Have you ever watched Veggie Tales, the wildly popular cartoon series made for kids?  It is produced by a group of Christians, and they often use themes from the Bible in their episodes.  In one of them, we are told the story of Madame Blueberry, a very depressed blueberry who resides in her tree house.  Let me share with you her story as it is found in this clip from the movie.  She is not content with anything she owns; her dishes are chipped, the knives are too dull, the spoons are too small. 

So she sings a sad song to her butlers, Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato:  “I’m so blue, blue, blue, blue.  I’m so blue I don’t know what to do.  My friends all have nice things.  I’ve seen them myself.  In fact, I keep their pictures up here on my shelf!”  I would have sung this myself, but believe me, I am doing you a favor!  Framed pictures of her neighbor’s belongings line Madame Blueberry’s shelf.  There are pictures of one neighbor’s flatware, and another of a neighbor’s ceramic jars with all kinds of sauces.  Though her tree house appears to be attractive and well furnished, Madame Blueberry is actually hopelessly discontented with her life because she covets her neighbor’s things so much.

Now one day after she sings this song, a new mega-store called Stuff-Mart moves across the street.  You can only imagine how the sign glitters like a beacon to Madame Blueberry.  Amazingly enough, three helpful representatives from Stuff Mart show up at her door and they do confirm her suspicions that her stuff is outdated and that she needs some new stuff.  These dapper sales-vegetables tell her about Stuff-Mart’s remarkable line of stuff: refrigerators to hold extra mashed potatoes, a giant air compressor to blow fruit flies off your dresser, and a solar powered turkey chopper.  They sing, “Happiness waits at the Stuff-Mart.  All you need is lots more stuff!”

Someone who could relate to Madame Blueberry’s lack of contentment with her life is King Ahab, whose story we hear today in our Scripture reading as we continue my sermon series on great moments in the life of the prophet Elijah in the Bible.  Now for those of you who have been here before, you have often during the course of this sermon series heard me refer to King Ahab as evil King Ahab, and he certainly cements his reputation in this passage along with his wife, evil Queen Jezebel.  You see, the Bible tells us that there was a beautiful vineyard located close to Ahab and Jezebel’s palace, looking something like this one on the screen, and over time, Ahab decided that he wanted to have this vineyard so that he could plant a vegetable garden.  Now where he came up with the idea of having a vegetable garden, I don’t know, but there is nothing wrong with wanting to have a vegetable garden.  I know that I don’t have one because I have a tendency to kill any living thing, but Ahab may have had more of a green thumb than I do.  Now this vineyard was owned by someone, and his name was Naboth.  So Ahab went to Naboth and offered to trade him a better vineyard, or to buy Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth refused to sell it to him.  It is worth noting here that most countries back then in the Middle East had the king owing virtually all the land in the kingdom and the common people then worked his land, which of course meant that the king could take his land back from them at any moment.   In Israel however, every family had the right to a piece of land, and the law had very stringent regulations that were designed to maintain their right to hold that land, which kept property from just being taken over by the rich and powerful.  As a matter of fact, Numbers 36:7 (NIV) says, “every Israelite shall keep the tribal land inherited from their ancestors.”   So Naboth wanted to keep the land that had belonged to his ancestors and he refused the king, which shows how the king’s power in Israel was limited.  God had set up a society there where the king’s power was controlled.

Now up until this point, Ahab had done nothing wrong.  There is nothing wrong with wanting to have a vegetable garden – indeed; God is pleased when we do things that bring us enjoyment.  There is nothing wrong with seeking to buy land that would be good for a vegetable garden – maybe this vineyard of Naboth’s was really better for this purpose than any other land that the king owned.  But now, like Madame Blueberry, Ahab becomes blue when Naboth refuses to sell him his land.  The Bible tells us that Ahab went home, sullen and angry and lay on his bed sulking and refused to eat.  I mean, here he is, with a beautiful palace, and a lifestyle that was better than 99.9% of his subjects, but he is not content.  I guess this is why one of the Ten Commandments says that we should not covet the things that belong to our neighbor, like their sauces or their vineyards, because God knows how our coveting something that belongs to our neighbor can lead us into thinking that if I could just have that one more thing in my life, then I would be content, then I would be happy. 

