The god who answers by fire

Scripture Lesson: Galatians 1: 1-12 and 1st Kings 18: 20-39, OT page 325 Sermon Title: The god who answers by fire Preached on 5/29/2016 I was folding laundry last Friday and the only thing that makes folding laundry tolerable to me is finding something good to watch on TV while I fold. After surfing through the channels I ended up settling on Rambo 3, which means really I was unable to find anything good to watch on TV while I folded laundry. If you’re unfamiliar with the Rambo movies, the only background that you need to know is that they came out in the 1980’s and star Sylvester Stallone, and in these movies he is a one-man army, having been trained for the special forces during the Vietnam War. In Rambo 3 this idea that he is a one-man army really gets blown out of proportion as he faces this entire regiment of the Soviet Union’s military – they have tanks, a helicopter, several hundred armed men – all talking in those harsh Hollywood versions of Russian accents and all laughing in the face of Rambo who stands virtually alone, accompanied only by an injured guy who was his commanding officer back in Vietnam. The movie ends with a face-off between Rambo, who at this point has commandeered a tank, and the last surviving Soviet who is in a helicopter – one is coming from one direction the other opposite, neither backing off until they collide in a huge explosion of fire from which Rambo emerges unscathed. I tell you this because I was struck that in a very strange way, there’s actually a couple things that Rambo and our 2nd Scripture Lesson have in common. They both end in a fire – a fire that signals victory for the one man who faced an entire army. Of course the comparison ends there, especially when you think about how the battle worked in the case of Rambo. For one thing, in the case of Rambo the enemy was clear. The Soviets had invaded from the outside, and they could be fought out on a battle field. Biblically speaking, such an enemy as this would be like the Philistines who once invaded and encroached on Israel’s promised land and had to be fought in the valley of Elah where little David brought the Giant Goliath to his knees. This kind of enemy makes the best kind of movies, but the Prophets of Baal are different. Fighting them is more like how a body fights cancer, how a nation fight terrorism, or how a mother protects her child from the neighborhood around them – the enemy that the Prophet Elijah is trying to defeat has so infiltrated his own country that he is trying to save his homeland from what she has become which is different from defending it against a foreign army. The Prophets of Baal were absorbed into the culture, accepted as neighbors, and even held high office in the land for the source of this corruption was married to the King of Israel. You know what this kind of situation is like. It’s a gradual kind of invasion. Your son comes home from school on a Friday and tells you that he’s been invited over to spend the night at a friend’s house. “What about going to the synagogue the morning?” his mother asks. The son says “that his friend’s parents will take him to the temple where they worship Baal” and mom and dad say, “We’ll that’s a little different,” but they figure it’s probably good enough. After all, at work dad’s been dealing with the same kind of thing. He’s been passed up for a promotion because he insists on following that old time religion with Moses and the 10 Commandments while his co-workers who are trying out this new thing imported by Queen Jezebel are getting the nod from the king. “Sure it’s a little different”, they say “but what’s the big deal?” According to our Second Scripture Lesson the big deal is that this new religion is empty. It can’t deliver on the promises that it’s made so the Prophet Elijah stands before all the people and says, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” What Elijah is doing is not giving a lecture to guilt the people back into righteousness, but he is instead calling for a contest to prove that the gods they are turning to aren’t even real. To do so he calls for two bulls on two alters. The lone prophet, Elijah, will be calling out to his God to light the fire and roast one bull while the 450 prophets of Baal will be calling out to their god to light the other and “the god who answers by fire is indeed God.” Now I can see the genius in this scenario, but it also makes me a little bit nervous. Just the other day a friend told me that if she never applies she never has to open the rejection letter – so this scenario makes me a little bit nervous because it is a moment where everything is put on the line. However, I also know how this is going to turn out, and that’s not just because I’ve read the story a few times but because I know that there are gods who claim to answer by fire but who cannot and never will and that there is another God who promises to do so and will again and again. Most people would rather see a movie where the good guy just shoots the bad guy, but this approach that Elijah takes – just asking the question of whether or not the object of your devotion deserves your devotion is one that we can use every day because I know that there is so much in my life that doesn’t do me any good but that I continue to pay homage to without much thought. So Elijah just forces the issue: follow the real God. Follow the God that can actually deliver on his promises. Which is a thought that I’d like to bring up with everyone who isn’t at church right now but is out shopping at Walmart instead. I’d like to remind them that where your treasure is there your heart will also be – and I for one do not want to die only to wake up in Walmart instead of heaven. If ever there was a religion to compare to the worship of Baal, one that had infiltrated the hearts and minds of a nation without too much of anyone noticing, it is this religion of consumerism. The rituals of this religion are clear: you spend your way to salvation, buy yourself some happiness, and relieve your anxieties through shopping therapy. It’s been claimed that today we spend enough on diet merchandise to solve most of the world’s hunger problems, and the worst