Texts: 1 Kings 17:1-16; Luke 4:24-26
Speaker: Joel Miller
“Anabaptist meeting on a boat. Pieter Pieters, ferryman, burned in Amsterdam, 1569.” Engraving by Jan Luiken in Martyrs Mirror, v. 2, p. 385 of Dutch edition. Source: Rijksmuseum
At first glance, this appears to be a fairly chill scene of folks out for a boat ride. The waters are calm. The rower’s relaxed position and the fact that somebody is standing up indicates the boat isn’t moving very fast, if at all.
There are nine people in the boat, maybe a little crowded for its size. At least two are women. A closer look reveals that one of the men, on the right side, is holding a large open book. Others seem to be listening, like he’s reading to them.
Looking in the background, one notices two large windmills. From this and the outfits, one would be correct to guess that this is the Netherlands. There’s a steeple towering above a city, back when churches were the tallest structures rather than office buildings, and the power of religion held more sway than the power of capitalism. Which isn’t necessarily a great thing.
Maybe the style of the artist looks familiar. If so, perhaps you’ve worshiped here in past years on the first Sunday of November when we’ve considered similar images. Part of our All Saints/All Souls remembrance. Or maybe you own a copy of the very large book in which these images appear, the Martyr’s Mirror. This is one of 104 copper etchings by the artist Jan Luyken that first appeared in the 1685 edition of that collection. Many of Luyken’s works show brutal scenes of torture endured by the Anabaptists who resisted the state-sponsored churches of the 1500s. Some Anabaptists actively called for a reshaping of society around the needs of the poor. Others focused on a smaller scale for living the teachings of the gospel, like nonviolence and sharing of goods.
What appears to be a relaxing boat ride on a nice day, is actually a little pocket of resistance against a powerful church that had wed itself to the violence of the political order. This is a secret meeting of the Anabaptists, women and men gathering for a Bible study, something not possible even 100 years prior, before the invention of the printing press that made the scriptures widely available.
The boat belongs to Pieter Pieters, who would soon join the long list of those martyred for their faith. More on him a little later.
At first glance, the scene of Elijah sitting by the Wadi Cherith, fed by ravens, is one of harmony with nature. Elijah is alone, but has all he needs through the gifts of the natural world. There is fresh water right beside him in the stream, and he doesn’t even have to go searching for food. The ravens are bringing him bread and meat in the morning, and evening – at least two square meals a day. It’s not too hard to imagine a Disney-fied version of this story where one of the ravens becomes Elijah’s side-kick, providing comic relief alongside this solitary and very serious prophet living out in the wilderness.
But these are not harmonious times, and even the friendliest of ravens can’t sustain Elijah for the long haul. This is during the reign of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, names that became synonymous with wickedness. 1 Kings notes that Ahab and Jezebel worshiped the god Baal. They built an altar to Baal in Samaria, the capital city of the Northern Kingdom of Israel where they ruled. 1 Kings says, “Ahab did more to provoke the anger of Yahweh, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him” (16:33).
There was some logic to Ahab and Jezebel elevating Baal worship. Baal was the Canaanite storm god – the unseen force behind the rains that watered the land. The rains that made the crops grow. The rains that filled up places like the Wadi Cherith for folks to have live-giving water to drink. Much like our time, rulers, for better or worse, got credited when things were growing, when there was plenty, when families had enough to feed their kids and save up a little for next year. Or, on the flip side, rulers got blamed when crops shriveled, when families had to draw down their meager grain reserves, when wadis dried up and people had to pray that their wells were deep enough to supply water.
We point to the stock market and the price of gas and groceries to determine whether the current administration is doing a good job with the god-like collection of forces we call “the economy,” which comes complete with an “invisible hand” that decides our fate.
For an agricultural society, like the one of Ahab and Elijah, the weather was the economy, or at least a big part of it. And so it paid to be on good terms with Baal, the invisible hand behind the seasonal rains.
But a storm god is a fickle friend, about as unreliable and impersonal as a global economy, and hey, we still know a thing or two about the unpredictability of weather events to impact communities. The Hebrew Bible puts Baal worship in sharp contrast with the worship of Yahweh. Yahweh was a god of covenant. Yahweh promised abiding faithfulness to the people, even if the weather didn’t always cooperate.
That’s the backdrop for this story of Elijah camped out by the Wadi Cherith. As a prophet of Yahweh, Elijah declared to the king that the rains would stop until he decided it was time for them to start again. In other words, the storm god was about to take a leave of absence. No matter how many prayers Ahab and Jezebel and anyone make to Lord Baal, it wasn’t going to help.
Elijah is by the Wadi Cherith because he is hiding from the wrath of Ahab, who is indeed being proved powerless as the drought worsens. It’s a secret meeting of one, unless you count the ravens, which we should, who serve as Yahweh’s partners in the resistance.
