My congregation doesn't follow the "normal" revised common lectionary texts that many of the mainline churches preach from during the year. We instead follow what's known as the "Narrative Lectionary," which means we focus on texts from the Hebrew Scriptures (or "Old Testament") from September through Christmas, then move into one of the four gospels between Christmas and Easter.
So this past weekend, the text I was given to preach on was from 1 Kings 18, the story of Elijah and his showdown with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. As I was preparing my sermon on Saturday morning (much later than I normally do, usually I'm done before Friday), I learned of a pastor in Alabama who had committed suicide after he was outed as being a drag queen in his private life.
I honestly had no intention initially of addressing this issue when I began contemplating the text Saturday morning. But as I read it, there were some things that stuck out to me, and so I wound up writing, and then preaching, the following sermon.
Last week we heard about the kingdom David had managed to unite splitting in two after Rehoboam, Solomon's son, decided he was going to be an even worse ruler than his father, so Jeroboam and the Northern Tribes broke away. In today's story, we’re up in the northern kingdom—that kingdom where Jeroboam was afraid that his people would go back to the south to the Temple, so he sets up the golden calves and they start worshiping other gods. So not only are they no longer following God, they aren’t following the Davidic line of kings anymore, so there’s a whole bunch of assassinations and things that go on to secure the throne throughout the North’s history.
That's how we wind up with a king named Ahab who married a Phoenician princess named Jezebel. (You've probably heard of her, and if you attend my "Harlots and Heroines" Bible Study on Wednesdays, you've learned a lot about her.)
Anyway, Ahab was a pretty successful king in terms of worldly standards—wealthy, militarily successful… but he’d adopted the gods of his Phoenician wife, Baal and Asherah.
Which is part of why he gets a bad rap in the Bible.
Now, to truly understand this story, you have to understand what Baal’s domain was: weather and fertility.
Elijah is called a “troubler of Israel” because Elijah is the one who proclaimed there would be no rain for 3 years.
So they’re in a drought.
Elijah counters that the drought is not his fault: “I’m not the troubler…YOU’RE the troubler, Ahab, because you’ve angered God by going after these other gods.”
I’m rubber you’re glue… has that same kind of energy, right?
Elijah goes, “Ok, you want rain? Isn’t Baal supposed to give you rain? Why isn’t that working? Come on, let’s go and entreat Baal and see if we can get Baal to do something. And then I’ll try MY God, the true God of Israel and let’s see what happens.”
And Elijah gives them every advantage. Even gives them the home field advantage, so to speak. Mt. Carmel was referred to by the Egyptians as a “holy place” of pagan worship. (Remembering, the Canaanites were vassal states to the Egyptian empire.)
So Elijah is essentially going, “Ok, let’s go to Baal’s home territory and play this out.” Elijah then begins to taunt the other team as they cut themselves and wail.
Now if you remember right, I've said in past sermons that one of the big problems with worshiping these “other gods” was that they were harmful to society. Worship of other deities was tied up both socially and economically, and your kings even typically took on divine status. This led to a lot of oppression, injustice and harmful practices.
Let's just look at how the prophets of Baal behave, believing cutting themselves with swords until their blood flows believing this will be please Baal. They think this is the only way to get their god to pay attention to them.
Elijah? He just prays.
Now when it comes time for the offering of the oblation—which means a loyalty offering—Elijah steps in and goes, “OK, my turn. But I’m still going to give you an advantage. I’m going to soak all my wood with so much water that it can’t possibly accidentally catch fire. In fact, it’s going to be so wet that even if you were trying to light it on fire, you couldn’t.”
And what happens?
A fire from heaven consumes everything.
The people go, “Oh wow, OK, God is God I guess,” and then Elijah kills all the prophets of Baal—which, God did not tell him to do, I just want to point that out. He did that on his own, which is what will then raise the ire of Queen Jezebel and she puts a death warrant out for him…and this is what ultimately ends his ministry.
So, killing the competition was not God-sanctioned, so to speak.
But what also happens immediately after this, is Elijah says, “OK, NOW it will rain.”
And it rains. Proving who really is control of the weather.
Ok, cool story. So what?
I mean, we don’t see a lot of “fire from heaven” type of showdowns going on in this day and age, do we?
