Sermon: Waters and Wilderness (and Wild Beasts)

First Presbyterian Church

February 18, 2024, Lent 1B

Mark 1:9-15

 

Waters and Wilderness (and Wild Beasts)

 

 

For some, this reading for the first Sunday of Lent, from Mark's gospel, is a disappointment. "Where are the actual temptations?" they might ask. "Where's any temptation at all?" Part of the qualm is that, where Matthew and Luke have extensive temptation accounts, each with three specific tests named and played out - not just the temptations themselves (yes, including the temptation to turn stones to bread), but Jesus's answers to them - "man does not live by bread alone..." for example. While Matthew's account expands through eleven verses and Luke's covers thirteen, Mark's temptation account only takes two.

In fact, today's reading is somewhat padded by material that's already been covered in the lectionary. Verses 9-11 came up on the Sunday on which we marked the Baptism of the Lord, and verses 14-15 appeared on the Third Sunday after Epiphany. Those two meager verses about the temptation are indeed our only "new" material for this first Sunday of Lent.

However, one can also point out that this combination of verses is new, and it may have something to teach us. These verses also clue us in on how Mark is presenting this Jesus character in ways that resonate deeply with the religious tradition they know. 

First we return to the Jordan River, where John, who typically baptized for the repentance of sin, baptized Jesus, who (as our faith reminds us) didn't sin. In another gospel this becomes a point of contention, as John protests the roles should be the other way 'round, but Jesus convinces him to do it anyway, and the baptism happens. Mark's account skips all that but adds some drama to what Jesus sees as he comes up from the water - memorably describing the heavens as "torn apart" before the dove-like Spirit descends on Jesus. 

Waters have a pretty interesting track record in Hebrew scripture, beginning somewhat mysteriously at the very beginning of Genesis. As early as the second verse darkness covers "the deep" and a wind from God blows over those waters, which are still later separated and eventually the oceans are formed. Early in Exodus we see a mother hiding her newborn son in a basket and setting it loose in the waters to keep a Pharaoh's soldiers from killing him; he is found and taken in by an Egyptian princess, but eventually Moses becomes the one who leads the Hebrew people out of Egypt. Those Hebrew people pass through both the Red Sea and the Jordan River en route to the promised land. Even the prophet Jonah spends a little time underwater, thanks to the efforts of a great fish, before being deposited at Nineveh to do the work God had called him to do.

Those are just a few examples. It's not a surprise that water, and immersion in it, becomes a part of an important religious practice, but the act of being immersed and then raised up works out pretty well as foretelling the ultimate earthly fate of this fellow that John was called upon to baptize. 

Before Jesus has even had a chance to dry off after the baptism, he is "compelled" into the wilderness. Matthew and Luke (and this verse in the NIV) offer words like "led," but nothing so gentle here; the NRSV offers "the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness" (emphasis mine). And no, we don't get any kind of account on how Jesus is "tested," which itself is a different interpretation than "tempted"; it suggests that one's strength or skill or faithfulness is being specifically tried, instead of one being lured or enticed into some sort of sin. 

Testing in the wilderness is, again, not new. The Hebrew people faced plenty of it on their way to the promised land, and they didn't always pass those tests. The prophet Elijah faced his times of trial in the wilderness, and David had to go on the run from Saul before becoming King himself. Again, the wilderness, like the water, have a history in the history of the Hebrew people, but there are new things here too.

Take those angels, who were present to minister to Jesus. That's not something you find in those Old Testament stories. That again adds something new to this story even if it starts out looking or sounding familiar. 

And then there are those wild beasts.

Yes, I know, the NIV uses the technically correct translation "wild animals." But let's be honest: "wild beasts" as found in the NRSV and other translations, just sounds cooler. 

While it might seem an obvious thing to expect wild animals in the wilderness, it's not the kind of thing that typically comes up in those accounts in Hebrew scripture. Also, for all the attention-getting quality of the inclusion of the "wild beasts," there isn't any particular indication that these wild animals actually did anything; no suggestion that Jesus had to wrestle with them or any such thing. The verse simply says "he was with the wild animals."

