The Troble With Prophets

"The Trouble With Prophets"

1 Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a
June 13, 2010

1-2And then, to top it off, came this: Naboth the Jezreelite owned a vineyard in Jezreel
that bordered the palace of Ahab king of Samaria. One day Ahab spoke to Naboth,
saying, "Give me your vineyard so I can use it as a kitchen garden; it's right next to my
house—so convenient. In exchange I'll give you a far better vineyard, or if you'd prefer
I'll pay you money for it."
3-4 But Naboth told Ahab, "Not on your life! So help me GOD, I'd never sell the family
farm to you!" Ahab went home in a black mood, sulking over Naboth the Jezreelite's
words, "I'll never turn over my family inheritance to you." He went to bed, stuffed his
face in his pillow, and refused to eat.
5 Jezebel his wife came to him. She said, "What's going on? Why are you so out of
sorts and refusing to eat?"
6 He told her, "Because I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite. I said, 'Give me your
vineyard—I'll pay you for it or, if you'd rather, I'll give you another vineyard in
exchange.' And he said, 'I'll never give you my vineyard.'"
7 Jezebel said, "Is this any way for a king of Israel to act? Aren't you the boss? On
your feet! Eat! Cheer up! I'll take care of this; I'll get the vineyard of this Naboth the
Jezreelite for you."
8-10 She wrote letters over Ahab's signature, stamped them with his official seal, and
sent them to the elders in Naboth's city and to the civic leaders. She wrote "Call for a
fast day and put Naboth at the head table. Then seat a couple of stool pigeons across
from him who, in front of everybody will say, 'You! You blasphemed God and the king!'
Then they'll throw him out and stone him to death."
15 When Jezebel got word that Naboth had been stoned to death, she told Ahab, "Go
for it, Ahab—take the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite for your own, the vineyard he
refused to sell you. Naboth is no more; Naboth is dead."
16 The minute Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, he set out for the vineyard of Naboth
the Jezreelite and claimed it for his own.
17-19 Then GOD stepped in and spoke to Elijah the Tishbite, "On your feet; go down
and confront Ahab of Samaria, king of Israel. You'll find him in the vineyard of Naboth;
he's gone there to claim it as his own. Say this to him: 'GOD's word: What's going on
here? First murder, then theft?' Then tell him, 'GOD's verdict: The very spot where the
dogs lapped up Naboth's blood, they'll lap up your blood—that's right, your blood.'"
20-21a Ahab answered Elijah, "My enemy! So, you've run me down!"
"Yes, I've found you out," said Elijah. "And because you've bought into the business of
evil, defying GOD.

I usually don’t put titles on sermons, or when I do, as I do for the website, I usually do it
backwards, trying to find a common thread that can encapsulate what I just wrote and
said in the sermon. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t, but this week it
actually works, and it arrived in my ahead before I began to put together this sermon
based on this text from First Kings—“The Trouble with Prophets” is the sentence that
kept rattling in my head all week, something exhibited in the text, and frankly, something
I’ve experienced myself personally with people like Elijah, prophet-types and all.

So, let me give Kevin McLemore’s theory on the two types of servants that God calls
into the church and the world, in order to explain what it means to have trouble with
prophets. It’s not scientific, and I’m not completely sure its original, but I can’t
remember if I heard it somewhere else, or just made it up out of my own personal
experience. For years, I’ve thought that there are really two basic types of servants in
the church, two types of people you see serving the people of God as far back as
Moses.   First, you have the priest types, the pastoral types, the folks who tend to
congregations and communities, the folks that marry and bury people, and care for the
spiritual and emotional and ritual lives of the people under their care. In ancient Israel,
you had these people ensconced in the Temple setting, people charged with delivering
the religious rites and duties and care for the people of Israel. Their primary task is to
take care of people, and so their focus is often on the unity of the people, temple or
church, and so they have to pay attention to the personal and political angle of what it
means to be in human community, navigating those forces, trying to do good, hold
things together, and, hopefully seeing the flaws of a place and people, including one’s
own flaws, with clear eyes, while still loving those very people, and, oneself too. I think
of myself as being that kind of person, in my better moments, of course, though not
completely nor always.

