Reading: I Kings 19
When the people of Israel entered the land of Canaan, one of the features of Canaanite religion they encountered was the worship of Baal -- lord of heaven and earth, god of sun and rain who made crops grow, the land fertile, and life good for his followers and their families. Who could not like a religion like that? And isn't that what they wanted from their Yahweh-God as well?
So the people combined the two traditions -- worship of Baal and of Yahweh, for a long time.
Fast forward a few centuries, though, and some people (called "prophets") are beginning to see how badly the self-centredness, greed, and other shortcomings of Baalism are crippling the soul of the people and corrupting the kingdom. Things come to a head when Queen Jezebel, the Phoenician wife of King Ahab (a strong Baalist herself, raised in the official Baalism of Phoenicia), begins a program to oust Yahwism altogether and make Israel an officially Baalist kingdom.
Elijah is distressed at this, and takes on the Queen and her Baalist priests in a public contest of let's-see-whose-god-is-really-God. In the contest (in which the stakes are life and death) he defeats 500 of the Queen's Baalist priests.
Great victory!! But then Elijah realizes the Queen is not going to take this public humiliation lightly. The story of what Elijah does next is one of the more familiar tales of the Hebrew Scriptures.
I'm glad you’re
here. It’s comforting not to be alone
when you’re looking for God. It’s reassuring
to be with others not afraid of the silence.
My name is
Elijah. So is yours. Sometimes we are made to be Elijah by the
times we live in, by the theologies that dominate our culture, or by troubles
that overtake us and break us down.
Out there there’s
lots of noise – lots of bluster and bravado, PR and praise, commercial
marketing and evangelistic messages about being able to have it all. About being blessed beyond belief, because of
belief. About being happy. Being successful, effective and entitled
to whatever I feel I need.
About being protected from trouble, and rescued speedily from it if it
happens. About being healthy and healed
of any disease or disorder that worms its way in and makes me less than I want
to be, less than my neighbour is, less than I used to be and feel I still am meant
to be.
It’s a wonderful
message. It comes to us from Madison
Avenue – where it’s called consumer capitalism and the self-help industry, among
other things, and from religious institutions and leaders – where it’s called
among other things, the prosperity gospel.
It feels good to
believe it. To be able to believe it.
And it’s really
hard not to, because there is enough of the truth about God in it to catch us
and grab hold on our hearts. God is
creator of the world and every good thing in it. God is generous and self-giving and has made
the world to be a place of blessing for all.
God is love, and desires only ultimate good for all creatures and all
people. So the gospel of Madison Avenue
and the good news of the prosperity gospel seem true enough, especially when
life is good and we seem to be able to get and be and do what we want in the
world.
But it actually
sounds a lot like the age-old religion of Baal – the religion that the people of
Israel met when they moved into Canaan, that they lived with and struggled with
the whole time they lived there, and that Elijah – the ancient Elijah, found
himself in the end fighting against for the sake of his own soul and the soul
of his people.
In the ancient
Middle East Ball was one of the most important gods in the pantheon – the closest there was to a supreme god among them. He was ruler of the heavens, lord of the
earth, god of sun and rain, and thereby god of fertility and of life – god of
abundance and of material and physical well-being. He was the god who would make your land
fruitful, your home secure, your family well, and your life happy.
And because this
was not unlike at least part of what the people of Israel also hoped for from
Yahweh who had freed them from slavery to Egypt, led them through the desert to
Mt. Sinai, and then to the Promised Land as a good place to raise their
families, they easily combined the worship and the temples of Baal they found
already established in Canaan, with their worship of Yahweh. At first they saw no contradiction between the two. Their message seemed to be one, and for centuries
the people happily amalgamated the two religious traditions and the two experiences
and expectations of God.
Until the cracks
appeared, and widened into chasms as they did by the time of Elijah – the first
ancient Elijah, and as they do at some point in most of our lives, making us
into latter-day Elijah’s as well. Because
the gospel of being able to have it all, doesn’t always work and sometimes does
more harm than good.
