Towards Sunday, June 2, 2013

Reading:  I Kings 18:20-39 
The contest between the power of Baal and the power of God on Mount Carmel

Uh oh!  It's 11:55 pm.  I won't finish this thursdaythought before Friday.  Best intentions...

And that's the background to the reading this week -- best intentions that go awry. 

Way back at the end of Exodus, just before the people of Israel first enter the land of Canaan (the promised land), Moses tells them to decide once and for all whether to worship and serve Yahweh -- the God who has freed them from slavery and led them through the wilderness, or Baal and other gods of fertility and prosperity that the other people already in the land will be worshipping. 

Of course they say, "Yahweh!" 

But then they move into Canaan, start settling in, find out who Baal really is  ... and find it hard not to slide into worship of him. 

Because Baal is hard to resist.  From my childhood I have an image of the cult of Baal as a pagan, child-sacrificing, primitive kind of thing that now exists only in story books and is hardly believable as something that intelligent people would do.  But Baal is really just the god of local fertility and prosperity who promises prosperity and well-being to the home, tribe and homeland of any people willing to sacrifice whatever Baal says needs to be sacrificed.  And doesn't that sound like most of our political leadership and discourse today?

So ... over time the people slide into worship of Baal, they displace Yahweh (and Yahweh's focus on justice and right relations among all people and within creation as the most important considerations in nation-building), they make Baal their god, and in this week's story things have come to a head. 

The King (Ahab), thinking he's doing what's best for the kingdom, has got into bed with a foreign queen -- good old (or maybe young) Jezebel, and he has also made Baal the official religion of the kingdom.  After all, can prosperity be bad?  Four hundred and fifty prophets agree with him, and can four hundred and fifty prophets be wrong?

A lone prophet named Elijah, however, says they can be .. and are very wrong and misguided.  So a contest is set up on Mount Carmel to see who is really greater and better for kingdom to have as its god -- Baal or Yahweh.

And that's what we'll explore in our worship this week -- the honest appeal of Baal (Ahab really was trying to do the best thing) ... and the challenge always of sticking to the resolution of focusing on what God sees as important.