THOUGHTS FOR KIRKRIDGE, SEPTEMBER 2009
COMMUNITY OR EMPIRE - WHICH WILL WE HELP TO BUILD?

Friday evening reflection: Liz McAlister

Deuteronomy 30: 19 - 20 - Today, I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life that you may live, you and your descendants, by loving your God, by obeying God's voice, and by holding fast to God; for this is your life and the length of your days...

“What should we be doing with our lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. -- Dorothy Day

In a Bible that we consider a sacred narrative of salvation history, these books of Kings seem strangely secular. Perhaps Elijah is a welcome exception; perhaps not! He was a lonely prophet - alternately manic and reclusive; he faced down the powers of his day. Elijah confronts us with the Realpolitik of Israel's ancient kings. So I'll be focusing on him (2 events from Kings. 1 Kings 17 - 19 and 2 Kings 2)

The two books of Kings encompass the reigns of 40 kings and one queen (Athaliah in 2 Kings 11). It begins with the death of David and the reign of Solomon; it ends 400 years later with Israel's exile to Babylon in 586 BC. Only 2 kings receive approval by the narrator, Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18:3 and Josiah in 2 Kings 22. We read about coups, assassinations, civil wars, marital alliances to consolidate power, and idolatry. More than 30 times the writer renders the ominous judgment that a king "did evil in the eyes of God." (It gets not a little repetitive). Instead of glorifying political power, this sacred history of secular politics is uniformly pessimistic - revealing it as pathological.

How should we read these texts about a territorial god who slaughters his pagan enemies? In what sense are these pages inspired? Can we draw parallels to the powers today and their pathologies? Is it possible to connect human politics with the politics of God - in ancient Israel or modern America or Afghanistan?

Some of the best writers I've come across - Dan among them - maintain that 1–2 Kings are not merely historical, prophetic, or wisdom literature. They are "gospel texts" that can inform our experiences today. There's the inseparable interplay between a ruler's private and public life. Idolatry looms large in these stories, especially the "guns, gold, and girls" of Solomon. The violent partition of Israel and Judah is replete with application for divisions in the church and the nature of genuine ecumenicity. The narrator uses flattering descriptions to describe the prominent role of "outsiders" among the "insider" elect — the military commander Naaman from Aram, for example, or the widow of Zarephath in Sidon who cares for Elijah. The providence of God over the history of humanity is a major theme.

How do these narratives inform our sense of God? In Kings, God appears to be a warrior who fights to win, and deception is part of his art of "holy war" He is a God of enmity and enemies, of violence and vengeance. Many endorse the violence of the kings as necessary AND as a "redemptive" and "positive good". I can't buy it! Kings seems to me self-serving imperial records that portray Israel 's kings as they saw themselves and wanted others to see them  (rather like most, if not all of our history books) — God favors my regime and hates my enemies . No war crime is too heinous as a means to the delusional ends of these kings, and so on page after page political hell descends to earth.

Dan's book on Kings tells us that the spirit of the text is that "there is no salvation outside the empire." There are many pathological means to that end: untrammeled imperial ego, political retaliation with absolute impunity, military might, revisionist history, manipulation of memory and time, grandiose building projects, economic exploitation, virulent nationalism, and, sanctioning it all with divine approval, legitimation by religious sycophants. In 1–2 Kings, "the medium is the message." And it sounds very like today and Iran, Iraq, Afhanistan, and the myriad congressional debates.

A few dissenting voices object to imperial power, but they are silenced as unpatriotic and seditious. Only with the eighth-century prophets like Amos are these "official" imperial texts amended so that we see and hear God's perspective about justice, kindness, and humility for people everywhere. Elijah is an exception. He arrives on the scene in 1 Kings 17 "as though, after an endless night, the longing of the saints summoned a dawn of light." (93).

King Ahab despises Elijah - " That Troubler of Israel !" (18:17). Elijah construed the prolonged drought as God's punishment for Ahab's idolatry. After Elijah humiliated Ahab on Mt Carmel, Ahab's wife Jezebel boasted that she would assassinate him. It was no idle threat; she had butchered many prophets.  Elijah fled for his life confessing: "I've had enough" (19:4). But with a "gentle whisper" that spoke louder than a violent earthquake, a powerful wind, and a raging fire, God assured Elijah that he was not alone in his prophetic stance against political corruption: "I reserve 7,000 in Israel whose knees have not bowed to Baal and all whose mouths have not kissed him" (19:18). People with whom Elijah was not (and maybe should have been) in communication and communion!

When we connect these ancient texts with today, it becomes clear that Kings is a mirror. Our leaders do not differ from these rulers of old! And when we silence or ignore the prophetic critique of contemporary politics today, we live under God's judgment just as much as Ahab and Jezebel did with Elijah's rebuke.

This evening we begin our last weekend at Kirkridge with Dan. Dan has spent his life obeying the good news of Jesus (who invested so much of the time during his ministry building a sense of community among his disciples) rather than the bad news of empire. Parallel to: ( 1 Kings 18: 17 When Ahab saw Elijah, he said to him, "Is that you, you troubler of Israel ?" ) He and Philip did time on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. In 1968 they and 7 other activists took 378 draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam, dumped them into two garbage cans, poured homemade napalm on them, and burned them in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board. In 1980, they trespassed into General Electric's nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, poured blood on nose cones for Mark 12A warheads, then hammered away to punctuate their prophetic point.

On the final page of his reflections on the kings and their gods, Dan challenges us: "One must urge a firm rebutting midrash; bring Christ to bear. Read the gospel closely, obediently. Welcome no enticements, no other claim on conscience. Mourn the preachers and priests whose silence and collusion are a revolt against the gospel. Enter the maelstrom, the wilderness; flee the claim that would possess your soul. Earn the blessing; pay up. Blessed — and lonely and powerless and intent on the Master — and, if must be, despised, scorned, locked up — blessed are the makers of peace."

The Word of God is spoken for our sake today, Dan concludes. " If not, it lies dead on the page. Lift the Word from the page, then--take it to heart. Make of it the very beat of the heart. Then the Word comes alive--it speaks to commonality and praxis. Do it--do the Word ."

Dan remains faithful to the struggle, faithful to the good news of peace, faithful as a witness, and inspires many of us to keep on walking the road to peace, speaking out for peace, praying for peace, and living in peace. Dan continues to live in community, spends hours each day studying and writing about the scriptures, meets with people and gives lectures and retreats regularly.

Long ago he wrote: "We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total--but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial. ….There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war--at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake."

On the witness stand during the 1981 trial of the Plowshares Eight he said: "The only message I have to the world is: we are not allowed to kill people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder. We are not allowed to be silent while preparations for mass murder proceed in our name, with our money, secretly…. It's terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, 'Stop killing.' There are other beautiful things that I would love to be saying to people. There are other projects I could be very helpful at. I can't do them I cannot. Because everything is endangered. Everything is up for grabs. Ours is a kind of primitive situation, even though we would call ourselves sophisticated. Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that-everything.