2 Kings 7:1-16
April 24, 2022 + "Holy Humor Sunday"
I.
Today I'm going to talk about a story that involves topics that we may not be able to relate to very well. I remember learning in seminary that there is a huge "hermeneutical gap" between people in Bible times and today. It requires great interpretive acrobatics, usually involving highly trained seminary professors, for us to understand such an alien culture. Three-thousand years ago people lived very differently. We have fortunately advanced and evolved so much with our sophisticated ways of thinking that I will need to explain for you some of the things going on. We have the great benefits of science and technology. We have advanced Capitalism; we have democracy, and a free press, and universal education. Sometimes we just need to humor these primitive, backward people we meet in the Bible, and be thankful that such things do not happen to us any more.
For instance, back then their economies were still subject to arbitrary forces like supply and demand. They did not yet understand how free markets solve all our economic problems. This meant that they were occasionally subject to a phenomenon called "inflation." That was when prices, even for necessities like food or housing, would skyrocket. People would literally starve or be left homeless because of difficult circumstances. I know it may be hard for us to believe, because today we have brilliant and highly compensated people who manage our economy for the common good, using very complicated technologies and economic practices, ensuring that we will never have to deal with such a thing.
Ancient people also had no understanding of public health. People who had virulent diseases would be quarantined and isolated, cut off from the community so they wouldn't infect anyone else. People back then did not have the benefit of our scientifically developed and universally accepted medicines and vaccines. Many people died due to diseases that are perfectly preventable today.
A third thing they had back then that we might find laughably weird was that from time to time a whole population of people would be spooked by an irrational rumor that spread among them. Without any evidence or proof, people would believe the most outlandish and ridiculous falsehoods that would incite primitive emotions like fear, desire, or anger. They would invent fantastic conspiracies based purely on their vivid imaginations, and react hysterically and even self-destructively. Fortunately, we have graduated to a much more rational approach, requiring things like actual evidence and verification before we believe what we are told.
Finally, there was one other terrible thing that we modern people have mostly managed to relegate to the dustbin of history due to our advanced and evolved society, and that is war. Countries used to invade each other for no reason except the egomaniacal delusions of a psychotic ruler, and inflict untold horror and suffering on innocent people. I realize that wars do still happen today, mostly in places where the full impact of modern progress has not yet been felt. But for such a thing to happen here or in, say, Europe? That's nearly unthinkable. We are making war virtually obsolete. And when wars do happen, the whole world gets together and firmly puts a stop to it....
Wait, when did I write this? Oh, 1997. Nevermind. (I should really read old sermons when I pull them from the file.)
II.
Ok, let's start over then, shall we?
In today's reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, the northern kingdom of Israel is involved in another war with the kingdom of Aram, what is now Syria. The Aramean army has the Israelite capital, Samaria, surrounded and under siege. They want to starve the Israelites into submission. And it is working. Food in Samaria has become so rare, and therefore expensive, that no one can afford it.
The full horror of this situation is illustrated just before this story with the grotesque incident of two starving women who make an agreement to eat their own children; they planned to eat one woman's son one day and the next day they would eat the other woman's son. So they do eat one baby, but the next day the other woman changes her mind and refuses to let her son be eaten. So the other mother indignantly brings a case to the king over the unfairness of this. At this the king finally snaps in frustration. And this is when the Prophet Elisha enters the scene.
The king is angry with Elisha to begin with for predicting that the king's corruption and injustice would bring about this disaster. Elisha understood, and was not afraid to state openly, frequently, and vociferously, the inexorable regression that shows up repeatedly in the Bible, in which idolatry leads to social injustice which in turn leads to some kind of disaster. In this case it led to a war the Israelites were losing.
Elisha almost never had anything good or positive to say about the king or even about the kingdom at all. He was considered woefully unpatriotic, and a negative influence undermining the morale of the people. So when he shows up the king has every reason to assume that Elisha would say "I told you so" and predict still more disaster. The king is even ready to finally rid himself of this annoying prophet.
But instead, totally out of character, Elisha makes a wild prognostication that the price of food is going to crash by the next morning. It would be like someone saying today that by tomorrow gas would be under a dollar a gallon and you could get a latte at Starbucks for 59 cents. The captain who advises the king scoffs at this ridiculous prediction, which earns him a rebuke from the prophet, who says that because he doubted he would not partake of this coming miracle.
Meanwhile, we hear about these four homeless men with infectious skin diseases who live isolated in quarantine outside the gate of the city. Their lives were probably pretty miserable even without a war going on. They were not allowed in the city because of their condition, and they couldn't go anywhere else because of the Aramean army. On top of everything, now, like everyone else, they are also dying of hunger.
So, since they figure they're about to perish anyway, they decide to go out and surrender to the Arameans. They realize that the Arameans might kill them, but what have they got to lose? So they wander across no-man's-land to the Aramean camp... and they find it deserted! The Aramean army had apparently inexplicably departed in such chaos that they left everything behind: animals, tents, weapons, and supplies, including a lot of food.
