08/16/2026 - "Faithfulness" (1 Kings 18:1-16)
You can watch the sermon here.
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Scripture: 1 Kings 18:1-16
After a long time, in the third year, the word of the Lord came to Elijah: “Go and present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the land.” So Elijah went to present himself to Ahab.
Now the famine was severe in Samaria, and Ahab had summoned Obadiah, his palace administrator. Obadiah was a devout believer in the Lord. While Jezebel was killing off the Lord’s prophets, Obadiah had taken a hundred prophets and hidden them in two caves, fifty in each, and had supplied them with food and water.
Ahab had said to Obadiah, “Go through the land to all the springs and valleys. Maybe we can find some grass to keep the horses and mules alive so we will not have to kill any of our animals.”
So they divided the land they were to cover, Ahab going in one direction and Obadiah in another. As Obadiah was walking along, Elijah met him. Obadiah recognized him, bowed down to the ground, and said, “Is it really you, my lord Elijah?”
“Yes,” he replied. “Go tell your master, ‘Elijah is here.’”
“What have I done wrong,” asked Obadiah, “that you are handing your servant over to Ahab to be put to death? As surely as the Lord your God lives, there is not a nation or kingdom where my master has not sent someone to look for you. And whenever a nation or kingdom claimed you were not there, he made them swear they could not find you. But now you tell me to go to my master and say, ‘Elijah is here.’ I don’t know where the Spirit of the Lord may carry you when I leave you. If I go and tell Ahab and he doesn’t find you, he will kill me. Yet I your servant have worshiped the Lord since my youth. Haven’t you heard, my lord, what I did while Jezebel was killing the prophets of the Lord? I hid a hundred of the Lord’s prophets in two caves, fifty in each, and supplied them with food and water. And now you tell me to go to my master and say, ‘Elijah is here.’ He will kill me!”
Elijah said, “As the Lord Almighty lives, whom I serve, I will surely present myself to Ahab today.”
So Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him, and Ahab went to meet Elijah.
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Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time? Maybe due to fashion trends or popular music? Is there another time period you wish you would’ve been born in or older in?
For me, I’m a huge fan of Queen, so I would have loved to have been in my 20s in the 1980s, and specifically have found my way to LiveAid in 1985.But for the most part, I feel like I do live in a good place and a good time period.
That is not the case with Obadiah. He probably wishes he was living anywhere else at any other time period than where and when he’s living in our passage today.
Our story today follows the story of Elijah and the widow, where the widow shared what little flour and oil she had in the midst of a famine. That famine is finally coming to an end after three years. God has ordered Elijah to go see Ahab for a final showdown to end the theopolitical cold war. And on the way to see Ahab, Elijah runs across his chief of staff, Obadiah, who is searching for grass to keep the royal cattle alive.
There’s a lot of unspoken context in verse five today:
“Ahab had said to Obadiah, “Go through the land to all the springs and valleys. Maybe we can find some grass to keep the horses and mules alive so we will not have to kill any of our animals.”
Keep in mind that there has been a famine going on for three years before this. And this verse hints at how the famine has impacted the royal family of Israel. That is to say, it hasn’t. Because Ahab reveals that the palace has not had to kill any of their animals, and if they haven’t had to kill any of their animals, we can assume that the people are doing pretty okay. So even as people have been starving and dying throughout the kingdom for the past three years, the famine has just touched those who live in the palace. They’re doing a desperate scramble for grass to keep their animals fed, while last week a widow scrambled to get sticks to make a final meal for her and her son.
The difference could not be more stark.
It’s in this lap of luxury that Obadiah lives as a follower of God.
He’s not a prophet, which may explain how he was able to avoid being killed by Jezebel and Ahab, even if they knew he worshipped God and not Baal. If he wasn’t outspoken about his beliefs, they may not have cared. But he may have also been living a double life; pretending to worship Baal publicly while worshipping God in secret. Most likely he would’ve been able to worship God more openly had he not been a member of the royal staff, but since he is, he may have had to keep it quiet.
Which may seem cowardly to us - why would Obadiah choose to compromise his beliefs to work for a corrupt institution that’s causing so much harm?
We don’t have a good answer to that. For one thing, we don’t know how easy it was for him to leave. It’s very likely if Ahab didn’t want him to leave, then he just couldn’t. And if he somehow managed to sneak away, he may just be arrested and brought back and forced back into service. Or, maybe, he wouldn’t be able to get a good enough job anywhere else. Maybe he knew that if he left, especially during a famine, it would mean that he would starve, and his family would starve.
Maybe staying in the palace was the only way to keep his family alive, and he was willing to pay the soul price to do so.
Whatever the situation was, Obadiah continues to work for King Ahab in a high-ranking position, insulated from the worst of the effects of the famine. And as the famine raged, Queen Jezebel took it upon herself to rage a one-sided war of her own against the prophets of God living in Israel.
Maybe she blamed them for the famine.
Or, maybe the famine was just the excuse she needed to carry out her plan without much pushback, and maybe even more support than she otherwise would’ve gotten.
