Sermon: Showdown at Mount Carmel

Sermon: Durham Cathedral.  Choral Matins, Sunday 9 December 2007, Advent 2

            May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always

            acceptable to you, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.

We hear strains of Mendelssohn in our minds, but there can be no doubt that the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal is one of the great narratives of the Old Testament.

The bear in the woods, of course, is Queen Jezebel, the Phoenician wife of King Ahab of Israel. Jezebel was fiercely loyal to her ancestral religion, to the worship of the Baals, and she was not content at all with multi-faith co-existence and tolerance. Her mission was to eradicate the worship of Israel's God, Yahweh, the Lord, and to establish the worship of the Baals.  So she persecuted the Lord's prophets, many of whom were killed by Jezebel, and the crisis was coming to a head. The foremost prophet, Elijah, was still alive, but the pressure was on.  Ahab called Elijah ‘the troubler of Israel' but Elijah laid the blame squarely on the King, who had abandoned his ancient faith in order to please his wife.  Of course, it was also a time of national crisis; three hard years of drought had parched the land; this was ironic as Baal was the god of rain.

So it was time for a showdown. Elijah confronted the king: Assemble all Israel at Mount Carmel, and bring along the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah, all who sit at Jezebel's table.  So they came; 850 prophets ranged against one, Elijah; no other prophet of the Lord was present, doubtless because those who had escaped death were racked by fear.

And Elijah's challenge was to offer a sacrifice, a burnt offering; the prophets of Baal to their gods, and Elijah to the Lord. The catch was that there were no matches; the test was which god would answer by fire and so prove his existence.

We have that marvellous challenge from Elijah to the people, ‘How long will you go limping on with two different opinions'; we might say, ‘How long will you sit on the fence?'  If the Lord is God, follow him, and if Baal, then follow Baal'. But the people were speechless.

And so Elijah invited the prophets of Baal to try first. An altar was built, the wood was laid and a bull placed upon it.  The prophets of Baal then began to call on the name of Baal to answer by fire and they cried out from morning till noon. Quaintly, the narrative says, they limped around the altar, a limping people with limping prophets; how different to the sentiments of the hymn, Isaac Watts' great paraphrase based on Isaiah 40,

            Awake and run the heavenly race,

            And put a cheerful courage on.

            Swift as the eagle cuts the air,

            We'll mount aloft to thine abode;

            On wings of love our souls shall fly,

            Nor tire amidst the heavenly road.

And there is irony and humour; as noon passed, Elijah mocked them - ‘Shout louder' - perhaps Baal is asleep, or he's meditating, or perhaps he's gone out for the day. And they cut themselves with blades in a frenzy, till they were covered with blood, weak and exhausted, and it went on until the ninth hour, the evening oblation. But there was no voice, no answer, no response.

Then there is a poignant act of restoration by Elijah.  Because when the foundations are destroyed, what are we to do?  Elijah first repaired the altar of the Lord; he took 12 stones representing the 12 tribes to whom was given the name Israel, and rebuilt the altar.  He invoked the name of Yahweh. In other words he attended to the ordered and reverent worship. Then he laid the sacrifice and moreover dug a trench, and poured in, we assume from one of the few mountains spring left, copious amounts of water, drenching the bull, the wood and filling the trench.  If this was to catch fire, it must be a miracle.  Then at the time of the evening oblation, he prayed to the Lord:

O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.

And the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the water, the bullock, the wood, the stones, even the dust itself. There was no doubt that Yahweh was the God who answered by fire. And the people fell down, and acclaimed that the Lord, he is God.

Of course, our reading then stops and so we are spared the difficult verses of the slaughter of the prophets of Baal, and the sequel - the return of the rains and the end of the drought. 

            From thee, the overflowing spring,

            Our souls shall drink a fresh supply,

            While such as trust their native strength

            Shall melt away, and drop, and die.     (Isaac Waats)

It is a magnificent narrative, brilliantly told.

What has it to do with Advent? Well, as with next week, we begin to consider John the Baptist.  And despite the denial in our second Reading that John is Elijah, the tradition of course, states in other places precisely that John is Elijah; for the prophet Malachi said that God would send Elijah before the Day of the Lord. John, like Elijah, came to restore - to call Israel back, not from the worship of the Baals, but back to a renewed and pure devotion to God, and so to prepare the people for God's decisive visitation in Christ. 

But I want to make another point. Because Elijah's triumph over the prophets of Baal is a classic ‘we're right, you're wrong' story.  And of course, rightly so; the point is that the Baals were idols, figments of people's imaginations, and idolatry is forbidden for Israel. ‘Thou shalt have no other gods but me....Thou shalt not make for thyself any graven image...thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them..' Indeed, the whole concept of the God of Israel is so more advanced than classical idolatry.

But it's much more difficult for us, in our world of many faiths and ideologies.  For while we have strong and definite convictions about our Lord Christ as the true and final revelation of the Name and character of God, we would be loathe surely simply to write off the other great Faiths as merely idolatry.  And while Jesus himself came with signs and wonders announcing the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, nevertheless, there was also hiddenness, pre-eminently in the darkness of his death on a hill outside Jerusalem - a mysterious challenge and call to live by faith and not by sight. We are not at liberty to demand that God should answer by fire and so prove his existence.

But in Advent, we have this strong hope, this sure and certain hope, that at the End, Christ will be revealed.  So what of those, who follow other Faiths and idealogies, who perhaps have had little access to or knowledge of the Gospel; those whose ability to believe has been fatally damaged by the sins of the Church, or those whose lives have been tragically cut short by illness, accident, violence or natural disaster?

My conviction is that when Christ is revealed, and humanity stands before him, that God in his mercy will allow response - so that those of other Faiths and ideologies will see in Christ the end of their longings, the fulfilment of their desires; that those whose view of Christ was perverted not least by the Church's sin, will see that his nature and his Name is love; that those who might have thought that they did not know him, will somehow recognise his face, and respond to that vision.  This is not a naïve universalism - the Scriptures forbid, dare I say, such an ‘easy' solution; God's judgment is real, for those within and without the Church and I do believe that through impenitence and hardness of heart, some will be lost. But I also believe that, ultimately, many will be saved, but not apart from Christ.

In the meantime, and on the basis of the sheer impossibility of avoiding the claims and person of Jesus Christ in our culture, we can ask the question: ‘How long will your limp along with two opinions'; ‘how long will you sit on the fence?'  If Christ is Lord, then worship and serve him.  And like Elijah, no matter if seems that we are like one against eight hundred, we can ensure that ‘the Altar' is restored, that the historical faith is proclaimed, that the name of Christ is invoked - in other words, we get on with the task of Christian worship, mission and service - and who knows when the fire of the Lord or his refreshing showers might fall and catch the imagination of our nation and our world, until in beauty and glory he is revealed and with what rapture we shall gaze on those glorious scars, and the Kingdom of God is among us. So we echo, with Mendelssohn-ian conviction, the prayer

O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.