So how does this story have anything to do with my faith life in the here and now?
Well, the problem of what Ahab and the Israelites were doing is still very real. It's still a question of what voices are we listening to? Because we have a lot of competing voices in this world, don’t we?
As I said, Ahab, by worldly standards, seemed like he was a pretty successful king. He displayed all the strength one wants in a leader. Even if you were a follower of God, not Baal, you might have interpreted that as his being blessed by God or something.
God doesn’t use offerings and fire from heaven these days to display his power. Instead, he gave us Jesus—the one who rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. The cross became God’s display of power—not fire consuming an offering.
So the question we face when we have to make choices in this life of what voices we’re going to listen to is: which voices sound like Jesus, and which don’t?
And I get it—it’s not always easy to discern.
But Elijah’s right in that we cannot limp along following two different paths: claiming on the one hand we follow Jesus, but then acting and behaving like we follow someone or something else that is absolutely not like Jesus.
Not the first time the people have been told to choose: choose a way of life, or a way of death. Moses gave them this choice once as well.
When I look at the prophets of Baal, and the destructive and harmful methods they used just to try and please their god, I look to Christianity and say, “Ok, where are we doing things that are harmful to ourselves and others? And is that pleasing to God?"
Now, absolutely I recognize we live in a world that is not always black and white.
That there is nuance to many of the issues we face today. Abortion. War. Self-defense. There are some things that are complex.
But I’m thinking specifically today of a pastor and mayor in Alabama who killed themselves after they were outed as dressing up as a woman.
The amount of backlash they received from Christians when they were outed led them to chose to end their own life.
This is sadly not a unique story or circumstance among the LGBTQIA community in Christian circles.
Is driving someone to feel so much shame, so much self-hate, that they want to kill themselves the Christian way to behave? Is it Jesus-like?
I don’t remember a single story about Jesus encountering someone and making them hate themselves so much they want to kill themselves.
We’re living in a society that right now thinks that “Christian love” looks like shaming people and telling them God hates who and what they are to the point that they literally would rather die than continue on being the person they are. I mean, we're in Florida, which is leading the country with it's anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric and laws.
Such Christians claim they do this because they want LGBTQIA+ to “turn away from their sinful lives,” when literally, the only ones doing anything that harms anyone else—are the Christians who make other people want to die rather than continue their lives as who they are.
Admittedly, we don’t have any examples of Jesus encountering LGBTQIA+ people.
What we do have is what happens when Jesus encounters other marginalized or outcast groups that were viewed as “unclean”--the hemorrhaging gentile woman, prostitutes, tax collectors… or even, say, the Samaritan woman.
Did he once condemn the fact that she had five husbands and the current guy she was with wasn’t her husband? No.
But the encounter makes her want to go and tell others about him. Not feel so much shame she wants to die.
Christians are called to heed the voice of Jesus. To love like Jesus loved.
To be a follower of Jesus means that when others encounter us—they want to run and tell others about us--and this Jesus we follow--in a positive way—not in that “insufferable Christians that go around judging us all the time” way.
When the prostitute comes and anoints Jesus—did he chastise what she did for a living?
No, instead he lauded her act of faith.
In fact—the people Jesus takes issue with over and over again, are the religious leaders who fail to show compassion to the marginalized. His issue is never with the marginalized.
We must choose which voice we’re going to listen to.
The cultural religious tide that results in harmful, polarizing rhetoric, or the compassionate voice of Jesus, who beckons those who are hurting and marginalized into a community where they will be truly loved and accepted, not shamed and ridiculed.
Now you want to know the weird way that God works? Normally I have 1-2 people who are LGBTQIA+ in the small second church we took over this past year. Today? I had five who were visiting, and one woman whose granddaughter was just hospitalized for...you guessed it... trying to kill herself because of her body dysmorphia. By the end of that sermon, the entire congregation was in tears. That's not normally how I preach--but this morning, those people needed to hear that message and were brought inside those church doors for a reason.
Never in a million years would I have guessed that a text about Elijah and Baal would ever have the ability to transform into a story about loving and accepting our LGBTQIA+ siblings in Christ.
Yet that's precisely what happened. I wish the pastor who killed himself had been able to hear from his Christian community the kind of love and acceptance that I know he's receiving from Christ right now.
Amen.
