ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 11, 2005
EVENSONG & BENEDICTION
Fr Alan Moses

1 Kings 11.41-12.20
Acts 14.8-20


Political and royal successions have been much in the news of late. Pope John Paul has been succeeded by Pope Benedict and we wait to see what impact that might have. On our own domestic political scene, we have the Conservative party deciding how to choose a new leader, before it can get round to actually doing it. And when political commentators lose interest in that, they can always return to long-running soap: the Blair-Brown handover.

On a more exotic note, the past week has seen the death of King Faad and the takeover of Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia. The airspace of the Middle East must have been crowded with private jests ferrying home all those thousand s of princelings from the their summer holidays in London and Marbela. Much ink has been spilt on the problems facing the new king who sits on top of the largest petrol dump which the incendiary bomb of Wahhabi Islam threatens to ignite at any moment.

Our Old Testament reading tonight deals another royal succession. The writer of Kings is not simply giving us bald history - no historians really do that, otherwise hardly anyone would write history and even less people would read it. They all have an angle, a purpose for telling the story. The author of 1 & 2 Kings has a theological stance, a canon by which he judges the kings of Israel and Judah. Most of them do not measure up very well to his exacting standards.

Solomon had begun well. His prayer for wisdom had been answered by God, the kingdom inherited from his father David, had expanded and prospered. But success seems to have gone to his head. He moved away from adherence to the law of God, permitted the worship of foreign gods - particularly under the influence of foreign wives married for dynastic purposes. This threatened the spiritual identity of God’s people. His reign became increasingly oppressive with high taxes and forced labour for his building projects; exactly as the prophet Samuel had warned the Israelites would happen when they demanded a king like other nations. This had led to rumblings of resentment. Jeroboam was one of the leaders of this and fled to Egypt.

Now Solomon is dead and his son Rheoboam has succeeded him. He comes to Shechem, the great shrine of the northern tribes of Israel to be acknowledged as their king. This would be a scene not unlike that in Riyadh last week. The people seize the chance to put their case to the new king, to ask for an easing of their burden.

It is one of the drawbacks of the hereditary system that the brains have to run out some time. Political savvy is not always handed down from generations. Rheoboam probably thought his fathers advisers were a bunch of old fogies. He and his friends had been waiting around long enough for the old king to die. Now he was in charge and he was going to show it! “You think you’re hard done by. You ain’t seen nothing yet!” The spark of rebellion is struck and Rheoboam makes matters worse by sending the most hated man in the country, Adoram the royal taskmaster, to force people back into line. The people respond in the only way possible when the government won’t listen; when they feel that they have no stake in society; they stone Adoram to death.



Much too late, Rheoboam gets the message and heads for the safety of Jerusalem, effectively abandoning any control over the northern tribes. His folly, his bad leadership, had cost him the greater part of the kingdom over which David and Solomon had reigned.

There is a stoning in the 2nd lesson too. This time it is Paul on the receiving end and it is not fatal. Things had started off quite differently in Lystra but crowds are fickle. There was a local legend that Zeus and Hermes had come down to earth in disguise. No one, other than an elderly peasant couple, had shown them hospitality. The couple were made the guardians of a splendid temple, but the rest of the local populace was wiped out.

So when Paul healed the man who had been a cripple since birth, the people were determined not to make the same mistake again. Barnabas was an impressive figure, so they assume that he is Zeus. Paul is the talker, so he must be Hermes, the messenger of the gods. The local priest wastes no time in organising a suitable sacrifice.

Lesser characters might well have their heads turned by such adulation. How successful, they would say. What an impression we are making. We can sort out the dodgy theology later. But Paul and Barnabas realise that the theology has to be sorted out now. The apostles tear their garments in the Jewish response to blasphemy. “We are mortals just like you.”

Then Luke shows us Paul setting out to persuade the crowd of the right way of thinking. This is one of two speeches Luke gives us in which Paul’s audience is predominantly Gentile not Jewish. So, instead of speaking of what God had done in the history of Israel, as he would have done to a Jewish audience, Paul speaks of the work of God in creation, as he would do later in Athens at the Areopagus, seeking to establish common ground on which he can then begin to speak of Christ. Even then, we are told, he only just managed to get the sacrifice called off.

Wise politicians know that they can go from being the darling of the media to being devoured within what seems no time at all. It has even been know to happen to clerics. The crowds which had been lost in adulation, are just as easily won over by hostility.

There is a lesson here for those who might be tempted to succumb to the personality cult of a preacher or priest - not unknown in Church history - or even the cult of a church or community. Popularity and success might seem to open doors for mission - but if they distort or blind peoples’ vision of God, then they are self-defeating. They destroy not only the mission of the Church but the missionaries.

Tomorrow is the feast of St. Dominic, the Spanish priest who founded the Order of Preachers. Dominic was travelling with his bishop in Languedoc in southern France at the time when the region was in the grip of the Catharist heresy, a cult imported from the East. The Cathars regarded themselves Christians but they were simply a new version of an ancient heresy which sharply distinguished between the spiritual world, which was good, and the earthly world, which was carnal and corrupt. The first was the domain of God, the second that of the devil. The object of the Cathar elite, the perfecti, was to lead lives of abstemious purity and so escape the coils of the flesh.

After converting an innkeeper back to Catholic Christianity, Dominic sought out the papal legates who had been appointed to combat the heresy. He found them on the point of giving up, so discouraged were they. Dominic did not take long to see the reason for their failure. They travelled like noblemen, with a costly retinue. Their preaching was uninspired and lacking in zeal but, worse still, was completely undermined by their lifestyle which presented no challenging alternative to the purity and zeal of the heretics.

Dominic conceived the model for a new kind of missionary, based on the pattern of the original apostles. They should travel on foot and without money, preaching wherever there was an audience and exemplifying the gospel ideals of faith and charity. Their words would be given authority and authenticity by their lifestyle.

Unlike his contemporary St. Francis, whose mendicant lifestyle he borrowed, Dominic was not anti-intellectual. His friars should be well trained in theology and doctrine and specially skilled in the art of communication and exposition.

Ours is an age of endless words and images. It is also an age of widespread ignorance of basic Christian doctrine. Teaching and explaining that doctrine has to be a priority for the Church; for all those who are called to preach and teach. We can no longer assume, if we ever could, that people will pick up basic Christianity in home or family. That teaching has to take into account where people are in their spiritual and intellectual development. There is no point speaking to them in a language they do not understand. But at the same time, we have to see what Dominic saw; that teaching is authenticated by life, by lives of discipleship, by leadership in the church which is marked by discipleship and servant-hood rather than the pursuit of power and success.