When Religion Becomes Disruptive

October 26, 1986

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Scripture: “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” I Kings 18:17

I really wish I didn’t have to preach this sermon this morning. It would be a lot easier if I didn’t feel a sense of compulsion about it. There are some things I feel I need to say to you while there is time about casino gambling and the lottery before the election on November 4.

If I had my “druthers”, I’d druther wait a little longer, until I’ve been here a while before embarking on any kind of crusade, or speaking out on a topic that invites controversy. It’s a lot easier, frankly, being a priest than being a prophet.... The pay’s better, and you can sleep at night more soundly.

Unfortunately, we don’t often have the privilege in the Christian life of picking our timing. We’re not in management, we’re in sales. What’s more, our Sourcebook, the Bible, is a pesky, stick-in-the-mud when it comes to letting us do what we think we’d like to do.

Have you noticed? While the major thrust of the Bible, always, is positive, while its message, on the whole, is one of uplift and affirmation, DON’T LET IT FOOL YOU. There’s an underside to that message, which is never far beneath the surface.

AUTHENTIC BIBLICAL RELIGION IS AS MUCH CONCERNED WITH TEARING DOWN AS IT IS WITH BUILDING UP. It’s against as much as it is for, opposed to as much as it supports, flagrantly, even violently, in contradiction to as much as it advocates. And it minces no words about it. There’s a built-in, down-to-earth stringency here. Those who want only a sweet, gentle, otherworldly, “spiritual” gospel may not find it comfortable, but there it is.

From the prophets, all the way to Jesus, the apostles and Paul, In fact, from the first page to the last, from Genesis to Revelation, from the Garden to the New Jerusalem, THE GOD OF THE BIBLE COMES AS DISRUPTER BEFORE HE COMES AS REDEEMER. He comes as Enemy before He comes as Friend...He comes as Disturber before He comes as Comforter. Why? Because a seed can’t grow until the ground is first broken.

Part of the function of Biblical religion is precisely to break, to shatter, to uproot the old idolatries and complacencies in order to prepare for real fruit.

See it in this old story from the Book of First Kings. Remember? I used a portion of it a moment ago. Ahab was the king.... a powerful king, a materialistic king, a self-indulgent king. Give him his due... He was also an able, competent, intelligent, even, I guess, a successful king, but with all of it, a callous, weaselly, manipulating, calculating, look out for Number 1, what’s-in-it for me king.

I know some people like him today.... Ahab was the king.

Elijah was the man of God in the picture...an embarrassment to the King a threat, a disturbance, a sandspur in the britches, a prick of conscience, an infusion of unwanted morality, just enough to mess things up and bring discomfort. Just his presence threw the monarch off balance. Oh, they co-existed, to be sure, the two.... There was an uneasy détente, agreement between them, maybe even a grudging respect, but Ahab never liked Elijah.... in fact, he detested him.

HE KNEW HE DIDN’T OWN HIM, as he did everything else. He couldn’t control him. He was an anachronism..... Elijah was YHWH’s man, not for sale, All that he stood for cast a shadow across the king’s easy compromising. And one day, Ahab went too far. It was really Jezebel who was behind it, his pagan wife, Jezebel. Don’t you just love to say that name, JEZEBEL. Isn’t it a deliciously wicked name, slimy and evil? What couple would even think of naming a daughter, Jezebel?

Well, Jezebel was something else, let me tell you. She makes Alexis Carrington look like Marie Osmond.[1] She worshipped the Ba’al gods, morally dissolute deities, uncaring, fickle, grasping deities. The Ba’al gods were nature gods, who had to be appeased to make it rain and cause the crops to grow. You appeased them through perverted, frenzied sexual activity.....Their very presence in the community degraded human life.

Ahab let Jezebel talk him into permitting the worship of the Ba’al gods, publicly, right alongside the worship of YHWH. What did he care? No moral issues involved.... It might bring a little extra revenue for the kings coffer.

Maybe we can use it to support education. When Elijah heard it, he flipped his lid. On the spot, he called up the royal press secretary, and made an appointment. You tell the King Elijah wants to see him. ”Didn’t even have to give his last name.... Ahab knew who it was.

And the two come together, out on the plain, at the meeting time. Can you picture it? The king and the prophet.... state and church, the secular man and the religious man, the opportunist and the moralist, the man whose motive was getting ahead, whatever the cost, and the man whose motive was doing right, whatever the cost.... There they are.

