In addition to Pharaoh’s daughter, King Solomon loved many foreign women, including Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. 2 These came from the nations that the Lord had commanded the Israelites about: “Don’t intermarry with them. They will definitely turn your heart toward their gods.” Solomon clung to these women in love. 3 He had seven hundred royal wives and three hundred secondary wives. They turned his heart. 4 As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods. He wasn’t committed to the Lord his God with all his heart as was his father David. 5 Solomon followed Astarte the goddess of the Sidonians, and Milcom the detestable god of the Ammonites. 6 Solomon did what was evil in the Lord’s eyes and wasn’t completely devoted to the Lord like his father David. 7 On the hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a shrine to Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and to Molech the detestable god of the Ammonites. 8 He did the same for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and sacrificed to their gods. 9 The Lord grew angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from being with the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. 10 The Lord had commanded Solomon about this very thing, that he shouldn’t follow other gods. But Solomon didn’t do what the Lord commanded. 11 The Lord said to Solomon, “Because you have done all this instead of keeping my covenant and my laws that I commanded you, I will most certainly tear the kingdom from you and give it to your servant. 12 Even so, on account of your father David, I won’t do it during your lifetime. I will tear the kingdom out of your son’s hands. 13 Moreover, I won’t tear away the entire kingdom. I will give one tribe to your son on account of my servant David and on account of Jerusalem, which I have chosen.” (Common English Bible)
“The Dreaming Architect:
Solomon, Son of David & Bathsheba, King of Israel” Week Eight
It’s
the eyes. Again. But unlike last week, in imagining those lifeless mannequins
in my CPR class from a decade ago, this young girl’s eyes were vivid and full
of depth and color, even as she was nearing her own death.
In
1985, just a few years after our own Mt. St. Helens volcano had erupted, the
Nevada del Ruiz volcano, a nearly 17,500-foot tall volcano in Colombia, likewise
erupted, causing mudslides and landslides that rushed down the volcano’s slopes
and into the towns within the river valleys beneath the angry behemoth’s peaks
and killing nearly 23,000 people in all.
One
of those people, Omayra Sanchez Garzon, was a thirteen-year-old girl whose home
was demolished in one of those mudslides, and the concrete from her home pinned
her against the ground amid growing pools of water.
For
two days while trapped, Omayra sang, prayed, and gave interviews to journalists,
but she eventually began to die. Because removing her from the debris would
necessitate amputating both of her legs, and because the medical professionals
attending to her lacked the life support mechanisms to keep her alive for such
a traumatic surgery, it was decided that the humane thing to do would be to let
her die peacefully alongside her father and sister, who had also died in the
eruption.
This
Omayra eventually did, but not before, near death, having her photograph taken
by a French photojournalist named Frank Fournier, who later said many years
later to the BBC:
When I took the pictures
I felt totally powerless in front of this little girl, who was facing death
with courage and dignity. She could sense that her life was going. I felt that
the only thing I could do was to report properly on the courage and the suffering
and the dignity of the little girl and hope that it would mobilize people to
help the ones that had been rescued and had been saved.
I felt I had to report
what this little girl had gone through.
Stories
like Omayra’s were raised in the debates once the dust had settled about why so
many people died, and how such a ghastly death toll could be prevented. What
emerged from those debates, in truth, is that much more could have been done
from the high places, the places of power and riches, to aid people like
Omayra. That sort of power is soul-sized in its capacities and its
consequences. We learn and re-learn that lesson every now and again, but now,
it is Solomon’s time to learn it as well.
This
is a summer sermon series in the mold of one that, stylistically, just like a
couple of years ago in 2014, when, if you’ll remember, we spent most of the
summer reading verse-by-verse through the beginning of Acts, we have once more
taken on one big narrative in Scripture.
Only
this time, that narrative has been the life and reign of King Solomon, a
fascinating figure in Israelite history who has probably been somewhat
mythologized and made into a King Arthur-esque national legend over the years,
but who nonetheless represents an epoch centered around a singular truth that
was not achieved again for hundreds of years, and then again for thousands:
ruling over Israel as a unified and independent kingdom.
Believe
it or not, a unified and independent Israel is a rarity in history. After
Solomon, an independent and unified Israel would only really exist twice:
during the short reign of the Maccabees (of whom you have probably heard via
the Hanukkah story), and during present history since 1946.
So
Solomon’s reign—and his father David’s before him—is unique. How Solomon is
remembered matters because of it. And we’ve gotten a chance to read this
dreaming architect’s story from his building of the original temple in
Jerusalem after receiving divine wisdom from the Lord in the dream all the way
up to today’s story of the visit from the queen of Sheba, which represented in
many ways the absolute pinnacle for Solomon and his reign, to today’s story
just one chapter later, in which we begin to see how the seeds of Solomon’s
spiritual and political downfall have been sown.
