Hands Off

June 18, 1995

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Scripture: I Kings 21:1-21a

Every now and then you need a call back to the basics, back to fundamentals, back to the old bottom line, We spend a lot of time on the derivatives of life, the inferences, the “therefores”, and as a consequence sometimes forget the “whereases”. We do it in our individual lives; we do it in the Church. It does us good now and then, to go back to what it all rests on.

No great surprise there, of course. Every discipline knows the soundness of that--You can’t do advanced academic research without knowing first how to read and write....In my first appointment, a member family lived down the street from the parsonage.

They had a little boy who was 6 years old, just starting out in the first grade. One day in early September, I saw Bobby walking home from school, passing by in front of the house. He had a serious, intent look on his face. I yelled out, “Bobby, how is school coming along?” He stopped and looked at me for a second, almost in anguish, and said, “Preacher, school is really tough. They make you write your name every day.”

Well, that’s where it starts. Everything subsequent academically is built on that foundation..... AND ELSEWHERE--Complex surgery presupposes and counts on basic principles of sanitation...

Before you master Chopin’s Polonaise, you master the scales...

Behind any successful 3 point shot in the NBA are countless hours of repetitive shooting.... you practice the fundamentals over and over until they are as natural as breathing.... even then 1 out of 2 is about as good as it gets.... and we know sometimes it doesn’t get that high.

BUT THAT’S HOW IT WORKS---You don’t start at the top.... you build toward it.

We sometimes overlook that incremental law of life when it comes to faith matters, unfortunately. We want to jump over a lot of the preliminary stuff, a lot of the getting ready stuff, in order to head straight for the fulfillment stuff.

Good news about grace, and love, and forgiveness---the heart of the Gospel---will always be received joyously... as it should be. I suppose it’s part of the reason we have overflow crowds on Christmas and Easter. Those are exciting, good news Sundays. “The Savior is born...The Savior is alive, forevermore.”

Anytime you’re dispensing unmitigated blessing, you’re going to draw people like a magnet. BUT THE GOSPEL MESSAGE, the Good News of Jesus Christ is glorious, and life changing, and redemptive because it stands as the culminating word of a long, complex story, a story with twists and turns, a story of lights and shadows, a story of agony and ecstasy, a story of life in the raw and life exalted.

The outcome of that story is robbed of its deepest meaning unless it’s seen as the final working out of a majestic plot resting on a carefully developed foundation.

The New Testament contains the plot’s climax, the breakthrough part, but that’s not all there is.

You can’t understand the New Testament without recognizing that it comes out of the Old Testament that it rests on the Old Testament, that it’s all one piece, one total story.

Jesus didn’t just come into history like a rock through a plate glass window. He had roots and they’re Old Testament roots. Jesus didn’t negate the Old Testament, he FULFILLED it, in a way that doesn’t make sense unless you keep in mind the basic building blocks of the

truth He came to embody.

One of those building blocks, expressed so powerfully, and so well in the Old Testament that the NEW Testament takes for granted and doesn’t have to emphasize it as much, is the bottom line, foundational belief in the RIGHTEOUSNESS of God, God’s impeccable moral character, and therefore, the necessity for His people to be righteous.

Mercy and forgiveness---strong New Testament emphases---don’t do away with the righteous requirement.... they don’t slough over it, or wink at it, or deny it, or forget it... they recognize it and do something creative with it.

This is why redemption through the Cross carries such a high price tag. Free to you and me, but terribly costly to God. We need to hear that to keep us honest.

They story of Naboth’s vineyard is a building block story, a pre-Gospel story, that speaks of rightness and wrongness as no laughing matter. We live in a moral world, a moral universe. Whether we happen to like it or not, Morality is built into the very fabric of things, all up and down the line, and to think that we’re immune, somehow, from being held accountable to a standard of basic ethics, is to fly in the face of what is most real.

First Kings doesn’t argue it...The Bible almost never argues that kind of thing...it simply lays it out in the form of a vivid narrative. It tells a story.

Ahab was a powerful man. He was the king. He ruled the country, the nation of Israel, and the people were subject to his whims.