This might be something to think about. It was noted above that wild animals weren't typical of those earlier stories, but they aren't totally absent. There is the story of Daniel, who ends up in that den of lions but comes out unharmed. On one of Elijah's times in the wild, ravens actually came to bring food to him. 

What if, instead of being a part of the threat and peril of the wilderness, the "wild beasts" were really there to, well, be with Jesus. What if what we're seeing here, instead of a threat to Jesus along with all of Satan's testing, is the "wild beasts" - indeed, creation itself - recognizing their Creator, the one who in the prologue of John's gospel was "in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being"? If we take this possibility, it really does set Mark's temptation story apart from those in Matthew and Luke. No less that creation itself was at Jesus's side in his time of testing. Later in this chapter we see that unclean spirits know exactly who Jesus is, with plenty of fear; maybe the creatures of the wilderness know who Jesus is as well.

And speaking of those unclean spirits or demons; while Mark doesn't specifically say anything about how this testing came out, the way those demons react to Jesus later in the chapter suggest Jesus passed those tests just fine.

So, we've had "three w's" - water, wilderness, wild beasts - in this account so far. Verses 14-15 give us one more "w": witness. When this testing is done Jesus is out proclaiming. He goes back to Galilee and begins to bear witness. It's really the theme of Mark's gospel, his "topic sentence," his "mission statement": 

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is near; repent, and believe in the good news.

 

There it is: Jesus's message in a nutshell, and not at all a bad theme to hold in mind throughout this season of Lent. We get the "repent" message plenty in this season, with all of the emphasis on penitence and reflection, but maybe we would be well served to hold on to that "believe" part of Jesus's proclamation as well; to know that the time is fulfilled, or at hand, and the kingdom of God has drawn near to us. In Jesus, repentance is never a hopeless act, not with the reign of God at hand. 

So make that part of your Lenten discipline; repent, with hope in God's sovereignty. Like those wild beasts, recognize the Creator with us. See the Spirit descending like a dove. Know that even - no, especially - in this season of Lent, God is with us. 

Believe in the good news.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #166, Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days; #---, When Jesus came from Nazareth; #410, God is Calling through the Whisper

Sermon: Don't Blink

Grace Presbyterian Church

June 26, 2016, Pentecost 6C

2 Kings 2:1-14; Luke 9:51-62

 Don’t Blink

When last we left Elijah, the prophet had just been rebuked (mildly, to say the least) by the Lord for his pronounced myopia and “I alone am left” whine, not least by being ordered by God to go anoint his successor, a prophet named Elisha. Whether enthusiastically or not (after all, we don’t know if Elijah even knew Elisha at this point), Elijah at least obeyed that command, upon which Elisha left his farm and family (slaughtering twenty-four oxen on his way out, and giving the meat as a feast for the locals) to follow Elijah. Elijah did have a couple more prophetic encounters left in him, including his dramatic condemnation of King Ahab over his theft of the vineyard of a neighbor and one more destructive conflict with Ahab’s successor, Ahaziah. By the time we get to today’s reading, though, Elijah’s time is up, and Elisha seems to know it.

Our narrator certainly knows it, and is almost blasé about it at the beginning of our reading. How often do you see a sentence that begins “Now when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind” and continues in blasé fashion about Elijah and Elisha’s journey? I suppose after all the over-the-top things that have happened in Elijah’s term on earth, one more crazy thing doesn’t seem like much, but we are talking about a man who is going to be gathered up by a chariot of fire and whisked away. That seems worth a little bit of excitement. At any rate, it seems like everybody, including Elisha, knows that something extraordinary is about to happen.

And if he didn’t know it, there were plenty of others along the way to clue him in on the subject. As they travel, they encounter companies of prophets, and in each case members of those prophet groups take Elisha aside and say “you know he’s going away, don’t you?” and each time Elisha responds “yeah, yeah, I know, just hush” and determinedly plugs along with Elijah, even though Elijah keeps trying to put him off as well.

