Text:  2 Kings 6:24-7:11                                                            23^rd Sunday after Pentecost

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

            In the name of Jesus, dear brothers and sisters in Christ: As you know, the Bible is unique among all the other books in the world, because it, and it alone, is the inspired word of God.  So it’s already in a class all by itself.  But the Bible is unique for a lot of other reasons too.  For example, unlike virtually all other ancient documents that have been preserved and passed down to us, the Bible always tells it just like it happened—it doesn’t hold back the bad news.  If you examine most works of ancient literature, you’ll find a consistent tendency to “clean up” the story.  Most ancient scribes used to record things kind of like writers did in the old Soviet Union when preparing the official government versions of what happened, or like the Iraqi national press reports on Saddam Hussein today.  You only get glamorized, highly exaggerated reports of fantastic accomplishments and conquests – and never any negative words, especially about the kings and leaders.  In the old days, if a scribe were so foolish as to write something negative, he didn’t usually get the opportunity to make the mistake twice, and his writings were destroyed.  The Bible stands out because it tells all:  the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The reading that you just heard and which is the text for this morning’s meditation is a prime example of a passage that wouldn’t have made it past most ancient censors. As a matter of fact, in a sense it doesn’t make it past modern censors either.  You won’t find this reading in our normal three-year lectionary series – or in any other lectionary series for that matter.  Nor is it likely to show up in your devotional readings.  That’s because it deals with such unpleasant business – not the sorts of things you expect to hear about in church.  And parts of it really are quite awful.  In this one text, we’ve got war, starvation, the horrors and deprivations of a besieged city, and people reduced to cannibalism – and that of the very worst sort:  mothers devouring their own children.  We’ve also got a weak, faithless, and vindictive king whose best plan in a crisis is to order the murder one of God’s greatest prophets; and then we’ve got some of the Bible’s most unlikely heroes:  four men with leprosy (a horrible, disfiguring disease of the flesh).  And some heroes they turn out to be:  they act first in desperation (Hey, we’re going to die one way or the other), then in base greed (Wow, look what we found!  Let’s pig-out and stash all this loot!), and then, finally, they only help the others because of a sense of guilt and the fear that they will be punished if they don’t share their find.  Not exactly what we would describe as noble, are they?

  And not only is this story unfamiliar and unpleasant, my guess is that for most of us it’s kind of hard to relate to.  Walled cities besieged by invading armies of Aramites, starvation, the rising costs of donkey’s heads, cannibalism, leprosy – these sorts of things aren’t part of our daily lives (which is okay by me).  It all seems so distant and archaic, part of those nebulous and larger-than-life “Bible times” that don’t quite feel to us like real history – back when miracles happened and God spoke through prophets and so on; and so it’s hard to get the sense that there’s anything in this reading that has application for us today.  And I imagine that as I read it, some of you were wondering, “Of all the passages he could have chosen, why did he pick this one?”

What I want you to see this morning is that though times have changed, most things – most of life’s situations – haven’t.  The Bible tells it like it was, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because that’s the way life is in this fallen world of ours.  I want you to see that with a few minor modifications, this story could have been snatched from today’s headlines; and that it has several direct applications to each of us today.  And that’s not all bad news.  Yes, it’s an unpleasant story, like a lot of the world we live in; but it also shows how God acts in this fallen world to accomplish his will and save unworthy sinners like you and me.

The story comes to us from the time of the Divided Kingdom; that is, after the reign of King Solomon, who was David’s son.  Recall that when Solomon died, the ten northern tribes of Israel united and rebelled against Judah and the house of David in the south.  They formed their own country, and set up their capital in the city of Samaria.  In general, they remained on friendly terms with the Southern Kingdom (whose capital was Jerusalem), and the two nations often cooperated in times of war. They were all Israelites, after all. Still, there was tension and disagreement on a lot of issues that kept the two nations apart.

And the Northern Kingdom had a reputation for being notoriously unfaithful to God.  You see, the place for worshipping the Lord was his temple in Jerusalem.  That’s the way God wanted it; and that’s what he told his people.  But the rulers of the Northern Kingdom realized it was a problem for them if their citizens kept going to Jerusalem to worship and to celebrate the high holy days like Passover and the Day of Atonement and so on.  It was sort of like conceding the Southern Kingdom’s moral and religious preeminence, which in turn undermined the northern kings’ authority and legitimacy.  So, to keep their folks from turning their religious loyalties to the south, over the years the northern kings established a number of alternative places of worship within their own borders.  The idea was to keep their people, and their allegiance, directed homeward.