What
makes the reality of this downfall doubly sad are two facts that, sadly,
overlap with a great many similar circumstances of ineffective rulers: the
seeds that were sown were Solomon’s own doing, and those who will be affected
by this sowing will not simply be Solomon and his plethora of wives and
concubines; no, it will be his people, his entire kingdom, and the crown that
was his inheritance from his father David.
We
still have this tendency of thinking of disasters as coming directly from God—that
God, in a fit of pique, decided to curse us like the ancient Egyptians with
frogs, or flies, or locusts, or boils, or any of the other plagues. You still hear
it today, packaged in various forms, like the televangelist grouch Pat
Robertson claiming that God sent 2011 Port-au-Prince earthquake upon Haiti to
punish the nation for its practice of voodoo.
But
that would be a very, very unsettling takeaway from this story. Because while
God’s plagues upon the Egyptians were necessitated by a particular circumstance—the
Egyptians’ enslavement of the Hebrews—so too was there a particular end in mind
that the plagues were meant to achieve: the demonstration of superiority of God
over the Egyptian idols and the liberation of the Hebrews out of slavery.
Natural
disasters like the Haiti earthquake, or the eruptions of Mt. St. Helens or Nevada
del Ruiz, they don’t happen to free people from slavery. They happen because
that is the way the earth scientifically exists, and they kill as many people
as they do because of us, not God. If Haiti hadn’t been plundered again and
again, first by colonizing empires and then by autocratic dictators, maybe it
would have had a better infrastructure to withstand such an earthquake at the
cost of fewer lives. And similarly, if the Colombian government had cared more
about disaster preparedness for its own people, it might have saved more lives
in 1985.
These
death tolls as a result of catastrophes, then, are a result of humanity’s
shortcomings, not God’s machinations. And God makes this abundantly clear to
Solomon by laying the coming schism of Israel at the feet of the aging king.
Solomon has turned away from God, and such apathy does not occur in a vacuum.
We
live in a world where people, our leaders, and, yes, ourselves all turn away
from the callings and responsibilities that God has entrusted us with and that
other people have entrusted us with. We live in a world full of Solomons,
pulled away from that which may have initially inspired them and called them
and drawn forth their wondrous gifts into the world but that now are only
ignored by them.
We
live in a world, in short, full of people whose hearts, like Solomon’s, have
been turned not by God or to God but by the convenience and enviousness of the
trappings of the high places: of riches they do not need, of status they do not
require, and of egos in constant need of stroking.
Solomon
may well think that he has outgrown God, that when allayed with the glory of
his many women and material riches, he has no need of the God who long ago
created him and crafted him.
And
if that sounds familiar, it is because it should. Because we as Christians need
to be able to stand up and say that we have had enough of such Solomons,
because the alternative is to see more people hurt by their decisions and
priorities, and in the most extreme of stories, like Omayra Sanchez Garzon’s,
killed by their decisions and priorities.
Omayra
is instructive for one of the cults listed in this passage in particular: the
cult to Milcom, or Molech, which was explicitly banned in Levitical law and is
believed to have included child sacrifice, something that even Israelite
royalty eventually practices when, hundreds of years later, King Ahaz has his
own son burned as a sacrifice. Children are sacrificed around the world to our
mendacity as a people, and Omayra was one such person, and one such sacrifice,
lost upon that altar.
We
are in a position that most of Solomon’s subjects were not: we have a voice,
and we can proclaim God’s truth to power. That’s not something easily gotten in
the ancient world—even a royal court prophet like Isaiah can lose everything;
his prophetic career ended by, according to tradition, his execution at the
hands of the ungodly King Manasseh.
And
the one person who is in a position in Solomon’s Israel to speak truth to power—Jeroboam,
who we’ll meet very soon—is Solomon’s chief slave overseer, hardly the
candidate for strong moral leadership in the face of a slowly rotting monarchy
to begin with, but Jeroboam himself will likewise abandon God the minute it is
politically expedient for him to do so by building two golden calves for his
future subjects to worship rather than to actually worship God.
Which
means that it cannot be left simply to the ones with power to actually proclaim
and live God’s truth, no, it must fall to us as well.
It
falls to us to say “Enough” to the Solomons and to the Jeroboams of the world.
It
falls to us to say “Enough” in face of suffering at the hands of corrupted
leaders, radicalized zealots, and know-nothing demagogues.
It
falls to us to say “Enough” in response to the Caesar who campaigns to rule
over us with an authoritarian bent that cares not for the outsider or the
oppressed.
And
it falls to us to follow up those cries of “Enough” to our earthly rulers by proclaiming
with one prophetic voice, “Long live the one true King, and long may He reign!”
Solomon’s
failure became Jeroboam’s failure.
Solomon’s
failure, then, has become our failure. We are responsible for responding to it.
Let
us do so, then, with vigor, and passion, and compassion, a compassion for the
Omayra Sanchez Garzons of this world who may have been left behind by their own
earthly kings but who have never fallen from the sight of their one true Lord
in heaven.
Let
us live for them, and not solely for ourselves.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
August
7, 2016
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