Remember, Elisha hasn’t really been the prophet yet. He has so far been functioning like an understudy, or perhaps like an Assistant Prophet of Yahwistic Theology still awaiting tenure. Even though God specifically commanded Elijah to go anoint Elisha as his successor, it’s not even clear that Elisha was a prophet at all before Elijah showed up and ordained him, so to speak. At the end of 1 Kings 19, when Elijah comes to anoint him, Elisha was plowing in the fields (his parents’ fields, evidently) with twelve yoke of oxen. And before following Elijah, Elisha wants to return home to say goodbye to mom and dad and to slaugher those oxen for a great feast. Doesn’t sound much like a prophet in the making, and his name doesn’t appear again in the Kings narrative until today’s reading, and yet here Elisha is, doggedly following his prophetic mentor to the last.

And this most likely wasn’t an easy life for which he was signing up. You might remember the gospel reading for today, in which Jesus warns those who say they want to follow him. “Nowhere to lay his head.” For that matter, no turning back – sounds like Jesus would have been less inclined to indulge Elisha’s wish to say goodbye to his parents and throw that ox barbecue. This is not a glamorous life. We have elevated these characters from the Bible to the status of heroes, but that wasn’t necessarily how they experienced life. It wasn’t easy, particularly when you had an angry king and queen hounding you as did Elijah. But, for all that, Elisha was still there, still following Elijah to the end.

So, let’s follow what he sees.

With some of those other prophets following along, Elijah and Elisha come to the Jordan River. Ii isn’t one of the Great Rivers of the World, but it’s not small. One doesn’t just wade across it, or swim across for that matter. Elisha watches as Elijah takes his mantle (the same one he had wrapped around his face on Horeb the mount of God, at the “sound of sheer silence”) and rolls it up to strike the water, causing it to part. No doubt Elisha and the others recall the Hebrew people crossing the Jordan under Joshua’s leadership as they finally approached their promised land after years in the wilderness. Elijah and Elisha cross, as the other prophets watch.

Finally Elijah gives up and asks Elisha what he wants. What do you say in such a situation? Many years before a newly elevated king, Solomon, was asked this question by no less than God, and had chosen to ask for wisdom. Here Elisha, asked by his prophetic mentor, chooses to ask for what he sees in Elijah, only more. Given what we’ve seen of Elijah this might seem a truly frightening prospect, but Elisha nonetheless sees in Elijah what he needs to step into his call. Except he doesn’t just ask for it, he asks for a “double portion.” He asks for more, for beyond. What makes a “double portion”? Is it more power, more ability to do great feats, more discernment about God’s call to a prophet? We don’t get an explanation. Nonetheless Elijah allows that Elisha’s request will be granted, but only if Elisha sees Elijah is he is taken away.

In other words, don’t look away at all. Don’t even blink. And certainly don’t look down at your cell phone. No pressure there, right?

And yet Elisha, determined as ever to fulfill this call he never expected, manages to keep his eyes on Elijah, until the fiery chariot and whirlwind sweep him away, finally fading from sight.

In a story like this one, with some utterly fantastic elements and a setting clearly unlike anything we will ever know, it can be difficult to relate. Chariots of Fire is a movie, not something we actually expect to see in real life. But Elisha does show us something we need to see, something we can in fact learn from even in our own very different modern times.

Elisha is wise enough to seek what his mentor had. It’s not that we need to think Elisha saw Elijah as perfect. We’ve seen the ways in which Elijah’s zeal sometimes outstripped his willingness to rely on God’s leading. And yet for all his excess, Elijah was still in touch with God, still a servant of Yahweh, and Elisha knew he needed that if he were to step into Elijah’s prophetic office.

