|
The Power We Are Given
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 27, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Kings 19:1-18 Acts 2:1-21
If you have been reading along in I Kings this week, you have found yourself in the midst of a nation’s downfall. Solomon, the last ruler of the united kingdom, is dead; however the effect of Solomon’s sin lingers. Specifically, Solomon’s zipper problems with foreign women that found him also flirting with foreign gods have cast a long shadow of unfaithfulness over the now divided nations of Israel and Judah. Time and again, in what remains of I Kings and what lies ahead in II Kings, those in power lead the people to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord: murder and mayhem, apostasy and conspiracy, aggression and greed litter the pages of this holy history. “A divine effort that, by the Bible’s reckoning, has lasted for more than a millennium,” writes Jack Miles, “ends in wreckage, slaughter and the ignominy of exile.” I promise that before too many more pages you too, along with Israel, will begin to long for a Messiah, for a ruler sent by God who will rule in righteousness. Actually I suspect even if you are not reading along in the Bible but only reading the morning newspaper, you have been given an inkling of the same longing! But instead of a perfect ruler, God begins to send prophets—the first being Elijah—to bear witness to the truth of God’s purposes over and against the pretensions of human power. In fact when King Ahab sees Elijah coming to meet him, Ahab calls out “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” By the way, how conveniently we forget the prophetic tradition that sends the faithful to speak a troubling word to those in power, preferring instead the church’s priestly role of blessing the present order, no matter how contrary that order has become to what God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human. Sent by God to trouble the king, Elijah begins with the king’s take on religion. The prophets of Baal assemble on Mt. Carmel--all four hundred fifty of them--to best the prophet theologically. Strains of their beseeching from Mendelssohn’s Elijah ring in the ear as they cry: “‘O Baal, answer us!’ But there was no voice, no answer.” Then Elijah carefully repairs the alter of the Lord and prays, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel…Answer me, O Lord, answer me so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” God answers with a fire that consumes the water-doused offering. The people believe but Ahab’s Baal-believing wife Jezebel vows in response to kill Elijah, causing the prophet to flee in fear. He goes a day’s journey into the wilderness where he asks God to take his life. Instead he is fed and called to stand on Mt. Horeb. God appears to the shaken prophet in a scene that some contend is meant to distinguish Elijah from Moses; others say the story is written to present Elijah as a second Moses. In either case, the God that Elijah encounters on this mountaintop does not coincide with the God Moses once met on Mt. Sinai. “What are we to make of the fact that all the features of [God’s appearance] to Moses—the wind, the earthquake, the fire—are mentioned and then rejected?” asks Miles. “It is out of the question that the ‘soft murmuring sound’ [the still small voice…the sound of sheer silence] is intended to signal gentleness.” In fact, the next scene involves God on the side of Israel in a bloody conflict with Syria. Still God’s character has taken a significant turn! Miles thinks God’s presence in the sheer silence signals a skepticism creeping into the biblical narrative concerning God’s power--or I would say concerning the nature of God’s power in human history. God’s power, so spectacularly present at Sinai, is absent on Mt. Horeb. Even so, Elijah veils his face before the stillness of God’s voice. “What does his gesture mean?” Miles asks. “Is the stillness, the Lord’s message to him, a revision? Is it a confession? How fully does the Lord really control the course of events?” It is a question we ask not only when the fate of the nation hangs in the balance, but when the fate of those dearest to our hearts seem to be held in life by a gossamer thread. Notice, however, that the skepticism is not Elijah’s. The prophet voices no doubt as to God’s power over nations and peoples. Rather, “what makes the skepticism…so bold is that it is [God]…who expresses it. It is [God] who removes himself from the wind, the earthquake, the fire and…who, in a soft murmuring sound, decrees a future that does not come to pass.” Miles’ literate reading notwithstanding, skepticism is not what I hear in God’s address. Rather I am taken with a change of strategy on God’s part. How is it that Israel will come to hear God’s voice in the events that send Israel inexorably into exile? In the first place, I think because God’s voice is in the sheer silence, it is a voice now meant only for the ears of those whom God has called to be witnesses. God speaks, but speaks in a voice heard by a chosen few. Second, in the ear of the prophets God’s voice sounds more like an international arbiter than a nationalistic warrior, says Miles. Often God speaks to clue the prophet in on the fact that God is sending nation against nation to the end that God’s purposes will prevail. The God’s whose cosmic power