The wife of Ahab was the redoubtable Jezebel, whose very name when pronounced, almost makes you feel the need to wash out your mouth. It just sounds evil when you say it......JEZEBEL. Do you know anybody who would bestow that name on a daughter?

Why, you wouldn’t name a dog Jezebel, any more than you would name one John Wilkes Booth, or Lucretia Borgia, or Judas.

The name itself, of course, gives us a clue of her background. The b-e-l at the end is a form of Ba’al, the coarse, pagan fertility god whose nature and character was everything the Hebrew God wasn’t.

No scruples to worry about in that religion.... You worshiped Ba’al not out of admiration or respect, and certainly not out of love.... All you tried to do was keep him out of your hair

by bribing him, or appeasing him so he wouldn’t mess up whatever you were planning to do anyway. Jezebel was a Ba’al worshiper. Her marriage to Ahab undoubtedly was entered into for political reasons.

Each saw the other as a means for opportunistic advancement. We sometimes call that “hedging your bets”. Ahab and Jezebel were powerful, greedy, and unconscionably ambitious.

Next door to the palace, a man named Naboth owned a vineyard. It was as fine vineyard. It had been in his family for generations, maybe going all the way back to the period of the Conquest, when under Joshua the Hebrews had taken possession of the land. The property had been passed down from father to son, all through that time. And now it was Naboth’s.

Ahab looked out at it from his court and wanted it. The desire for land, property, is deeply rooted in the human psyche... That hasn’t changed much in the intervening centuries, and Ahab was the king.

Yet give him credit for this---At least he began negotiations in a legitimate fashion. He offered to buy the property...or to swap it for an equivalent vineyard somewhere else.

Naboth held his ground. Ahab was the king, but this was a family inheritance...It wasn’t just ground, it was blood, and memories, and birthright...the very thing ol’ Esau forfeited when he gave away his birthright to his brother years before. You don’t think Naboth knew the history of his people?

He wasn’t about to impugn his heritage, not even for compensation, not even for the king. No deal, your royal highness. This land is not for sale.

Ahab went back to the palace and pouted. He wanted that property, and he was the king, but there was just enough religion in him just enough grounding in Torah to make him nervous about blatant overreaching.

Not so for Jezebel. Nothing made her nervous. She could look the Devil in the eye without blinking. For about 30 seconds she watches Ahab moping around, and whining.... The Record says he was sullen and resentful. Have you ever known anybody in that disposition? I had a District Superintendent one time that.... well, that’s another story.

Jezebel the stone heart looked at Ahab for as long as she could stomach that wimpiness...AND THEN SHE JUST TOOK CHARGE.

“Pull yourself together, Noodle Spine”.... The Bible doesn’t actually use that title. But if the precise label isn’t there, you better believe the implication is. “Get a hold on yourself, Buster... I’ll get you that vineyard.”

So she initiated a governmental purge. IRS, FBI...all the forces of the federal bureaucracy

were concentrated and focused on poor Naboth. Charges were brought, accusations were made, slanders were brought.... dirty stuff...all beautifully orchestrated and done by the book. It was LEGAL, that’s what chills your heart.

First they killed Naboth’s reputation, and then they killed Naboth. No owner, no heir... of course, the property reverts to the state.

“O King Ahab, live forever.... the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite is yours.”

Somehow the word of all this came to Elijah. The callousness of it, and total disregard of simple decency may have been common knowledge. Maybe everybody knew what had happened, we don’t know, but when Elijah the prophet found out, he went immediately in the authority of God to confront the king.

I haven’t seen the movie Clear and Present Danger, but I have seen the preview, and there is a powerful scene in it where Harrison Ford, playing the role of a minor CIA operative, having discovered the truth of a covert operation, illegally carried out against a drug cartel in South America, confronts the President of the United States in his office, and accuses him face to face of complicity in the plan.

He knew about it, could have stopped it, should have stopped it, and didn’t. In the scene,

the President says, “Don’t you know I am the President of the United States?” To which Ford’s character replies, “And you, sir, have betrayed a great trust.” NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE, THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT ARE JUST WRONG. 3,000 years ago people knew that, nearly 3,000 years ago, long before our day, the basic wrongness of misusing power and flouting moral decency had already been expressed in powerfully vivid images. THERE ARE SOME THINGS IN LIFE THAT ARE JUST PLAIN WRONG.

