Unrealistic, Unrelentless Courage

Stories of restoration and healing by the prophet Elisha continue with a shocking story.  See 2nd Kings 6

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

August 3, 2025

“Unrealistic, Relentless Courage”

2nd Kings 6: 24-29a – The Message

The king of Aram pulled together his troops and launched a siege on Samaria. This brought on a terrible famine, so bad that food prices soared astronomically. Eighty shekels for a donkey’s head! Five shekels for a bowl of field greens!

One day the king of Israel was walking along the city wall. A woman cried out, “Help! Your majesty!”

He answered, “If God won’t help you, where on earth can I go for help? To the granary? To the dairy?”

But the king continued, “Tell me your story.”

The king said, “Tell me your story.”  But first, here’s the back story:  Starvation.  Simple.  There was no food.  But not so simple, it wasn’t because of a drought but because of a blockade – engineered starvation by an enemy nation.  No food was allowed in.  It sounds so eerily similar to the blockade of food and humanitarian aid to Gaza that I can’t not say it out loud.

But first, back to the story in the Book of 2nd Kings.  Here’s how bad it was.  The head of a donkey was selling for 80 shekels of silver.  That’s nearly a thousand dollars today – for an animal they weren’t even supposed to eat, the skull of something unclean.  And if that wasn’t enough—people were paying the equivalent of fifty dollars for a cup of dove dung to use as fuel for fire.  That’s what the famine had done.  It warped the economy of suffering into something grotesque.

And to illustrate how grotesque, how tragic and unspeakable – the woman who cried out to the king for help told him that she and another woman had made a deal.  A pact made out of their absolute desperation.  Let me read it in all its gruesomeness directly from scripture:  She told the king, “A woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so we can eat him today; and we’ll eat my son tomorrow.’  I agreed.  So, we cooked and ate my son.”  How grotesque, how unspeakable… The woman continues, “the next day I said to her, ‘Hand over your son so we can eat him.’  But she had hidden him from me.”

 And so now, that’s why she was crying out to the king for justice.  The king tore his robes in grief and rage.  “What do you expect me to do?”  And immediately looked for someone to blame.  He chose Elisha.  The prophet of God.  “It’s his fault.  And may God do to me, and more, if the head of Elisha remains on his shoulders today!”  In other words, off with his head.  In response to the starvation of his people by their enemy.

The king sent a messenger to tell Elisha the shocking news, but Elisha didn’t respond with fear.  He said something even more shocking.  He said, “today a donkey skull is $80 and a cup of dove dung sells for $5.  This time tomorrow, food will overflow the city gates and everyone will eat again.  A whole gallon of wheat will sell for just 25 cents.”  The king’s officer scoffed.  “That’s ridiculous.  Even if God opened the windows of heaven, that couldn’t happen.”  Elisha replied, “You’ll see it with your own eyes.  But,” he told the official, “you won’t eat a bite of it.”

Meanwhile… there were four lepers sitting just outside the city gate starving too.  They said to one another, “Why are we just sitting here waiting to die?”  But what could they do.  We can’t go through the gate, even if there was food.  And we can’t just sit here, we’ll die for sure.”  So one of them had an idea, maybe not a good one, but at least an idea:  “What if we went to the enemy camp and beg for mercy.  Maybe they’ll kill us, but maybe they’ll feed us.  We’ve got nothing to lose.”  

They all agreed that first thing in the morning, they would use the last of their strength and walk toward the Aramean army camp.  Maybe a march to their salvation.  Maybe, a march to their death.

Soldiers heard something that night like the sound of galloping horses, the rumble of chariots.  The ground seemed to tremble beneath them like an army was approaching fast and fierce.  They thought, maybe Israel had hired mercenaries.  They panicked and ran stumbling into the dark, dropping their weapons as they went – leaving everything behind.  

When the four lepers arrived, there were no soldiers.  The camp was empty – except tables left behind spread like a feast – bread, roasted meat.  They ran from tent to tent eating as much as they could.  And along the sides of the tents, there were barrels of grain and jugs of oil.  They saw wine and firewood.  They found gold and treasures.  But as they were running around laughing, unable to believe their good fortune, one of them said, “Hey, wait.  What we’re doing isn’t right.  We’re keeping this all to ourselves.  We have to tell the whole city.”

These four men who had been outcasts, thrown away because of their disease… they went back and shouted through the gates what they had seen.  The king thought it must be a trap, so he sent scouts to check out their story.  And when the scouts returned, they said, “It’s true.  The enemy is gone.  Their camp is empty and the road is scattered with their weapons and clothing.” Empty except for barrels upon barrels of grain and jugs of oil and wine.  Lots of wine.

The city gates opened and the people flooded out, carrying back everything left behind by their enemies.  And thus, food began to overflow in the streets.  And just like Elisha said – an entire gallon of wheat sold for twenty-five cents.   Two gallons of barley for the same price.

Elisha’s miracles have always been about restoration, not over-the-top spectacle — and this is no different. The famine ends not by magic but when the discarded become the ones who bring life. This, too, is the healing ministry of Elisha – the kind to which we are called.  Not just the healing of one body, but the repair of society itself.  The prophet who once poured salt into poisoned water and raised a dead son and multiplied oil for a mother drowning in debt has now unleashed a flood of wheat and wine into the streets.

Here’s the end of the story:  And the officer who scoffed in disbelief, the one who said, “Even if God opened the windows of heaven, it couldn’t happen”…  Well, he indeed saw the promise fulfilled, but as Elisha warned, was trampled by the rushing masses and never tasted a bite.  The end. 

