Hilton Head Island, SC – October 3, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
I Kings 22:5-12; 22:13-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But Jehoshaphat said, “Is there not here another prophet of the Lord to whom we may inquire?” – I Kings 22:7 (RSV)
After King Solomon died, things in Israel went steadily sour. Within a couple of decades the kingdom split in two, with a kingdom in the north called Israel, whose capital city was Samaria, and another kingdom in the south, called Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem. From then on, whatever history was written in the Bible was written by people who lived in Judah. Eventually all those living in the kingdom of Israel were called Samaritans. In the New Testament we learn that “Samaritans” was a pejorative ethnic slur, like Micks or Wops or Spics in earlier shameful days of American history.
In the four historical books of I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles, a one-sentence summary is usually given for every king in the two kingdoms upon his death. Every single king of Israel is said to have “done that which was evil in the sight of the Lord,” or other words to that effect. However, only a handful of the kings of Judah were given a positive obituary when they shuffled off this mortal coil. You don’t come across many stellar royal biographies in these books. Everything, north and south, seemed to be spiraling downward into spiritual and social oblivion.
There was a king of Israel who ruled from 873 to 853 BCE. His name was Ahab. He married a Gentile woman from the city of Sidon, in what now is Lebanon. (Sidon still exists, by the way.) Her name was Jezebel. Fifty or a hundred years ago, when Christians were much more familiar with the Bible than they are now, any woman who was called a Jezebel was thought to be a very shady lady. Frankie Lane had a song called Jezebel, which you might remember. From the Bible’s standpoint, Ahab was the worse of the fatally flawed royal twosome. He built a temple to the Canaanite god Baal on Mount Gerezim above Samaria, which enraged the writers of Kings and Chronicles. Herman Melville knew about Ahab, and he named the captain of the Pequod “Ahab” in Moby Dick, intending thereby to tell his readers that Capt. Ahab was not a stellar fellow. Felix Mendelssohn also knew Ahab, and he wrote a great choral oratorio called Elijah. Elijah was apparently the only true prophet of God living in Israel during the reign of Ahab, and he was a thorn in Ahab’s side the entire time. Ahab was so bad that he had six full chapters devoted to his wretched reign, which was far more space than any of the other seedy kings of Israel got. Furthermore, it says that Jezebel was killed by being thrown off the walls of Samaria, and the dogs came and licked up her blood. If you deduce that the Bible doesn’t like Ahab or Jezebel, you deduce correctly. They were a corrupt couple, a perilous pair, a disgusting duo.
This sermon was prompted by an article in Christian Century written by Brian Bantum, who is a professor at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, a United Methodist institution. The article was called Is there no other prophet? It was written about the rather obscure story you heard in the two scripture readings for today.
Although the southern and northern kingdoms seldom collaborated on anything, they did in the events described in I Kings 22. The king of Judah at the time was a man named Jehoshaphat. A few of you may remember his name, because you may recall an exclamation from the old days, maybe seventy-five or more years ago. When people back then wanted to exclaim about something, they might say “Jumping Jehoshaphat!” It was fun to say, if you could say it, and it conveyed the notion that something was surprising or shocking or unsettling.
Anyway, Jehoshaphat and Ahab decided to join forces to try to defeat the Syrians. The Syrians have always been enemies of the Jews since the Jews conquered Canaan over three thousand years ago. They are still the most intractable enemy of the Israelis since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Hafez Assad and his son Bashar Assad are considered as bad now by Israelis as Ahab was then by Israelites and Judeans.
Well, when Jehoshaphat teamed up with Ahab to fight the Syrians, he, being a loyal follower of Adonoy, the God of the Jews, thought that Ahab should consult the prophets in Israel to determine whether God thought it would be wise to attack the Syrians. Four hundred of the prophets of Baal (not Adonoy, although both words mean exactly the same thing, one in Hebrew and the other in Aramean) gave enthusiastic support to a declaration of war. (The 400 were probably members of the same prophetic guild whom Elijah defeated and killed in his bloody contest on Mount Carmel a few years earlier. Elijah called down fire from heaven, and 450 prophets of Baal were slain. The numbers may be suspect, but the two stories are memorably spectacular, if also spectacularly lethal.)
Jehoshaphat was still hesitant to go into battle, even with such unanimous prophetic support. So in order to be absolutely certain that there was universal prophetic approval from Adonoy as well as Baal, the king of Judah asked the king of Israel, “Is there not here another prophet of the Lord (Adonoy) to whom we may inquire?” This is where yet another bloody and murky biblical story has a maudlin touch of dark humor. Ahab says to Jehoshaphat, “There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord, Micaiah the son of Imlah, but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but only evil.”
The vocation of prophets is to proclaim what they believe God wants done at any given period of time and in any situation of any people or nations. Spiritually, religiously, politically, militarily, sociologically, and ethically, what does God want us to do? Often what prophets say is not popular, but they feel compelled to say it anyway. Micaiah, about whom we are told nothing else, feels called by God to be a burr under Ahab’s saddle, and he says that he had a vision of what would happen if the two kings attacked the Syrians. The coalition army would lose the battle, and they would be scattered like sheep without a shepherd. Ahab erupts to Jehoshaphat, “Did I not tell you he would nor prophesy good concerning me, but evil?” Despite Micaiah’s pessimistic words, the kings go up against the Syrians, and Ahab is struck in the chest by a Syrian arrow, and dies. So once again the prophets of Baal are wrong, and the lone prophet of Adonoy is right, and the evil king Ahab is forever obliterated from the biblical royal chronology.
