False Gods, False Regime (1 Kings 18:20-39; Proper 4C; June 2, 2013)

False Gods, False Regime

1 Kings 18:20-39
Proper 4C
June 2, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

There are any number of reasons to be scandalized by the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s a great story.  It’s one of my favorites.  But there are plenty of ways that this story rubs me the wrong way.

To start with there’s the fire that fell from the sky because Elijah prayed to God.  A story with this bolt-from-the-blue kind of miracle rubs my skeptical scientific worldview the wrong way.

Then there’s the violence.  The folks on the lectionary committee have done their best to shield us from the full force of the story by ending the reading at verse 39.  We keep Bibles out of the pews so that you won’t accidentally read on to verse 40.  But I know what comes next:

Elijah said to them, “Seize Baal’s prophets! Don’t let any escape!” The people seized the prophets, and Elijah brought them to the Kishon Brook and killed them there.

I’m a mainline Christian with liberal sensibilities and I don’t think the Bible ought to celebrate a massacre.  So that rubs me the wrong way.

But there is something about this story that, even more than the magical thinking and the mass murder, really sticks in my craw.  During Lent this year we had an Adult Forum series on civil conversation.  I preached a series of controversial sermons and then we practiced careful listening and conversation skills in the forum around the issues that were raised in the sermons.  We had a pretty good turnout for an event that promised difficult conversation.  I was happy with the number of people who came.  I’ll tell you something, though: Elijah was not one of them.  He doesn’t seem to be concerned with respectful conversation.  He is not interested in inter-religious dialogue.  He doesn’t even try to find common ground with the prophets of Baal. 

At a time when the world has become very small and religiously-motivated violence threatens to ignite a regional or even global bloodbath, Muslims and Jews and Christians need to be able to get past our historic animosities and talk to each other.  And here comes the hero of our story—confrontational, in your face Elijah—who sounds like Dirty Harry in a robe and sandals: “Go ahead, make my day!  Do ya feel lucky, Ahab?  Do ya?”

It is bad enough that Elijah has set himself as King Ahab’s enemy, an implacable foe, a remorseless critic.  He does what he believes God wants him to do.  He’s sincere.  I’ll give him that.  But he also demands that the people take sides.  “How long will you hobble back and forth between two opinions?  If the Lord is God, follow God.  If Baal is God, follow Baal.  The people gave no answer.”

Of course they gave no answer!  They don’t want to decide!  I understand that.  I don’t want to decide, either.  Deciding makes people angry.  Anger scares me.  I’m not terribly comfortable with my own anger and I’m sure not comfortable with other people’s anger.  Left to my own devices I’d sure rather hang around in the middle.

I’m a scholar by training.  Scholars have opinions, but we’re also carefully trained to say things like, “On the one hand A. says this.  On the other hand B. says that.  And, of course, there is always C. who said that and, really, most theories are variations of that.  So, all in all, and until there is further evidence or a new interpretive method, I am inclined to favor the other thing.”   Deciding is not something to be done rashly or on any but conclusive grounds.

I’m also a part of the middle class.  By definition I’m in the middle.  I’m neither rich nor poor.  I remember poor and I have a great deal of sympathy for those who are poor.  I’d also kinda like to be rich, although it’s hard to see how that might happen.  It’s not as if being a United Methodist pastor is the royal road to riches.  And, no, that’s not a back-handed way of asking for a raise.  And I’m not allowed to play the Lottery.  I’m in the middle.  And when you’re in the middle, the risk is being caught in the middle, so it’s maybe best not to make too much noise.

The problem, of course, is that the middle is disappearing.  The middle class is being hollowed out.  The middle class hasn’t had a raise since the early seventies.  Productivity has increased by some ninety percent since then, but the middle class has seen none of that gain.  The gains have gone exclusively to the rich.  Our children will spend much of their working lives in a state of indentured servitude as they struggle to pay their college loans.  In the meantime the poor have seen a merciless assault on social welfare programs.  One in five children in the United States lives below the poverty line and in a state of food insecurity.  In the face of that fact, our public conversation has tipped so far from its biblical roots that we actually entertain the notion that reducing their nutritional support is a viable alternative to returning the tax rates for the rich to their Reagan-era levels.  We in the middle are being forced to take sides, because the middle is disappearing.

“How long will you hobble back and forth between two opinions?  If the Lord is God, follow God.  If Baal is God, follow Baal.  The people gave no answer.”

But this was not simply a choice between two religions, a matter of life-style.  There was no such thing as religion in those days, if by religion we mean the privately held beliefs about God and private devotional practices.  The choice between Yahweh and Baal was a choice between regimes, about what sort of life people should have and share, about who would rule, about who would have power, about who would be served, and about who would serve. 

