Risky Business
How do you stay spiritually alive in a world like ours? How does someone
who wants to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ navigate the ever more choppy
waters of our blatant idolatry? We have literally built cathedrals to money, sex,
and power, the dominant expressions of humanity’s version of the trinity. After
we have worshipped and the benediction has been given, we have been sent out
into the world we have created, a world centered in our idols. There we discover
what we have wrought. Then we feign outrage when those who out maneuver us
in the power game ending up abusing their power in some way, using it against us
to their own advantage.
We find it incredulous that sex, that gift of God that is supposed to express
our oneness, is instead used in risky and destructive ways which rob us of true
intimacy. And sex is used to sell everything from beer to trucks to medicine and
vacation packages. I just saw an ad on Wednesday morning that uses a naked
man to sell salad dressing. Clever. As Joni Mitchell put it in a song: “Sex sells
everything, and sex kills.”
And rounding out our frustrations with our unholy trinity, we cry for justice
most severe when scoundrels like Bernie Madoff pull of a ponzi scheme that
wreaks havoc upon many innocent savers and investors robbing them of their
financial futures. We are outraged still when we hear that he is almost a cult hero
among the inmates in the prison where we have locked him away. Prison is too
good for him.
How do we stay spiritually healthy in a world like this, the world we have
built because, infected by sin as we are, we don’t know how to build another kind
of world. One strategy is to move out. The old time desert fathers and mothers
fled to the wilderness to live lives of asceticism. They sought to avoid
contamination by separation. Some formed monastic communities and closed
ranks against the outside world while they dedicated themselves to prayer and
devotion. The Amish have set up cultural boundaries to try to keep the cultural
leaven out of their souls. Many Christians have opted to home school their
children, deeming the public schools to be toxic and too far gone to influence the
tender minds of their young.
Some have become spiritual subversives, going underground until God
chooses to show his hand in power and mercy. Believers had to do this in the old
Iron Curtain days in Soviet Russia. Believers have to do it today in Muslim
countries where radical Islam holds power.
Obadiah was such a man. He was an underground believer in Yahweh. He
served as head of the palace when Ahab was king and Jezebel was queen. He
lived and worked in the heart of darkness. Jezebel wore the spiritual pants in that
royal household. She was a pagan queen who worshipped pagan gods, Baal and
Asherah, the fertility god and goddess of her homeland in Sidon. In no time at all
she had King Ahab in her tow. She was having Israel’s prophets murdered for
their insistence on the worship of Israel’s one true God. The unholy trinity,
money, sex, and power was exacting its toll upon the faithful. Idolatry was
poisoning the well of living water in Israel.
So Obadiah, Ahab’s prime minister who had loved Yahweh from the time
he was a little boy, went underground. He took one hundred of Yahweh’s
prophets and placed them in the witness protection program. He hid them away.
There were fifty in one group that he hid in a cave. He saw that they had enough
bread and water to survive. You remember that this was a time of severe
drought. Elijah the prophet had declared the cessation of dew or rain as
judgment upon the idolatry of Ahab and Jezebel. The royal couple had pitted
themselves against God and all of God’s prophets. Things were not going well.
The drought ground on and on. Things were going from bad to worse. The
prophets of Yahweh became the targets of royal animosity and blame. The king
and queen responded with the tools of idol worshippers, with violence,
intimidation, pride, arrogance, and even murder of their opponents.
Rather than abandon his faith, Obadiah became a subversive. Ahab
directed him to join him in scouring the country side in search of water and grain,
lest even the king’s horses and mules die of hunger and thirst. All the while,
Obadiah was siphoning the king’s resources of food and water to his enemies, the
prophets of Israel’s God. It was a dangerous game he was playing. It was risky
business. But it was still safer than the high risk game Elijah was playing.
Elijah was a man out in the open. Elijah was an in-your-face prophet. He
prophesied on a whole different level. Elijah had challenged Ahab and Jezebel to
a duel in the spirit. He had declared a drought, then disappeared for over three
years to allow conditions to ripen. Ahab’s response was to search high and low,
no doubt muttering to himself, “Just wait ‘til I get my hands on him.”
Just to give you a little background on scriptural prophecy in general, we
can observe two distinct but often related kinds of prophetic utterance. There is
prophecy that is foretelling and prophecy that is forth-telling. The writers of the
New Testament and the early Christian believers were most interested in the first
type of prophecy as it related to Jesus of Nazareth. As light was increasingly shed
upon Jesus, who he was and what he came to accomplish, the light illuminated
what so many prophetic utterances from the old covenant really were about.
They saw the life and ministry of Jesus foretold and foreshadowed at every
scriptural turn. So for example, Psalm 22 describes perfectly the agonies of
crucifixion centuries before it was invented. Isaiah 53 describes perfectly the
human experience of Jesus long before he came. There are many, many other
examples throughout the Old Testament. Prophetic fore-telling provided powerful
proof of the providential preparations preceding the coming of the Messiah.