But even at the same time he asked for Elijah’s blessing, he knew that wasn’t enough. He needed more. Elijah’s world was already shifting away. Ahab was no longer on the scene, and even his successor Ahaziah’s reign was short-lived. Israel would be challenged by different enemies. Elijah’s way wasn’t going to be sufficient. Elisha’s prophetic ministry was going to be a different one than Elijah’s, and in his request he was wise enough to grasp that.

We can learn from this. We, the modern church here in Gainesville and around the world, cannot cavalierly dispense with the foundation that our ancestors in the faith have built. It is not perfect. It is not foolproof. We as Christ’s church in God’s world have failed too many times in too many places in too many cases to think we’ve ever been perfect. We’ve endorsed too many evils in the name of our convenience or our status in society. We managed to read the Bible in such a way that we decided keeping slaves was o.k., for perhaps the most egregious example. That’s in our history.

But still, flawed as those saints may have been, they are the ones who have built the foundation on which we stand, and we cannot dispense with that. Neither, however, can we be bound to it.

The church of the nineteenth century was not sufficient to witness to the world of the twentieth century, and neither would the twentieth-century church will never be the church that successfully witnesses to the world of the twenty-first century. Just try telling someone they ought to be in church. They’ll ask you “why?” point blank. And if you don’t have a real, honest, authentic answer, you’ve lost them, probably for good. We don’t get to throw open the doors and just expect them to come. Doesn’t work.

We need more. We need things we’ve never understood before. Our challenges are different than those our fathers and mothers, or grandmothers and grandfathers, or any of the generations before us ever faced, and we need to be equipped and prepared to witness to unchanging truth in an ever-changing world.

Elisha did indeed step into Elijah’s prophetic call. Yet his prophetic ministry would be quite different from Elijah’s. No rash challenges to a horde of Baal prophets, no running from Israel to Sinai. And yet his work would see healings, health restored to barren and poisoned lands and wells, and even a powerful foreign general converted to the worship of Yahweh. Not bad.

Can we as a church, both local and universal, rise to that challenge? Can we be a church that witnesses to the eternal in an age like none we’ve known before? Can we speak truth, bear witness, tell good news to a world or a country or a city that is dramatically different that the one in which we grew up?

We would do well to ask for a double portion. Thanks be to God. Amen.

#405            Praise God for This Holy Ground

#810            When In the Night I Meditate

#282            Come Down, O Love Divine

#825            Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Well, you try to paint a man being carried away in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire...

Sermon: Not the Lone Ranger

Grace Presbyterian Church

June 19, 2016, Pentecost 5C

Psalm 77:1-2, 11-18; 1 Kings 19:1-16;

      Galatians 3:23-29

Not the Lone Ranger

I’m a little young to remember the TV show – not as young as some here, but a little young for that. And because of my history of studying and teaching music history, if you played me the musical theme to that show I’d be much more likely to identify it as the final theme from Gioacchino Rossini’s overture to his opera Guillaume Tell, or the “William Tell Overture.”

But, yeah, we know about the Lone Ranger.

Some of you might be mentally rehearsing the opening to that show right now: “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear … From out of the west with the speed of light and a hearty ‘hi-yo Silver!’” … Yes, I can see you, it’s showing on your faces… .

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the Lone Ranger, because of those old radio serials and the later television series, has been established for many decades as one of the iconic fictional characters in American popular culture.

Funny thing about the Lone Ranger, though; he was almost never really “lone.” The name, it turns out, is traceable to the character’s “origin story,” in which he was the lone survivor of a unit of Texas Rangers that was ambushed on a patrol. The five other members of the patrol, including its captain – the older brother of the eventual “Lone Ranger” – were killed. Rather than being truly “lone,” The Lone Ranger was instead virtually always accompanied by Tonto, a Native American who found the man barely alive after the ambush and nurtured him back to health. Again, I didn’t hear or watch the show, but it seems that most of what he accomplished required Tonto’s help.

