Sacred Place Worship Series 1, August 14, 2016, "God owns the land"

Sacred Place 1 BFC 2016

I Kings 21:1-18

August 14, 2016

Before we moved from Illinois, our family would regularly take a vacation at Tower Hill, the Illinois Conference church camp in Sawyer, Michigan, along the shore of Lake Michigan.  We used to make fun of that, an Illinois Conference church camp in Michigan?  We do not make fun of it any more.  In vacationing there in three successive years, we began to develop a sense of place there—where the groceries stores are, where some of the great restaurants are, and, most importantly, where we can get the best ice cream--Oinks, by the way, in New Buffalo, Michigan. 

That sense of place slowly made Tower Hill into a holy setting for Tracy, Sophia, and me.  We all would read.  I would get time to really study.  And Tracy and I would end up in a smaller bed than usual as a proving ground for our marriage.  Tower Hill became a good place for us, a sacred place, a shared place, a place of Sabbath and rest for me, a place we could enjoy only because the church made it available to us. 

In Hebrew thinking, “not to have one’s place is to cease to be.”[1]  In that thinking, God is defined as the preeminent “place” which makes room for all other spaces, salvation defined as setting aside a space for community living.  That thinking about place and space became realized in the land, the promised land, the covenanted land. 

The western Apache frequently speak of the land as “stalking people” or “going to work on them” playing tricks on them so as to reconnect the people to their roots in the land.  For the western Apache, the land and the teaching stories of the land had a way of “shooting them with arrows”, calling them back to an identity and responsibility for the land.[2] 

Wendell Berry, 2010 award winner of the National Medal for the Arts and Humanities, writes that the dominant tendency in American history among the white race has to been to forego much intention around place.   Instead, our mythology puts us forever on the move, seeking greener pastures, heading west for greater gold, a conquering of people and place as resource to be exploited, a manifest destiny that moves through the land only as pass-through and highway.[3]

That mythology was firmly established in the U.S. Supreme Court case first read in many Property Law classes[4]—Johnson v. M’Intosh (McIntosh).  Johnson v. M’Intosh established that the land vested in a Sovereign[5] by right of discovery of that land and the Sovereign or State could thereby buy and sell the land as it willed.   It was a form of convenient socialism.  Rather than sell to the highest bidder, the U.S. government required Native American peoples to sell the land to the State at what amounted to a much lower price.  The State, effectively, owned the land.

Our western culture often teaches the land as an inanimate object, something that we act upon but does not act upon us.  As a result, we often fail to see how it creates and forms us—isolates and divides us, builds community and saves us, provides nourishment and sustenance for us.  In affirming this mutual relationship with the land, I am often amazed at how we can then turn around and put poison after poison into the land with no resulting, response in kind from the land.  God forbid that the land should stop providing nourishment and sustenance for us. 

God forbid.  In a culture that is somewhat post-Christian, it sounds like a throwaway line doesn’t it?  God forbid if I don’t call my mother every Sunday.  God forbid if I don’t give Mr. Reynolds the best seat at the restaurant.  We use it to indicate that we will catch heck from somebody that has certain expectations.  We really do not use the line like Naboth does in our Scripture passage this morning. 

King Ahab wants to have a little vegetable garden by the palace.  What’s wrong with that?  He offers Naboth an even better plot of land in exchange.  Or King Ahab will offer him a nice sum of money for the land.  Naboth responds, “The Living God forbid that I should sell you my ancestral heritage.”  Naboth believes God will give him heck if he sells off the land to King Ahab.  Any better land he gets, any sum of money he might get will not necessarily remain in his family to protect them far out into the future and keep them free. Some things are not up for sale.

God gives the land as an ancestral heritage to the Jewish people.  The land is given as a space to deliver and save them from the slavery they experienced in Egypt.  The land, as an ancestral inheritance, was given to each family and was not easily given up so that people did not fall into debt slavery or encourage the debt slavery of others.  One could always lose land that is your ancestral inheritance during down times, but then you or a relative could buy back, redeem the land, when things came back around for you or your family again.  That was not necessarily true for the prime piece of real estate offered by King Ahab to Naboth.   Land like Naboth’s vineyard is a reminder to the Jewish people of their free status.  Some things are not up for sale. 

According to Hebrew Scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann, “the vineyard could not be without Naboth belonging to it. Naboth could not be without this land. That close and inalienable land linkage is likely reflected in the Jubilee practice (Leviticus 25), a social, institutional guarantee that this connection of land and family is indispensable for the functioning of society.”[6]

This Biblical story is told for dramatic effect.  The strong reference to the Exodus story, the critique against the monarchy—any pharaoh or king, is found when the prophet Elijah is introduced.  After Naboth, the poor farmer is unjustly accused, convicted, and murdered by the ruling elite, the Scripture has that dramatic turn, “Then! . . . then the word of the Living God came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying, ‘Go down!’”

