Roger Ray, pastor
June 16, 2013 Proper 6
1 Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a
Later the following events took place: Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard in Jezreel, beside the palace of King Ahab of Samaria. 2And Ahab said to Naboth, "Give me your vineyard, so that I may have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near my house; I will give you a better vineyard for it; or, if it seems good to you, I will give you its value in money." 3But Naboth said to Ahab, "The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance." 4Ahab went home resentful and sullen because of what Naboth the Jezreelite had said to him; for he had said, "I will not give you my ancestral inheritance." He lay down on his bed, turned away his face, and would not eat.
5His wife Jezebel came to him and said, "Why are you so depressed that you will not eat?" 6He said to her, "Because I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite and said to him, 'Give me your vineyard for money; or else, if you prefer, I will give you another vineyard for it'; but he answered, 'I will not give you my vineyard.'" 7His wife Jezebel said to him, "Do you now govern Israel? Get up, eat some food, and be cheerful; I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite." 8So she wrote letters in Ahab's name and sealed them with his seal; she sent the letters to the elders and the nobles who lived with Naboth in his city. 9She wrote in the letters, "Proclaim a fast, and seat Naboth at the head of the assembly; 10seat two scoundrels opposite him, and have them bring a charge against him, saying, 'You have cursed God and the king.' Then take him out, and stone him to death." 15As soon as Jezebel heard that Naboth had been stoned and was dead, Jezebel said to Ahab, "Go, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give you for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead." 16As soon as Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, Ahab set out to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, to take possession of it.
17Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying: 18Go down to meet King Ahab of Israel, who rules in Samaria; he is now in the vineyard of Naboth, where he has gone to take possession. 19You shall say to him, "Thus says the Lord: Have you killed, and also taken possession?" You shall say to him, "Thus says the Lord: In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood." 20Ahab said to Elijah, "Have you found me, O my enemy?" He answered, "I have found you. Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, 21I will bring disaster on you; I will consume you, and will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel;
We changed internet service providers a few months ago and when we did I had to give our wireless network a name. Never wanting to waste an opportunity to kind of mess with the neighbors, I named it, "FBI Surveillance Van." Which, given my rather non-conformist reputation around here, was not immediately interpreted as a joke by some church members who were looking for an internet connection on their cell phones when things got a little slow in a service here one morning...... I'm confident that I was not preaching at the time.
But what seemed kind of funny to me back in February has taken a rather more serious turn in recent weeks. It turns out that our government has been spying, not just on me or this church, but on the entire nation and a big part of the world. Beyond spy satellites and drones with cameras coupled with cameras on intersections, bus and train stations, banks and retail stores, we have discovered that our government has the ability to keep all of our phone records, record conversations at will and read our email.
In the not too distant past, we understood that our guaranteed constitutional rights protected us from unwarranted searches. We understood that our mail was sacred and that our phones could only be tapped by court order with probable cause being presented to a judge. As technology has changed the way we communicate has become digital and wireless and the government's technological ability to spy on us has become unimaginable and they have implemented it.
The 4th amendment to the constitution assures us that the government has to present a darn good reason to stick its nose into our business but the Patriot Act gutted our legal privacy and long after the 9-11 hysteria that pushed the Patriot Act through congress in the first place was passed, the congress has renewed and strengthened the Patriot Act so that this outrageous and indefensible invasion of privacy may have actually not broken any laws...... which demonstrates what a bad bit of legislation the Patriot Act really is.
Now, it must be said that our various intelligence agencies have had some laudable success in catching terrorists before they can strike. I don't want to fail to applaud those important victories, but playing around in the back of my mind is that famous bit of wisdom from Ben Franklin who said that those who will give up essential liberty in exchange for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor security and will lose both.
As soon as there are enough people living close enough to one another to compete for food, shelter and water, there is a need for a government to help us to live successfully together. But from the beginning of time, there has been in our genes a tendency towards stratifying our society so that some of us become more important than the rest of us, claiming more and more of the food, housing and water for ourselves, even to the point of having much more than we can use while leaving others without enough to survive.
You can say this is a matter of politics or you can say it is a matter of religion though it seems to me that it is necessarily both. Our scripture lesson this morning describes an ancient and seminal exchange between a monarch and a citizen. Naboth had a small family vineyard that was near the palace of King Ahab and Ahab wanted it for his own use. But Naboth believed that even though it was a king who was asking to buy it, he had the right to say "no."
The king became depressed about this limit to his power and his wife offered the perfect solution.... They didn't have drones back then so she hatched a plot to have him falsely accused and murdered so that the king could take his land.
The Hebrew Bible has many such examples of warnings about abuse of state power and the limitations on that power necessary to maintain the sacred value of every human's life. It is safe to say that it is a theme in all of western religions, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam that there is a deep and passionate concern for protecting the equal value of all people.
Anytime we lose sight of that value then our religion starts to move from being a meaningful faith and starts to become a meaningless superstition.