On the one hand was Baal.  Among other things Baal was a fire god.  He had a consort, a wife, whose name was Asherah.  They were gods who had been worshiped by the Canaanites before the Israelites arrived.  They were gods that assured the fertility of the land and its people.  They promised that if their rites were observed, if the right sacrifices were made, then the land would produce its grain, their sheep would bear healthy lambs and their cattle healthy calves, their beer and wine would ferment properly, and they would have lots of children. 

Baal and Asherah didn’t care much about how all that was shared out among the people as long as they got their share.  So Baal and Asherah ruled over a regime in which the wealthy used their wealth to gain power and their power to gain wealth and the poor struggled to survive.  A few landowners held almost all the land and the poor were reduced to serfdom or something like it.  The strong took what they wanted.  Local warlords styled themselves as kings and drafted armies to fight each other.  All life was competitive and the rules of the game were written by the winners who also paid the umpires.

On the other hand was Yahweh.  Yahweh’s regime is quite different from Baal and Asherah’s.  Baal and Asherah care about production.  Yahweh cares about justice.  Baal and Asherah are about the accumulation of wealth and power.  Yahweh is about the enjoyment of a good and meaningful shared life.  The goal of Baal and Asherah’s regime is glory for the king.  The goal of Yahweh’s regime is that, in the words of Micah, “All will sit underneath their own grapevines, under their own fig trees.  There will be no one to terrify them.”

Faced with the glaring inequalities and injustices of Baal’s regime, Yahweh had picked a fight.  Yahweh had sent a drought that halted production and produced an economic crisis.  Baal and Asherah, the gods of production, were revealed as gods that had no power to control or predict production.  As an economic theory, Baalism was a bust.  It was left only to demonstrate this to the people.

But caught between these two regimes, between their distant memory of Yahweh’s regime and the reality of the regime of Baal and Asherah, the people were afraid to decide.  They were unable to decide between sticking with Baal and Asherah and the hope that somehow some miracle would improve their lives coupled with the fear that any show of resistance on their part would make their lives worse and the possibility Yahweh offered of a humane and neighborly life in which everyone had enough.  They couldn’t choose. 

I understand.  For all my awareness of just how privileged my life is I am reluctant to make choices that would upset that privilege.  I eat well and struggle not to gain weight while one in five children in this country does not have enough and their prayer, “give us this day our daily bread,” is a prayer for food, not some poetic metaphor.  I know what the policies that allow me to buy cheap merchandise are costing the people of the villages of El Salvador, but I am still thrilled when I can get a great deal on a new toy.  I know the injustices carried out by the imperial machine and I am afraid to place myself in its path.  I have never been arrested.  Not even once, not even when I should have been.  I don’t want to decide.  I want both sides.  I want to eat well and sleep well in a world in which you can do one or the other, but not both.

“How long will you hobble back and forth between two opinions?  If the Lord is God, follow God.  If Baal is God, follow Baal.  The people gave no answer.”

So Elijah proposed a contest.  The four hundred fifty economic advisors of Baal would take a bull and arrange a sacrifice with an altar and wood to burn the bull but they would not set fire to the wood.  Elijah would do the same.  The reality of Baal and Yahweh would depend on which god sent fire.  The prophets of Baal went first.  It should have been a cinch for them.  Baal was among other things a fire god.  But after spending the morning calling of Baal, nothing.

Elijah taunted the prophets:  “Maybe he can’t hear you.  Shout louder!  Maybe he is lost in thought.  Maybe he’s going to the bathroom.  (“Wandering” in our translation is translated “going aside from the path” in others, a euphemism.)  Maybe he’s gone on a trip.  Maybe he’s asleep.”  So Baal’s council of economic advisors prayed louder.  Nothing.

Then it was Elijah’s turn.  He arranged everything.  He set up an altar.  He laid firewood on it.  He cut up the bull and laid its pieces on the wood.  Then he called for water to be poured on the wood.  And more water.  And more water.  And then Yahweh’s only public prophet called on Yahweh to answer.  And answer Yahweh did, sending fire to consume the sacrifice, the wood, the stones of the altar, and even the water.  And the people shouted, “Yahweh is the real God!” It was a great victory for Elijah.

But Ahab was still king.  The empire would strike back.  The story is not finished.

It still isn’t.  I am still caught between the gods of production, privilege and power on the one hand and the God who chooses the poor, the God of justice, the God of real peace.  I guess I’m waiting, waiting for fire, waiting for a demonstration of the feasibility of another way, waiting for courage, waiting for a prophet.  In the meantime, the middle is disappearing and history is moving toward a crisis and God, too, is waiting.

“How long will you hobble back and forth between two opinions?  If the Lord is God, follow God.  If Baal is God, follow Baal.”And the people?  What will our answer be?

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