Crisis can make people turn to blaming and shaming people we otherwise wouldn’t, in an attempt to explain and gain some control over the chaos going on.
In this case, it’s possible the prophets became the scapegoats for the famine.
But as Jezebel tried to hunt down every last prophet, she didn’t count on somebody in her own court being the one to keep them alive. Because Obadiah as Ahab’s chief of staff had access to more resources and information than most people in the kingdom.
He knew safe places to hide people where the king and queen would never look.
He had access to more food and water than almost anyone else.
And he was a very faithful follower of God.
So maybe that’s why he stayed in the palace. Because he knew what he could do because of his position.
Sometimes when we read Scripture, what we don’t read in a text is just as important as what we do read. And what we don’t read in our passage today is that Obadiah heard from God that he was supposed to save a hundred prophets by hiding them in caves and giving them food and water. He put the pieces together himself that he had the means and the ability to keep the prophets safe from Jezebel’s wrath. Obadiah didn’t need God to tell him exactly what to do, because he’d been following God long enough that his hands and feet and mind knew how to help.
So in an incredibly courageous and faithful choice, he hides the prophets and feeds them from the king’s storehouses, keeping over a hundred of them alive during a famine, seemingly without anyone noticing or commenting.
And all he gets is two verses about it!
Then one day, Jezebel ends her crusade and the prophets are able to leave hiding. But the famine is still ongoing, which is how Obadiah finds himself walking through the lands trying to find enough grass to keep the animals alive. And as he does so, he runs into Elijah, the prophet over all of the other prophets.
The prophet that Jezebel and Ahab have wanted to kill the most.
He’d disappeared right after pronouncing the famine three years ago, plunging the kingdom into chaos while avoiding the violence against his fellow prophets that followed. Clearly the thought is that God spirited him away to keep him out of Ahab and Jezebel’s clutches.
But only Elijah was saved, as far as we know. More than one hundred others were left behind. All of the prophets that Obadiah saved were left in a danger that Elijah avoided. Had Obadiah not stepped up and hid them, they would’ve been killed. And after three years of the stress of keeping them safe on top of the famine, Obadiah is probably already at his limits when Elijah shows up and tells him to risk his neck once again.
Elijah has already disappeared once before, leaving followers of God in danger. Whose to say God won’t snatch him away again, leaving Obadiah to face the deadly consequences, even if he’s been faithful to God this entire time? Because the other prophets had been faithful to God too, and look what they’d gotten.
Had they not been faithful enough? Had they done something wrong that Elijah hadn’t, and that’s why he was spared? Or, maybe they hadn’t been faithful in the right ways, believing the right things, praying the right words, doing the right things all the time.
Unfortunately, that’s not how faith works.
Because the truth is no matter how good someone is, how faithful we are to God and to each other, bad things happen.
We live in a broken world that begins to affect us from the moment we’re born.
We live in a world with accidents, with violence, with diseases and tragedies and chaos that we can’t make sense of no matter how hard we try.
And when they touch our lives, it’s a painful reminder that the broken world we live in is real, and none of us are immune from it.
Over the past summer, many in our community have faced medical crises, accidents, tragedies, deaths in our families and friends, and more.
Treatments have stopped working, family fights have broken out that you’re not sure you can come back from, separations and divorces, and decisions made by others that you’re not sure you can ever forgive them for. And that’s not to mention the continuing crises happening around the world that we see on the news and in our social media feeds.
One of the lessons that my ethics professor, Dr. Long, drilled into our heads during seminary was that evil defies understanding and rational explanation. It doesn’t make sense. It happens to people who don’t deserve it, and it avoids people we think do.
So what do we do in the face of the irrational?
We remain faithful to our beliefs, our values, and to each other.
We find the people who need protection, who need food and shelter, and we provide it.
We stand by the sides of people who are facing some of the worst times of their lives, who are scared and angry and sad, and we hold them in that fear and anger and sorrow.
When I interviewed here at UCLB over a year ago now, one of the things I noticed was how faithful you all were in showing up for each other and this church.
From volunteering at events, to serving on committees, to recognizing when something is falling through the cracks and being willing to step in and take care of it, you all show up for each other in ways pastors dream of their congregations doing.
I can’t count how many times somebody has shared something during prayers of the people during service, and when I try to get to them after service to check on them, there’s already two or three of you talking to them already. And it’s been something I’ve experienced firsthand these past few months as I’ve navigated the deaths of three of my grandparents.
Friends that is faithfulness; showing up for each other and living out our love of God and neighbor, no matter what comes our way. We cannot change the irrational nature of evil, we cannot make it make sense. Maybe we can sometimes understand the reasons why something happens, but at the end of the day, evil remains incomprehensible.
But we can be the faithful presence in the evil that can be understood, through a hug, through gentle words, or even just sitting in silence with someone when there is nothing that can be said.
We can be the ones that show up when it seems like God isn’t there, because we’re the ones meant to be the faithful presence of God in their lives when they need it the most.