Forth-telling on the other hand was done by prophets who were engaged in
discerning the will of God in their own days. They weren’t trying to predict the
future. The prophets often gathered into groups or prophetic schools. They
formed communities of prayer and study. They tried to speak the truth to power.
They often tried to cultivate ecstatic experiences as a way to access the divine
will. They were concerned with a wide range of societal issues like government,
politics, invasion by enemies, what judgment caused it, how to resist it, how to
return to Yahweh when the nation drifted away into idolatry. They concerned
themselves with public morality and issues of social justice. In short, they tried to
discern the character and purpose of God in issues of judgment and mercy. In our
day, people like Martin Luther King come to mind.
Obadiah would have been this sort of prophet. Obadiah was caught in
between his job in the palace and his calling as one of God’s prophets.
As our own culture becomes less and less friendly to our faith, we see all
sorts of people caught betwixt and between as Obadiah was. We see politicians
struggling with ways to be faithful to their beliefs without running afoul of those
who believe public life has no place for personal spirituality. Teachers in the
public schools have the same challenges. So do many others. The pressure is
relentless to have a purely privatized religion. No mention of God, no prayer, no
public words or deeds of devotion to God should ever be on display. We might be
offensive to those who don’t choose to believe. Subversive spirituality is one
option open to all of us in a world like ours.
How can we be subversive? Well for instance, you can say that prayer in
school is against the law, but how will the ban be enforced if someone silently
prays. In a world where people are increasingly litigious and vindictive, you may
become a forgiver. In a world obsessed with self, you may become subversively
kind and compassionate.
The latest issue of Presbyterian Outlook described the recent appearance
of the Dalai Lama in Louisville, Kentucky. The hall was sold out. The waiting line
to get in stretched around blocks and across the bridge into Indiana. What was
the attraction? A Buddhist monk was there talking to the crowd about simple
human compassion, love, and kindness. In a world starved for these things, such
a message is subversive. The Christian Gospel ought to be so subversive but
perhaps we’ve lost our focus somewhere along the way. Our specialty after all is
the love and grace of God. Nothing is more subversive to the priorities of idolatry
than these.
But there also comes a time when the ways of subversion are not enough.
There comes from time to time in each of our lives an occasion when we must
step out of the underground and into the harsh light of day. That time had come
for Elijah. And through Elijah, it had come in a small but scary measure to
Obadiah.
No doubt Obadiah had a backlog of apprehension. He’d been pilfering
imperial resources to sustain the prophets of the opposition. If he comes forth
now and announces to Ahab, “Elijah is here and will meet you today,” will Ahab
suspect that Obadiah has been conspiring to hide Elijah all this time and have him
executed on the spot? This was no baseless fear. Ahab and Jezebel had been
routinely executing Yahweh’s prophets for some time. Even carrying a message
for Elijah was risky business.
After laying his fears before Elijah, Elijah gives him assurances that he will
not leave him in the lurch. Ahab’s fight is with the Lord but it is taking place
through Elijah, not Obadiah. So Obadiah takes the risk. And so the stage is set for
the famous confrontation between the “troubler of Israel” so called and the true
troubler of Israel, Ahab the idolater.
To bring this home to roost in the present day, I hope all of you are
practicing the ways of Christian subversion. I pray that you are finding ways to
combat evil and injustice and corruption with your faith and your prayers, with
laying down your life in order to be faithful to Christ. I pray that you are
becoming deeper in kindness, wider in compassion, more alert to the wounded
and forsaken ones that surround every single one of us in our day. Somebody you
know needs encouragement today. Someone needs your help. Someone needs
some form of human touch. Someone needs one of us to notice what they are
going through and to be made aware that they are not invisible. Someone who
has hurt you needs forgiveness from you. A true subversive will not wait until the
offenders in their lives deserve mercy. A true Christian subversive will give mercy
precisely when it is undeserved. And we will do this because that’s what Jesus
whom we call Lord, the one we say we emulate, that’s what Jesus did and does
for us, over and over again.
And dear brothers and sisters, I don’t welcome the day but I see it coming
when in the land of the free and the home of the brave, you and I will need
courage to stand for what we believe. The devil himself prowls around seeking
someone whom he may devour. As our society declines spiritually and he sees
our anemic condition, he will stir up opposition more and more boldly against
those of us who say we love and follow Jesus Christ. We may see a dramatic
increase in the days ahead where subversion will not do. We may face a new
season when we too must step forth boldly like Elijah and challenge evil and
idolatry to a duel. Then we will finally discover the true power of our God and of
His Christ, whom even death could not defeat.
I won’t ask you if you think you are up to it. None of us will know until the
day of battle. But we can begin to practice the disciplines of readiness. Worship
in Spirit and in truth. Pray. Give. Serve. Love you neighbor. Be kind and
compassionate, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. Put on the
full armor of God and be filled with the Holy Spirit. The weapons of our warfare
have divine power for the tearing down of strongholds. By God’s help we will do
more than survive in the present evil age. We will thrive in the midst of it and
discover that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. Following
Christ is risky business. It is the only business worth doing. Amen.