Scowling Simon Cowell, the criminal Chrisley’s, and “Love After Lock-Up” are not what critics have in mind when they call this a “Golden Age” of television. They are actually speaking about the serials, both comic and dramatic, that have been a staple of the traditional networks, premium channels, and streaming services in recent years, shows like “Lost,” “The Wire,” and “Ms. Marvel.”
You know, the sort of show that starts with “Previously on ‘We Own This City’”… which, by the way, is both a great non-fiction book and a great fictionalized serial on HBO.
I sometimes feel like we need that sort of thing in worship, that season recap. We are way over-scheduled and over-stimulated on a good day, and we don’t invest as much time as maybe we should in the study of scripture, then we come to church and get a ten line excerpt without any context.
And that is exactly where we are this week. Thousands of preachers will focus on God being present not in the storm, the earthquake, or the fire, but instead being present in the silence, drawing Elijah from the cave. And that will preach though I’m not always sure what exactly it preaches. Some will focus on God providing for Elijah, caring for him when he seems incapable of caring for himself. That, too, will preach, for we sometimes need care, human and divine, when we cannot care for ourselves. But why is Elijah off in the wilderness and hiding in a cave to begin with? So…
Previously on Kings, Season One: Ahab, the King of Israel, is in an interfaith marriage with Jezebel, who worships Melqart, also called Baal Shamem. Elijah, a prophet in Ahab’s Hebrew tradition, challenges Jezebel’s court priests to perform a miracle by lighting a sacrificial fire through prayer. When they fail, Elijah performs the miracle, and having impressed the crowd and called them back to Yahweh, Elijah orders that the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal be taken to a dry river bed and murdered.
So this is why Jezebel is angry, why she promises to have Elijah killed, because he has caused a mass casualty event, has ordered the slaughter of people because they were from a different nationality with a different religion. Elijah is wanted for murder, for what we would consider today a crime against humanity.
The prophet is a fugitive from justice, but we’re supposed to take his side. Elijah the Prophet, hero of our scripture tradition. Yay us! Right? If this is our religion, this violence and intolerance, the Fundamentalists can have it.
The Elijah Vs. Jezebel smackdown is ancient propaganda in support of two claims central to the Hebrew scripture narrative. The first is the idea that the worship of other gods was only ever an aberration, that the Hebrew people were mostly united in their monotheism from the moment God called Abram and Sarai out of what is today Iraq.
The second claim, which also comes into play here because Jezebel is a foreigner, is that the Hebrew people were racially pure, though we would do well to think of it as ethnically pure, since the pseudo-science of race manufactured under colonialism and the Enlightenment didn’t exist yet in the Ancient Near East. There was no such thing as race in biblical times, only tribe and clan.
Neither of these claims is true, religious purity nor tribal purity. Not only do history and archeology undermine these claims, so too does scripture itself. There are layers in the text that reveal belief in multiple gods all through Hebrew history, and texts which show the Hebrew people absorbing other ethnic groups. The Exodus refugees may have actually been little more than a small, distinct group of escaped slaves that assimilated with an existing Canaanite population. While the text celebrates genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Book of Joshua, we know that it did not actually happen.
Still, the central question, the one at play in the supposed evil of Jezebel, her faith and her tribe, is one of identity. The message here seems to be that diversity is evil. Only purity will save you.
Now, I’m all about not worshipping false gods. I believe there is only one God that is the source of all, the eternal composer who sings existence. I also know that the ways I interpret holy mystery, the ways my ancestors interpreted holy mystery, are not the only way to experience the holy. My prophets are not the only prophets. God, in order to be God, must not be something that can fit into some human formula, some god-box of our creation, for God is infinite and we are by not. In fact, God is little more than a placeholder for what is beyond our knowing.
So I embrace variety in the human encounter with the holy, yet still I fear that many do worship false gods, tiny gods that they can control, like calling a Mason Jar full of salt water the ocean.
We know that the story the ancient Hebrews told themselves about purity was a lie. Creation doesn’t work that way. I see exactly zero evidence that the holy works that way. Only we humans, who use ourselves as the measure of all things, seem to work this way.
The colonialist and racist narratives that pretend to be history in our own nation are lies, more than 27 centuries after the kingdom ruled by Ahab was ground into the dust of Samaria.
America was never a Christian nation. Sure, most of the immigrants from Europe were culturally Christian, and some were seeking to create a new world based on their faith. Some were refugees fleeing religious persecution in Europe. But even then, in those earliest days of the invasion of the Americas by Europeans, many came simply to escape war and poverty, came seeking opportunity. The first permanent settlement in Virginia was not religious. New Amsterdam was not religious. And, of course, there were those here before the first invaders arrived, and those brought to the continent in shackles, none of them Christians.
And speaking of those pushed from the land or brought to the land against their own will, America was never a white nation. It was slavery that necessitated the creation of the idea of race, for only under the guise of pseudo-science could humans behave with such barbarity toward other humans.
Today we know without a doubt that the amount of melanin in our skin is just one of countless adaptations in the long and on-going process of natural selection. Even what seems to us enormous variation in environmental adaptation represents less than one tenth of one percent of our genome.
This weekend we celebrate the new federal holiday of Juneteenth, marking the day when Union Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, officially declaring those once enslaved free. The order still needed to be disseminated and enforced, of course, and emancipation simply ended slavery in one form, for the newly freed were advised to stay on the property of their former masters and work for wages. There were no reparations. There was barely an economy at all, much less one with competition for wage labor. All too soon, white Southerners would discover a loophole built into the engine of emancipation allowing them to once again shackle those descended from African abductees. All they needed was a trumped up charge, a racist sheriff and a racist judge, and people of color were once again in the fields, unpaid labor in what were once again effectively slave states.
Never mind the terror. It is not really “the land of the free and the home of the brave” when the continent’s First Peoples were not free, were still being slaughtered, when race slavery simply took new forms. There isn’t much bravery when you are hiding your face behind a white hood or a badge.
The story of the Hebrew people was never quite as narrow as this excerpt we read today from 1st Kings. Scripture is filled with faithful foreigners. Maybe Elijah did call the mob to murder 450 priests, but the message we are supposed to hear, this message of purity, is a fiction. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God. Nothing about purity there. Let justice flow down like the waters. Welcome the immigrant. Pay a just wage. Free the captives. This is God’s voice, at least the one I choose to follow.
The story of America was never quite as narrow as the fever-dreams of white Christian nationalists and their white secular nationalist companions. There were people here before white Europeans, abducted Africans almost as long as white Europeans, and a steady stream of voluntary non-white immigrants in the last two centuries, and they are every bit American, make America what it is. Our government may be designed to preserve control by rich old white men, but our nation has never been them. America is best like jazz, a blending of cultures, a little freedom, a lot of funk.
Our encounter with the divine is a work in progress. We are continually constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing our faith. Our nation, the ways in which we govern ourselves, is a work in progress. Juneteenth is a work in progress, a task not yet complete, a beginning, not and ending, for the weight of abduction and slavery, of racism and mass incarceration, still shackle our sisters and brothers of color. No land, no reparations, no real freedom to live into who God spoke them to be. Making it a federal holiday does nothing to make right what has been for so very long so very wrong.
May Juneteenth be a challenge to live into the promise of that day, an officer in Texas, an order from a dead president, and a nation still not what it could be. May we get there in the fullness of time, with our hard work and God’s help. Amen.
Next season, on 2nd Kings, some small boys call Elisha “baldhead,” and forty-two of them are promptly mauled by bears.