Four lepers go back and share their good fortune.  What an inspiring story.  However, at the same time, it’s kind of a cruel story.  I mean, it feels wrong to preach this story while Gazans are starving, but it is timely.  Just this week in the New York Times, there was a story about food prices.  Instead of a donkey’s head for an outrageous price of $1000, flour is now selling for $305 for 25 kilograms instead of $10.  Sugar is now $106 per kilogram instead of 89 cents.  Fuel is $36/liter instead of $1.87 before.[1]  That is, when you can find any of it.  And so, it feels outrageous, cruel, to speak of bread overflowing the streets this time tomorrow when, right now, children are dying because of a blockade.  An engineered famine.  There is more than enough food.  Just outside the walls and fences.  There is medicine and clean water only yards away from suffering people, but blocked by… what?  Indifference?  Brutality?  Surely, silence.

It does not have to be that way.  Just like there is no reason — none — that people in our country should be hungry.  No reason anyone should be losing health care, or their homes, or their hope, just to fill the coffers of those already obscenely wealthy.  It does not have to be that way except for… what?  Indifference?  Cruelty?

And so, how can I tell this story?  How can I speak of miraculous reversals and abundance when people are dying at this very hour from the same violence that fills scripture?  How can I preach, “This time tomorrow, everything will change?” 

Well, here’s the truth.  I can’t.  I shouldn’t imply such promises.  However, sometimes the Spirit acts and the illogical happens.  I can’t deny that God makes a way out of no way.

Long before I was born, my dad nearly lost his life in a farming accident.  He was a young farmer home alone loading grain into the barn using an auger – it’s a device made with sharp rotating metal that moves the grain upward.  It’s dangerous.  A horse bucked him into it and he was trapped as it began to slice his leg away.  Meanwhile, his uncle was driving home from town and realized they hadn’t spoken for a while and decided to drive up the long half-mile driveway – just in time to find my dad and save him from bleeding out.  He was left without a chunk of flesh on the back of his leg the size of a fist, but he survived.  And the neighbors banded together to finish the harvest.  And yet, in front of the same barn, my two-year old nephew Ryan was not spared from a farm accident.  Why?  And so, I can’t tell you why some prayers are answered and others are not.  I do not know why the heavens sometimes open with deliverance, and sometimes stay shut.  However, here is what I do know:

Today’s story in scripture begins with mothers who had to resort to the unthinkable because no one was coming to help.  Not just hunger but total collapse.  And while most of us have never faced that kind of despair, some of you have come close — the depth of pain, the absence of hope, abandoned in your grief, unseen and left to fend for yourself because no one showed up.  And then — sometimes — someone does.  Sometimes, just as you are about to give up, a neighbor knocks with a casserole.  Not because it fixes everything.  But because it reminds you: you are not forgotten.

Here’s what I know:  The lepers had nothing to do but wait to die or they could do something that might kill them – walk into an enemy camp.  They chose to risk.  To hope for mercy from those who had no reason to give it.  And maybe you’ve stood at the edge of something that terrifying.  You’ve left the job, ended the relationship, admitted the truth knowing it could go badly. But you did it anyway.  You’ve walked into a doctor’s office not knowing what the scan would say and said yes to the treatment that might not work.

 And sometimes – not always, but sometimes – the scan comes back clear.  The treatment works.  The thing you feared most doesn’t happen and against all odds, what was once dismissed as foolish hope becomes the only truth that matters.

Mothers, lepers, the people in the city – all had run out of options.  The people who had been cast outside the gate came with an absurd tale about enough food to feed them all.  It sounded impossible.  But they dared to believe.  

And in our lives, here is what I know:  Sometimes a stranger says exactly the right thing and something in you shifts.  Sometimes a check arrives at the last possible moment and holds off the ruin.
 Sometimes the people we least expect, or people we don’t want to help us, bring the good news that saves us all.

It doesn’t always happen.  But when it does, it’s often a mix of unrealistic but relentless courage, with a little help from the Holy – remembering those galloping horses and approaching chariots?  And somehow, not just for individuals but repair for a whole society, what seemed impossible has become real.  We’ve seen it happen.

• Drag queens and trans women of color rose up at Stonewall and defied police.  They ignited a movement that changed repressive laws, a hostile culture, and a recalcitrant church.

• Women locked out of the power to vote, dismissed as irrational – marched and organized until they changed the Constitution of the United States.

• Marchers in Selma walked into tear gas and terror so that a nation would finally pass the Voting Rights Act. 

• Farmworkers in grape vineyards — invisible, underpaid, and exploited — organized strikes and boycotts and won contracts that reshaped labor rights across this country.

• We just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, not a benevolent gift but decades of unrealistic but relentless courageous work by activists in wheelchairs and others refusing to be excluded until the doors of access finally swung open.

If they could do that, if the dismissed and discarded could change history, then so can we.  We can practice the moral imagination of the prophet Elisha – the vision that sees beyond fear and famine, that believes we can achieve liberating reversals – with help from the Holy.

We can follow the example of those lepers who returned and shared and broke open what had been hoarded.

We can walk toward the pain.
 We can carry the truth.

And we can dare live, not with shallow optimism, sure to disappoint, but in soul-deep defiance of despair – with unrealistic, relentless courage – to say:

“By this time tomorrow, there will be more than enough.”

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/world/middleeast/gaza-market-prices-flour.html