On the simplest
level the prosperity gospel does little to curb human greed, possessiveness, competitiveness,
and oppression of others as Israel found out in their own society, and as we
(and others around us) find in ours as well.
The equation of
material things with spiritual blessing, and the use of material stuff to prove the blessing of God and our own spiritual good standing feeds, rather than challenges and heals
addictions and unhealthy attachments that we always are prone to.
And the promise
of being able to be well, or at least clearly on the way to well as we understand it –
when it doesn’t happen, easily engenders depression, doubt and even unnecessary
loss of faith. Because when trouble
strikes your house, disease takes residence, or you suffer loss that you never
thought you would, how do you understand this within a religion of Baal –
either ancient or modern?
Surely it must
mean you are bad, or have done something bad and therefore at least for
now don’t deserve god’s blessing. Or, it
means god somehow has just forgotten about you, has taken a bit of vacation, or
maybe wasn’t even real in the first place – was just a heavenly Santa Claus of your childhood that now you have grown up not to believe in anymore.
Either way, life suddenly takes a turn toward the empty, the lonely, the
hopeless, and the dark.
Which is exactly
what Elijah – the ancient Elijah is feeling when he runs from the power of
Jezebel, high queen of Baal, who is shaping the faith of so many of the people
of Israel. He flees to the wilderness,
finds a tree to sit under, and sits down to die. In a land where Baal is god, what else is
there to do when God – when Baal, no longer works you?
But then God –
Yahweh-God, intervenes, sends an angel to feed him, and direct him to go back
to the beginning – back to Mt Horeb, the mountain of God, Mt Sinai, where the
whole covenant, the whole holy marriage of commandment and commitment between
Yahweh-God, and God’s people was sealed.
Yesterday there
was a marriage celebrated here. At the
heart of that marriage were two things – one was the union of two persons who
over time have come to know and to love one another pretty honestly and openly;
the other was the vows they shared, to live in that openness of knowledge and
love for the rest of their lives –
to have and to hold [as the
traditional vow says] from this day forward
for
better, for worse
for
richer, for poorer
in
sickness and in health
in
joy and in sorrow.
When you think of
it, that doesn’t sound like the kind of commitment Baal makes or people make
with Baal. Baal is in it, and we are in
it with Baal for better, for richer, in health and in joy. But not so much for the other stuff – the worse,
the poorer, in sickness and in sorrow. For
Baal and Baal’s people, those things aren’t accepted and embraced as part of the deal.
Those kinds of
things, though, are included in the covenant with Yahweh. Because Yahweh is not just a god who makes our crops grow, but who also sits with us when drought comes and we don’t
know where to turn – and gives us no guarantee the drought will not come. Yahweh is not just a god who keeps us and our family well, but who also holds us close and helps us grow in some way when
disaster or disease or some tragedy overtakes us – and gives us no guarantee we will not suffer such things.
Yahweh is not a god who bends heaven and earth just to make us happy,
but who understands that sorrow and fear are part of life, tells us it’s not
the end of the world, and says he’s not afraid of living and walking into those
things with us and making them his own as well.
Those are the
promises – the wedding vows of Yahweh to us, made at Mt Sinai and through all
the journey both to there and beyond.
And the promises
we make – our wedding vow to Yahweh at Mt Sinai, in the holy place? It's this:
it’s to live in the ways God shows us – the way of the ten commandments, the
way of loving God with all our heart and loving our neighbour as ourself, no
matter what –
for
better, for worse
for
richer, for poorer
in
sickness and in health
in
joy and in sorrow.
Because that’s
the way of true life. That’s how life is
made good. That’s what changes us for
the better, day by day as we live these commandments no matter what the circumstances
of our life may be. And that’s how we
find our way – our own little way, rich or poor, full or empty, healthy or ill,
joyful or filled with sorrow, into being part of God’s making all the world good one life at a time.
I’m glad you’re
here. It’s comforting not to be alone
when we’re looking for God. It’s reassuring
to be with others not afraid to leave behind the noise of our time, and to be
renewed in the deep, quiet presence of the God who is always with us, no matter
what.
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