Nonetheless, the image, or maybe the myth of the “Lone Ranger” as a singular individual who pursued justice on his own has persisted in the American mindset in particular, and has sometimes curdled into a image of a loner seeking revenge or retribution instead of justice (an appropriation that does no justice to the original character).

Though he lived innumerable centuries before the Lone Ranger mythology, the prophet Elijah seems sometimes to fall prey to the mindset of “going it alone.” You might remember from a few weeks ago, how Elijah took a simple command from God to announce the end of a drought and drew it out into an elaborate contest with the Baal prophets, culminating in the spectacular display of fire from heaven coming down and consuming all the waterlogged altars and soaked sacrifices. Afterwards, as the rain approached, Elijah (apparently now possessed by the super-speed of another modern hero, The Flash) ran ahead of King Ahab’s fully equipped chariot to the town of Jezreel, serving then as the seat of power in Israel.

And that’s where today’s reading kicks off, with Ahab whining to his wife Jezebel about what Elijah had done, and Jezebel issuing (via messenger) a not too veiled threat to Elijah: what you did to my Baal prophets, I’m gonna do to you.

And Elijah, the man who had been sustained in the wilderness by ravens, who had seen God miraculously extend meal and oil for weeks for the widow and her son, who had challenged the Baal prophets and won, who had slaughtered all those Baal prophets in triumph and humiliated the king … now, Elijah was scared. And Elijah ran. To be blunt, he ran like a scared chicken.

You can see the account of Elijah’s flight, falling asleep in despair only to be awakened, fed, and sent on his way (not once, but twice); arriving at Horeb the mount of God (in Exodus, that mountain was called Sinai), and repeating what almost sounds like a rehearsed, pre-packaged answer to God:

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.

Elijah says this two times: first, when he comes to the cave on Horeb the mount of God, and then after the progression described in verses 11-12; a great wind, a strong earthquake, and a mighty fire, a scene not unlike that at the end of the psalm we read earlier. But God was in none of those; only in the “sound of sheer silence” did Elijah discern the presence of the Lord.

So somehow, the bombast and tumult of the mountaintop display, not completely unlike the bombast and tumult Elijah himself had initiated back at Mount Carmel, somehow doesn’t seem to get through to Elijah, for afterwards when he is asked a second time “what are you doing here, Elijah?” he responds the exact same way as before:

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.

He doesn’t get it. Maybe if Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio with its vivid and exhilarating depiction of that scene had been available, Elijah might have had a better time understanding it. (Insert misguided attempt to sing here.) But Elijah doesn’t get it, so God has to hit him over the head with it, if Elijah is ever going to get over his severe case of Lone Ranger Syndrome.

First of all, we the reader know that Elijah has been fundamentally incorrect all along. Back in the first verses of chapter 18 we read of Obadiah, a servant in Ahab’s court who despite the threats of the royal family had secreted away a hundred prophets loyal to the Lord, hiding them in caves to thwart Jezebel’s plans to kill them. That’s at least a hundred and one examples of how Elijah was wrong when he claimed that “he alone was left,” and Elijah knows this because Obadiah told him to his face in 18:13. God then, in 19:18 just outside our reading, points to seven thousand loyal Israelites who have not bowed the knee to Baal, seven thousand faithful that God would preserve.

But maybe the unkindest cut of all comes in verse 16. Not only was Elijah not the Lone Ranger, he wasn’t even irreplaceable. Another prophet would take his place, and it was Elijah’s job to go anoint him. If that’s not a direct slap in the face against Elijah’s pity party I don’t know what else it could be.

Now God still had work for Elijah to do, but God needed Elijah focused on God’s call to him, and not hung up on his self-obsessed and self-possessed despair. It’s not hard to extrapolate the lesson for us from such a story: the same thing applies to us.

