“The Kings and Us: the limits of power - crocodiles and butterflies”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Text: 1 Kings 21:1-21
There is a very famous motorway in the United Kingdom that runs between the northern cities of Leeds and Manchester. It is known as the M62. It is usually famous for congestion, but there is one other outstanding characteristic of that motorway, and any of you who have ever driven it at any time in your life would never forget it if you had seen it. It is simply this: in the middle of the motorway, there is a farmhouse.
There is not a normal barricade, not a fence, not girders, not even a grass verge… just a farmhouse! As you come over the hill, after having been on a normal highway similar to the 401, all of a sudden you have to detour around a farm and a farmhouse stuck in the middle of the motorway. It is the most bizarre thing you have ever seen in your life. The farm is called Stott Hill Farm and the hill it is on is known as Windy Hill.
The story went - and it was one that I knew growing up as a boy - that the owner of the farmhouse refused to move when the country came along and said that they were going to expropriate the land and put in a great big motorway. It was the story of a defiant farmer who was going to stand against the power of the British Commonwealth, and no matter what money was thrown his way, no matter what powers of the law to expropriate land were brought upon him he was not going to move.
It was a great story: The little guy standing against the great, big government. It just makes the juices of your body boil up with excitement! There is only one problem. It had nothing to do with that at all. In fact, the reason the farm is there is a geological one, not a geographical one or a political one. It is because they simply could not build the motorway through that section, so they just allowed the farmer to keep his house there.
Now there is a great, big fence around it because there were truckers who when they broke down would always go to the farmhouse asking to make a phone call or something, and it became irritating to the farmer, but it is not a particularly glamorous story. It is actually about rocks and motorways, and nothing to do with defiant little farmers against the empire. But isn't it a great story?
Who doesn't like the little guy standing against the big and the powerful? Who doesn't identify in a story with the one who is not supposed to win but does against great odds? There is something in the human heart and psyche that makes us love the triumph of the little guy.
If you want such a story and you want to get really upset, then look at the one from today's reading. It is a great story from the Bible: The story of Naboth's vineyard. It is the second in what is known as the Elijah cycle, which I began last week and will conclude next week. They are marvellous stories of the encounter between King Ahab, the King of the Israelites, the northern kingdom, and the power of Elijah, the great prophet of God.
In this particular story, we have this character, Naboth, who owns a vineyard. Clearly, it must have been a fruitful vineyard, a very good vineyard, and the king, thinks it would be a wonderful place to grow his crops. So, King Ahab, who was of the line of the dynasty named Omri, decided that he wanted to have the vineyard. He did all the right things. He went to Naboth and he made him an offer to buy the vineyard, and he would even move him to another vineyard and he would take care of him. But, Naboth wouldn't move.
On the surface it might appear that Naboth was simply intransigent and not willing to accept a good deal, but that is to misunderstand the law of Israel. The law of Israel suggests that if you have been given a piece of land that land is inviolable - it is not only your land, it is the land of the ancestor who got it in the first place - and it is the land that you must hand to your family. As a good father, Naboth wanted to assure that his successors would have the vineyard that he himself had received. Ahab knew that. Ahab knew the law. But Ahab was still persistent. Then, he went home and he just sulked. Kings do! “I didn't get my vineyard,” he says to his wife Jezebel, “and I am upset about it.”
Jezebel enters the scene. “Don't worry about it, Ahab. If you are weak, I'll take care of it.” And, take care of it she did! What a woman that Jezebel! Everything that nightmares are made of! Jezebel decided that she was going to trap Naboth and she did it, ironically, by using the law of Israel. The irony of this is overwhelming. She is a Phoenician who worships the God of Baal. She has no time for Israel's God. Still, she knows enough of the law, and her friends told her about it, so she traps Naboth. This is what she did.
She got two ne'er do wells to swear that Naboth was blaspheming God and the King, and that was a punishment worthy of death. So, she got these two criminals (does this sound like another story somewhere?) to sit on either side of Naboth and swear that he was in fact someone who was idolatrous, using God's name in vain and speaking against the king. She had this particular meeting at a dinner and had this publicly demonstrated and all we are told is that Naboth was stoned to death, the punishment for idolatry, the punishment for not believing in God and not being loyal to the King. Naboth died.
