This Week's Sermon: "Obadiah"

“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Five

I remember sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor, back at home in Kansas as a child, thinking, “How much longer can this possibly last?”

It was playtime that I was seeing drag out like a blade before me, rather than flying by. Because this time, it was also a punishment. Increasingly fed up with my misbehavior towards my younger sister, my exasperated parents decreed that she could choose my punishment—I had to play with her for an entire hour, she got to choose what we played, and I had to act like I was enjoying it.

I tip my hat to my parents, it was a brilliant piece of child-rearing. Not only did they get to outsource the choosing of a punishment to my sister, but you had better believe that after a few sessions of paper dolls (I do not even think my sister liked them all that much, but that she chose them because I liked them even less) I became much more judicious about my eldest sibling misbehavior.

Even though we have both made good to become productive members of society—I a minister and she a program director for the University of Missouri Kansas City’s public health department—it never fully quashed our sibling rivalry to this day. She presently believes she has a leg up because she returned to Kansas City eventually, while here in Birmingham—a full day’s drive away—is the closest I have come. On the other hand, I am the supplier of grandchildren. So I think I am ahead.

But the strength of sibling rivalries stands to reason when you look at Scripture. And much to my older sibling chagrin, God very often seems to come down on the side of the youngest sibling, which is the key dynamic at play here in Obadiah’s prophecy, even if it is not immediately evident.

This is a new sermon series to take us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend, and truthfully, it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade, in fact. But it never quit fit into the arc of my ministry until now. Because I think that after all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series can help us catch our breath and focus on getting back into the weekly rhythm of worshiping in-person again. We have gotten off our couches and back to the gym, now we need to settle into a pace on the treadmill.

So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we will hear from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so that if you do some traveling this summer and miss a Sunday or three, I do not want you to feel like you have fallen behind everyone else. So I hope by the end of this series come Labor Day, we have discovered newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.

To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and followed him up with Hosea, Joel, and Amos, and today we arrive at the shortest book in the Bible—that of the prophet Obadiah.

You may recall from earlier installments of this series that a prophet’s focus on Assyria, Babylon, or Persia can help scholars date that prophet to before Judah’s exile into Babylon, during the exile, or after. Obadiah notes the exile from Jerusalem into Babylon, suggesting that he is one of the exilic prophets, but he is not focused on any one of this trio of ancient superpowers. His attention is set much closer to home, to the neighboring kingdom of Edom and the wrongs he perceives by them.

Edom means “red” in ancient Hebrew, because traditionally, it was believed to have been founded by Jacob’s older twin brother Esau, who was a ginger. This phenomenon, of two different brothers begetting two different peoples, is a relatively common one in Genesis. Of Abraham’s two sons, the Israelites hold Isaac as their common ancestor and Ishmael is held as the Arabic peoples’ common ancestor. Also commonly across Genesis, as I noted, God tends to side with the younger sibling over the older. Isaac is favored over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, and Joseph over his ten older brothers. Call it the “curse of the first,” I suppose.

There is a bit more to it than that, though. Ancient Near Eastern custom held that the eldest son was to receive a double blessing, or a double share of his father’s inheritance. In that singular context, it is much easier to see God’s favor for the younger sibling as a sort of divine leveling of the playing field, of wanting to create a bit more fairness where arbitrary birth order created unfairness.

So, back to Obadiah now. He is castigating Edom for its sins against Israel, and now we can recall a) that Edom is descended from Esau, and b) that Israel is descended from Israel—literally, since Jacob is given the name Israel by God after Jacob wrestles with God at Penuel and was spared, coming away only with an injured hip.

We should see in Obadiah’s grievance a hearkening back to that sibling rivalry of Esau versus Jacob; Obadiah even says as much, name-dropping both Esau and Jacob. Only instead of two brothers it is two peoples descended from the brothers. Obadiah’s hope, like Jacob’s, is that God would fall once more on the side of the younger, disadvantaged brother, Israel, after Edom has violently wronged it.

But when a rivalry becomes so encompassing—and, frankly, so violent—it is not simply a family matter. And that means that there is no theological or Biblical silver bullet for it. But lets start here:

Next Sunday is Independence Day, July 4. We put on displays of patriotism with flags, fireworks, anthems, and much more. Can we also leave space in our love of country for love for the country to be better? In our role as a superpower, the United States has been acting as an eldest sibling of sorts in the world, sometimes for good, but also sometimes very much not for good. How do we learn to be a better eldest sibling of sorts as a nation—that is, a nation that has the resources an eldest sibling would expect to inherit with their double blessing? Can we see our abundance and do right by it?

Or, how about as a church—American Protestantism is similarly flush with resources, including here at Valley, even as we face numeric decline in our younger generations. We have done a lot of good with our capacities and our abilities, but we have also done real harm. And I would pose the same question: can we see our abundance—not scarcity, but real, tangible abundance, and do right by it?

Because I think that is where a sense of rivalry can really become supercharged into something unhealthy. If we believe we are jockeying over something scarce, we are more apt to see our siblings and neighbors as competitors, not as beloveds. If we treat money, resources, attendance, anything, as a zero-sum concept, then make ourselves more prone to unhealthy rivalries with one another.

But if we can recognize our abundances for the blessings that they are, that recognition can create a sense of security and stability that discourages us from turning friends into rivals, because we know that caring for ourselves does not, and should not, depend upon tearing them down.

Can we build loving relationships as a people, as a church, as a nation, but also individually, by recognizing our powers, our abilities, our resources for the abundances they are, especially when many people do not have them? Are we able to be honest about the extent of our abundance, and be eager to put it not toward keeping others down but wanting others to achieve abundance as well?

Because if all an eldest sibling’s double blessing does is ensure that the eldest sibling lives abundantly, is it even really a blessing? I think this is why God is so pro-younger sibling in the Scriptures. God’s blessing counterbalances the eldest sibling’s double blessing. That is really what is at the heart of Obadiah’s prophecy—an expectation that God will countermand Edom’s older sibling power over Israel—power that Edom has misused to perpetrate violence against Israel by collaborating with Babylon to double up on a smaller, less powerful neighbor and sibling.

How do we break that habit, that cycle of allying with the strong to put down the weak, instead of with the weak so that they may stand up to the strong? How do we decide our allegiances not on the basis of who is already the strongest, but on the basis who is being righteous? Can we hear in Obadiah’s obvious anger and sense of betrayal a pleading, a yearning, for justice on behalf of the least of these whom nobody less than Jesus Christ Himself calls us to look after?

It may be that it is hard for us to sympathize with Obadiah, either because of that anger or because we do not want to see ourselves in a losing nation that has just had the stuffing knocked out of it by a superpower of its time, so accustomed have we been to being the superpower ourselves.

But if we are to let loose that double blessing of being the eldest sibling—and I believe that God is hoping that we will—we may find that God has been speaking to us, through the voices of all the Obadiahs, all the younger siblings of the world, the least of these, all along.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

June 27, 2021