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"Sacrificing to the Baals"
August 4, 2019
Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, Year C
“Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies,
“Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ladies and Gentlemen,
“Today, in Afghanistan, a girl will be born. Her mother will hold her and feed her, comfort her and care for her – just as any mother would anywhere in the world. In these most basic acts of human nature, humanity knows no divisions. But to be born a girl in today’s Afghanistan is to begin life centuries away from the prosperity that one small part of humanity has achieved. It is to live under conditions that many of us in this hall would consider inhuman.”
So begins the lecture former United Nations Security General, Kofi Annan, gave to the Nobel Committee upon receiving the centennial Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, nearly twenty years ago. Though, if we’re being honest, not much has changed in twenty years. That Afghan girl could very well have been born today. “We have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire,” Annan said three months after the events of September 11th.
Looking around now, maybe it wasn’t just the gate that was on fire.
It seems as though we have not learned our lesson. That hate begets hate and violence begets more violence and division begets more division.
Today, on the heels of yet another—I hate that word; another—mass shooting within our borders at the hands of homegrown white nationalist terrorism, that reality feels all too true. And sure, I could stand up here and say something like “God’s still on the throne,” but if I’m being honest with myself, that theological proclamation is starting to ring a little hollow. Because this—all of this—has been going on for a long time. A long time. Much longer than twenty years even. It goes all the way back to those pesky Baals.
Now, those of you unfamiliar with the intricacies of the foreign and domestic policies of the ancient divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah and who are following along in the bulletin are probably wondering what the heck is going on with that sermon title. Sacrificing to the Baals. Well, you all are in luck because the intricacies of the foreign and domestic policies of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah are just the kinds of things that I kind of like to nerd out over.
I’m a real hoot at dinner parties.
The long and short of it is that all of their troubles boiled town to an economic system wherein wealthy landowners who lived in urban centers bought up and rented out land out in rural areas. Those who rented and worked the land could never afford to own it themselves, in part because the fruits of their labor went back to their landlords. It created a vicious and endless cycle of indebtedness and poverty and the land being overworked and stripped of its nutrients, becoming less and less fertile with each passing year. And what, might you ask, were those wealthy and elite landowners doing with the fruits of their tenants’ labor? Everything in their power to secure their own power and status. They would pay massive tributes to foreign empires in the hopes that they would deal peacefully with them, massive tributes that more often than not, came in the form of sacrifices to the gods and idols, also known as Baals, of the Assyrians and Babylonians (named after the Assyrian fertility god, Baal). The very empires that would eventually swallow them up and destroy their way of life.
So to recap, the ancient Israelite elite exploited their own people and used the results of their exploitation not to lift up the marginalized but to secure their own status by making lavish sacrifices to a foreign fertility god whose empire would one day totally conquer their land and spread them throughout the Levant.
We all on the same page? Exploitation. Sacrifice. Destruction.
The fall of the two kingdoms posed a major problem of theology for the people of God at that time. Though we now understand the Abrahamic religions to be what we call radically monotheistic—that is, there is one God and only one God—this wasn’t always the case. When we look at the texts written before the exile, we don’t find an outright denial of the existence of other Gods. Take the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God…you shall have no other gods before me” you shall have no other gods before me; before me. It doesn’t say “I am the Lord your God and I’m the only God”. No, it says you shall have no other gods before me. As in, “yeah, sure there might be other gods out there, but I am your God and I come first in your lives.” It’s what religious scholars call henotheism, the worship of one God while not denying the existence or even possible existence of other, lesser deities.
And that lesser is an important distinction. In those times, gods were intimately linked with a nation’s identity, and the strength of a nation’s god was directly proportional to the strength of the nation itself. If two nations went to war with each other, the nation that won had a god who was stronger than the other nation’s god. And well, if your country lost the war or, heaven forbid, was conquered, then your god wasn’t all that great anyways so might as well start worshipping something else.
So yeah, when Israel and Judah fell to the Assyrians and the Babylonians respectively, they had a bit of a religious crisis on their hands. If Israel and Judah fell and their land was occupied and their people dispersed throughout the Ancient Near East and the Temple, God’s very own dwelling place, was destroyed, that must have meant that the God they worshipped—the God of Abraham and their ancestors—was weaker than the gods of the Assyrians and Babylonians and therefore less deserving of their worship and adoration. The loss of their land and power and status brought with it a loss of their religion too.
And yet, it’s also right around this time that we see a shift in the texts to a profession of that radical monotheism we’re familiar with today. Adonai, the God of Abraham and their ancestors was no longer seen as one God among many or even the strongest God among many, but rather the one and only God. The gods of the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Baals, were false gods. Their statues and idols were merely wood and stone. You didn’t take us over because our God is weaker than you; we’re the ones who fell away from our God.
We disobeyed the commandments.
We neglected to care for the most marginalized people. The orphan. The widow. The immigrant.