You know, she wasn't satisfied to have Naboth die; she wanted to make sure he couldn't pass on this land again to a future generation. And so, Ahab walks on to the scene and gladly takes over Naboth's vineyard, thanking God for his wife Jezebel, who gave him a wonderful Father's Day gift - Naboth's vineyard!
Enter Elijah, the unexpected one. Elijah breaks on to the scene, takes Ahab to one side and gives him a piece of God's mind. “What are you doing? Why have you done this? You know you are not supposed to do this!” Elijah lets Ahab know. Ahab knows: Jezebel might have done the dirty work, but Ahab had allowed it to happen. Ahab was spineless and weak. Ahab didn't take the law seriously.
Ahab didn't stand up against the pernicious, undermining work of Jezebel. He had been complicit by his silence. Then, Elijah says something to him that is earth-shaking. He says, “You have sold yourself to the cause for evil.” This powerful statement by Elijah went to the heart of Ahab, and Ahab repented, but it was too late for Naboth, who had lost his vineyard and his life.
This story has it all: intrigue, lies, deceit, murder, repentance, the little guy suffering, the big guy winning. It is amazing this story! It has it all! But, does it have anything for you? By all means, it does! It shows to every one of us who reads Naboth's vineyard the dangers of losing your soul, of losing yourself. Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16, put it this way, “What profit has a person if they gained the whole world, but they lose their soul?” And, by “soul” Jesus was not talking about one's eternal destiny or something that lives on after us. He means yourself, your very being. What profits you if you gain all of this, but you lose your very self? That is what Ahab had done.
Do we sometimes face the danger of losing ourselves? Are we not tempted to do so when we placed our love of money ahead of people? And, is this not a good day, on Father's Day, to think about the importance of being, as Naboth was, a good father, thinking about those who would follow him. And, is it not incumbent on fathers to think about the effect of their time and their example and what they are doing in the life of their children. And, is it not important to remember this salient fact: Never ever place the pursuit of money ahead of the needs of family.
Never place the pursuit of financial gain ahead of the needs of people who are around us. But you know sometimes we even do this in a collective way. We have the love of money ahead of principles. I think it is fitting that there has been a great deal of coverage over the last few days about South Africa and the cities in South Africa and the stories of those cities. There was one that was covered ever so slightly by Rosie DiManno in the Toronto Star this week about a place called District Six. This is the famous place situated at the foot of Table Mountain in the heart of the City of Cape Town.
During the 1960s 60,000 people lived there. It was a mixed race community, made up of Malays, Cape coloureds, the people from India, some Afrikaners, and some English-speaking whites. It was a strange mix of people, a sort of a mosaic. But, when the Group Areas Act came in under Apartheid, it was deemed that a place like that did not fit in to the system of racial segregation. So, the South African government systematically shut down District Six. It moved 60,000 people from their homes, bulldozed many of them, and turned it into a polytechnic institute and called it Zonnenbloem. Those people that lived there moved into racially segregated communities on what are known as the Cape Flats, a desolate area.
Sometimes even the pursuit of political goals can drive people from their land, where we place the acquisition of land, or money, as being above the needs of people. It is a story that has happened on almost every continent of the world: from Afriqueville in Halifax to native issues in this country to places all over the world where people have been moved and shuffled around for the sake of something that is deemed more important than they are. Oh, we do it collectively! Naboth's vineyard is not just a moment in biblical history; it is an archetype of the dangers of power.
We see it in other areas. We see it when we love expedience over the word of God. When we follow the love and the pleasure of our own ideas at the expense of following the word of God itself and never even consider what the word of God brings to any of our moral or our ethical discussions. We conveniently place it to one side and think that our expedient needs and wishes are somehow more important.
That is precisely what Ahab did. He wanted that land knowing that the law of God said Naboth was right to hold on to it. He knew Jezebel, his wife, was having an innocent man stoned to death. It is not always the trivial things that become expedient, sometimes it is the big things that become expedient, and when that happens, it is at the expense of the word of God. Elijah wanted Ahab to know the word of God, to be convicted by it and to place his ethical and his moral thought in line with that word.