And yet, there is another type person called by God, called by God to both the church
and the world, and that is prophet type, people like Elijah, the second story of which we
heard this week, the first being from last week. Prophets are people called by God to
call into question people and institutions, including religious ones, that fail to live up to
God’s high mark of justice and faithfulness. These are the folks who speak truth to
power, people who are sometimes not connected to congregations as pastors, but
sometimes they are, and who use their voice and their life to call into questions all
those forces, all those actions that denigrate or dismiss God’s people in this world. I
think of Martin Luther King Jr, as being of this type, calling the world and his own
people to do the right thing and fight against the injustices that they had lived through
their whole lives, whatever the costs. Now, to MLK’s credit, he knew what he was
asking of all those faithful souls in the deep south, both black and white, he knew that
their willingness to march and speak up could cost them their jobs, their safety, maybe
even their lives, and so there was a beautiful pastoral edge to him, an understanding of
what he was asking of people, especially the older generation of his race, who had
experienced the full force of racism, unlike some of the younger generation that so
wonderfully and thankfully answered his call. Good prophets have a bit of the pastor in
them, and, hopefully, the good priests amongst us have a bit of the prophet in them as
well—being of one type without an element of the other type, well, that is a recipe for a
crazy and uncompassionate prophet, or an eternally pliable and squishy priest, or
pastor.

I saw the the difference between these two types of folks In my own life and my own
ministry years ago, in the city that I once helped to begin a new church. I was the first
pastor of this new church start in Oklahoma in 2000, which is celebrating its 10th year
this August, for which they’ve asked me to preach at in a few months, something that
will be a bit of homecoming for me, and something I am looking forward to. However,
anytime you are planting a church, especially a church that is focused on reaching the
gay and lesbian community in one of the most conservative and religiously
fundamentalist cities in the country—Oklahoma City—there are things you need to
remember, and that was to always try to protect the privacy and identity of the people
who were coming to church, some of who really did fear the loss of their jobs if they
were found out, even in some the corporate settings they worked in. That was my
concern as a pastor when I was approached by a woman outside my congregation and
asked by her to push my folks into helping her protest a Baptist church in the
community that was taking an anti-gay stance. The church wasn’t particularly
homophobic, and I was familiar with it because I had actually attended it when I was in
junior high—I lived in Oklahoma in the mid-eighties—but it was the church of this
woman’s mother, and the pastor had refused to budge from his anti-gay position, and
to have more conversations with this woman about it. The group she was leading was
going to protest every Sunday morning right before and after worship, and she was
seeking my help in encouraging my congregation to join them in their efforts.

Well, first, I objected to the whole protest idea for many reasons, one of which is that it
felt a bit personal, with it being the church of her mother, and, secondly, for a Baptist
church in that city, it wasn’t the worst of the worst when it came to that issue, though, of
course, I disagreed with its position on that issue. But, really, the issue that was
foremost on my mind was the possible repercussion for my new congregation if we
decided to start protesting another church, and that was the possibility that this other
church could just decide to return the favor—they could come out and protest us on
Sunday evening, though, it was probably unlikely, knowing the tone and tenor of the
church. Still, if it did happen, the attendance of my church would plummet, I know,
because who knows who would be on the other end of that protest sign—a friend, a co-
worker, a boss, someone with a camera—who might want to out my congregants as
punishment for attending a church that was reaching out to the lesbian and gay
community. My instinct, as a thoroughly priestly type, was to protect the people and the
fledgling community. This didn’t go over well in my meeting with this woman, and there
a lot of tension over breakfast that morning, and yet, I think some of it had to do with
the eternal tension that always exists between prophet and priests. For the prophet
type before me, the question I needed to answer was what the point of the church was
if it didn’t stand up for what was right, and issue I had with her was that she was more
than willing to put my newly formed church community into jeopardy, leaving me with a
possibly empty church on Sunday evenings, while she went back to her lake home in
northern Oklahoma when she was done with this Baptist church.

