May 29, 2016
1 Kings 18:20-21, 22-29, 30-39
Galatians 1:1-12
This story from 1 Kings is not my favorite. In a way it feels very primitive to me, representing the kind of faith that doesn’t stand up to the tests of life. This is a God that the biblical writers preferred to believe in more than the God that actually existed for them. That said, it isn’t wise to glibly skip over the passages you don’t like all that much. Though idolatry doesn’t look to us now like it looked back then, it is still very much an issue and scripture’s concern over it remains relevant.
Ahab was the king of Israel, and Elijah wasn’t a supporter. The reason is that Ahab seemed a bit more than willing to accommodate the local Canaanite gods, or “Baals.” According to the author, he worshiped Baal and even erected an altar to Baal. So, it wasn’t simply a matter of living peaceably with the neighbors, which maybe Elijah wouldn’t have tolerated anyway; it was a matter of losing oneself and sacrificing one’s God in favor of the neighbors’. When you are God’s king, YHWH’s king, this is ill advised. Elijah stirs the pot by making this clear to Ahab, and then he orchestrates what amounts to a bull burning contest between himself, “the sole prophet of Israel,” and the 450 prophets of Baal. You heard the reading, and I won’t repeat it all to you, but in the end Baal never turns up to light the sacrifice, while YHWH’s fire falls from heaven, consuming the bull, the wood, the stones, the dust, and even the water in the trenches. Elijah wins. YHWH wins in dramatic fashion.
A friend of mine, and a colleague who has been in ministry for over 50 years came to lectionary group the other day and shared one of his few remaining memories from his seminary days. They had a big fancy preacher (famous at the time) come to school and preach on this text. The preacher’s faith didn’t quite pair with my friend’s, but the message stayed with him all this time. “You have God, and you have Baal,” the preacher said. “And, you have to choose. You can worship God. Or, you can worship Baal… and go to hell. Amen.”
Not quite how I would say it, but depending on how he meant it, I might actually agree. If he meant, “only those who believe in God as I believe in God will be spared from the fires of hell,” then I am not on board. But, if he meant, “You can give yourself over to God, or you can give yourself over to lesser substitutes, things which claim to satisfy, things which claim to offer meaning, peace, purpose, and an enduring sense of self, but never can. And if you do you will end up living in a hellish kind of wandering, unquenchable, egocentrism.” If that is what he is saying, I think he has a point.
David Lose was one of the speakers at the Festival of Homiletics. He used to be the president of Luther Seminary, but now he seems to be employed as the chief brain behind the merger of two other seminaries. If so, I believe those seminaries are in good hands! He was very engaging and compelling, and I hope to be able to introduce more of his thought and work into the life of our church.
He began his lecture with a quote, which read something like this: “The world is not made up of molecules. It is made up of stories.” He shared some good evidence of how this is true; the easiest and most relatable of which had to do with his children. They always wanted to hear stories, not new and different stories, but the same old stories about their mom and dad as kids, about their grandparents as parents, about something crazy that dad did as a kid and how grandpa handled it. They didn’t ask for the stories (and they didn’t listen to them) in order to find new plot twists; rather, they listened because the stories reminded them of who they were, who their family was, and how to be in relationship to the people who gave context to their lives. Our stories do this for us. They tell us who we are.
Lose’s suggestion is that the church has forgotten its story. We are bombarded with many other inviting and distracting alternatives. One of those stories is entitled, “You are what you own.” I won’t rail against materialism right now, but I’ll say that I’m pretty sure its effect has reached us all. Here’s another: “Image is everything.” It’s not who you are; it is how you look. And, it’s not just how you look; it’s how you look to others. How about this story?: “There is not enough.” Life is a fight against scarcity, a battle to obtain, protect, and preserve what you’ve obtained. His final example is a story called, “Fear.” You should live in fear. You are under attack. He noted how political leaders through the years illustrated a key awareness of how easy it was to control people once people believed that this was their dominant story.
The church, the people who make up the church, have succumbed to these stories. These stories shape us more profoundly than our own story, a story that dramatically contradicts the others, saying that by the love of God you ARE worthy, you HAVE enough, you ARE TOTALLY enough, and, my people, BE NOT AFRAID.
In sacrificing our own narrative we’ve sacrificed ourselves and our God as well. In taking up other defining stories we’ve taken up their idols too.
Paul is dealing with this very issue in today passage from Galatians. Paul’s letters generally include long introductory sections and extended words of thanks and affirmation for the churches to which he is writing. But, not to the churches in Galatia. Not in this letter. No, here, Paul is mad. “What have you done!?” says Paul. “Why have you abandoned the very faith through which you received the gift of God’s Spirit and the presence of Christ’s love?” “Why are you letting it go for something less?”
It isn’t exactly clear what the corrupting influences were within the churches of Galatia, but it seems that the message of radical, extravagant, untamed, holy grace that Paul taught and preached was now being qualified by others who claimed that the Gentile churches couldn’t remain Gentile. Their status in the God story was contingent on their willingness to follow some of the laws of the Jerusalem church, that is, the first Christians who thought of their Christianity as a particular way of being Jewish.
But, you see, Paul was a missionary to the Gentile world. His great discovery, which was the same discovery that Peter made in Acts, was that the good news of the resurrection of Christ was good news for all. The resurrection of Christ was a revelation to the world that this God of undying holy love was the God of all peoples, all were invited into the story of a God whose reality was unbound love. To be sure, Paul believe that faithfulness to this love would be expressed organically in moral codes of living, but what he couldn’t tolerate was contingencies on grace. A gospel of contingencies was no gospel at all. A law-first gospel, or an anything-first gospel, was not the God-first gospel that gave them life, and hope, and the assurance of a new and beautiful story.
Writes Professor Wendy Farley, “In both Corinth and Galatia, Paul resisted teachers who privileged a particular practice as essential to Christian life. In Galatia, it was Jewish custom; in Corinth it was prophecy. Although the debate was over different practices, the underlying problem was similar. It is not that Paul stands in the middle mediating between law and prophecy; rather, he challenges the kind of piety that makes anything other than the graciousness of divine live a marker of the gospel… Love makes one a Christian. It is love that justifies, that makes us right. That love is not conditioned by anything but God’s own self-initiating love for humanity. If we miss this, for Paul, we miss everything.”[1]
Everything rides on this love. Everything rides on grace. We have secular narratives of un-grace, and we our own Christian narratives of un-grace. These were the ones that really made Paul angry. How could we… how can we still… let such an amazing love story between our God and our souls go to waste?
I’ll tell you that I believe completely in this love story, and I’ll confess to you also that there are plenty of times when I don’t feel it as I want to; plenty of times when I want the transforming, healing, heart-warming, compassion-inducing love of God to show up, to change me, to guide me, to do whatever, and yet I feel stuck with my own imperfect, conflicted self. We have this love story, but the question for those of us who wish to live it is: how do we receive it?
It’s funny, but the answer came to me a few different times throughout the course of last week. Essentially, it is this: to experience intimacy with God we must practice it with God’s people. Here are words from one of Richard Rohr’s daily reflections. “Relationships, experiences, and mirroring change you much more than ideas. You cannot really do something until you have seen someone else do it. You do not know what patience is until you have met one truly patient person. You do not know what love is until you have observed how a loving person loves. We hold great power for one another – for good and for ill.”
Our story, the great defining story of our lives, is given to us by God. If we are to know it; if we are to feel it; we must practice it together.
[1] FOTW, Year C, Volume 3, page 90.