Reading: I Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a, 27-29 (Near King Ahab's palace there is a fine vineyard that Ahab would like to turn into a garden for his palace household. Ahab offers to but it from its owner, named Naboth -- either with a trade for a better vineyard somewhere else, or with the full cash value. Naboth refuses, saying it's an ancestral inheritance. Queen Jezebel -- she of ultimate allegiance to the the narrow cost-benefit logic of Ba-al, is upset that such a sensible transaction has been blocked, so she plants evidence falsely accusing Naboth of treason and has him murdered. With Naboth dead under a cloud of suspicion, Ahab takes over the vineyard -- at which point the prophet Elijah feels stirred up enough to come out of hiding and confront Ahab with the evil he has done.)
What's the issue here?
Is it just Jezebel's libelling and murder of Naboth, and Ahab's complicity in it, putting this royal crime in the same field as King David's arranged murder of Uriah the Hittite, one of his own generals, to get to Bathsheba?
Or is it also Ahab's lusting after Naboth's vineyard and his refusal (or inability?) to honour Naboth's ancestral inheritance? The way Ahab boiled everything down to economics, good business, and cost-benefit analysis?
It happens all the time.
Homeowners in Mississauga will be moved from their homes to make room for a new transit line; homeowners along the Red Hill in Hamilton lose backyard developments to Hydro right-of-way clear-cutting.
Every time there's an Olympics or a World Cup or a G-whatever summit, poor people are relocated from inner-city streets and neighbourhoods to make room for meeting and security infrastructure and to make the city more attractive to visitors.
Multinationals buy up traditional sustainable farm-land in Third World countries and turn it into cash-crop plantations.
And how much "ancestral land" of the First Nations of Canada has been taken for economic development, with either a cash settlement or re-settlement of the people on reserve land elsewhere?
It happens all the time.
And as we celebrate the 91st Anniversary of the founding of the United Church of Canada this Sunday, what do we feel stirred to say?
Easy enough to point a prophetic finger at all those "evil" expropriators. But I wonder if the point might be for us to learn and show in our own behaviour a little bit about the value of ancestral inheritance, of valuing the treasures we have been entrusted with, of letting our lives be grounded in what is given rather than be driven by what we can make, earn, accumulate and aggrandize?
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