So Brian Bantum asks in his provocative piece, “When confronted by shifting demographics, by new accounts of what our land [the USA] is or isn’t, by the opportunity to reread scriptural accounts of sexuality or race or gender, how do we respond to the question, Surely there is another? How do we respond to calls to confess, to repent, to change course?”
We have come through the most tumultuous presidency in our lifetime, and we are now in the ninth month of a new presidency. It seemed to start well, but it has become bogged down by a major miscalculation in Afghanistan. Furthermore there are partisan impasses in Congress, as the equally divided Senate and the almost equally divided House of Representatives argue like petulant children over every conceivable arguable issue. The president seems uncertain and stymied, the Congress is shredding itself, and the Supreme Court, which alone determines what cases it shall adjudicate, gives hints that progress it has previously made on many fronts may be reversed by June of 2022. …Is there no other prophet?
For four years President Trump had strong affirmation from the prophets of American evangelical Christianity. Wave the flag. Outlaw abortion. Stop the immigrants. Repel the Islamists. Support Christian schools. Continue suppression of Blacks, gays, and transsexuals; they represent the antithesis of genuine American values. …Is there no other prophet?
President Biden is a dedicated lifelong Irish Roman Catholic. He has many enemies who are Roman Catholics, who think he is not sufficiently Catholic. The same pattern holds for Pope Francis I; he is not considered properly Catholic by millions of traditional Catholics. Is there no other prophet? Is Francis not sufficiently prophetic? Is Biden a heretic? Who, in these days of widespread distrust, can be trusted? Can we trust anyone?
For more than forty years the USA has become increasingly polarized. We went from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden. There has been constant political wrangling, with nothing like the words of Isaiah, “Come, let us reason together, says the Lord; though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Isa. 1:18-20).
God is more interested in the world’s wellbeing than the world is, but His will is worked out through our actions, not His. God does not directly intervene in much of what happens, and perhaps in nothing at all. He watches what we do, He judges what we do, but it is we who do it, not God. And the question persistently arises: Is there no other prophet?
From January of 2017 to January of 2021, the Democrats were filled with doom and gloom, and since January 20 of 2021, the Republicans have been predicting doom and gloom. Is there no other prophet? Does anyone see an escape from the corner into which we as a people have painted ourselves? Must negativity continue to be our primary modus operandi?
There was a recent cartoon in The New Yorker. It showed a family at breakfast. There was a mother in a robe and slippers, pouring herself a cup of coffee. The father was on his cellphone. The young boy was the table, eating a piece of toast. The dog was in the foreground, looking in the same direction as the three humans, and on a shelf in the background the cat was focused on the same frightening reality that the cartoonist hinted at, but did not draw. Five sets of eyes are opened wide, as though they have glimpsed the apocalypse, and they are transfixed in fear. The caption below the cartoon says, “The family that stares into the abyss together gets through whatever insanity this year has in store together.”
But it’s hard when there are conflicting prophesies and conflicting prophets, isn’t it? In the 1950s and 60s, the primary American prophets seemed to be Mainline Protestants, and they were saying that everything was rosy, and that every day in every way were getting better and better. Then the War in Viet Nam came along, and things began to change, and the Mainline prophets became pessimistic. Mainline Protestants started bailing out of church in droves, and the spotlight shifted to Evangelicals. They said that if conservative principles, both religious and political, were followed, we would get back on the right track. But our nation became more and more divided, until now, when we can’t even agree on whether or how to fight a pandemic, let alone whether to pass two enormous deficit-producing spending bills, or even one or the other.
Reading about the Israelite monarchs is not a cheerful exercise. Reading the Israelite prophets isn’t much fun either. Everybody always had problems, just as we always have problems. Individual life is not always a bowl of cherries, but communal life or national life or international life can be and is a never-ending difficult challenge. Are there no prophets to guide us through dark days? When the going gets tough, do the tough get going, or do they just sit there and stew in their own juice, plaintively complaining, “Woe is me?”
Things look bad. But then, things have always looked bad, especially to those who see more bad than good in whatever is to be seen. But, as has been said many times by many types of people, God will not leave himself without a witness. God never abandons us; never! He chastens us, He constantly seeks to correct us, but he never forsakes us.
One people more than any other illustrate the ceaseless care and love of God, and they are the ones whose story is told in what Christians call the Old and the New Testaments. They are the Jews. Through nearly four thousand years, from the time of Abraham to the present, they have encountered innumerable trials and tribulations, but they have always survived, because enough of them trusted in God and therefore they were never obliterated, not by the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, nor by the pogroms of the Middle Ages and beyond, nor by the organized attempt altogether to destroy them during World War II. They live, they survive, they thrive. The God of Abraham praise, all praised be His name.
Is there no other prophet? When the false prophets proclaim falsehood confidently, many people fall for it, but others discover true prophets, who preach a continuous message of both judgment and hope. Micaiah gave Ahab holy what-for as long as Ahab lived, which was not long after Micaiah predicted Ahab’s demise at the hands of the Syrians, but Jehoshaphat survived the lost battle. Years later, when he died, the writer of I Kings said of Jehoshaphat that he did “what was right in the sight of the Lord.” Nobody is perfect, but all of us can do better than we are doing, and that also goes for the United States of America and for Planet Earth.
These are hard times, unsettling times, troublesome times. We hear many things that can greatly discourage us. But in the midst of the fear and uncertainty, God is there. And if God is there, ultimately things will turn out well. In the meantime, lest we fall victims to despair, hang on. The road ahead is long and rough, and all of us must keep the faith which God has instilled in each of us. A thousand ages in His sight are like an evening gone. Because God is God, we shall get through this.