And Ahab greets his antagonist with the words of our text, plaintively on target, the inevitable reaction of selfishness when it’s being gored.... “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” How many times through the centuries have Ahab’s words been echoed? Over and over when vested interest reacts to moral challenge.

It’s how slave owners right here in the South looked at Lincoln when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.... “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” It’s how mine owners in 18th Century England saw John Wesley when he insisted that miners, children of God, be paid a decent wage.... It’s how the owners of that slave girl in Philippi saw Paul and Silas when they healed her of the abnormality that possessed her and cut off their profit....

It’s how the members of the Sanhedrin in the 1st Century saw Jesus of Nazareth when, without so much as saying a word, He shamed the tawdriness of their lives by the purity of His own.... They knew something had to give. Either they had to get rid of Him, or they, themselves, had to change.... And you know what decision they made..... “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?

No, the troubling word is not God’s final word. Thank God for that. Thank God for grace, and love, and acceptance, when we’re in a position to receive them. They’re God’s final word, which is precisely why we call it GOSPEL. BUT BEFORE HE CAN GET TO THAT WITH HIS CHILDREN, SOMETIMES HIS FIRST WORD HAS TO BE A WORD OF DISRUPTION, to get our attention for what He really wants us to hear.

The Church of Jesus Christ, if it is to be faithful to this Book which is its charter, must never shy away from the “troubling word”, when that is the appropriate word for a given situation.

Now, I know you’re already ahead of me. I hope way ahead of me, and running fullsteam. Give me just a moment to catch up. In the train of Elijah, and the Prophets, and Jesus of Nazareth, and I firmly believe out of that heritage, I urge you to “trouble” to death the issues before us on the ballot November 4th-- a proposed state lottery, and casino gambling.

The claims for them sound almost exactly like Ahab and Jezebel, bringing in the Ba’al gods....What’s wrong with it? What harm can it do? It’s what the people want.... It’s good for the economy, It’ll bring in revenue.... That’s what Ahab said.

But I submit that any industry which provides no service, produces no product, and blatantly panders to human weakness is not the kind of industry on which to base our state’s future.

Casino gambling was soundly defeated in 1978 by a 2 to 1 vote. Some of you remember

it well. The people of Florida then said, WE DON’T WANT IT.... Casinos attract organized crime.... They cause street crime to escalate. They prey on the weak and elderly. They drive away family tourism. They cost more than they bring in in the long run because control and rehabilitative services have to go up.... They create a bad moral climate.

Florida already has a basically healthy economy...We don’t need casinos to grow and prosper. That was 1978. NOTHING HAS CHANGED. In fact, the threat now is not simply to a thin strip of land way down in the Southeast corner of the state called Miami Beach. That’s where casinos would have been restricted to if the vote had passed in ’78. Now its Central Florida which has the potential for becoming the center of casino activity.

According to the amendment, casino operations may be allowed, following county approval, in hotels which have at least 500 rooms. There are 14 hotels in Dade County (Miami) with 500 rooms or more. Broward County has 5, Palm Beach County 2. There are 2 hotels in Tampa with at least 500 rooms. None in St. Pete, none in Jacksonville.

In Orange and Osceola Counties there are 25 hotels now with at least 500 rooms. Says Andrew Rubin, a Dade County lawyer, who led the drive to get the casino gambling proposal on the ballot, “It’s interesting to note that Orlando is more the target for this thing in the long run than Miami, (simply) because Orlando is the tourist center of the state.”

I hope and pray we’ll not let these Ba’al gods, with their cynical disregard for the moral fabric of human life, have a chance to begin their polluting influence. “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” God grant that that’s exactly what the ba’al gods and their supporters will say to the good people of Florida when the votes are counted on November 4th and the casino gambling proposal is defeated soundly again.

Now, the lottery issue is a more subtle thing, and maybe for that very reason a more insidious thing. The documented blight that has accompanied the coming of casinos to Atlantic City---- a tripling of the crime rate in 5 years, the closing of any number of family businesses just off the strip, the actual diminishing of population since the vote passed----makes casinos a more obvious bad choice.

A lottery, though, sounds so much better. It’s lure seems so much more appealing. Indeed, polls taken recently seem to suggest that a statewide lottery has majority support, especially when its backers talk about it as an easy way to raise more money for education, and who doesn’t want more money to improve our public schools?

The truth is, nothing in the amendment requires that lottery proceeds would have to

go to education. Even the strongest supporters of the lottery for education admit that.

