go home and read again the story of Jesus. Was life fair to him? For me, the cross demolished for all time the basic assumption that life will be fair.

We want life to be fair. We expect it should be because God is fair and we believe in God. When you experience a dry spell remember the wise words of Douglas, Do not confuse God with life.

Remember the faith of Mother Teresa who served so humbly despite feeling like God was absent in her life. She was able to trust in God’s presence despite her feelings.

Remember God’s repeated call to each of us to not be afraid and then trust in God’s promise to be present in our lives even in the midst of suffering.

Remember, Tough times don’t last. Tough people do. You can hang in there in the face of dry spells, droughts and even death because God has promised to help you and uphold you with his victorious right hand. Amen.

GUIDED BY THE GOSPEL: GATHERING • GROWING • GIVING