• I Kings 18: 20-21, (22-29)

Continuing the vital tradition in the Hebrew scriptures of speaking truth to power, the prophet Elijah has directly and publicly challenged King Ahab’s infidelity to Yahweh.  Specifically, Elijah has identified the King’s foray into Baal worship as the cause for the famine which has nearly crushed Israel; the King has blamed the prophet for the famine.  Now the two confront each other.  The King has initiated the confrontation by summoning “all the Israelites, and assembled the prophets [of Baal] at Mount Carmel.”  Elijah addresses the assembly: “How long will you go limping with two different opinions?”  If God is God, follow God; if Baal is god, follow Baal!  “The people did not answer him a word.”  Elijah sets up a contest.  He points out that he is only one prophet against the 450 prophets of Baal.  They can have the first choice between two bulls for sacrifice.  Let them prepare their choice and Elijah will prepare the one they rejected.  Let them call on their god for fire to come down from heaven and he will call on the Lord; “the god who answers by fire is indeed God.”  The contest ensues with no results for the prophets of Baal, despite their feverish and prolonged entreaties “from morning to noon.”  Elijah mocks them.  The priests of Baal resort to self-mutilation, “as was their custom.”  They “raved on,” but there was still no response.  Now it is Elijah’s turn.  He builds an altar with twelve stones, “according to the number of the tribes of Jacob” whom the Lord had re-named “Israel.”  He dug a trench around the altar, slaughtered the bull and instructed that the bull, altar and trench be drenched in water, three times!  Elijah makes his entreaty: “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant….”  “Then the fire of the Lord fell,” consuming the bull, wood, stones and even the “dust” and “the water that was in the trench.”  Falling on their faces, the people confessed twice: “The Lord indeed is God….”

• Psalm 96

The psalmist asserts that the Lord’s “glory” and “wonder” are to be celebrated by “all peoples,” because this God is “over all other gods.”  This God is “the Lord who made the heavens.”  “Grant” to the Lord the Lord’s due.  This God is a fair distributor of “justice.” Let all people and creation “exult” because this God “judges the world in justice.”

OR

• I Kings 8: 22-23, 41-43

King Solomon has fulfilled the promise denied to his father, David; in his reign and under his leadership the Temple has been built and splendidly furnished and decorated.  The “Ark” has been brought into the Temple.  Now King Solomon stands before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel and spreads out his hands to heaven.  He begins his prayer by acknowledging that the Lord God of Israel is like no other god, because the Lord has been a steadfast partner and lover.  Today’s appointed  excerpt now addresses any “foreigners” who might be attracted to the Lord’s Temple.  Solomon asks the Lord to hear and to respond to the prayers of “foreigners,” “so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name….”

• Psalm 96: 1-9

(See comments, above.)

• Galatians 1: 1-12

(We commence reading from Paul’s letter “to the churches in Galatia” and continue reading for the next five Sundays most of this letter.  It is a stern letter in response to controversy in the churches and challenges to his personal authenticity and authority.)  Paul makes it clear in the first words he pens that he is an “apostle” not by “human commission,” but directly “through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead….”  He addresses them as co-benefactors of Christ’s sacrifice and forgiveness.  He is shocked that they have “so quickly” turned to a “different gospel,” a “perverted gospel.”  Paul’s “gospel” is not of human origin, he writes, but “I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”

• Luke 7: 1-10

Luke’s variations on this story of a sincere seeker (in contrast to Matthew’s version, 8: 5-13) establishes that it was Jesus himself who initiated ministry to non-Jews; and Jesus himself who used unexpected intermediaries!  Jesus enters Capernaum, where there is a Roman centurion “with a slave whom he valued highly, and who was ill and close to death.”  The Roman officer asked the local Jewish leaders to approach Jesus on his behalf for the welfare of his slave.  They did “eagerly” because he “loves our people and it is he who built our synagogue for us.”  The message he asks them to convey to Jesus is distinctive.  He asks them to convey to Jesus his humility and his full confidence in the authority of Jesus.  In his own words, he says that he is not worthy to have Jesus even bother to meet him or come into his home.  Yet, as an officer of the Roman Empire, he understands the effectiveness of genuine authority and trusts in Jesus’ authority.  Jesus is “amazed” at the man’s perceptiveness and  trust and tells the crowd “not even in Israel have I seen such faith.”  When the Jewish emissaries returned to the centurions home, “they found the slave in good health.”

Both Testaments include crucial narratives that insure access to God’s love for all people.  It is access unfettered in any way.  It jumps over all human barriers.  It is just as accessible to those with the longest relationship with the Lord as well as to the most remote or tenuous.  In the First Testament, God’s first love is Israel.  But at one of the most emotionally powerful moments in the history of that long love story with that chosen people– the dedicatory prayer by the builder-King, Solomon– there is an explicit provision made for the prayers of any “foreigners” to be heard and responded to.  The Lord’s passion for Israel is demonstrated in a spectacular fiery display invoked by the prophet Elijah in the name of “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel.”  Both of these stories of God’s love for those with whom there has been the longest and most intense relationship are followed in the lectionary by an appointed psalm (96) which explicitly invites “all people” to praise the One who not only initiated covenant with beloved Israel, but is the creator of the heavens and the whole earth and the sole guarantor of pure “justice.”  In the Second Testament, Luke provides a story that establishes that it was Jesus himself who took the initiative to bring God’s love to any and all who seek it, including through intermediaries for those who never could have known Jesus in the flesh!  Both Testaments include narratives which, if honored, always dismantle human tendencies to assume or to establish barriers between God’s love for “others.”  Crucially and paradoxically, the same scriptures which record a love story for God’s people also contain narratives that guarantee the possibility of direct, unlikely access to God’s love for any and for all!

A theme which many writers deemed postmodern have considered is ‘religion beyond religion’.  One take on this recurring theme is that biblical texts and their interpretations are always slipping out of control of established religious official-dom.  Biblical texts are interested in the whole human experience, warts and all, and assume God’s love always exceeds human expectations about where and to whom it is directed and available.  Even the most devout religionists are God’s mere “intermediaries,” not gate-keepers!

Jacques Derrida presumed that Levinas, Marion, Ricoeur, Kierkegaard and even Heidegger participated in what he called “a nondogmatic doublet of dogma… a thinking that ‘repeats’ the possibility of religion without religion.”  (The Gift of Death, p. 50)  Derrida’s American disciple, John Caputo appreciates Derrida’s ‘religion without religion’ for its potential to reignite faith, specifically a biblical understanding of faith.  Paraphrasing the prophet Amos, Caputo writes in The Prayer and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion:

“… I do not care about religion, Yahweh seemed to say, but about a religion without religion, or before religion, a religion where the only thing people believe in religiously is justice, where their passion is to let justice flow.  So it would not matter to Yahweh, according to Amos, whether you had religion–i.e. whether you belonged to the ‘determinable faiths’ or whether you rightly passed for an atheist in the eyes of the determinable faiths– but whether you had a passion for justice, longed for justice, wept and prayed over justice.  Yahweh was jealous about justice, not Judaism, and the false gods he inveighed against were gods who do not translate into justice, the religious assemblies that do not translate into justice.”  (pp 337-338)

The God to which the biblical texts rise up in testimony is known as creator of the whole earth with a passion and capacity for rendering pure “justice.”  This God initiated, they tell us, a deep love affair with some who were chosen, not as gatekeepers but as “intermediaries” to accelerate access to God’s love for every person!  Is this is a biblical definition of ‘religion beyond religion?’