That is the tension we priests and prophets have with each other, the tension between
institutional men and women, and those who speak out against institutions when they
will not speak truth to power, especially unjust power. It’s something that will probably
never be resolved, and perhaps it’s best that each type be in healthy tension with each
other. For me, as someone who sees himself as more of a priest than a prophet, I think
I made the right decision years ago, though I have come to understand more and more
how needed people like this woman really are, how needed prophets like Elijah really
are. So few us really actually speak up in this world, and are willing to put ourselves on
the line for our beliefs, especially our beliefs on justice, justice for the supposed
nobodies of this world, that when it does happen, it’s a crystallizing moment, to see
someone say something about the need to do right by the outsiders, the outcasts, the
nobodies of this world. We admire the prophets like MLK and Cesar Chavez, but
usually from afar, and usually in retrospect, never much participating in the fight they
fought during the time it was going on. I have come to admire prophets like Elijah a bit
more, though I am thoroughly the priestly type, and I admire them more, because there
needs to be moments like the one we saw in the latter part of our Scriptural text today,
a moment when the wickedness of Ahab and Jezebel, the meanness of their greed and
selfishness, is simply laid out before them and the world, without, frankly, the
mumblings and the “now, now” of pastoral and priestly types like me.

You heard the story of Elijah, Naboth, Jezebel and King Ahab minutes ago, and most of
you are probably already familiar with it, and so I will not repeat it again. What does
strike me over and over again is the pettiness of the king, the ruthlessness of Jezebel,
and the courage of the prophet, Elijah, doing his truth telling in that vineyard, telling this
man who could order his execution with a simple wave of his hand, that what he done to
Naboth was wrong, wrong, wrong. King Ahab has the kind of attitude that Bernie
Madoff, the money manager who eventually stole 19 billion dollars of investor funds,
and who was profiled this week in New York magazine had, and who said the following
to the interviewer: "F--- my victims. I carried them for twenty years, and now I'm doing
150 years." The article goes on:   He was past apologizing. In prison, he crafted his own
version of events. From [the prison], Madoff explained the trap he was in. "People just
kept throwing money at me," Madoff related to a prison consultant who advised him on
how to endure prison life. "Some guy wanted to invest, and if I said no, the guy said,
'What, I'm not good enough?' " One day, Shannon Hay, a drug dealer who lived in the
same unit in Butner as Madoff, asked about his crimes. "He told me his side. He took
money off of people who were rich and greedy and wanted more," says Hay, who was
released in December. People, in other words, who deserved it. (http://nymag.
com/news/crimelaw/66468/?dbk)

We need people like Elijah to speak and say something to people like Madoff, people
who feel entitled to it all, who feel as if the world is owed them and they have been
wronged, even as they have wronged others. And, frankly, we also need people like
Elijah to speak to those folks who were willing to turn off their brains, like Madoff’s
victims, who believed that they had entered some magical fantasy land in which one
can gets returns on investments that hugely beat the market, over and over again. No,
I’m not blaming the victims, but so many of us are willing to turn a blind eye to reality, as
noted in a book I just finished that you must pick up and read, a book called THE BIG
SHORT by Michael Lewis, which chronicles the roots of the recent financial crisis. We
need people like Elijah to tell us the truth about the wrongness of what we are doing—
greed is wrong, environmental exploitation of God’s green earth is wrong, our endless
consumption of more and more stuff is wrong, and to tell us the fundamental truth of
Jewish law and life, something that Jesus himself encapsulated later in his life and
work—people matter more than things, and neighbors and enemies are to be loved,
not exploited for our use. On the cover of The New Yorker magazine this week, there is
a painting of an executive taking the oath to tell the truth, as if he was doing it a panel
of congressperson, but instead of congresspersons, there are the creatures of the sea,
dolphins, penguins, fish, birds of all type, about to grill this oil executive. Perhaps even
nature is pointing its finger at us now, and we as a people are having our moment in
the garden, we as Ahab, and all of the dead animals of Gulf being our Elijah, our truth
teller, our prophets.