But you see, God did not authorize or approve of these centers of worship.  And since they had started by defying what God had said with respect to where to worship, it was only natural that they felt pretty free to ignore other things that God had said – and they did.  They began by relaxing the Lord’s moral standards. Soon they started mixing the ideas and practices of various pagan religions into their worship of God. They even went to far as to assign the Lord a divine consort that they borrowed from Canaanite mythology, a fertility goddess, and they started to worship her too. All of these things, of course, were serious offenses to God – but the funny thing was that the people still all considered themselves faithful followers of the Lord.  Though they had perverted and corrupted the faith, they always acted shocked and offended whenever one of God’s true prophets tried calling them back to the proper worship of the Lord.  “What do you mean, ‘turn back to the Lord’?  We believe in him!  We’re his chosen people too.  Are you saying that you’re better than us just because we believe a little bit differently?”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Ours has been called the “age of designer religions” because everyone wants to express their individuality by creating their own faith.  People who call themselves Christian feel free to add, subtract, and borrow doctrines and teachings from any and every source imaginable. The result is that many (if not most) Christians adhere to a hodge-podge of beliefs, a lot of which are anything but Christian – and some of which actually contradict other things they believe. Just for example, a majority of Christians say they believe that faith in Christ is the only way to eternal life – that is, only by trusting in his atoning death for sin and his resurrection can a person be saved.  That’s good. But at the same time, a majority of Christians also say that the adherents of any faith, Christian or not, if they truly believe and try to live right according to their moral principles – those folks will be saved too.  It really can’t be both ways; but woe to you if you point out the obvious contradiction:  “You religious bigot!  Do you think you have the only truth?”

In Old Testament times, one of the ways the Lord would encourage people to return to faith and trust in him was by applying external pressure.  Folks tend to seek the answers to life’s big questions in times of crisis – and at such times, they are more receptive to the answers that God gives.  It’s in hard times that people are forced to examine their ways, repent, and seek the Lord. And so, over the years, God sent famines and droughts to the Northern Kingdom, or he brought in an invading army of “ites” like the Hittites, Amorites, Moabites, or as in today’s text, Aramites, to oppress them. His goal was to turn up the heat to show people the futility and emptiness of the false beliefs in which they placed their trust.

And today the Lord does the same for us.  We have our “ites” too:  We’ve got Shiites who hate and threaten to terrorize us, political hypocrites who spend our money on civil programs that do not work, and we’ve got nitrites that preserve our fruit loops and twinkies and also give us cancer.   We’ve got commercial sound bites that tell us what to buy and what to eat in order to be happy, and when we listen to them, we get cellulites that make our thighs big and flabby and give us heart disease.  And we too are besieged by destructive and evil forces – we’ve got crime and violence, and addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and sex.  And because of our rejection of God’s basic morals standards, we’ve got broken, dysfunctional, and abusive families.  And unlike the Israelites, we don’t need invading armies to pressure us: we’re doing it to ourselves.  I was watching the news the other night when they were reporting on the capture of those two snipers out in Washington.  One of the newsmen was saying how (justifiably) appalled he was that someone could just drive around and shoot people for pleasure.  But then in the very next segment, the same newsman was enthusiastically reporting about the release of a new version of a popular video game – the goal of which is to steal cars and shoot people for pleasure.  He said he couldn’t wait to try it out.  It seems that God doesn’t need to give us enemies, we do that job fairly well all by ourselves.

As we see in this morning’s text, the result of the Lord’s action, bringing droughts or armies, was very often to place the people in a state of hunger and starvation.  He intended it to be more than a force of persuasion; it was also to be a picture of the people’s spiritual starvation. Because they weren’t feeding their souls with what was good and wholesome to live on, he didn’t allow them to fill their stomachs either.  And so we see the desperate situation, as people are willing to pay a small fortune for a miserable donkey’s head.  Donkeys were not usually eaten because they were more valuable as a beast of burden. But here the hunger is so severe that the head, a relatively meatless portion, or a handful of seed pods (the normally discarded husks of beans or lentils), commanded a high price.  People who are hungry will pay just about anything even for that which is not nourishing. 

And that’s true spiritually as well – especially in our day.  It amazing what the empty soul will try to digest in the hope that it will stop the pangs of spiritual hunger.  Cultists know this, and often target as potential converts people who are mourning the loss of a loved one or experiencing some other crisis.  So too, people who get sucked into the occult, and heresies like the health and welfare gospel, are usually people who are starving for something to believe in – but they fail to see that the reason they’re starving in the first place is only because they have already rejected God’s life-giving truth.

In the reading, the situation is so severe that people are driven to the ultimate depravation: feeding off the flesh of their own children.  I suppose that it may be hard for us to imagine a situation so bad as that—but maybe it shouldn’t be.  Then people were compelled by necessity to do the unthinkable in order to survive.  It’s revolting to us; but for them it was do it or die.  Forced to make that choice, most of us would probably say we’d choose the latter.  And yet we live in a country where children are sacrificed at the rate of four thousand a day not to ensure anyone’s survival, but simply to add to their pleasure and convenience – and rarely do we think twice about it, and even less do we speak out against it.  I said before that things are much the same as they were in ancient times; but it other ways it’s apparent that they are getting a lot worse.

Like the citizens of Samaria, we live in a dying world.  The question is what to do about it.  The king in this story seems to know who holds the answers to life’s problems.  He tells the woman who complains to him, “I can’t help you.  Only God can do that.”  And yet, rather than return to God in repentance himself, he chooses instead to attack the Lord’s prophet.  The king knew the truth; he just didn’t like it.  He wanted to stay in charge and find the solutions for himself. He wanted to be his own savior. He wore his sackcloth of shame sure enough, but he wore it underneath his royal robes as if to say, “I know that I’m a sinner who needs God’s help, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of asking for it.  I’m too full of pride to humble myself before God.”  So when he heard the prophet’s message, that the Lord’s salvation was just around the corner, he chose instead to listen to his advisor who said the city’s problems were too big even for the Lord to fix.  “We can’t count on the Lord; we’re going to have to figure a way out of this ourselves.”

And I think that’s a big part of our problems today.  In general, people know who holds the answers; they just don’t like what he has to say.  They do not want to admit their guilt, they don’t want to conform to his absolute truth, and they do not want to humble themselves before him. 

But there are in the story a few fellows who find the truth – and what I want you to see is how they get there.  They begin by realizing that they are dying, and that no matter which way they turn, there will be no help.  They ultimately decide that their only chance to live is to apply for mercy to the same force that is oppressing them.  They go fully expecting to be killed.  But when they get there, they find that what they feared is gone, and the ground is strewn for miles in every direction with blessings of food and riches.

The same is true for us.  When God lays his hand on us to cause affliction, he does it to guide us back to him. He does it to show us that there is no other real help except for that which he offers.  So we come to him knowing that we are dying in our sin and that we are powerless to save ourselves.  We come knowing that we are guilty before him, and that we justly deserve to die.  We come to him, the judge, appealing for his mercy – and when we arrive, we find his judgment that we so feared is gone.  Everything that threatened to harm us has fled into the darkness, leaving only God’s rich grace and blessings behind.

It happened in the story because God frightened the enemy away by making something go bump in the night.  Basically, he said, “Boo!” and they all ran for their lives.  It’s like that line in Mighty Fortress that says, speaking of the rout of Satan and his army, “One little word can fell him.”  And we know what that word is.  It was spoken in the darkness on Good Friday by our Savoir when he cried out, “It is finished.”  At that word, sin’s debt was paid, and all the powers of hell and everything that could really harm us fled from the field.  Now, when we go to the cross of Christ, instead of finding God’s judgment that we deserve, we find his grace and forgiveness flowing down in the water and blood.  There is true nourishment for the hungry soul.

And now the question is:  what do we do with it?  I fear that too often our gut response is like that of the leprous men in the story. First they celebrate and gorge themselves on the abundance; and then they try to hide it away to keep it all for themselves.  It doesn’t occur to them to share what they’ve found until later – and even then, their motives are less than honorable.

 But I’d like to leave you with this thought:  my whole point this morning is to show you that this is a story about the world we live in today.  The time is the present.  And if you are sitting here now, it’s because you are one of these lepers who knew you were dying and that you had to come to the Lord for the only hope of life and salvation – but what you’ve found here is God’s limitless grace and forgiveness. Behind you is the city of Samaria.  The people inside it, some of them your friends and neighbors, are still starving to death.  They are still buying things that cannot satisfy their hunger and thirst.  But they firmly believe they are safest where they are now.  They don’t know that the coast is clear and that Satan has been beat.  They don’t know that the siege of sin’s power has been lifted.  They don’t know what food and treasures can be picked up for free right here off the ground.  You can go tell them.  You can help lead them out.  You can do that today.  May God give each of us the grace to do it.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!