The Intoxication of Power

(I Kings 21, the story of King Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard)

Proper 6   June 12, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield

Roger Ray, pastor   1 KINGS 21  "The Intoxication of Power"

Bumper stickers are a political art form. How can you sum up some of your most closely held views in just 16 inches of type with letters still large enough for your neighbors to read it?  One that those of us who live in the Ozarks will have seen several times says, “I love my country but I am afraid of my government.”  You could typically expect to see that on the back of a pickup truck that had a gun rack in the back window with maybe a second bumper sticker that said, “Warning: driver chews tobacco”.

But if I had several copies of the one that said, “I love my country but I am afraid of my government” to pass out here today, we might come back next Sunday morning and see a lot of cars sporting this once rather conspiratorial sentiment. And if you asked someone who didn’t have one why they didn’t want to display it, they very well might tell you that they are not so sure that they love their country anymore.

I was still in high school when Congress held the Watergate hearings. Though I had come, at a very early age, to be opposed to the war in Vietnam, I had not taken the next step into accepting that my government, of my country, that America could be corrupt, do and say dishonest things, and betray the character of a nation that prided itself on being the shining city on the hill.

What would have been considered taboo in a previous generation became normative. We were not perfect.

We were still far superior to the Soviet Union and to Communist China but a lot of the enthusiasm was drained out of us.

I have not watched the TV miniseries about the 1994 O. J. Simpson trail because 20 years has not much dulled my vivid memory of how my previous absolute confidence in police integrity was slowly eroded.  I had sincerely believed that the 1991 police beating of Rodney King had been a fluke, bad cops put on trial in a violent city where a fearful population wanted the police to be rough on drunk drivers and people who evaded arrest.

But hours of testimony and analysis of evidence demonstrated that in the Simpson case, there was institutional racism and the police were willing to plant evidence and lie under oath. Of course, in recent years we have no longer had to depend on TV news cameras following the slow speed chase of O. J. down the highway, or the low resolution of that rare privately owned video camera that recorded the Rodney King beating.

Now we all have high-resolution video capability in our cell phones and indisputable evidence of police shootings of unarmed black men and women is just way too common. I will be speaking in Ferguson, MO on the second anniversary of the death of Michael Brown and I don’t mind telling you that even though that is still a couple of months away, it is a chilling thing to think about.

Chelsea Manning showed us video proof that our armed forces not only commit war crimes on the battlefield but that we institutionally cover up those crimes as a matter of course.

Edward Snowden made it obvious that the 4^th amendment’s protections against unwarranted search and seizure of our private documents was being treated as an almost quaint bit of antique thinking and that our government has given itself permission to not only read our mail but to listen to our phone calls and discover everything in our internet browser history…. And most men won’t even let their wives see that!

We grew up being taught to make fun of the Soviet Union and Chinese fake news services that fed their population a constant stream of false propaganda. Having been a writer for a newspaper for 20 years and an avid consumer of TV news, I can tell you that there is a great deal more propaganda in our news media than there is journalism.

I understand that there has to be a chain of command and that governments have to have secure covert operations but am I the only one that would be more comfortable if Edward Snowden was in charge of the NSA and Chelsea Manning was in charge of military intelligence? 

Still, I don’t want to encourage excessive cynicism nor become tolerant of silly conspiracy theories. But a healthy suspicion of government seems like a pretty good idea.

We acted out the Old Testament account of King Ahab and Naboth this morning… an account from an ancient voice that runs all through the Torah, the Prophets and the Wisdom writings of the Hebrews that was just plain old distrustful of their government.

If you look for passages of scripture that praise the Jewish king you will find a lot of them. Especially in the books written while the captives from Judah were in Babylon…. They remembered their history with exaggerated pride and penned stories about David and Solomon that made them sound a lot more important and powerful than they ever were.

But, as you know, there were a lot of different authors in a lot of different time periods who wrote the Old Testament and there were a lot of them looked back fondly on the early history of Israel when they didn’t have a king. Judges 21:25 says: In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.

And the “we don’t need no stinkin king” sentiment gets very strong in the words of the prophets. In I Samuel chapter 8, the people were demanding that the prophet anoint a king to rule over them and Samuel gave them a stern warning:

¹¹He said, ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; ¹²and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers.

