Proper 6
June 17, 2012

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

Way back in June of 1965, Guideposts magazine printed an article by Mary Bartels Bray that’s still making the rounds of the internet. In that article Bray tells of living directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Because of that location, Bray’s family would often make a little extra income by renting out rooms to the clinic’s out patients.

One day, when Bray was making supper, she heard a knock on the door. She opened it to find an exceptionally short person, whom she described as “a truly awful looking man.” He had a cancer-ravished face that she said was “lopsided from swelling, red and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, ‘Good evening. I’ve come to see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus ‘til morning.’”

He had been looking for a room ever since noon, but apparently his appearance scared everyone, so he couldn’t find a place to stay overnight. Bray allowed him to sleep on a camp cot she set up in her children’s room.

The two of them talked for a little bit after dinner and Bray says, “It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury. He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was prefaced with a thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease […and h]e thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.”

Over the years, he came back to the Bray home many times, always bringing some freshly-caught fish or oysters or something from his garden as a thank you for allowing him to stay. He was always polite and his visits became a source of joy for their family. The morning after his first visit, one of Bray’s neighbors said, “Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people!” Bray said, “Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have known him, perhaps their illness would have been easier to bear. I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.”

Bray concluded her article by writing, “Recently I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse. As she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket. I thought to myself, ‘If this were my plant, I’d put it in the loveliest container I had!’ My friend changed my mind. ‘I ran short of pots,’ she explained, ‘and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind starting out in this old pail. It’s just for a little while, till I can put it out in the garden.’

“She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven. ‘Here’s an especially beautiful one,’ God said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. ‘He won’t mind starting in this small body.’ All this happened long ago — and now, in God’s garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.”

In essence, that’s what our Old Testament lesson is all about this morning as well. For the first 200 years the Israelites lived in the Promised Land, they were different from all the other nations around them, because they considered God to be their king. From time to time, God would raise up someone to serve as what they called a “Judge.” In essence, the judges functioned more or less like prime ministers whose role was to carry out the will of God.

But at the end of that time, the Philistines became a powerful enemy and when the Israelites lost a devastating battle to them, they didn’t want to hear that their loss was due to their own unfaithfulness. Instead, they decided the only thing that could bring them comfort was to have a human king to fight their battles — just like everyone else.

So God choose a man named Saul to be their king. And things went smoothly at first. His job, like that of the judges, was to put God’s will into practice and — with the help of Samuel the prophet — Saul did just that. For a while.

But you have to understand that being a king with limited authority is very difficult in a world filled with monarchs who wielded absolute power. Given the way human nature usually works, it was almost inevitable that problems would develop. And they did. Saul eventually assumed too much authority and God rejected him.

That sets the stage for today’s Old Testament lesson. God sends Samuel out to anoint the king who will replace Saul. Given the power that even a limited king had in those days, that was a dangerous thing to do. If Saul caught even the faintest whiff of what Samuel was planning, Samuel could be arrested and executed with no trial and no appeals.

Yet Samuel courageously follows God’s command to travel to the home of Jesse in Bethlehem, where he would find Saul’s successor. And so begins what I think of as the Bethlehem beauty contest. Each of Jesse’s sons is paraded in front of Samuel, one by one.

By the way, it’s unlikely Jesse and his family know the real purpose of Samuel’s visit since he only told them a partial truth. That is, that he was coming to make a sacrifice to God. But because of that secrecy, there is no lobbying or preening going on.

All of the comments we read in the passage are simply Samuel’s thoughts as he sees one impressive son after another. And all of that serves to set the stage for the heart of this passage in which God says of himself, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

Eventually, Samuel sees David, the runt of the litter, and God tells Samuel that David is the one he should anoint as the next king. And so the story ends. But we’re left with the weight of the pronouncement that God looks into our hearts. That seems like a simple enough claim for an all-powerful God, but let’s a look at it for a few minutes.

If God truly looks at the heart, then why did he pick Saul in the first place, only to reject him? Didn’t he know that Saul would be tempted by the possibility of unlimited power? What does that tell us about God? And why did God lead Samuel to anoint David? David would prove to be a man of deep faith, but he was also a man of equally deep character flaws. What does that tell us about God?

