The Widows Who Were Almost Forgotten

The rulers had ordered Peter and John to stop talking about Jesus, and it did not work. Every week more people in Jerusalem believed, until the followers of Jesus numbered in the thousands.

They shared everything they had. Barnabas sold a field and gave the money to the apostles. And every day the church handed out food to the widows. (A widow is a woman whose husband has died. In those days a widow with no family to help her could easily go hungry.)

But the believers did not all speak the same language. Some had grown up around Jerusalem. Others had grown up in faraway cities, spoke Greek, and had moved to Jerusalem later.

Every morning the bread went down the line. And morning after morning, the Greek-speaking widows went home with less. Perhaps the helpers knew the local widows by name and did not know the others. Perhaps the baskets were empty before they reached the back. It kept happening.

The Greek-speaking believers began to grumble.

"Our widows are being skipped!"

"My mother came home with an empty jar again!"

So the twelve apostles called the whole crowd of believers together. (Twelve preachers had been trying to run a kitchen for thousands of people. Something was bound to go wrong.)

"It would not be right," the apostles said, "for us to stop teaching God's word so that we can serve food at tables. So, brothers, choose seven men from among you. Choose men everyone trusts, men full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom. We will put them in charge of this work, and we will keep on praying and teaching."

Everyone liked the plan.

They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit. They chose Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas. (Try saying Prochorus and Parmenas three times fast.) And they chose Nicolaus from the city of Antioch, who had not been born Jewish at all but had joined God's people.

Every name on that list is a Greek name. The widows who had been missed would now be served by men with names like their own sons' names.

The apostles prayed and laid their hands on the seven, setting them apart for God's work. The next morning, the bread went all the way to the back of the line.

The good news kept spreading, and even a great crowd of priests came to believe in Jesus. (These were priests from the very temple whose leaders had locked up Peter and John.)

Seven men could fill a widow's jar with flour. They could not fill the empty place at her table where her husband used to sit, and by evening the jar would need filling again.

But the church had learned this kind of noticing from someone. At the gate of a town called Nain, a teacher once saw a widow crying at her only son's funeral. "Do not weep," he told her, and he gave her son back to her alive. On the night before he died, the same teacher tied on a towel and washed his disciples' feet. "Now do for each other what I have done for you," he said.

So when seven men carried bread to the women nobody had counted, they were doing his work by his Spirit. It was Jesus, risen and alive, still carrying bread to the back of the line.