1 Kings 19:9-12

9 At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.

Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.

ELIJAH

When King Ahab first saw Elijah, the first words out of his mouth were, “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?”  Elijah was trouble.  If you were in power and saw Elijah coming the result would not necessarily be your own joy and merriment.  Instead, if Elijah was showing up it likely meant he would be speaking in the voice of God and calling you to task.  Elijah was most likely to tell a truth you didn’t want to hear to remind you of the power of God when you spent most of our time enjoying your own powers, thank you very much.  Elijah was the one who called accounts and who called the drought:  three years of drought without water or even dew to fall upon the land.  Three years of drought without water to prove that perhaps the storm god that everyone had been worshipping wasn’t quite that stormy.

And so, you understand how those who were in power at the time would have given him the title he had earned:  Elijah, troubler of Israel.  And if you were Elijah, called upon this task, you might find that you ended up with just as much trouble as well, for just as Elijah would say the booming words of courage, “If they shall worship Baal the storm god in the place of God of Israel, then there shall be neither dew nor rain except by my word,” and you can imagine those words with force and conviction.  And then, of course, in the next scene you will see Elijah standing in front of a puddle.  It is a wadi, a valley that catches the rain, except that there is no rain.  So here is Elijah, standing before the puddle that God has provided for him.  This is to be his water for the drought that is to come as Elijah stands and waits each day for the ravens to bring him his food: bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat at night, standing before the puddle saying, “Look at me, the great prophet of Israel.  Here I stand waiting for God.”

When the puddle dries up he goes instead to a perhaps even more unlikely source: a widow.  She is so poor she doesn’t have food both for dinner and breakfast the next day.  She is so poor she doesn’t know what will come next and she fears for her and her child.  So, how do you think that Elijah is going to be fed by this widow, this widow who has nothing, even for herself?  And here it is that the meal and the oil don’t run out, day after day.  Elijah is provided for, if not in the ways he would have wished.  Elijah is provided for by the compassion of God, the grace of a poor widow and a miracle that brings her son back to life.  And at the end of three years of these times in the desert, Elijah is sent by God back to the palace.

Now let me say, in Scripture even the most glorious of kings have their seasons of being terrible: Saul has his rages, David his Bathsheba, Solomon in his wisdom works the people into rebellion.  Even from the beginnings of the monarchy in Scripture, when the people are crying for the king Samuel, the last of the judges, tries to talk t