created the heavens and the earth and whose Baal-like power brought Israel victory against every foe is increasingly the God who is sovereign over all nations and rulers. Third, God’s alliance in any given conflict may be with Israel’s enemy if such an alliance will accomplish God’s purposes for justice in human history or will judge the nations—including Israel—with righteousness! In fact, notes Miles with his literary eye cocked to the text, “It was a bold literary stroke to turn the historical victories of Assyria and Babylon into the actions of a protagonist, the Lord God, enforcing the terms of a prior agreement with his [now] antagonist, Israel.” This is the turn in God’s character missed by most in power who uncritically would claim God’s imprimatur for their own self-interested politics. The American theologian that best grasped this turn and so understood the complexity of God’s relationship to power politics in the last century surely was Reinhold Niebuhr. In yesterday’s New York Times, when asked what insights of Niebuhr’s are most pertinent for the nation’s public life today, Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York cited three: “His sense that elements of self-interest lurk even in the best of human actions; his recognition that a special synergy of selfishness operates in collectivities like nations; his critique of Americans’ belief in their country’s innocence and exceptionalism—the idea that we are a redeemer nation going abroad never to conquer, only to liberate.” Make no mistake: Niebuhr was a realist when it came to the evil incarnated in power that finally would not be defeated without the use of power. Yet he was also insistent that the human use of power could never be equated with the exercise of God’s power. “To declare the omnipotence of God is to insist that the ultimate power which maintains the order of the world is superior to all subordinate powers and majesties, which tend to create anarchy by making themselves the premature and inadequate centres of order in the world.” But Niebuhr says more: “…despite the certainty of Biblical faith that God is all-powerful, [faith] looks upon the crucified Messiah as the final revelation of the divine character and the divine purpose.” Relative to all earthly powers, the still small voice of God heard by the prophets of old is the same voice [a Word made flesh] speaking in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ against the pretensions of all earthly powers: the power of weakness up against the weakness of power. Return in your mind to Israel’s longing for God to send a Messiah who would rule in righteousness, and juxtapose that longing to a powerless man who would not even save himself from death on a cross. We long for one who will combine perfect power and perfect goodness, says Niebuhr, when “always in human history the same power which maintains order in the world also introduces injustice into the order by reason of the selfish use [rulers make of their power].” “For this reason,” the same reason God came to Elijah in a still small voice, I think, “the revelation of the divine goodness in history must be powerless….No human cause or interest gains a triumph through Him; all human interests and claims are revealed as partially in contradiction to the divine goodness because ‘all seek their own.’” To wit, says Niebuhr, “the best law of [Jesus’] day (Roman law) and the best religion of His day (Hebraic monotheism) are implicated in the crucifixion…. Christ is thus doubly an offence to the common sense of [humankind]….He is an offence…because He convicts the righteous as well as the unrighteous by his impotent goodness.” How curious, then, that the Spirit promised in power by Him whose power was made perfect in weakness is a Spirit that comes, according to Luke, in earthquake, wind and fire at Pentecost! Surely this manner of appearing is no coincidence! Has God’s strategy with this newly formed community reverted to the strategy of a warrior God who will be, this time, on the side of the Christian nations? Yet this understanding could not be farther from the truth Luke’s story means to tell. That God’s voice has returned in wind, earthquake and fire signals God’s intention to speech not quietly to the prophetic few but publicly to the gathered many in these latter days, and to speak in a voice that flies in the face of the absolute claims of race and nation, clan and creed, division and dynasty. Poured out on Parthians, Medes and Elamites, those who live in Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus and the province of Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Cyrene in Libya, and residents of Rome, Jews as well as proselytes, Cretans and Arabs, these remain themselves in their particularity and yet are given, by the power of the Spirit, an “unbelievable commonality of understanding” writes theologian Michael Welker. “What does this mean?” asked those addressed on that day. It means, says Peter, God’s Spirit has been poured out on all flesh…and they shall prophecy. As Moses long ago hoped, finally the prophetic office falls upon us all: sons and daughters, young and old, slaves and free, men and women. All who are given the power of God’s Spirit shall be none other than the troublers of this present order, witnesses to the God whose power is made perfect in weakness! Thanks be to God. |