¹⁵He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle^* and donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves;

The prophet is making an assumption and a very simple one… that whenever you give someone a lot of power, they will abuse that power and take advantage of those with less power.

A member of our internet audience wrote to me this week to request that I do a sermon on a topic of his particular interest… I’ve been trying to find a way to politely say that this is not a “top 40’s show” that takes requests but this writer added to his request, “and see if you can do it without mentioning Donald Trump.” And at that point I knew I wasn’t even going to try to rise to the challenge.

So, now that I have broken the ice, let me just briefly use the Donald once again as a sermon illustration.  Trump has had a bad couple of weeks. For months it has seemed that the man was made of Teflon. Nothing he said, no matter how false, insane, or racist, ever seemed to cost him any public support. But when he took on the Latino judge in his Trump University fraud case, the worm turned.

And here is, I believe, the difference:  When Trump was ginning up fear of illegal immigrants from Mexico, or Islamic terrorists slipping in among refugees from Syria, he was playing on the anxiety that many of his uneducated supporters feel. He was speaking to their fears. But when he racially maligned this Indiana born jurist simply because his parents had emigrated from Mexico he was picking a target that affected only him.

Trump had said a few months ago that he was so popular that he could shoot someone in the street and not lose support but he has misinterpreted his own support. It wasn’t all about him. There is no reason for the public to turn on Judge Curiel…. Trump wants to malign him because, well, the long and the short of it is that Trump is guilty of fraud in the Trump University case and it is going to hurt him financially and it is going to further tarnish his reputation…. If that is possible.

His defense of his clearly racist comments to his Republican detractors has been to point out that he has just set a record for votes in the Republican primary as if getting votes makes racism not matter…. And, in his mind, that is just a privilege of power.

Of course, we are talking about a billionaire who is running for the office of the President of the United States. That is a lot of economic and political power but it doesn’t really take that much to corrupt most of us. 

Like most of you, I have dreamt of what I would do if I were to win the lottery. And I would wager that everyone of us has a charity or some noble cause in mind that would benefit greatly from our windfall.

And yet, once blessed with such a windfall, it almost never seems to bring out the best in us. Lots of lottery winners have died of cocaine overdoses, most end up quickly bankrupt and several have committed suicide but there is one story that stands out as being iconic for me:  West Virginia’s $300 million dollar winner, Jack Whittaker, got real preachy after his win and started spending money on helping to build churches, he gave 10% to his own church but a few months later called the police to report that a briefcase with a half a million dollars in it was stolen from his car while he was inside a strip club enjoying some of windfall.

But, still, it isn’t just billionaires, presidents, and lottery winners. One of my first time jobs was as an assistant manager in a fast food restaurant. If you can imagine that being a manager of a Wendy’s could actually go to someone’s head, let me tell you, I worked for some really hard wired narcissists during my short career in food service.

In our culture, even the middle class exercises a good deal of power, with or without employees. Parents exercise authority over their children. All of us exercise power over others in choosing how we will spend our money, where we shop and what we buy. I can tell you, the little guy who was president of my neighborhood association for several years acted like he thought he was Napoleon.

There was a campus minister who was a member of my former parish who was married to a stockbroker. Twenty-five years ago he was a nice enough sort of guy but as his wife became more and more successful the money went more and more to both his and her heads.

A few years ago their twenty-something daughter’s boyfriend broke up with her… there was evidently no real scandal and in my imagination, he may have just realized that he didn’t want to marry into this toxic family. But the girl’s mother was so outraged she actually hired a hit man to break his legs after trying to bribe a cop to falsely charge him with a DUI.  And she has been mystified that she was charged with a crime… a crime that would have any of us here behind bars right now but she got probation, lost her license to be a broker and has tried repeatedly to cheat on even that restriction.

How do you get from seminary, ordination, being a chaplain to hundreds of college students to hiring a hit man because some guy made your daughter cry?  What I’m saying is, dear friends, we can discover that not many of us are made of the stuff of heroes. A little power, a bit of cash, and we come to excuse a collapse of moral decision-making.

I am asking you not to fall asleep at the wheel. Don’t let a little power make you drive your own life into the ditch. You are the decision maker in your life. Think about who you want to be and how that person you want to be will live both in how you treat others and how you use your wealth and authority. There is no final judgment but there is a judgment that comes every day when you have to look in the mirror. I hope that you will always like what you see.