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Proper 4 - May 29, 2016 Community Christian Church of Springfield,
MO
Roger Ray, pastor “God vs God”
1 Kings 18:20-21,
30-39
20So Ahab sent to all the Israelites, and
assembled the prophets at Mount Carmel.
21Elijah then came near to all the people, and
said, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If
the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” The
people did not answer him a word. 30Then Elijah said to all the
people, “Come closer to me”; and all the people came closer to him. First he
repaired the altar of the Lord that had been thrown down; 31Elijah
took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob,
to whom the word of the Lord came, saying, “Israel shall be your
name”; 32with the stones he built an altar in the name of
the Lord. Then he made a trench around the altar, large enough to contain
two measures of seed. 33Next he put the wood in order, cut the
bull in pieces, and laid it on the wood. He said, “Fill four jars with water
and pour it on the burnt offering and on the wood.” 34Then he
said, “Do it a second time”; and they did it a second time. Again he said, “Do
it a third time”; and they did it a third time, 35so that the
water ran all around the altar, and filled the trench also with water. 36At
the time of the offering of the oblation, the prophet Elijah came near and
said, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that
you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these
things at your bidding. 37Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so
that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have
turned their hearts back.” 38Then the fire of
the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones,
and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench. 39When
all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said,
“The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God.”
Shortly after the war in Iraq
was launched, Lt. General William Boykin was tasked with finding and either
killing or capturing Osama Bin Laden. Perhaps because his previous assignments
to fly helicopters into Iran in 1980 to rescue hostages in our embassy or his
1992 assignment to arrest Pablo Escobar in Columbia had been so successful. Boykin
is a very religious man, so religious that a military psychiatrist had once said
that he was not fit for duty, but he was given this task of finding Osama Bin
Laden and he took it on as if it were a religious crusade.
In fact, in a speech he delivered
to an evangelical Christian event in 2003, he actually said: "I
knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was
an idol."
He encouraged his Christian
audience saying, "We in the army of
God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as
this.” That same year he told another religious audience that his boss,
President George W. Bush was, “in the
White House because God put him there." And see, all this time cynics
like us thought he was put in the White House by five partisan Supreme Court
Justices! It is indeed true that the Lord works in mysterious ways!
Though Bush tried to distance
himself from Boykin’s anti-Muslim statements he was not fired. He retired from
the military in 2006, leaving Osama Bin Laden for another administration to
find. However, Boykin was recently fired from the teaching position he took in
Virginia in retirement, reportedly for refusing to allow transgender students
to use the restroom of their choice.
Bigotry against Muslims never seemed to hurt his career but the
transgender community is well organized. Legislators in Texas, North Carolina,
and South Dakota, well… and Illinois, Indiana,
Kentucky, Mississippi, …. As well as Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia,
Washington and Wisconsin… it appears that stupid bigotry is not regionally
contained.
Now, it is
obvious that General Boykin is one of the most shocking un-self-aware people
ever to be in a position of leadership but I didn’t tell you about him simply
to mock him for his ignorant prejudice. I mention him today to tell us
something about ourselves.
It is like what
Melissa Harris-Perry recently said about Donald Trump, the mere fact that
Donald Trump is a racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and violent man it is that
his candidacy, in his popularity, is hold up a polished mirror to America.
Trump is
irrelevant but what he is telling us about ourselves is that we an “id” a dark
side of ourselves, that is still very racist, very anti-immigrant, very
intolerant of other religions, still quite sexist, and still longing for
authoritarian rule by a wealthy elite. If our nation did not harbor those
horrible qualities, Trump would not be so poplar among voters. Trump is like a
presidential dipstick and it is increasingly evident that America is a couple
of quarts low on intelligence, morality, and civility.
Our lectionary
reading today is from that well-known contest recorded in I Kings of the Hebrew
Bible. In the 8th century, not long after civil war had divided the
Jewish state into the southern kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of
Israel, came a king, Ahab, who married the daughter of a neighboring king in
Tyre. Ahab’s foreign-born wife, Jezebel, persuaded Ahab to abandon the Hebrew’s
religion and to worship the Assyrian god, Baal.
History is always
written by the victors and religious history is written from the perspective of
what eventually became the orthodox view of history. So the Bible tells us that
Ahab was even and his wife, Jezebel was even more evil, because they were
straying from the Hebrew’s faith.
Of course, you
must see, that if they had been successful in this religious reform and these
ancient religious texts had been written by the priests of Baal, then Ahab and
Jezebel would have been portrayed in stained glass windows in churches all over
the world and they would be remembered as the Abraham and Moses of our
religion.