part is that those diets don’t even work. We drive the car off the lot and some get brought low by a case of buyer’s remorse or loath the payments that keep coming month after month because they thought they were buying more than a means of transportation – they thought they were buying something that could make them happy. We sign away our future on a high interest loan so we can get the stuff that everyone else has and we end up like everyone else – in debt up to our eyeballs and kept up at night by mounting payments. Could we outlaw the cult of consumerism that has invaded our entire nation? Or might it be more effective to just ask this question: “will consumerism answer with fire?” Will it supply us with what it has promised? Or will we end up with an empty wallet and a basement full of stuff that we’ll eventually throw away remembering the old saying that the two happiest days in the life of a boat owner are the day he bought it and the day he got rid of it? As much as things have changed in the 2500 years since our 2nd Scripture Lesson was written things have really stayed the same. At least two if not all of the great theologians of the 20th Century, Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr agreed that the most damaging sin facing humanity is still that of idolatry – where we expect salvation to come from places where it simply never will. And rather than turn to the only source of salvation, the living God, we continue bowing at the altar of the idols created by human hands forsaking the creator for what has been created – and the worst part of all is that while we spend our time and our money on idols we’re not even getting anything in return. No one lies on their deathbed wishing they had more stuff. No one breathes their last breath worried about the fate of the junk in their storage unit. In the last moments the regrets are always the same – I should have spent more time loving the people who I love and making a difference in this world while I had the chance – so there’s a message here from the Prophet Elijah for all of us: turn to the God who answers by fire, who can actually deliver on his promises and drop those values within our culture that just aren’t valuable. And there are so many. In our world today we’ve absorbed all this junk. We hear about forgiveness on Sunday morning but the TV shows and movies who preach a gospel of revenge have a much larger audience. Once again – there’s one prophet on one side and 450 on the other. What can the lone prophet say but ask the question: “In choosing vengeance do you get anything in return? Will vengeance answer with fire?” And in asking this simple question this holy man of God helps us to see what works and what doesn’t in a culture that has adopted so many lies as truth. Rather than bow before the God who created the human body and gave it life, we bow before the human body, join the cult of youth and beauty, adhere to the discipline of attaining acceptance and popularity, and watch as young men and young women adopt the heretical belief that it doesn’t matter so much whether you like yourself so much as whether everyone else likes you. They say: It doesn’t matter how you feel so much as how you look. It doesn’t matter what’s between your ears so much as what’s everywhere else. And I hate to think about how superficial our whole culture has become with more emphasis on youth and skin cream and the habit of looking in the mirror and seeing what’s wrong rather than what’s right, and there aren’t just 450 prophets proclaiming the gospel of superficiality – there is a corporate machine that preaches on magazine covers and commercials and bill boards so all-encompassing that some will risk their lives just to look how they think they are supposed to look. What would Elijah do? Simply ask if this cult will ever give a return on what it’s promised, and some will wait all day for beauty to equal happiness but this god will never answer by fire because you can’t get what you need until you look in the mirror and accept what you see. The prophetic battle wages – and it’s not like that of World War I where the battle field was Flanders’s Field or Lorraine all across an ocean and waged at a visible enemy. A war like the first World War has a clear battle field, a clear enemy, and even the costs of the war are more easily determined. We can just walk into the Narthex of our church to read the names of those young men who this church lost in defending our country during World War 1. On the day before Memorial Day we are mindful of all those who we’ve lost in war, but we must also be mindful of all those who we have lost and are losing because of passed down values that have no value and devotion to gods who can’t answer by fire. That’s what happened up on the mountain, and when Baal failed to light the altar Elijah mocked his prophets saying, “Cry aloud! Surely his is god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” Then the prophets cried even louder, but “there was no voice, no answer, and no response.” So also, every time we go expecting to be filled up by the approval of others, the altar remains unlit. Every time we think we can buy our way to satisfaction we can cry and shout and shout and cry until there’s nothing left but still there will be no answer. And every time we go putting our hope in human power – the politician, the pastor, the friend, or ourselves we will be left disappointed – so this must go for you just as it must go for me: My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness; I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name. For each and every time we kneel before the creator. Each and every time we bow before the father. Each and every time we call out to Hosanna, Lord of All, righteous judge of the nations, shepherd to his people we will know the God who answers by fire. We have to stop being consumers and start being Christians. We have to stop obsessing about the flaws of our appearance and focus instead on his wounds which bring us life. We have to stop looking for love in all the wrong places, because there’s only one place where we’ll ever find it. “The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God.” Amen.