October 4, 2020 “Magic” – Nahum 3:1-7, 14-19

Nahum 3:1-7, 14-19 (Immerse Prophets pp. 189-191)
“Magic”
October 4, 2020 – Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

I’m not much interested in fast cars, but I can get really excited about a fast computer. It’s really cool to be able to press the power button and watch the screen light up with your desktop in less than 30 seconds. Some of you know I’ve struggled with video editing these sermons for several weeks. A new computer I’d bought for the purpose overheated and crashed in the middle of the project two weeks ago. So I’m currently on my second new computer. This past week I toyed with the idea of taking the latest one back and getting the newest and fastest processor available installed in it. But it looks like I don’t really need it.

Power is seductive, whether it’s in cars or computers, politics or pistols. Men especially are subject to the attractions of some forms of power, but my wife tells me that women often seek it in their own ways in how they relate to each other. And handguns and hard drives can captivate females too while status and manipulation can also drive male relationships. It’s a human thing, not a gender thing.

The seldom-preached little book of the prophet Nahum is in part about the seductiveness of power. In our translation near the top of page 190, the prophet calls it “magic.” The ancient city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, “taught them all, the nations of the world, “her magic, enchanting people everywhere.” I don’t think Nahum is talking about either literal sorcery or literal seduction. He is talking about the magical, enchanting, seducing power of power.

My children and I grew up with Walt Disney’s Fantasia as part of our cultural experience. I hope children as well as adults still watch it. The art of that animated concert has held up well for 80 years. One of the most memorable parts is the Mickey Mouse version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” It’s from a story based on a poem by the German poet Johann von Goethe and set to music by Paul Dukas.

In the movie, the sorcerer’s apprentice is Mickey Mouse. One day when the sorcerer is away, he attempts to lighten his work load with magic. He puts on the sorcerer’s magic hat and enchants a broom. It grows arms, picks up buckets and starts hauling water for him.

The problem is that Mickey does not know how to turn off the magic. The water keeps on coming until the cistern is overflowing. Chopping the broom apart only results in all the pieces becoming yet more animated brooms, all of them hauling even more water. The sorcerer’s workshop is flooded and Mickey is swept away on the tide and about to drown. That’s when the sorcerer unexpectedly returns and breaks the spell.

The sorcerer in Fantasia is clearly angry with Mickey. After he stops the broom and drives away the flood, he gives his apprentice a good swift kick. But in the Goethe poem, the apprentice first called out to his master, who immediately answers. He sends the broom back to its corner, only saying that no one but the master should call such things.

But the words of the apprentice asking for help have become a cliché for Germans. He cried out, “The spirits that I called I can’t get rid of now.” The first part of that, Die Geister, die ich rief, “the spirits that I called,” now mean relying, particularly in politics, on forces over which one has no control. It’s a caution very relevant to our times.

In Nahum’s time, many nations submitted to and relied on the force of Nineveh and the Assyrian empire. Under King Ahaz, before that time, Judah itself made an alliance with the Assyrians to stave off an invasion by the northern kingdom of Israel. But that alliance proved foolish. Ahaz had to pay off the Assyrians with treasure from the Temple. And the Assyrians later turned on Jerusalem itself in the time of King Hezekiah.

As we read in Isaiah 36, Assyria tried to seduce Hezekiah’s people. Their general Sennacherib promised starving residents of Jerusalem that his king would take good care of them. If they just surrendered, everyone would have food to eat and water to drink. Trust the Assyrians and all would be well. As Nahum points out, they said the same to other nations, either beguiling them with promises of peace or crushing them with military force.

The first few verses of chapter 3, top of page 190, are a poetic and graphic description of ancient warfare and the kind of power wielded by Assyria.

Hear the crack of whips,
the rumble of wheels!
Horses’ hooves pound,
and chariots clatter wildly.
See the flashing swords and glittering spears
as the charioteers charge past!
There are countless casualties,
heaps of bodies–so many bodies that people stumble over them.

We know from their own records and bas relief images that the Assyrians themselves fought like that. They gloried in piling up the bodies. They carved pictures of their enemies impaled on stakes and skulls in heaps in front of city walls. But now, says Nahum, it’s time for the same thing to happen to them.

One of the reasons there is so little preaching on this book is that there doesn’t seem to be much good news. It’s mostly judgment and doom for Nineveh. But at the beginning of the book of Nahum, chapter 1 verse 7, page 187, the prophet reminds us:

The Lord is good,
a strong refuge when trouble comes.
He is close to those who trust in him.

That is an extremely comforting word in times of trouble. Like that master sorcerer who came to the aid of his apprentice, God is here, close at hand when we trust in him.

Yet those comforting words of good news are followed by a different kind of comfort, the main theme of Nahum’s prophecy:

But he [God] will sweep away his enemies
in an overwhelming flood.
He will pursue his foes
into the darkness of night.