It’s not uncommon for us to fall into that pit. Australian biblical scholar and pastor Howard Wallace points out that Elijah needs to be released from the zealousness and self-control that had ruled his previous service and learn that it was the word of the Lord, which sometimes did not speak in the wind or earthquake or fire, to which he needed to submit his prophetic witness.[i] We’re convinced it’s all up to us. No one else is going to step up, it’s all on our shoulders. Yes, it’s easy to slip into that particular quality of despair, but it can be possibly the worst place for a follower of Christ to end up, It can go either of two different ways, both disastrous and potentially destructive.

This has been a week where perhaps we’ve felt that despair and sense of aloneness, in the wake of the horrific murders of forty-nine patrons in a nightclub in Orlando patronized primarily by gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer persons (and primary a Latino/Latina audience on that particular night). That event happened only a few days before the first anniversary of another infamous shooting, of nine members of an African-American congregation in Charleston. In the face of such horrific evil, it’s not hard to slip into that despair that no one is faithful anymore, no one will stand up and do what needs to be done.

Of course, on the flip side of that “I alone am left” mentality is the misguided, vengeful would-be Lone Ranger who takes up weapons to commit the murders, because he believes blacks are inferior or gets offended by the sight of two men kissing. “I alone am left” is not just a despairing place; it can be a pathway to acts of unspeakable evil. Even Elijah has already shown himself capable of grotesque violence in the throes of this mindset, commanding the slaughter of all those Baal prophets back in verse 18.

We can’t go there. We must not fall into that mindset (which has nothing of God in it) that the problems of the world are ours to solve by any means necessary. We also can’t be the one who is paralyzed by grief and despair, unable to take up the work of God’s kingdom. We need God, we need Christ, and we need each other too much.

The passage from Paul’s epistle to the Galatians reminds us that for all the ways we differ, God insists on making us one. Not making us “the same,” but one. We are one in Christ. We can’t go thinking we’re the Lone Ranger, folks; if we are truly following Christ, we literally can’t be alone – it is not possible. We are never abandoned, no matter how much we may feel like it.

Speaking of that masked man, besides Tonto, the Lone Ranger as originally written was bound to a strict moral code, one which governed all his actions and prevented him from veering off into revenge or other departures from his mission. For us, our ground is simpler, and yet amazingly complex; our “moral code,” our ground is Christ. It is in Christ, after all, that we are never alone; it is in Christ that we are one.

Even in dark and despairing days, we’re not alone in this, friends. Let’s not act like it.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

---

[i] http://hwallace.unitingchurch.org.au/WebOTcomments/OrdinaryC/Pent41Kgs19.html, accessed 17 June 2016.

Hymns (From Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#4                Holy God, We Praise Your Name

#317            In Christ There Is No East or West

#322            We Are One In Christ Jesus

#824            There Is a Place of Quiet Rest

Yep, there's Tonto. See, he's really not "lone."

Sermon: Calling Down Fire

Grace Presbyterian Church

May 29, 2016, Pentecost 2C

1 Kings 18:20-40; Galatians 1:1-7;

            Luke 7:1-10

Calling Down Fire

Elijah is, to put it mildly, one of the more difficult characters in scripture to comprehend. He seems to come out of nowhere; unlike many of the major characters of Hebrew Scripture like Moses or David, we don’t get much of a life story for him. His presence in biblical story is pretty brief; a few chapters at the end of 1 Kings and the very beginning of 2 Kings. He is attributed feats of superhuman strength (presumably by divine favor, although it isn’t always made clear) that would qualify him as a character in a Marvel superhero movie. And when his time comes, instead of dying like a mere mortal, he is caught up for a ride in a flaming chariot.

His reputation lives on after his death, or final chariot ride. He shows up along with Moses in gospel accounts of the Transfiguration, and his name is invoked at Jesus’s crucifixion, when someone from the crowd wonders if Elijah will come to save him. In modern Jewish practice a chair is reserved for Elijah at circumcision services, and at a Seder meal the door is opened and Elijah is invited in, and a cup of wine is set at a place at the table reserved for him. As a Jewish friend of ours pointed out to me, though, Elijah never shows up and the wine never gets consumed – a waste of good wine.