The four men wander around the empty Aramean camp in wonder, and basically have a big, instant party, freely partaking of the piles of supplies left abandoned by the army, four hungry guys in this vast, deserted encampment.
They went out there in defeat, to surrender, fully expecting to simply be executed either for being Israelites or having an infectious disease or both. Instead, they find more food and supplies than they could imagine.
III.
They would have had no idea why the army was gone, but the narrator informs us that the Arameans had heard some strange noises in the night that they interpreted as the sounds of a great army. They apparently thought they heard in the distance the sounds of horses, barked orders, tramping feet, rumbling chariots, clanking armor and weaponry. Rumors started spreading among them that the Israelites must have made an alliance with another, larger military power, perhaps the Egyptians or the Hittites, and this new army has arrived and is getting ready to attack them. Imagining without any evidence or verification that they are now outnumbered by superior forces, the Aramean soldiers panic, break ranks and run for their lives, abandoning everything in their camp. It's really quite comical.
This is obviously the work of God, which Elisha has foreseen. The Lord incites the Arameans' fearful imaginations. Humans are prone to such conspiracy theories, especially in situations of stress. And boredom. And ignorance. The Arameans are on the very verge of victory: The people in Samaria are resorting to cannibalism, for heaven's sake. How much longer can they hold out? Another couple of days, max, and the Arameans could have simply walked into the city, unopposed.
The story is definitely intended to make the Arameans look really foolish, which is the effect conspiracy theories always have, because they are by nature superstitious and ridiculous. It is the same with idiotic and outlandish conspiracy theories today, of which we seem to have an epidemic. The latest one is that Disney (Disney!) and public school teachers are conspiring to "groom" children to make them compliant victims of pedophiles. It would be laughable were not many people, in particular children, actually being harmed by such paranoid and irrational nonsense.
Meanwhile, these four men gorging themselves on Aramean loot start to realize that they can't keep this to themselves. Eventually the Israelites will find out that the Arameans are gone, and they don't want to get in trouble. They suddenly rediscover their Israelite patriotism. So they go back to Samaria and tell the gatekeepers, who tell the king. "Yo, the enemy army is gone! And the left all their stuff, including food!"
The king, though, when he gets this news, thinks it's a trick by those wily Arameans. He is afraid that the Aramean army is actually hiding, and if the Israelites all go out and raid the empty camp, the Arameans will ambush and overrun them and storm into the city. But he agrees to send out a few scouts to scope out the actual location of the enemy army. They find a trail of discarded materiel going for miles along the road back to Damascus, in the wake of the frantically fleeing soldiers. They come back and report to the king that the Arameans are indeed gone and the camp is easy pickings.
So with this confirmation, the starving people of Samaria leave the city and venture out to the Aramean camp and plunder it, bringing back to the city truckloads of Aramean MRE's. More souvlaki, pita bread, hummus, and babaganoush than anyone has ever seen! This sudden surplus drives the price of food down so quickly that by the time morning comes the Prophet Elisha's prediction comes true. Food in Samaria is so abundant as to be practically free.
IV.
I think we read this story on the Sunday after the Resurrection as an example of how God turns our mourning into laughter, our scarcity into abundance, our certain defeat into amazing victory, our death into life. For this is what is going on in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. God turns our situation, analogous to a kind of cannibalism, in which we are forced to consume, compete, and lie to each other, killing our future for the sake of mere survival and instant gratification, wallowing in the misery and depression of imminent death and loss, into a time of exuberant and profligate sharing. Isn't that precisely what we need to hear as we face the global climate crisis? That it doesn't have to be this way and God can turn this whole thing around?
Maybe we need to understand that when we interpret the world's random noises as scary threats, stoking our fears, it can drive us to a humiliating defeat in which we really do lose everything. I mean, what if America is finally on the very verge of emerging into its own promise as a multi-cultural, multi-racial, classless democracy, where there really is equality, freedom, and justice for all... and instead we threw that away because we believed superstitious lies we were told on cable news? What if the church is placed for an imminent dramatic comeback, but we squandered it out of fear of failure?
And maybe we need to remind ourselves that in the Bible the catalyst for the turn-around, the people God uses most readily and effectively, is the least likely bunch of losers, people who have effectively hit the bottom of despair and realize they have nothing left to lose, who therefore face death fearlessly. Those are the people who may awaken to unimaginable abundance. They can often see God's miracles before everyone else does.
Finally, maybe we need to listen to the prophets among us, the wise and courageous ones who are suggesting to us that it doesn't have to be this way; who are casting a vision for us that seems impossible, unrealistic, and outlandish, yet who are in touch with God's truth and who are proclaiming God's Word. The ones who are really annoying, because they call us beyond business as usual, and open us to the possibility of new life and a new future emerging with, within, and among us.
Maybe we even need to be those people. Maybe we need to be the ones who witness to the God of miracles epitomized in Jesus' resurrection. Maybe we need to communicate to people that these miracles are always happening. And maybe we need to start living together in God's very different world of abundance, inclusion, and sharing which is being born among us all the time.
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