Our main comfort is that God is near, but we also find comfort in the dark promise that God will not let evil go unpunished. In our Gospel lesson today from Matthew 21:33-46, Jesus tells the parable of tenants in a vineyard who rebel against the owner, trying to keep all the profits for themselves. In the end, they even kill the landlord’s own son, imagining that would make the vineyard theirs. Our psalm today, the 80^th, echoed that story with images of trampling and destroying a vineyard planted by God.

Jesus meant the Jewish leaders to grasp that He was talking about their own unfaithfulness in caring for God’s people and their response to Himself, the Son of God. He ends the story with his listener’s own judgment on the unfaithful and murderous caretakers of the vineyard, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

Nahum and Jesus come together in our Scripture lessons today to give us the grim assurance that God is present. He hears the calls of those who trust in Him. And He is going to bring wrathful justice upon those who do evil, especially on those who reject or are unfaithful to Him. Nahum says to Judah on page 188, chapter 1 verse 15,

Look! A messenger is coming over the mountains with good news!
He is bringing a message of peace.
Celebrate your festivals, O Judah,
and fulfill all your vows,
for your wicked enemies will never invade your land again.
They will be completely destroyed.

That strange, bittersweet comfort is a common theme in Scripture. Psalm 37 begins in the old King James language,

Fret not thyself because of evildoers,
neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.
For they shall soon be cut down like the grass,
and wither as the green herb.

You and I might want to look around at evil being done around us and quietly tell ourselves, “Fret not.” Nahum, Jesus, the author of that psalm, they all assure us that evil can’t last, can’t win. God will come, like the apprentice’s master, and sweep it all away in due time.

As we work on not fretting so much, let us also make sure we are not ourselves trusting in magic rather than God, not calling up and relying on forces we do not understand and which will only turn back on us and wash us away. Nahum has more to say to us about that sort of misplaced trust in “magic.”

Nahum gives more than one vivid depiction of war and ancient military technology in action. But he also talks about another sort of force on which people rely instead of on God. In that part about magic on page 190, we read the reason for God’s vengeance:

All this because Nineveh,
the beautiful and faithless city,
mistress of deadly charms–
enticed the nations with her beauty.
She taught them all her magic,
enchanting people everywhere.

That word “taught” is translated various ways, but at root it actually means to sell. Some translations suggest Nineveh was selling people into slavery, which is true. You might also get the idea Nineveh is selling herself. She’s the seductive “mistress of deadly charms.” In other words, prostitution. But it’s at least possible that the magical force here is the selling itself, economic magic, economic power.

Further on, just below the middle of page 191, verse 16, we read “Your merchants have multiplied until they outnumber the stars.” Back at the beginning of our text on the bottom of page 189, we read,

What sorrow awaits Nineveh,
the city of murder and lies!
She is crammed with wealth
and is never without victims.

It is a culture that profited hugely by exploiting people, like that tribute taken from the Temple. Then they exert deadly force to maintain that economic power among the nations. You and I may want to consider how we ourselves are tempted to buy into a culture which profits from an economy upheld by the exertion of military force around the world.

Even in small ways, we are often tempted by “magic.” It’s a cliché now, but people talk about “magical thinking,” the idea that I can control my life and everything will turn out well if I just have the right attitude. My great aunt used to say that it helped her catch fish if she held her mouth just right as she cast. We fall for seductive magical selling of an easy way to lose weight, to learn a foreign language, or to build a profitable business. We would like to put on the magic hat and make the broom do all the work for us.

Nahum’s prophecy ends on what may seem like an ugly note. He says to Nineveh,

There is no healing for your wound;
your injury is fatal.
All who hear of your destruction
will clap their hands for joy.
Where can anyone be found
who has not suffered from your continual cruelty?

That sort prophecy may entice us to gloat and clap our hands when we see evil punished in this world, when bad consequences overtake those who have done wrong. Yet that may just be more magical thinking, if we do not realize that it has to be God who in the end judges evil, who works a better magic than the magic Nineveh was selling.

As C. S. Lewis showed us in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the only real magic in the world is the “Deep Magic,” which belongs only to God. It’s magic which does not seek control, but sacrifice, a magic which profits not by killing but by dying. Jesus’ parable of the vineyard did not finish the story. The tenants of the vineyard, you and I, really did kill the Son, the Son of God. But the Son rose again and came back to that very same vineyard to offer salvation and grace to those who murdered Him. That is true magic.

The real magic of the Cross and Resurrection is the final and complete way in which God deals with the evil of the world. We can take a little comfort now, we can “fret not,” because our Lord is coming again to judge this world and all evil done here. But we can take even more comfort in the fact that Jesus our Lord has magically and brilliantly subverted that evil. He took the bad meant for Him when He was nailed to the Cross and rose again to make it good for the whole world, including those who did the evil.

So let us not seek the magic of Nineveh, the magic of power and of money and, to complete the triad with that “mistress of deadly charms,” of sex. But let us seek the subversive, resurrection magic of Jesus. He destroys evil by standing it on its head. He ends murder by being murdered. He stops exploitation by being exploited. He takes away power by becoming powerless. That’s the kind of magic in which I believe. It’s the magic that, when I let it, vanishes all my fretting and despair. May it do the same for you. The Lord is good.

Amen.