Read the amendment and see for yourself. What will happen, say most legislators, is that any new monies generated by a lottery and assigned to education will simply reduce by that amount the normal education budget, and education is no better off than before.

What’s more, a lottery is probably the most expensive way to raise tax revenue ever

devised. Newsweek Magazine says, “the strongest case against lotteries may simply be that they are inefficient.”

It takes only a penny or two of administration to raise a dollar of tax revenue through a sales tax, for instance. Up to 60 cents of every lottery dollar goes to commissioning, advertising, policing, prizes, etc., all those things necessary to run it. People talk sometimes about Church bureaucracy, as if it were an out-of-control giant. Nothing in the Church structure can begin to compare with the built-in inefficiency of that kind of wasteful money making procedure.

I guess, though, what agitates me most, and what saddens me most about the prospect of a lottery, and what I think would rile Elijah if he were living, is that getting into the business of promoting gambling would make the state itself a “peddler of unrealistic dreams”.

That’s not my phrase. I wish I had thought it up, but it expresses to me what is most cruel and callous about a scheme which deliberately makes an appeal to human weakness. Is that the kind of thing government is supposed to be doing? It’s the poor who suffer most from the ravages of gambling.... Don’t kid yourself.

Pat Anderson, a sociologist from Florida Southern College told some of us last week that out of 4 winners in a recent lottery drawing in California, 2 of the 4 were on welfare, and a 3rd was an undocumented immigrant. The winners are a microcosm of the players.... A lottery is not primarily a middle class or upper-class sport. It’s those who can least afford to lose who are most hurt by responding to the glitter of an elusive chimera.

Most have no comprehension of the odds stacked against them. The state’s not going to

tell them. 99.9% of all lottery players are not going to win, say the odds..... You are 7 times more likely to get struck by lightning than to have your number chosen.

Yet those who have most to lose find it hard to resist the “this-is-my-time” lure, which the state publicly promotes in direct contradiction to everything else it encourages in the way of thrift, personal industry, and being self-sufficient.

How can a government, created for the benefit of the people, set up to promote creativity, hard work, discipline, and independence, turn right around and sponsor an activity based on a philosophy of getting something for nothing? How can you reconcile that “get-rich-quick-the-easy-way” attitude with what you want to be taught in public education.

There must be a better way, a more honest way, a more upright, moral way to raise the money we need for public service. We lived for a while in another country where there was a public, government sponsored lottery. Every week there was a drawing with one or two winners, and a host of saddened losers. At Christmas time there was the big, annual lottery, what they called the “Gordo”, the fat one.

We saw little children, peddling tickets on the street, even at that tender age, being caught up in a way of life.... We saw the countless, torn up and discarded tickets after the drawing, thrown down in the gutter, mementos of exploded anticipation..... We saw, so many times, fathers of families, where there were barefooted kids, and nothing on the table but beans and rice, take their meager Christmas bonuses and blow them on a fickle hope that this time it would be different. IT ALMOST NEVER WAS.

One or two in all the country made it big. A few who were in the ticket printing business took a good haul. Some crooks and petty bureaucrats stuffed lots of money in their pockets. All the rest sighed in disappointment as they had the time before, and the time before that, and said, “Maybe next year.... Maybe next year my number will come up. HOW SAD AND HOW CRUEL.

God knows we need a lot of things in our nation, and in our state.... better housing, better roads, better education.... on and on. More than anything, these improvements rest on better people. They rest on the cultivation of stronger families, a more tightly knit moral fabric.

How can parents teach their children that discipline, and hard work, and honesty, and integrity are the key to success when the government tells them that the way to make it is to bet on a number. We don’t have to fall into that trap. The Ahabs and Jezebels don’t have to shape our future. The Ba’al gods don’t have to prevail.

The Social Creed of the United Methodist Church, adopted by the General Conference, the only body that can speak for the denomination says, in part: “Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life, and destructive of good government. As an act of faith and love, Christians should abstain from gambling and should strive to minister to those victimized by the practice....” This is the official stance of our Church.

Voting NO on November 4th on the lottery and casino gambling won’t all by itself guarantee an improved moral climate for our state..... but voting YES will almost certainly guarantee the opposite.

Is it you, you troubler of Israel? I hope all of us will be trouble-makers on election day, trouble makers for God, standing in a long line of divine disturbers, to uproot in order to plant, to disturb in order to build, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

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[1] Note: Alexis Carrington was an actress and Marie Osmond, a singer. Both well known in popular culture when the sermon was written.