Elijah went to the king, the most powerful figure in the land, in the name of God, to call him to task. We’re not told what kind of courage it took on Elijah’s part to make and keep that appointment. But you can imagine---you can almost hear the beating of his heart, pounding through the words of the text. Yet the one who blinked first was Ahab.... the two old antagonists knew each other well. This wasn’t their first hostile encounter---

“Have you found me, O my enemy?”, stammered Ahab sheepishly. WHAT AN ILLUMINATING LINE THAT IS! It lights up the whole scene. You can see it in your imagination, can’t you, etched in sharp definition....King and prophet, physical world and spirit world, secular power and ethical power, the authority of the throne and the authority of moral persuasion, in clear-cut, collision course. Rarely is the contrast between good and evil portrayed so starkly, even in the Bible....

“Have you found me, O my enemy?” It’s almost pathetic. Ahab was a powerful man, but before another kind of power, a power he neither understood or valued, the arrogance of his defensiveness crumbled like a cardhouse.

And Elijah looked him in the eye while the very angels held their breath. I’m sure the entire dialogue exchange is not recorded. The passage in I Kings gives us just one line of Elijah’s response, but there’s no mistaking the devastation of God’s evaluation as delivered through the mouth of his spokesman: “I have found you. Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, I will bring disaster on you....” THE LINE IS DRAWN AGAINST WICKEDNESS.

And, of course, it happened, exactly as Elijah said it would. The reign of Ahab and Jezebel came to a violent end before many years were played out. You read the details in the rest of I Kings and in II Kings. Ahab was killed in the battle by an arrow that pierced his breastplate...and Jezebel died even more ignominiously when her body was thrown down from the wall of the palace by the people, and trampled under the hoofs of horses. Not a very pretty death.

So much for the perpetuation of worldly power. “Sic transit gloria mundi”, the old Romans used to say as they paraded conquered kings and chieftains in chains through the streets of Rome. “Thus passes away the glory of the world.”

It would happen to them, in turn, in time, when their inner integrity became eaten away by rottenness.

The phrase is still found, incidentally, in the Roman Catholic enthronement service for the Pope, when the Holy Father receives the symbolic accoutrements of his office---all the authority given to him...but “sic transit gloria mundi”, the ritual intones...Remember the transitory nature of worldly power.

When someone asked Victor Hugo why Napoleon Bonaparte, the most powerful man in Europe for more than a quarter century...the dominant force on the continent and maybe the world for that period.....when someone asked Victor Hugo why Napoleon fell, finally, what it was, ultimately that brought him down, Hugo smiled, and said, “Because after a while God just got tired of him.”

It was a Biblical answer, the old story of Ahab and Jezebel again, just played out in different costumes. Injustice, immorality, cruelty, unrighteousness carry within them the seeds of their own destruction, sooner or later... It’s a law of life. It may not happen overnight; It may not follow a fixed timetable... God has never been one to balance His books too quickly.

But bank on it! The world God made and called “good” when He made it, is shot through and through with the juices of morality. That’s a given, as the Bible makes so unmistakable plain.

Laugh at it at your peril.... Think it doesn’t apply to you. Think you’re too big for it to pertain to your situation.

Think you’re somehow a special case and therefore exempt from everybody else’s rules---Ahab and Jezebel were certain that was so with them---think that and you’re headed not only for a rude comeuppance, you’re headed for inevitable disaster.

Now, we need to be very clear here... maybe it’s worth taking a moment longer to underline... We’re not talking Gospel now.... please don’t hear me to be saying that.

THIS IS NOT THE ULTIMATE MESSAGE OF THE CHURCH.... thank goodness...The story of Ahab and Jezebel is not a story of GOOD NEWS, of deliverance, of salvation.

If all we had to offer people was the gospel of Naboth’s vineyard, we’d be out of business

before the week was out.

By itself it’s not a good news story, but it’s the foundation for the good news story, the context which makes the good news, truly GOOD NEWS. Before we can hear any of that in a meaningful way, we have to hear what lies behind it. BEFORE WE CAN KNOW THE GOOD NEWS, WE HAVE TO KNOW THE BAD NEWS.

The Bible wants us to know the truth. It wants us to know that God is not amused by our

disregard for His unblemished moral purity. God is biased on the side of holiness, and morality, and purity, for God Himself is holy, and moral, and pure. Those characteristics of the Creator are built into the very universe.

The worst mistake we can make is to think that God somehow just winks at our moral lapses, just sloughs off with avuncular tolerance and amusement our greed and pride and callousness.

Whenever we covet what is not ours, we are under judgement. Whenever we seek to manipulate people, to treat another person as a “thing”, an object to be controlled, we are under judgment.

Whenever we build walls to protect us from having to look at the misery, and pain, and wretchedness of the less fortunate.....whenever we fail to use our resources and blessings for the purpose of blessing, whenever we expect others to adhere to a more rigid standard than we’re willing to apply to ourselves, WE ARE UNDER JUDGMENT.

And don’t think for a minute that the Church itself is exempt from accountability. The thread of morality runs through the fabric of the entire created world, including the ecclesiastical world.

I shudder sometimes to think of how much worldly standards of evaluation of infiltrated our churchly mindset.... I look at my own profession---

When clergy abuse their authority and take advantage of someone who is helpless in order to satisfy some unworthy need or lust within, IT’S WRONG.

When evangelists, television or otherwise, play shamelessly on people’s emotions, concocting stories of doubtful truthfulness, and twisting their testimonies to give a misleading impression in order to bilk a gullible audience, IT’S WRONG.

When ministers, of whatever stripe, covet accolade over achievement, applause over accomplishment, status over service, good will over good works, solicitude over sacrifice, and recognition over righteousness, IT’S WRONG, and when it happens, it is an offense against an unyielding Biblical principle.

I love my Church....I love the Church of Jesus Christ, I love the United Methodist Church, I love this Church, this local congregation.... love them all enough to engage them in quarrel, a lover’s quarrel, as Robert Frost said about the world.

I don’t worry today so much about the Church’s enemies on the outside.... the atheists, the non-believers, the forces of hostile totalitarianism that would like to wipe us out. At least you know where those enemies stand. They’re not going to do us in. Look at the rekindling of faith going on now in the former Soviet Union. After more than ¾ of a century of vigorous repression, the Church there is more alive now than it’s ever been....and maybe healthier there than the Church here.

No, what I worry about more than external opposition is the ERODING OF INTERNAL INTEGRITY. We must not become a country club, a social enclave of homogenized gregariousness...We must not become a slightly pious mirror of secular values. We must not become a preserver of worn-out traditions, that enhance life for a few, but keep others in their place. We must not become an institution committed to gathering and making, as opposed to giving and spending.

The Church was never called into being so it could obtain...it was called into being to it could serve.

And we must keep in the forefront of our awareness the recognition that God calls His people, clergy and lay alike, to live lives of moral uprightness, lives of high ethical standards, lives that respect other people, and treat them with dignity.

The righteousness of the Holy God of Israel demands nothing less. Ahab and Jezebel scoffed at the seriousness of it, and paid for their arrogance with their lives.

Is this the last thing to be said? Is this our message as heralds of the Eternal? Is this the final verdict? NO, thank God, it’s not. This is NOT the last word.

But before you can hear the last word, God’s final verdict, you have to hear this first word. WE STAND BEFORE A BAR OF MORAL STRINGENCY...every one of us.

Admittedly, there will be lapses, for we are human, with frailties, even the strongest among us. And, of course we must treat those who stumble with compassion and kindness. We don’t keep records and we don’t gloat when someone falls.

But we also remember Ahab and Jezebel and our own tendencies to turn away from God’s uncompromising expectation. The Good News of God’s acceptance doesn’t eliminate that expectation. What it does is bring something NEW and TRANSFORMING to it. It is the righteousness of God that gives the forgiveness of God its revolutionary power. Only when we have felt the burning tears of God can we hear His lilting laughter...

The story of Naboth’s vineyard, an ancient story of overreaching---The truth of it is what makes the Gospel necessary; the universality of it is what makes the Gospel such a terrific deal.