Well as Ahab lay on his bed sulking, it was as if he was begging someone to ask him what was wrong and finally his loving wife Jezebel came into the bedroom.  At first she could not believe what she saw – the king of Israel in a pity party all by himself on his bed, facing the wall and refusing to eat dinner.  When she found out that her husband was sulking because of Naboth and that silly vineyard, she being the helpful spouse said, “Is this how you act as king over Israel?  Get up and eat!  Cheer up.  I’ll get you the vineyard of Naboth.”  Then she came up with a solution to their little problem. 

The Bible tells us that she wrote letters in Ahab’s name, placed his seal on them, and sent them to the elders and nobles who lived in Naboth’s city with him.  In those letters she wrote, ‘Proclaim a day of fasting and seat Naboth in a prominent place among the people.  But seat two scoundrels around him and have them testify that he has cursed both God and the king.  Then take him out and stone him to death.”  What a nice lady Jezebel was, huh?  She was not troubled by anything that God might have said in the Ten Commandments, as she was a follower of the god Baal.  You have to be especially impressed by her wickedness in the way that she took something that was of God, a day of fasting, a day of repentance and of turning to God, and she made it clear in her letter that she wanted to turn it into a day of evil, a day of lying and ultimately killing.  Now we can assume that Ahab was well aware of her plan and does nothing to stop it, and so now he now lets his coveting of his neighbor’s property turn into an even more active form of evil.

The elders and nobles receiving Jezebel’s letter quickly sought to obey her, which shows their own.  The fast was proclaimed in Naboth’s town, and at the feast ending the fast, they had two paid witnesses testify that Naboth had blasphemed God because they said that Naboth had promised to sell the king his land, but then he had defaulted on his promise, which was of course not true.  This gave the nobles and elders the excuse to take this innocent man and his children, as we find out later in the books of Kings, and to stone them to death, thus eliminating any legal heirs to the property.  Word of the death of Naboth and his children was quickly passed on to Jezebel, and then she rejoiced and told King Ahab that he now had his land for his vegetable garden.  And when Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, his reaction was to go take his vineyard and to walk on his new piece of land.

We will talk next week about how the prophet Elijah confronted Ahab over his evildoing, but today I want to focus on how this whole story began with Ahab’s coveting Naboth’s land, with his inability to be content with what he had. Now as we all know, contentment can be an elusive thing in life.  Some people think that contentment is achieved by accumulating more of what your heart desires until you have everything you want.  But God says to us that being content means recognizing that God has already given you all you really need.  Although you and I will always want more things in our lives, not having those things should not ruin our contentment. So we remember today that one ingredient for contentment is to learn to live in the here and now.  So often, much of the discontentment we have in life is caused by two things: regrets that we have about the past, and too much looking ahead to the future.  So first of all, we bring discontent into our lives when we spend too much time focusing on missed opportunities and past failures in our life.  I am not saying that we can’t learn from our mistakes in the past, but many of us have a hard time letting go of them.  We remember them so vividly – at least I know that I do.  We play our past failures and missed opportunities over and over again in our minds, like a favorite DVD, thinking “If only I hadn’t said that, or I had done that, or only if I had kept my commitment then, then things would be so much better – I would be content.”  We don’t recognize that this obsession about our past mistakes and failures ruins our lives here and now.

On the other hand, there is also a great danger in living only for the future, thinking that I will be happy at some point in the future if this thing happens or that thing happens.  This is what Ahab did by assuming that taking over the vineyard to be his vegetable garden would make him happy, which we will find next week is not exactly what happened.  If we think to ourselves that if I can just get a better job this year, or buy that car, or move to a different place, or get into a new relationship, then I will be happy, we are setting ourselves up to be discontented in the here and now.  This is clear – we need to learn to live and to be content right here and right now, and not spend out time regretting all of our past mistakes or waiting around for perfect conditions in the future.  Contentment is for today.

The other key to being content is forgiveness.  Psychologist Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan says that his studies indicate that forgiveness is the trait most strongly linked to being content.  Peterson said, “It’s the queen of virtues, and probably the hardest to come by.”

Today, we will have a time of healing, as we do have once a month or so.  This is a time for you and I to let go of the discontentment in our lives, to let go of painful things in our past or of basing our contentment on something that might happen in the future.  This is a time for us to forgive ourselves before God, and to forgive others. This morning, we just want to live in the here and now before our Lord, seeking God’s ways and God’s heart for things.  Praise be to His Name, Amen