There is more at
work here than meets the eye. These texts were all redacted in the temple cult
in the southern kingdom of Judah so their rivals in the north always get to
play the bad guys. If it is possible to have less journalistic integrity than
modern newspapers, the people who wrote the Bible had an agenda that trumped
any concern about accurately recording history.
So they tell a
story about how a wicked king and his horribly evil wife tried to lead the
people astray but God’s superhero, Elijah, managed to kill the bad guys and
restore the true faith. This narrative is just the gravy that covers the meat
of the politics that was playing out beneath the religious language.
The tiny kingdoms
of the ancient world had shifting loyalties and alliances that helped them to
survive. Ahab didn’t meet Jezebel on Match.com, theirs was an arranged marriage
to bring these two weak kingdoms together in an alliance, primarily against
their stronger southern neighbor, Judah.
In the ancient
world, the gods were conceived as living in heaven just above the temple where
they were worshipped. Yahweh wasn’t just the God of Judah; Yahweh lived in
Judah, just above the clouds above Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem.
When the Jews
were taken into captivity in Babylon, they literally believed that they were
too far away from God for their God to hear their prayers. The Gods of the
ancient world were associated with a nation, with a place.
In almost every
case, the God of any given nation was a war god. The Ark of the Covenant,
described in Exodus, was probably originally a large throne that warriors
carried into battle to symbolize the presence of God on the battle field.
The graphic
battle between Elijah and the prophets of Baal represented a clash of nations….
Asking which culture would survive. The
battle of the United States against the nation of Iraq was portrayed by General
Boykin as a battle between the Christian God and the Muslim God and Boykin was
willing to say that our God is greater than their God…. A sadly sophomoric yet
theological way of saying “My dad can beat up your dad.” And, in this case, he
was right because his dad is armed with sophisticated artillery, and is backed
up by a navy and an airforce, and their dad had none of that.
A great deal of
the hostility between the Muslim world and the west is articulated in religious
language but the real fear is cultural domination. If their cars, electronics,
clothes, and even their foods fall to western influence… if their TV shows,
movies, and music all come from Hollywood and New York then, they feel, what it
means to be who they are is being destroyed.
France and Spain
have long had laws that mandate that their TV and Radio stations play at least
40% of their content from France or Spain and at least 60% from Europe, to keep
the USA from destroying their culture but now with satellite providing most of
the TV and music, national governments are losing control.
The USA dominates
the world, our culture, fashion, and fast food are pervasive the world over and
yet we all know people who get scared out of their minds if they see a woman at
the mall wearing a Hijab, or if they see Spanish signs at Home Depot.
And somehow,
extremists on both sides, somehow want to us to believe that the real issue is
that Allah and Yahweh are locked into a death match in a heavenly arena.
The story of Elijah
is told in I Kings to encourage the kind of xenophobia that Gen. Boykin
articulated, that the Iraq war wasn’t about controlling the oil fields of the
Middle East, it was to prove that Christianity is superior to Islam. No one
wants to send their sons and daughters to fight and possibly die defending low
gasoline prices but they may be willing to sacrifice their own children to
preserve, not simply our brand of religion, but to defend country music,
NASCAR, Levis, Coke, McDonalds, Jack Daniels, and bacon.
You know that if
Muslims ever run our grocery stores that bacon will become a black market
product just like heroin and crack cocaine!? When politicians talk about
fighting for our way of life, they are talking about bacon! They are talking
about our consumer culture and our specific tastes. Fanatics may focus on the
tenets of one faith against another faith but governments, whether they are
western or eastern, are concerned with economics and power.
Jews and Muslims
fight in the Middle East. Hindus and Muslims fight on the Indian subcontinent.
Muslims and Buddhists fight in Indonesia. The largely secular or Christian west
is willing to fight anyone and everyone all over the globe but I will say this
and as soon as I say everyone in the sound of my voice will know instinctively
that what I am saying is true:
Scrape away the
hocus pocus from all of the world’s religions and underneath all of the
rituals, creeds, and holy books, we’re all just trying to figure out how to be
better people. We have nothing to fight
about.
We are all just
trying to figure out how to make our lives a little better, to make the world a
little better for our children and our grandchildren. And at the heart of what
it takes to make us better people and to make the world better for our kids is
to flatly refuse to be manipulated into another war that sends the poor of
America to fight and kill the poor of another nation. Let the people say:
