The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for June 17, 2007

Texts: 1Kings 21:1-10,15/Luke 7:36-8:3

Title: “Expendable”

               Two bedrock principles collided. The first principle was that a family inheritance was to be zealously guarded. The second principle was that a king possesses uncontestable authority.

              When bedrock principles collide stalemate is seldom the result, for we maintain and assert those bedrock principles with passion.

              Naboth and King Ahab adhered to their principles, only one, Naboth, adhered more ardently than the other.  No, Naboth would not turn over his property to the king, even when the king offered him a superior piece of property as an inducement to close the deal.

              Faced with the fact that Naboth would not surrender his property, Ahab, surrendering his royal dignity, went into a pout. But why? You see, the prerogatives that came with his royal office had somehow failed to register with Ahab. Such was not the case with another member of the royal household, Jezebel.

              Jezebel lives on as one of history’s more notorious characters. Go to a good dictionary and you will find an entry like this one: Jezebel---the wicked woman who married Ahab, king of Israel.  Any woman regarded as wicked, shameless, licentious, etc.

If you want to defame a woman, and none of you would, call her a “Jezebel.”

              While Ahab acquiesced to Naboth’s refusal to surrender his property, Jezebel stepped in to remind the king of his royal prerogatives.  Why, after all, should Naboth’s refusal stand? Naboth was a nobody.

              Jezebel concocted a plan to secure Naboth’s vineyard.  Where there is a will, sin will find a way.  Ahab may have acquiesced.  Not so Jezebel.  We know the scenario.  A religious fast was called, Naboth sitting at the head of the table.  “Two scoundrels,” according to the text, were commissioned to slander Naboth, “He cursed God and king.”  On the testimony of the two “scoundrels” Naboth was taken out and stoned. 

              There is an object lesson here that all those who run afoul of people in power have had to learn.  If you want to save your neck, don’t stick it out by insisting on your rights or prerogatives.  Power trumps rights and prerogatives.

              Where there is a will sin will find a way.  Ahab happily went out to claim his vineyard.

              Naboth enters and exits the biblical narrative in a matter of ten verses, while the duo of Ahab and Jezebel would happily continue along the course their ambitions and vanity set.

              Naboth, just another name, another face, swept to the margins as history rolls along. The fact is power will have its way. Who was Naboth, anyway?  He was expendable.

              Expendable.  A certain Pharisee hosted a dinner party to which Jesus was invited.  We can presume that he was a man of means because the average person of that day lacked the resources to entertain guests in his home. The dinner party finds its way into scripture because of an interruption. 

              The party was going along fine when a notorious woman of that city entered unannounced.  Stooping at Jesus’ feet “[she] began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair.”  The indignant host was outraged that this sinner would make such a display, and in his house.  It was a violation.  “Throw her out.”

              A notorious sinner, who from the Pharisee’s point of view was in free fall to the depths of hell.  Let hell exact its vengeance on her lost soul.  She was a nobody, expendable, so far as the Pharisee she concerned.

              Expendable?  “Not so fast,” said Jesus.  Have you noticed how Jesus consistently aligned himself with the expendable nobodies. That expendable sinner the Pharisee viewed with such distaste, was not, as it would turn out, so expendable after all.

              You know, folks, people living without the comfortable assurance you and I maintain about life, hear things in Jesus’ message that you and I don’t hear.  The notorious sinner who in contrition wept at our Lord’s feet lived her life in the conviction that she was condemned for good, that she was in the eyes of God expendable.  Imagine the sense of freedom and gratitude that must have overtaken her to know that Christ had removed the burden of her condemnation. How real and compelling her sense of deliverance must have been.                

                Most of us live our lives never pausing to question whether or not we are in good standing with God. Sin and damnation don’t really square with our modern sensibilities. A for instance. We are not convicted by the prayers of confession we recite Sunday after Sunday, if anything we are indignant for having been falsely accused.

              So what about “declaration of pardon” that follows confession in our order of service?  What do words of assurance mean if we believe in our hearts that we have committed no sin warranting a pardon?

              Forgiveness only really registers for sinners, those who believe in their hearts that they are estranged from God, and thus believing regard themselves as expendable. As people who believe ourselves to be in good standing with the Lord, expendable is a foreign concept for us.

People living without the comfortable assurance you and I maintain about life hear things in Jesus’ message that you and I don’t hear, but not just on matters pertaining to the status of our souls.  They hear Jesus talk about deliverance from oppression.

            Naboth’s fate was not some isolated occurrence. Royalty and others in powerful places could trample the rights of the Naboth’s of the world with impunity. The heavy boot of oppression falls on Naboth’s all over the world today.  Just this past week I received a solicitation in the mail from the “international Campaign for Tibet, an initiative to help Tibetan refugees escape oppression. Another solicitation was seeking my support from Amnesty International, an agency that works aggressively to publicize the plight of those unjustly imprisoned.  Darfur is in the news. The current crisis in Darfur is currently before the United Nations.  The Sudanese government will not stop the genocide in the Darfur region.

              Expendable.  Is there another way people in Tibet, or rotting away in some hell hole of a prison, or being subjected to genocide in a place like Darfur are to view themselves. To us who do not find ourselves in such straits the Bible’s message of justice, freedom, and deliverance, cannot have the same impact as for those who read those passages in prison or see their land confiscated without compensation to make room for some high end commercial project.    

              It doesn’t take a very careful reading of scripture to realize that insofar as Jesus’ ministry was concerned the word “expendable” did not apply.  In fact, Jesus made himself expendable that we would not have to suffer the consequences to which sin subjects us. He died for the world. In Jesus’ eyes the person living on a ration of 400 calories or less a day in sub-Saharan Africa, the person dying of AIDS in Calcutta, or the person subjected to daily terror in Darfur, is no less expendable than we who live in favored circumstances are.

              The issue of expendability came home to me at the latter part of last week and the first part of this one.  A week ago Saturday, Pam Wegmann and I canvassed a section of the Lakeview neighborhood to invite residents and others to join us at our community picnic.  Fully one half or more of the picnic fliers we distributed went to workmen, many of them Hispanic. 

              None of us are unaware that the Hispanic population of greater New Orleans has dramatically risen, but on Saturday I realized how slow I have been to recognize how prominent they have become in our restoration, this despite the fact that it was Hispanic workers who gutted this sanctuary and the rest of the church, laid the tile in this sanctuary, and did other demolition that needed doing in our building.

              These workmen, and women, are prominent in most of what has been done in gutting, framing, roofing, and the other unskilled and semi-skilled work that takes place in greater New Orleans. Hispanics clean our church. These men and women move in and out of our lives, and aside from a smile, a nod, and some gesturing we use in an attempt to communicate, they do their work anonymously, and move on. 

              Are they expendable?  The word doesn’t really fit. Interchangeable for the tasks to which we assign them, perhaps, but not expendable. Yet in another sense expendable does fit. Take for instance the laborer we pick up at Loew’s or Home Depot---have you seen the Hispanics gathered around those stores looking for work?---to do some work around the house, or the church.  If that laborer for some reason decides that the cash we offered him for a job falls short, we simply take him back to Loew’s and find someone else.  He can work on our terms, and earn something, or reject our terms, and earn nothing.  We know we have him over a barrow because he needs us more than we need him.   

              Earlier this week I was reminded of just how precarious the Hispanic’s circumstances in the United States are. National Public Radio ran a story about a raid by authorities on a Portland business where over sixty undocumented aliens worked.  While a handful were released for various reasons, the majority were held for immediate deportation processing.

              The issue of immigration is being debated in the Senate, with the President aligned, interestingly enough, with members of the Democratic Party, while facing stiff opposition within his own party. This is occurring as current laws on the books are being enforced with greater vigor. Removing ourselves from that debate before the Senate, and the merit of current immigration laws, there is an aspect of how the so-called illegals are handed that should, in my judgment, trouble us as Christians.

              They show up for work, finish at the end of the day, leave the job---where they go, how they spend their time off the clock we do not know---they show up again the next day and repeat the cycle again. But then, one day, a federal agent shows up, and off to the deportation center.  As “illegals” is not afforded them. Setting aside the legal ramifications of how these persons are processed, the issue as it presents itself to the church is one of human dignity. Can we really justify rounding people up and showing them the exit, in one dramatic action severing the connections these workers and their families have made with us and with our communities? 

              Those who are appointed to enforce the law of the land have little or no discretion in doing so, thus we do not fault their actions taken under the law.  We Christians, however, honor a second authority even higher than the law of the land.  Love of our neighbor is a commandment, a commandment Jesus, Alvin Currier reminds us, applied in the most far-reaching way. Jesus, according to Currier, took the command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and pushed the definition of who is our neighbor, out, out, and still further out, until it reached to the ends of the earth and included all of humanity - all of God’s children.” 

             We have a neighbor who lives in close proximity to us, a neighbor who at a modest wage is doing work we are unprepared to do for ourselves.  Arguments are made that this neighbor is breaking our laws, bankrupting our social service systems, and overtaking our neighborhoods.  The neighbor may not in all aspects of his life and actions be the model citizen we would like him to be, but neither is he expendable as we, even without malice, may view him.

              Jezebel didn’t see a person when she set up the plot leading to Naboth’s death.  The Pharisee didn’t see a person when he saw the figure kneeling at Jesus’ feet.  So far as Jezebel was concerned Naboth didn’t exist, for the Pharisee, the woman didn’t exist.

              Fundamentally, the unwillingness, or inability, to acknowledge another human being as a neighbor, is the root of virtually every human tragedy that has afflicted this earth.  If I, for whatever reason, can deny my neighbor’s essential humanity as Jezebel and the Pharisee were able to do, I can disregard her.  For all essential purposes she becomes expendable.

              The essential humanity we share as children of God is not calculated on the basis of our country of origin, the color of our skin, our educational attainment, or on the basis of whether or not we have a green card to work here. Each of us is a person of worth in God’s sight, a person to be treated with the dignity that that status confers, and no one, not a single one of us is expendable.

PRAYER  

.             Living God, as we gather to worship on this Father’s Day we are reminded once again that you defined fatherhood.  With a love all-embracing and eternal, you who created all that is covenant never to forsake us, even when we in sinning forsake you.          With what shall we compare a love so vast and enduring?  In gratitude for our earthly fathers who have striven to embody your love in nurturing and providing for us, we pause to give thanks for the blessings conferred upon us.  Even as we acknowledge gifts received, we pray that by the intercession of your spirit each father present today may with pride and thanksgiving embrace the honor conferred by the title father, and may the confidence of fathers new to their special vocation be more firmly established.

              O Christ, our brother, grant us wisdom to see the world for what it is.  The good fortune we are privileged to enjoy as an affluent population shields us from the harsh realities so many of our brothers and sisters are forced to face. Suffering is so pervasive in our world that we have become numb to its impact, resolving that anything we might personally do to address it is futile. Yet you do not call us to trek to the ends of the earth to carry a message of hope, you call us to be beacons of hope locally by being hospitable to the stranger in our midst, by insisting that those whom we have elected to public office be advocates for those who have been marginalized and forgotten.  It has been said, O Lord, that “a different world cannot be created by indifferent people.” With the wisdom you yourself modeled, O Christ, grant us also courage to stand against the tide of indifference, to distance ourselves from value systems that raise personal comfort and ambition as first priorities.

              Holy Spirit, abide with those who are not here this day, we are enjoying leisure in distance cities or lands. Guard our friends safely.  Continue to bless the scouts and advisors of BSA troop 150 as their Alaskan adventure proceeds.           Be with those, O Spirit, who have yet to enjoy the benefits of a change of scene. Renew our spirits to find new meaning and purpose in our daily tasks.                

              O Christ, you come to us as the Prince of Peace, condemning the brutality and killing which afflict the world as a persistent curse. Help us to do that which we, on our own, are incapable of doing.  Help us find new ways to promote peace and justice around the world, and let that work begin in Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank where wars rage today.  May those who care about peace and justice win public support for peacemaking.

              Even as the restoration of our facilities continue, we pray for the restoration of lives that continue to be impacted as a consequence of the hurricane. Support those who are entangled in the bureaucratic red tape of insurance, Road Home, and FEMA.  In your mercy attend the homeowners who are struggling with contractors, whose frustration daily mounts with no outlet to express it.

              Abide with the citizens of Lakeview, those who are building back, and those waiting for more signs of recovery before doing so. Support our elected officials, O God, and grant them wisdom as they carry out the state and city’s business.

              O God, hear our prayers both spoken and unspoken. Confer strength to the weak, confidence to the wavering, and assurance of your presence to the lost.  In Christ’s name we boldly pray….