The difference between a wadi and a river is that a river generally has a continual flow of water, while a wadi is a valley that fills up after rains, but then goes dry. After a period of no rain, the Wadi Cherith does what wadis do, it goes dry. So Elijah must move on.
1 Kings 17:8, “Then the word of the Lord came to him saying, ‘Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’”
Elijah goes, and he meets this woman at the gate of the town. She’s gathering sticks for what she says will be her final fire, her final meal. She and her son are also suffering from the drought, down to their last handful of grain and oil. She tells Elijah, “I will go home, and prepare this meal for my son, that we may eat it, and then die.” Elijah pledges that if she is willing to include him on the meal, that they will share many more meals together. She welcomes Elijah into her household of two, and his words hold true. The jar and jug never run out, and they are sustained through the drought.
This is the widow of Zarephath. An unnamed woman remembered for her loss- a widow, and her place – Zarephath, a village outside the boundaries of Israel, outside the territory ruled by Ahab and Jezebel. It’s that second part of her story, her foreignness, that Jesus highlights to his listeners in Luke chapter 4:
“But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine all over the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.”
For Jesus, this woman’s foreignness, and the key role she plays at this time in Israel’s history, is a sign that God partners with all peoples, regardless of identity, to sustain life, to practice hospitality, to feed the hungry. Jesus points to her as a model of his own ministry.
This woman gives no indicators of being a political dissident. She very likely did not consider herself part of the resistance against the wicked king Ahab. As far as we can tell, she was mainly just concerned with survival – for herself, for her son. What sets her apart, and the reason she is remembered, is that she allowed the little that she did have to be used by God. Like the mighty and mischievous ravens, she becomes a partner with God through generosity and neighborliness, and thus a resister of self-seeking power, of hoarding, of shutting off those foreign to her.
Which brings us back to Pieter Pieters and his boat.
We know maybe just a bit more about Pieter than that woman from Zarephath, but not by much. Ironically, what preserves the memory of Pieter was the very thing that ended his life, the court record of his sentencing, preserved in the Martyr’s Mirror, just a couple paragraphs long. From this we know that the boat was his livelihood. He was a ferryman on the Amstel River in Amsterdam. Official Roman Catholic church records revealed that he had been to confession only once in 20 years. He was accused of attending the “reprobate and prohibited assemblies of the Mennonists,” as some of the Anabaptists were being called, named after the leader Menno Simons, our direct lineage as Columbus Mennonite Church.
Pieter is accused of hosting some of those gatherings on his boat. It is also noted that he and his wife did not have their youngest child baptized as an infant, “all of which are crimes against the divine and the secular majesty, as said before, which disturb the peace, and the common weal, and which ought, therefore, as an example to others, not go unpunished.” (Martyr’s Mirror, Second English Edition, page 739.)
What did Pieter think he was doing? Was Pieter a rebel? Maybe. Was Pieter quietly trying to survive while staying true to his beliefs – a husband, a father, just as concerned as any about the wellbeing of his family, the world his children were inheriting? Maybe.
What we know, alongside these other sparse details of his life, is that Pieter had a boat. And Pieter allowed that boat to be used by God, for small gatherings of Anabaptist/Mennonists/Mennonites, and their reprobate and prohibited Bible studies.
On Pieter’s boat, women and men, studying their scriptures previous generations had not had access to, would have heard stories like Elijah being fed by the ravens out of sight of King Ahab. They would have heard about the miraculous jar of meal and jug of oil of the widow of Zarephath who provided hospitality to the prophet of God. They would have heard Jesus affirming this woman as model of God’s way.
On Pieter’s boat, these small groups would have discussed the earthshaking declarations of Jesus in the beatitudes: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness and justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
On Pieter’s boat these folks would have heard the Spirit’s call to become partners with God in the practices of hospitality, sharing of goods, and refusal to return violence for violence. To resist the fickle gods vying for their allegiance. To ground themselves in a Steadfast Presence of mercy and grace that no draught or storm – natural or political – can overcome.
It is not lost on me that these stories are coming to us two days before a national election. These are not harmonious times. There is a lot of manufactured fear out there, and some fearful possibilities for how this unfolds. We can receive these stories this morning as signs of another Spirit at work in the world, one not defined by fear. In times past, ravens have shared bread and meat, widows have multiplied meal and oil, ferrymen have offered their boat as a floating church. The Creative Spirit of this small blue marble and the entire cosmos has always been looking for partners in the creative process. Peiter had a boat and we have plenty to offer in partnership with God.
Blessed are the merciful; Blessed are the peacemakers, and the disturbers of the false peace of empire; Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for theirs is the kin-dom of God. Amen.