A figure like Elijah can take on legendary status – it can be very hard for us to conceive of Elijah as human, with all the flaws and faults that implies, when he is calling down fire, outrunning a chariot, running from Israel to Sinai, or disappearing in a trail of flame. That would be a mistake, though; even in his great moments Elijah displays flaws from which we would do well to learn, if only to learn to avoid.

The story covered by today’s lectionary reading is probably the most famous part of Elijah’s narrative, except possibly for the fiery-chariot departure from the planet. It’s the kind of scene that big old-fashioned Hollywood biblical epics are made of: a dramatic confrontation; wild, frenzied action (particularly on the part of the Baal prophets, in their desperation to get a response from their nonexistent god); a charismatic and slightly crazy lead in confrontation with the political authority of his day; and a spectacular climax (with superior dramatic buildup) that would be a great opportunity for the special-effects department to do their thing. In fact, it rather amazes me that the story of Elijah hasn’t been made into such a movie somewhere along the way, although it does get a good dramatic treatment in Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio about the prophet, Elijah.

Still, though, if we poke around the ends and the corners of this account, there are a few parts that should give us pause.

First, though, it’s worth setting the scene. Israel (the northern kingdom at this point in biblical history, in contrast to the southern kingdom Judah) has, largely under the influence of Israel’s king Ahab and his foreign-born queen Jezebel, taken up the worship of the idol Baal, a figure in non-Jewish religions to which is attributed power over rain. In response to this, Elijah predicted a drought to fall on Israel, which indeed happened; by the time of today’s reading the drought has been in effect for three years. Elijah has first been in hiding in the wilderness, and later with a family in Zarepath, in the region of Sidon, outside Israel (next week’s scripture reading will cover this part of the story).

Now it was no new thing for the people of God to go astray and give their homage to idols. Nor is it a thing confined only to the darker past of such corners of Hebrew Scripture as this. They many not be carved wood or stone, and we may not trust them to provide rain for our crops, but even today the people of God are far too prone to give their allegiance and their trust in false gods, willingly supplied by the culture and society in which we live.

Those of you who follow college sports saw an example of just such a thing in this week’s headlines about Baylor University, which initiated proceedings to dismiss its president, athletic director, and football coach in the wake of an investigation revealing failure to take seriously numerous allegations of sexual abuse of female students on the campus, by male students including but not limited to football players. Despite its self-described status as a Christian institution of higher learning, Baylor apparently tolerated one of the most vile and unchristian, not to mention criminal, actions one human being can inflict upon another, apparently blinded by the idol of athletic prowess and success according to a very worldly status. Idols take many forms these days, but don’t ever be deceived into thinking they don’t exist anymore just because nobody’s physically bowing down to carved wooden statues.

But back to Elijah. God does give a command to Elijah in the face of the three-year drought, but nothing so elaborate as you might think. In 18:1, God issues this word to Elijah: “Go, present yourself to Ahab; I will send rain on the earth.”

That’s it.

Nothing about a big altar-burning contest. Nothing about any kind of big display, or show of force. Just a command to go to the king. But from this Elijah has extrapolated this elaborate contest. When he does meet Ahab, in verses 17-19, he doesn’t even say anything about rain coming. Ahab tosses off an insult at Elijah, calling him “troubler of Israel,” and Elijah rants back and challenges Ahab to the contest with the prophets of Baal.

One can look at this a few ways. Elijah is simply confident in God to support him. Or Elijah has an ego the size of a planet to think he can challenge the king and have God automatically back him up. Or Elijah has a hair-temper trigger and goes off half-cocked rather easily. Or Elijah has the mindset of a Celebrity Pastor; why simply proclaim the good news when you can put on a monumental show?

To be honest, I think there’s something to be said for the latter view. After all, Elijah doesn’t just challenge Ahab to the contest, but makes a theatrical event out of it at every step. The way Elijah mocked and derided the Baal prophets during “their turn,” you’d think he took taunting lessons from professional athletes. And when it’s finally his turn, he doesn’t just call out to God to consume the fire. Noooooo…first he has to make a great display of drenching the altar thoroughly, using an amount of water that makes very little sense at the height of a three-year drought.

