Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible depicts Elijah’s contest on Mt. Carmel with the prophets of Baal. The prophet Elijah must convince Israel during the crisis of a drought and famine that the Lord is the only true God. His opponents worship the Canaanite god Baal who is known from the pantheon of Ugarit, an ancient major trading port in modern-day northern Syria which predates Israel by a couple hundred years. Despite their temporal distance, Ugaritic literature describes Baal with similar language the Hebrew Bible describes the Lord. Both are depicted as storm gods who wield lightning bolts as weapons, ride on clouds, and have control over meteorological events.

Given the deities’ comparable abilities to manipulate weather along with the drought, the contest between these two gods becomes very important as the result determines who the Israelites will implore to fix the environmental catastrophe. Elijah addresses the Israelites, “How long will you straddle the issue? If the Lord is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him.” He essentially asks which storm god will the Israelites call on to bring relief to the land in disaster: the Lord, God of their ancestors, or Baal, a god whose abilities are familiar but is ultimately foreign? Elijah asserts that the Israelites’ indecision at what should be an easy question is linked to the drought.

How long will we Christians straddle the issue when very real consequences are at stake? Our black brothers and sisters tell us the world actively oppresses them but does our moderativness help them? When the coronavirus forced shelter-in-place orders, people of color working in grocery stores and delivery services – often below a living wage – did not have the luxury of staying home unequally exposing them to the virus. Health professionals who study COVID-19 find that communities of color are disproportionately affected by the virus corroborating the reality that “when America gets a cough, black communities get pneumonia.” And now as we recognize the injustice with which black people are treated in the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmad Arbury, we do not have the option of wavering in proclaiming whose lives matter. At some point, our straddling the line has become complicit with oppression. Prophets in our time are asking the same question Elijah did: How long will you straddle the issue?