Listen, I am always going to be the priestly type, the pastor, and I am no prophet. Sure,
I’ve taken my stands, had my moments of integrity, but even those moments were
rooted in my calling as a minister, a pastor, not as a prophet. I didn’t decide at 18 to
live honestly and openly about who I was and who I loved because I was trying to speak
truth to power, or do some much needed rabble rousing on the issue of homosexuality:
I told the truth because I couldn’t imagine being a pastor without being a person who
told the truth about my life. For me, it went back to that calling to be a minister, and
what I respected and valued about the ministers I loved the most, which was their
integrity. And what I do, and what I am called to do is valuable thing, I think, though I
know in this day and age it is certainly become less so, but I wonder if what we need
nowadays in this world is less priests and more prophets, more women and men willing
to speak to the Ahabs and Jezebels of this world, and who know that they may pay for
such truth telling with their livelihood, or even their lives—and are willing to pay that
cost, people with a bit more courage than most of us have in this room, including
myself.

The trouble with prophets, then and now, is that they are so troubling to the culture,
and to the church, the synagogue, the temple, and their reward is usually elimination,
their deaths, professionally or personally, at the hand of other contemporary Jezebels.
If we could just find a few more prophets that had a bit of the priest in them, then
perhaps we could hear their words more powerfully. I’ve always said that every good
minister has a bit of prophet in them, though such well-rounded ministers are hard to
find, of course, and it may be even rarer to find the opposite, the aforementioned
prophets with some priest in them.

But they do exist, as exemplified in an article I read this week about a Vietnamese
Catholic priest in New Orleans who is ministering to the large Vietnamese fishing
community that is on the verge of collapse due to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In
his work after Katrina in community organizing and dealing with bumbling bureaucracy,
and his leadership in fighting a trash dump just miles from the poor neighborhoods of
his people and his African American neighbors, he’s learned a lot about how to deal
with forces that don’t really don’t give a damn about people, and now, of course, he
and his parish have BP to deal with, and the possible death of a way of a life, and an
already fragile economy. And yet, he is a priest with a prophet’s heart, something we
need more of nowadays, and a gift I can only admire from afar. (http://www.
religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/2764/a_pastor_takes_on_bp_in_new_orleans)

We need to listen to these people, these prophets who keep reminding us that this way
of life is unsustainable, and that we have an obligation to the do the right thing. You
and I, we don’t need to assume that we are the Elijah in this picture—no, it’s always
probably best to think of ourselves as Ahab in this picture, to wonder how we have
stolen our neighbors garden, even if that neighbor is a thousand miles away, working in
slave like conditions so you and I can have cheap clothing. The next time you and I
hear a voice that rankles us, that calls into question the way we are treating each other,
or treating someone across the globe, or who implies that we might have to do without
something so someone might else just have something, then we need to ask ourselves
this simple question—is this God speaking to me through this Elijah, this prophet? Am I
having my own moment in my newly acquired vineyard, in my garden, being told by the
living God through this man, this woman, that people matter more than things, that
people are what matter to God, and that I, you and me, we will be held accountable for
what we have done, and what we have left undone, in this life and in this world. I wish I
had the courage of a prophet, but I don’t…but we need them more than ever, don’t
we? We need people like that woman that took me to task for my unwillingness to
speak when it was important to speak, and though I think I did the right thing then, and
still do now, I know that I need her, we need her, so she can tell us the truth about
ourselves, the truth about how God really sees us, in all of our beauty and in all of our
deep shadow. Amen.