It is also the same way we sometimes pursue popularity at the expense of principles or people. Is that not where gossip comes from? Is that not where the desire to talk ill of others comes from? Is it not the desire to be popular by being witty, by putting down someone else when in fact it is the experience of having one's own joy or thrill at the expense of someone else? Is that not what Jezebel did? Did she not deliberately speak evil and falsely of Naboth in order that she might get her own way and build herself up? The gossip of all gossipers is Jezebel, and it led to Naboth's death. It is easy to overlook the dangers of selling ourselves for the sake of our own pleasures and joy and power. Ahab did it. Jezebel did it. And, Naboth died.
Isn't there a better way? Isn't there a way to approach life that is not the selling of one's soul? Of course there is! It is the Elijah way. It is a way of speaking the truth in love. It is the way of offering Ahab an opportunity to get out of the demise that he was facing, for indeed, as we look at the story, Elijah had the courage, and believe-you-me, it took courage to go to the king, who had Naboth killed by the way, and to come and tell him that he had sold his soul for evil.
This was not a small thing that Elijah did. It took courage. But when he did that, Ahab repented. Ahab was given the opportunity of salvation, not his successors you note, not the dynasty that had become corrupt. Elijah was making sure and God was making sure that the dynasty of Ahab would not succeed and continue misrepresenting God. It had to come to an end. But Elijah had enough power in his spirit and enough courage to confront the evil and say, “This will be no more!” Because of that even Ahab was saved. A remarkable story!
What are the seeds of this courage? What is the hope of this courage? It takes courage not to sell one's soul and it takes courage when a community, a society, a world, or an individual is intimidated, simply to sell its soul for the sake of ease to go along with the flow. It takes courage not to do that. It takes the power of risk not to do that: To be able to go out on a limb and to stand where others would fear to tread.
The great 12th century monastic leader, Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the truly great monastic leaders and mystics of that time was very concerned about the Crusades. He believed that the best way to conquer evil and sin was through the walk with God and through prayer. But he understood that there was sometimes a conflict between good and evil. Here, he wrote how one should stand:
Only by desertion can we be defeated. With Christ and for Christ, victory is certain. We can lose the victory by flight, but not by death. Happy are you if you die in battle, for after death you will be crowned. But woe to you, if by forsaking the battle, you forfeit at once both the victory and the crown.
For Bernard of Clairvaux, to stand with Christ and for Christ is the source of victory and of hope.
Elijah knew that, not of Christ, but of Yahweh. He knew that as the power of God. He knew that is where you stand and when you stand for what is Christ's way, you stand for what is God's way. And, if you have the courage to do that then you will not lose your soul. On the contrary, said Jesus, “If you lose your life for his sake, you will gain it.” To do that requires one last thing and that is the persistence of that courage, not only of risk, not only of faith, but persistence in the face of hardship and troubles and temptations.
I have been asked this week a lot: “What on earth are you preaching on this Sunday? It just seems like the most bizarre title? ”“Andrew! Are you sure you haven't lost it in the summer heat? Have you been watching too much soccer on TV? Crocodiles and butterflies! Are you on something?”
No, I am not! You see, there is one other thing I learned in Africa, also in the Okavango delta, also in the northern part of Botswana. Despite last week's story, one of the most vicious creatures in the waters of the delta is the crocodile.
The crocodiles are like Jezebel: they will sneak up on you and they will just take you. If you are on the side of the banks of the river, beware of the crocodiles: they will take you! One of the most dangerous species in the world! But there is one creature that has the most incredible way of driving a crocodile absolutely mad! It is the butterfly, for the butterfly lands on the crocodile's eye and the butterfly drinks the crocodile's tears and survives on the saline solution that comes from the crocodile.
The crocodile has no way of driving the butterfly away. It can't bat its eyelids fast enough! To all the incredible creatures - from lions to hippos - the crocodile says “Be gone with you!” But, to the butterfly, it cannot do a thing! The butterfly wins the day! The butterfly lives off the crocodile's tears.
There is something powerful about simply being in the right. There is something powerful that no matter how small you are and how insignificant you are against the challenges of life, you can take a stand and there is something for you in it if you have the courage, just as it takes courage for butterflies to alight on crocodiles. If you do, you live. So it is with those of us who follow Elijah and Elijah's God. Amen.