And yet… “…the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench.”

Elijah would hardly be the first or last such leader to be subject to temper, or excess, or theatrical overload. Our reading from Galatians captures just a small part of the vitriol Paul unleashes upon the believers in that community over their being misled by religious leaders who taught them rather less good news that Paul and his company had taught. His anger at their straying is palpable and only builds until finally, at 3:1, he exclaims, “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” But at least he doesn’t have anybody killed.

There it is, in verse 40, which the assigned lectionary would have me leave out; those prophets of Baal are rounded up and executed. Let me put aside all delicacy and say bluntly (as much as it is a shame that this even has to be said, but such is the world in which we live) that this is not good, and it certainly isn’t commanded of God. There are plenty of disturbing passages in the Old Testament, back in books before 1 Kings, in which God really is portrayed as ordering the king or the prophet to slaughter their enemies (usually an opposing army, though), but there is no such mandate from God here; remember, all Elijah was told to do was to present himself to the king, and that rain would soon some. Everything else here is Elijah’s doing.

Some scholars argue that Elijah is taking retribution on Jezebel for killing the prophets of the Lord, as noted in 18:4. But since when is retribution Elijah’s to take? Violence in return for violence only guarantees more violence, as Elijah himself will find out in the next chapter. This weekend, and the Memorial Day that is observed this weekend, should serve as a reminder of that hard fact, if nothing else. In a day when far too many people are far too ready to kill in the name of God, this bit of “inspiration” from Elijah we don’t need.

The story of Jesus and the centurion found in the day’s gospel reading stands in stark contrast to the Elijah story. First of all, rather than the putative people of God straying from faith, the protagonist is a Roman centurion, an officer of an occupying army, who shows greater faith, according to Jesus, than he had seen in Israel. Secondly, it’s worth noting that Jesus did not consider it beneath himself to go to meet this centurion and the slave who was “close to death.” Rather than one to be destroyed, Jesus saw one to be extended the healing, the wholeness, and the love that it was his mission to show to God’s people. And in the centurion’s clumsy if earnest equation of Jesus’s power to that of a higher military authority, Jesus found a seed of faith that he went out of his way to respect.

Today it seems that Christianity bears maybe too much resemblance to the wrong examples in this story. We get led astray by false teachers, like the Galatians, or we vent our anger at other Christians like Paul (who, it should be said, did eventually get himself under control). We take up destructive idols like the people of Israel, or we appoint ourselves executors of God’s wrath like Elijah.

There’s only one worthy of our worship. We may not erect idols of wood or stone and bow down and worship, but don’t let’s kid ourselves; we create and adulate plenty of idols, and I don’t just mean the ones on that TV singing competition. Our adulation of wealth, or influence, or status; our fanatical support of a political party or figure; even excessive allegiance to a sports team or league or game – any of these, or any kind of overzealous allegiance, can become a false god, claiming adoration and emulation and worship that belongs only to God. It’s not for nothing that John Calvin described human nature as a “perpetual factory of idols”. [i] And yet the overzealous avenger is no better a position to take, bringing only destruction and death rather than life and healing.

As much as we may respect and admire and even learn from the likes of Elijah or Paul, Moses or David or the Apostles, we have only one Person in our Bible who is worthy of emulation or imitation, and most certainly only one Person worthy of worship; the one who frees us, both from the idols to which we would enslave ourselves and the claims of retribution by which we would destroy ourselves. “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God…”[ii]

Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[i] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 11:8.

[ii] The Nicene Creed.

Hymns (GtG): "Sing Praise to God, Who Reigns Above" (645); "O My Soul, Bless Your Redeemer" (439), "O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee" (738); "Hear the Good News of Salvation" (441)

Elijah, what a showoff...