Now I don’t want to put too much theological weight on passages that were written to make other points, but I believe that a case can be made for believing that the tension between God’s choice of Saul and David and the way things worked out can teach us a couple of things.

First of all, those who believe in a form of predestination in which all of our personal choices were actually determined long ago by God are simply wrong. I believe that when God chose Saul and David, God knew both their potential for greatness and their strong temptation toward sin.

I would suggest that the fact God rejected Saul as king after his sin, but didn’t reject David after his is due to David’s instant repentance versus Saul’s inability to understand what he had done wrong. Both suffered consequences for their sin, but in the long run, David came off much better than Saul because of David’s underlying faith.

And that’s the second thing this passage can teach us about God. That is, that God is willing to work with and through sinful humans to bring about God’s will, even if things would be so much simpler and better if God just did things by himself. In the same way, parents often sit back and allow their children to do the best they can in order to learn how to do things, even if the initial results aren’t that great.

This past week, I watched an online conversation among ministers about the future of the Christian church in the United States. The essence of the comments was gloom, gloom and more gloom. One pastor pointed out that every denomination in this country except three is losing members and those three are growing at only 1.4 percent a year or less.

Every church growth success story we’ve been used to hearing about during the past 20-30 years is no long true. The evangelical wing of Christianity is now losing members; the mega-churches are not adding members fast enough to keep up with the flow of their losses; and, of course, the mainline churches like the Presbyterians, have suffering diminishing membership for decades.

In process of discussing these facts, many of the ministers involved in this discussion expressed the opinion that Christianity would simply disappear in the United States within 50 years or so. However, I don’t believe that all. Then, the very next day after this discussion, I attended Presbytery, where we heard a sermon about the decline of Christianity preached by a pastor who, to my knowledge, had no awareness of the previous day’s online conversation.

His point was that we Presbyterians were so concentrated on scoring theological points from each other that we’ve lost our focus on sharing the love and joy we feel from being a part of God’s kingdom. And he vowed that he would never do that any more. That’s quite a change, given that, in my opinion, he has been one of the most divisive people in our presbytery in recent years.

And, of course, I heard both of these discussions in the context of my preparing to attend General Assembly, which will wrestle with its own proposed suggestions to turn around the losses from our denomi-nation. I’ve been a Presbyterian all my life and I deeply love our denomination. So I truly hope we can find the magic key that can turn our decline around.

That may not be possible. Perhaps the Presbyterian Church (USA) has fulfilled its purpose and won’t be needed much longer. Perhaps God has rejected us as God rejected Saul long ago. Only God knows that for sure. But it would definitely surprise me if that were the case since it seems to me that we are almost uniquely positioned to meet the spiritual needs of modern Americans.

Our culture places a high value on having options and I think that few denominations offer more options than we do. Unlike so many groups, we don’t have anyone in authority handing down the official interpretation of any given issue. Instead, we say that God alone is the Lord of the conscience and we try to train people to come directly to God and to wrestle with the Bible on their own.

As a result, we have a spectrum of beliefs from the very conservative to the very liberal. And yet, even though we sometimes come to different conclusions about ethical issues or the meaning of certain biblical passages, when we are at our best, we are willing to live with those differences, trusting that those who disagree with us have come to their position faithfully through their understanding of God.

Beyond that, we trust that if we are honest in seeking God’s will, not only will God know our hearts, but we, in turn, can ultimately come to know God’s heart as well. But, at the same time, we should be examining our own hearts to see what it is that we really expect from God and from our church. Are we looking toward God simply to comfort our wounded feelings and confirm our deep-set opinions?

If so, then perhaps we have settled for something less than the true God. For God is the one who often calls us out of our comfort zones and into an unknown — but always infinitely better — future.

After all, we serve the God who drew Abraham and Sarah away from their family and their familiar surroundings in order to make them the founders of a great nation.

We serve the God who transformed a simple shepherd boy named David into a mighty king.

We serve the God who calls all of us to leave behind the successes of our religious past in order to build a more powerful tomorrow — both in this church and, I’m convinced, in our denomination. The question is: will we have the faith to follow him? Amen.

(Comments to Jim at :jmfpc@sbcglobal.net.)