God, Indeed. A sermon preached at First United Church of Christ, Northfield, on June 23, 2013, by Rev. Abigail Henderson. I Kings 18: 20-39 In the United Church of Christ, we have that wonderful saying that goes, Wherever you are on life s journey, you are welcome here. Well, Elijah might beg to differ. How long will you go limping with two different opinions? he demands of the people hovering ambivalently between Yahweh, God of Israel, and Ba al, the Canaanite god of weather and agriculture. I m struck by that word limping. It s an imprecise translation of the original Hebrew, but we get the implication here: when you can t make a choice--let alone the right choice--you are weak, halting, impaired. But wait, we re the United Church of Christ! We love choice and mystery and living the questions! We want everybody to feel comfortable and safe and included within our walls. We seek to peacefully coexist with people of different faiths. We are the body of Christ that struggles with evangelism because God forbid we impose our beliefs on anyone else. And it goes without saying that we post-modern readers of the Bible are not OK with our God s prophet executing the prophets of lesser gods--which, if you had continued reading after verse 39, is exactly what happens. No, we want all the gods and their prophets to play nicely together, please. Indeed, we may find ourselves identifying less with Elijah s utter confidence in the power of his God, and more with the anguish of the 450 prophets of Ba al. Let s review how this goes down: As Todd shared in last week s sermon, the people of Israel are caught between the austere, reverent sensibility of Yahweh, on the one hand, and the antics of the Canaanite gods and goddesses, on the other. All things being equal, I might be drawn to the Canaanite side of things myself. Ba al, for example, is the subject of epic poems describing his heroic conquest of the sea,
his capture by the god of death and sterility, and his rescue by his sister, goddess of sex and war, a virgin who is perpetually pregnant. Interesting, right? But in all seriousness, the prophets of Ba al genuinely and wholeheartedly believe in the power of their god. When challenged by Elijah, they are more than ready to play. Elijah has this rather elaborate proposal--he ll build a stone altar, dig a trench, slaughter a bull. Like you do. All that s missing is the fire, and the god that supplies the fire is the winner. Elijah even lets the prophets of Ba al go first. And the assembled crowd thinks this is a great idea! Well spoken! they say. But things quickly go awry, and our biblical text captures the surprise and disbelief of those 450 Canaanite prophets. They cry and cry to their god, but there is no answer. Elijah mocks them mercilessly, suggesting that Ba al has gone on vacation. (Incidentally, this is what my father said about a certain church in my hometown that always closed up shop in the summer--god had obviously gone on vacation.) In all seriousness, Elijah s words are actually really insulting. According to biblical scholars, to suggest that Ba al has gone on a journey may be a euphemism for attending to bodily functions. To say that Ba al is asleep implies that Ba al is dead. Your god is dead. And so the prophets of Ba al respond according to the funeral rites of Canaanite culture--they begin to mutilate themselves. This image is so violent and troubling; I even considered skipping over it in this morning s reading. But I wanted us to hear it, to appreciate the desperation of these prophets whose god has abandoned them. Whose god is dead. Whose god, according to Elijah, never really existed in the first place. Have you ever found yourself in a place similar to the prophets of Ba al? Had your basic assumptions about the world challenged, even mocked? Destroyed right before your eyes? This may sound like a trivial example, but I have this vivid memory from the second grade. My father had helped me with my homework assignment, and my teacher told me that one of my answers was incorrect. But my pop said it was right! I protested, thinking, clearly there must be some mistake. Well, your pop was wrong, she responded. I was crushed. Whether
followers of Yahweh or Ba al or some other higher power, we all have our sacred cows; and sometimes we cling to them like security blankets, because they help us feel oriented in this big confusing world. We often think of perspective as something that ought to be widened. Why else would be encourage our youth to have broad experiences, to learn about other people, to challenge their worldviews? But we forget how incredibly painful the growth process can be at any age. Speaking of growth, many of you have heard the news that Exodus International, the world s largest ex-gay organization, plans to close up shop and has issued an apology to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Now, the authenticity and meaning of these gestures are subjects for another time. But commentators are rightly calling attention to this extraordinary shift in tone and mission. How does such a thing happen? How does such a profound recalibration happen in an organization famous--nay, infamous--for its views of LGBT people? As I ponder this question, I am reminded of a much smaller-scale experience I had many years ago at Harvard Divinity School. I was taking a class on religion and democracy, which included several cross-registered