I wish that it were not so but power is always in need of being held in check lest those in control begin to decide that certain groups of people are expendable.... Whether they are the poor, blacks, Jews, gays, immigrants or the middle class. We have been assure by the likes of Lindsay Graham, senator from South Carolina, that as long as we are not doing anything wrong that we have nothing to fear from this governmental invasion of privacy. If Graham had been aware that the Nazi propaganda director, Joseph Goebbels, had said essentially the same thing about Nazi information gathering on German citizens he would probably have said it differently but it is the fact that he and his ilk are not aware of the historical precedents that should motivate the rest of us to protest.
I think that the IRS scandal is over blown. If you are starting a group that you name after a historical tax protest, the Tea Party, and then you apply for special tax-exempt status then I think you are begging for additional scrutiny. I don't think our local police should use profiling in determining who they are going to pull over but if you, like one of our local residents has done, have a vanity tag that says "Zig Zag" the brand name of popular marijuana rolling papers, then I think you can expect some special scrutiny.
But this NSA thing is big. I don't believe that they will only look for people who are hatching terrorist plots. I think that our government has a long history of using personal information to control opposition and ruin the credibility of their critics. The CIA kept records on Martin Luther King, and several prominent religious war protesters such as Thomas Merton and the Berrigan brothers.
When you consider the case of someone like New York governor, Elliot Spitzer, who was forced to resign in 2008 in a sex scandal, you see how information like this is often used. Spitzer had been known as the "sheriff of Wall Street" because he understood complex financial instruments and he helped to safeguard the public interests from the abuses of investment bankers and stock traders. When it was discovered that he was a regular customer of a high end prostitution service he was removed from office.
I have two observations to make about that...... Wall Street, without an aggressive sheriff, went wild and plundered the retirement savings of millions, trashed the world economy and caused massive unemployment, home foreclosures, made it impossible for many to retire or for others to find jobs.... It left many in the middle class no longer able to send their kids to college or to own their own home.
Spitzer really should not have paid that young woman to have sex with him. That was a bad thing and his wife should divorce him and his kids should not send him a father's day card for years. However, a victimless crime contrasted with what he was doing to protect millions of people? Really, are we such simple-minded gossips and Puritans that we would consciously make this kind of decision?
And how was Spitzer discovered? Well, you know, if you have transactions of over $10,000 at a time in your bank account, those transactions can be subject to review. That's how we were told that Spitzer's illegal conduct was discovered. That is not, however, true. None of his transactions amounted to even half of the amount that should have triggered an investigation. They went deeper, into smaller transactions, because the banking industry was looking for something to use against him.
I am afraid that much that same may have happened to Julian Assange, the Australian founder of Wikileaks who has defied the American military and intelligence agencies by leading classified information but our government is trying to build a case against him on a rape charge that may be little more than a fabrication to get their hands on him.
Again, I have every reason to assume that Assange's personal morals would disqualify him for a role in the clergy but that would be true of most people, including most members of clergy. There are not many people who would survive the NSA's "white glove" test if they are allowed to dig into absolutely everything about our lives.
The public has been manipulated by the dumbing down effect of these neo-Puritanical sexual witch-hunts. If we really are capable of analytical thought that is higher than the watermark set in the Jr High boy's restroom then we really need to refuse to just keep piling effective people on the trash heap of "you would have embarrassed my mother's Sunday School class."
Religious people have been sold a bill of goods in having been told that the Lord God Almighty is as obsessed with people's bedroom lives as is the tabloid media. We are being manipulated by a government use of fear of terrorism so that we will not object to their ever-increasing invasion into our privacy for reasons that look pretty dubious to me.
Did you know that more Americans have been killed by gun wielding toddlers this year than have been killed by terrorists? Should the NSA start spying on pre-schoolers? After all, guns don't kill people..... toddlers kill people.
Thankfully, no one told the Old Testament prophet, Elijah, not to mix politics and religion. Elijah didn't just preach about out the sane limits of political power, he went into the King's house and confronted him to his face, assuring him that dogs would lick up his blood in the same place where the blood of the innocent citizen he had murdered was spilled.
The progressive church now wears the prophet's mantle. We must stand up to the monarchs of our day, fearlessly, consistently, refusing to be distracted with their use of sex and fear to manipulate us.....
We don't want to turn our food supply over to a handful of corporations.
We will not allow our planet's resources to be used up and we will not allow our air, water and land to be polluted for profit.
We will not favor banks over homeowners or sit idly by while the poor are kept out of colleges, hospitals and houses.
We will not tolerate forcing our elderly to work until they drop dead wishing people a happy shopping experience at Walmart.
We will not tacitly accept the imprisoning of a generation of black young men who have been kept out of meaningful employment by inadequate education.
We will not passively watch as our gay sisters and brothers are marginalized, our Latino neighbors are first enslaved and then deported.
And we will not give our sons and daughters for your military adventures ginned up by lies to hide your profit motives.
And I don't care who is sleeping with whom as long as my government is continually found in bed with corporate interests..... they are the only whores I'm worried about.
And if the NSA missed any part of this message the manuscript will be posted on our website by 5 this evening. I don't want for you to miss a word of this.