Going down was the beginning activity of God in the Exodus story.  God came down to hear the cries of the people living in bondage in Egypt.  Then God commanded Moses to go down in imitation of the divine activity.  Go down.  Go down, Moses.  Tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go.  If we are to imitate the activity of the Living God, the Deliverer, we must go down to hear the cries of those who suffer, whose blood is spilled, and who have suffered injustice.  Go down.

Some things are not for sale.  Elijah uses language that pronounces judgment on King Ahab because in making the land up for sale, Ahab shows that he himself can be bought and sold.  Though some things are not up for sale, Ahab was.

 One of those things not for sale is the integrity of God’s prophets, the truth tellers, over and against the ruling class in a community when they conspire with the political leaders to do injustice.   Elijah is an outsider.  God is acting through a person who is not part of Naboth’s village.  Elijah is not even identified as being from where Ahab reigns.  How often do we ignore the truth spoken by outsiders when the Biblical story so often tells us that God seems to especially favor outsiders to bring messages of truth?

The land is given by God to the Jewish people as an ancestral heritage, a particular place and space, that acts upon them for their salvation and deliverance.  By knowing what God forbids, Naboth not only fastens the land to his family and tribe, he also supports the infrastructure of his community and wider society. 

But we are caught up in a time when the idea that everything can be bought for a price is encroaching upon the idea that there are things fastened to our family, tribe, and community which cannot be sold.  As you may know, one of our major political parties has the sell-off of national parks and forests as part of their party platform.    So it is that we, as a nation, may soon be deciding whether everything is a commodity.  Is everything up for sale?  Is Yellowstone?

At one time we, as a nation, decided that we believed in public schools, but now, they too, have been put up for sale.  My brother and sister, both public school teachers, have both talked about getting out of teaching, not because they love teaching any less.  More because the hatred and vitriol now leveled at them has reached fever pitch because they and their pensions are somehow responsible for budget shortfalls.  Benefits and pensions they took so that the State would not have to pay them directly in salary.   The financial sacrifices they made for their families seem nonsensical now.  And they find teaching students in school districts that can afford their salaries while other students suffer makes them sick to their stomachs.  The last summer at Tower Hill, Tracy and I began to return to back to our cabin, when we struck up a conversation with a Michigan high school government teacher of 40 years tell us that he would quit right now if he did not have to worry about putting his daughter through college.  Listening to my siblings and this person talk, they all entered the teaching profession because they heard public education as something that was not up for sale to the highest bidder.  It was a common good proudly practiced by their families within their community. 

The land, the environment, public schools, state parks, too often health care, and elections all seem to be up for sale to the highest bidder.   Very little these days fastens to us as something given to the community, wider society, as something that brings wholeness and health to all of us.  We are slowly losing the idea that if things go well for Naboth and his family on the land, then perhaps this creates a wholeness and peace and shalom that ripples out to our entire community.

We need to have important and honest conversations about what is not for sale in our communities, in our wider society.  Elijah the prophet tells King Ahab and Queen Jezebel that the violence they perpetrated on Naboth the farmer will certainly ripple out and destroy them as well.  For the land was intended to bring shalom and peace to Naboth’s family, tribe, and the wider community.  God intended this value to be wefted into the fabric of Jewish society so that the Jewish people might know that the universe is not intended to go to the highest bidder and that God intends, from the smallest vineyard dresser to the king, God intends their joy.  If the people are to remain free, liberated and delivered, some things should not be up for sale.  God forbid. 

So it is now with this sacred place.  Do we believe it is vested to the highest bidder and owned by us as we may do with it as we please?  Or do we believe that God owns this place and gives it to the community so that the community might know God’s intent for joy?  My hope, my most fervent prayer, is that we might work against what Wendell Berry calls our tendency to treat place without much intention. May we be the people of Elijah the Tishbite, the people of God’s own heart.  What does God intend for this incredible building and place?  God owns the land and gives it over to us in trust--that we might love and intend joy for our community as God does.  May it be so.  May it ever be so.  Amen. 

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[1] Belden C. Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality. Expanded Second Edition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 244.

[2]Ibid, p. 264.

[3] Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America:  Culture and Agriculture  (Berkley:  Counterpoint, 1977), p. 5.

[4] It was the first case studied in my Property Law class.  This analysis comes from my memory of the case and this resource:  Kades, Eric, "History and Interpretation of the Great Case of Johnson v. M'Intosh" (2001). Faculty Publications. Paper 50. http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/50.

[5] Notice, a term we use for God at times.

[6] Walter Brueggemann, “The Prophet as a Destabilizing Presence,” in A Social Reading of the Old Testament: Prophetic Approaches to Israel’s Communal Life, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), p. 239.