We stole their land and resources to pay tribute to foreign empires—to make sacrifices to their Baals.
Tribute and sacrifice that we thought would protect us.
Protect our status.
Protect our power.
Protect our privilege.
And if protecting ourselves meant stealing from our children and our elderly and our impoverished citizens—the very people our God commanded us to protect—so be it.
Your gods didn’t defeat our God! Our God used you to punish us for our transgressions.
And you know, I have to say. As far as theological Judo goes, that’s an outstanding move.
It’s the kind of move that allows a religion to not only survive, but flourish while the community is in the wilderness of exile, waiting for the day when God will settle them in their homes.
Now, before I continue, there’s a quick pastoral distinction I need to make. Note the conditions and context from whence that theology emerged. The community from which it comes is living through and reflecting on their own experiences. It’s not coming from a place of comfort and ease towards another person. They’re trying to make sense of their own trauma. The challenge with this kind of theological reasoning—that suffering is the result of God punishing us for our transgressions—is that it’s really easy to, with even the best of intentions in the world, externalize and push that theology on others living though their own traumatic experiences.
It’s one thing for me, myself, to say “the Lord is testing me” or “I screwed up”.
It’s quite another altogether for me to say to someone else “the Lord is testing you” or “you know, this is really your fault”, especially when I have more power and privilege than that someone else.
And, to be perfectly clear, that line of thought isn’t universal in the prophetic texts either. In some places, sure, the prophets paint a picture of a God whose justice is swift. A God who is leading the armies of the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But in other places, like our text this morning, we see a more nuanced approached. In this chapter, Hosea doesn’t paint a picture of God who is destroying Israel Godself. On the contrary. In this chapter, Hosea paints a picture of God who laments. Who grieves. Who mourns God’s children’s infidelity. The more I called them, the further they went from me. How can I hand you over Israel? How can I make you like Admah or treat you like Zeboiim; those two cities in the plain of Sodom and Gomorrah?
Hosea tells us that none of this—absolutely none of this—is what God desires. None of this brings God any joy. My heart winces within me.
My heart winces within me.
It’s a cry that reverberates through time and space.
Because, if we’re being honest, those Baals haven’t gone away, have they?
Oh sure, Assyria was eventually destroyed, and for that matter, so was Babylon. Their Baals and other idols reduced to rubble or, if they were lucky, sitting in a museum somewhere. But their lure has persisted through the ages and persists still today using different names and slogans and structures.
White supremacy.
Christian nationalism.
America first.
Privatized prisons.
Colonialism.
Nuclear proliferation (because pulling out of a nuclear treaty literally the week before we remember the anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is par for the course, I guess).
Militarized police forces.
Sexism.
Heteronormativity.
The NRA.
Thoughts and prayers.
Capitalism run amok.
Border security.
National security.
The military industrial complex.
Profit that comes from destroying our planet.
Profit that comes from destroying lives.
Patriarchy.
Every single time we try to protect ourselves and our own institutions at the expense of others.
All Baals. Every last one of them and more.
We pay tribute to them. We bow down and worship them. We make sacrifices to them. The lives of our children. And our children’s children. And our children’s children’s children. We think that if we just make one more sacrifice or say one more prayer to these false gods, then everything will be made right in the world without having to make any real change on our parts. Without realizing that the sacrifices we’re making and the tributes we’re paying are costing us everything; are costing us the lives of the very people we are called to protect and care for.
If we continue down this road, we can expect the same fate as those who came before us. Swords striking wildly in our cities, consuming our gates, and taking away everything we hold dear.
But there’s another way.
“Each of us,” Annan says, “has the right to take pride in our particular faith or heritage. But the notion that what is ours is necessarily in conflict with what is theirs is both false and dangerous. It has resulted in endless enmity and conflict, leading men to commit the greatest of crimes in the name of a higher power.”
“It need not be so,” he continues, “We can love what we are, without hating what—and who—we are not.”
We can love what we are without hating what we are not.
We can hear the voice of God, roaring out like a lioness, and return to her like we are her cubs. We can turn away from the Baals enticing lure and re-align our lives with what God desires for us. All of us. Each and every one of us. Rich and poor. Free and fettered. Privileged and humiliated.
That might mean giving up our own power or letting go of our own privilege to stand alongside those who are most marginalized.
Or maybe it means using our power to be co-creators with God of God’s justice—using our power to dismantle the systems and structures that privilege certain people over others.
Both can be true.
Both have to be true.
“Your Majesties,
“Excellencies,
“Ladies and Gentlemen,
“You will recall that I began my address with a reference to the girl born in Afghanistan today. Even though her mother will do all in her power to protect and sustain her, there is a one-in-four risk that she will not live to see her fifth birthday. Whether she does is just one test of our common humanity – of our belief in our individual responsibility for our fellow men and women.
“But it is the only test that matters.”
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