students from other schools, including a young woman named Melissa from the local evangelical seminary. It was an evening class, and Melissa often gave me a ride home, since we lived in the same neighborhood. We were very friendly but didn t know anything about one another s lives. Until, one week, when the conversation turned to homosexuality and the public school curriculum. Should and could public school teachers talk to their students about sexual orientation? What if parents disapproved of that lifestyle? What if they wanted to impart those values to their children? Melissa declared, speaking as a Southern Baptist, that she believed both sides of the issue ought to be able to come to the table for an honest debate about homosexuality and really listen to each other. My heart thumped in my chest as I responded. I announced that I was speaking as a member of the LGBT community, and that I did not feel welcome to any table where the topic of debate
was the inherent worth and dignity of my own identity and life experience. Couldn t do it. In my mind, the conversation had to start somewhere else, or I wasn t participating. My voice shook a little. I couldn t really look at Melissa while I spoke. I wondered if she d ever want me in her car again. Sure enough, Melissa rushed out at the end of class, and I took the subway home. But the very next week, she offered me a ride and I gratefully accepted--it was winter and starting to snow. As we got into the car, she said, I really want to talk to you about last week. Uh-oh, I thought. I can t stop thinking about what you said, Melissa told me, and went onto say that until now, she had never met a person who identified as gay, and she really liked me. The day after class she had called up her childhood pastor in Virginia to ask him, Do you really believe all those things you say about homosexuality? Apparently the conversation didn t go very well. Melissa started to cry. She was confused. She loved her church. She didn t know what to do, or what to think. Melissa then asked me for my forgiveness. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, Elijah says, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back. On that snowy evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two hearts were being turned--melissa s and mine. For she surprised me as much as I had surprised her. It s funny, despite having had my own heart turned, despite having fallen on my face in awe like the people in Elijah s story, I still do not share the prophet s confidence. I do not trust, as he seems to do so effortlessly, that my God will answer when I call, demonstrating to the world that I, of course, am on the right side. On the contrary, I have been surprised too many times and had too many unanswered prayers. But here s the thing: there s reason to think that the writers of the Elijah story may not have been confident either. They may have felt more like the prophets of Ba al than they d care to admit.
It all goes back to the socio-political context that produced our sacred texts. The contest between Elijah and the prophets of Ba al reads like a proclamation of monotheism--the Lord is indeed God--but monotheism was not a sudden and complete development in ancient Israelite religion. On the contrary, Israel s transition from polytheism to monotheism took many centuries. Throughout the Bible, you ll see references to God not as the one God, but the best God--the God that Israel ought to single out for worship. Scholars have suggested that it was traumatic, destabilizing events such as the Babylonian Exile that caused Israelites to embrace true monotheism. They d lost their homeland, their Temple, their entire way of living and worshipping. It was in this period of abandonment and desolation that the people turned to belief in One God. Not just any One God, but the God Yahweh who had forged a special covenant with the people, who had delivered their Hebrew ancestors from slavery in Egypt. This God, Yahweh, sometimes became angry with the people of Israel. This God sometimes turned his face away from them, punished them, left them in the dust. Yet according to their stories, this God always came back, always followed through, always wiped their tears away--in the end. Now mind you, redemption was always on God s timeline, not the people s, and thus the people might be waiting for a very long time--but somehow they were able to hold onto hope in the midst of crisis. It was the promise of God s special covenant with Israel--this promise of future redemption--that helped the Israelite religion survive--and thrive. So this is the God whom Elijah summons: the God not of false promises, quick fixes, or easy answers, but rather the God whose mysterious love for the people is too deep for words, too big to be contained, and too vast to be described. The God of the long view. This is the God whose fire consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench. This is the God for whom the people fall on their faces, awestruck. And here s the thing: although Yahweh wins the contest, the questions still remain. The uncertainties persist. The future of God s people--the future of us--is still unknown.
Yet in the midst of all of the chaos is God, constantly reorienting our hearts and broadening our horizons. In other words, wherever you are on life s journey, you are welcome here, in the presence of the Lord who is God, indeed. Amen.