Bob Kaylor

Finishing Well: A Sermon on 2 Samuel 11

When I was back at Asbury a few weeks ago I went out for a run one afternoon and somehow wound up in the town cemetery. I’ve always had an interest in cemeteries, which I guess comes from being a historian. When Jennifer and I were dating, whenever we’d pass a cemetery in Western PA I wanted to stop and look for Civil War or Revolutionary War veterans. Somehow, she married me anyway.

I slowed down there in the cemetery when I came across the grave stone for one of my beloved professors who had taught my pastoral care classes back in the early 90s. It was from this professor, whose name was David, that I got my foundational education in pastoral ministry—how to work with people in crisis, how to help couples move toward healing in their relationships. I recorded every lecture and still have all the tapes. He had been a missionary to India, was the author of many books, was highly respected in the United Methodist denomination. Every class was a form of healing for all of us there. Jennifer and I also went on a Marriage Encounter weekend that was led by this professor and his wife. It was extremely helpful to us and to many of the other student couples that were there. David was one of my biggest influences during those seminary years.

A couple of years ago, however, it came to light that while he was teaching us about the sanctity of marriage and how to work with people dealing with the brokenness of extramarital affairs, he himself had been harboring a secret—that he had had an affair with a member of his congregation over the course of many years just before he became a professor at the seminary. When the story broke, David, now in his early 80s, had to confess that it was true. It was a devastating admission. He died a year or so later.

Seeing his grave that afternoon really got me thinking about all of that, the disappointment, the shock, but also about something else we had been talking about in one of my doctoral classes. The question we were wrestling with was this—how does a person “finish well?” Over and over again we hear stories about people whose public life was one of success, admiration, and a golden reputation…only to learn later that, in private, their lives were broken. Often, that brokenness finds its way outward in a risky or sinful behavior that, when discovered and brought to light, can destroy not only that person’s reputation but shake the faith of those who put their trust in him or her. We’ve seen plenty of high profile cases like this: think of Ted Haggard, the megachurch minister, who was caught doing the very thing he was preaching against; or John Edwards, the presidential candidate, who wrecked his career by having an affair with another women while his wife was dealing with cancer.

We may look on and be appalled, maybe even wag our fingers or get angry, but the truth is that all of us, and I do mean all of us, are susceptible to this kind of life-shattering behavior. I heard a quote this week that I thought was very powerful: Character is what you are. Reputation is what others think you are. When one’s character and reputation aren’t compatible, it will eventually lead to disaster.

The story of the biblical David represents this truth for us in a very powerful and convicting way. If you are reading along with us through the Bible you covered a lot of his story over the past couple of weeks and time doesn’t permit me to retell it all (there’s a whole sermon series there in itself). Yet, even if you aren’t too familiar with the whole story, you know at least part of it. You know how David, as a young shepherd boy, slays the Philistine giant Goliath with just a sling and a stone. David is anointed king in place of Saul, who we profiled last Sunday. Saul is fiercely jealous of David and wants him dead, so David flees into the wilderness and puts together his own band of warriors. But instead of exacting revenge on Saul, David bides his time and continues to serve God by cunningly manipulating and raiding the enemies of Israel. Even when David has an opportunity to kill Saul and end his exile, David refuses to do so. He is fully committed to serving God and, as a result, achieves great success. When Saul dies on the battlefield, David is formally made king and leads Israel into a period of great prosperity and peace. He is offered a covenant by God, that God will build his “house,” his lineage, and establish it forever. The writer of 1 Samuel characterizes David as “a man after God’s own heart.” Biblically speaking, it’s hard to imagine a finer thing to say about someone.

But success is a dangerous thing. Success can breed a sense of invulnerability and a desire to keep up appearances at all costs. When you’re at the top of the heap, you can’t show any weakness, any struggles. And so you begin to compromise your character and, perhaps even more dangerously, you begin to see others as less important than yourself. Worse, you begin to see them as less than people.

I read a great book this week that’s been on my shelf for awhile. Someone left it in my mailbox a couple of years ago, anonymously, but as I was looking over my library for help with this week’s text I came across it again. It’s a book entitled, Leadership and Self-Deception and, when I started looking it over, it hooked me so much that I read it in an afternoon.

The basic premise is this: that all of us have a problem and that problem is that we each have a tendency to believe that other peoples’ needs and desires are not as important as our own. The book calls that state of thinking “self deception” or, more graphically, being “in the box.” When we’re “in the box” we are focused on self and others are seen as problems or as objects to be manipulated for our own purposes. From our boxes, we find it easy to blame others or we begin to believe that we deserve certain things that others just aren’t giving us.

How do we get in the box? Well, it happens when we choose not to do the things we know we should do. Here’s a simple example: I come home from work and notice that the dishwasher is full and ready to be emptied. Now I’m confronted with a choice: I can simply empty the dishwasher, which is what I know deep down I can do and should do. Or, I can choose to leave it full. Now, why would I do that? Well, maybe it’s because I did it last time. Or maybe it’s because my spouse was home all day and “should have” done it. After all, what else did she have to do? Or that my kids are too lazy and maybe they should do it. Suddenly, I’m no longer thinking of the other people in my house as people with their own plans and agendas, their own busy lives. I’ve suddenly made it all about me. I’ve put myself firmly in the box. And when I’m in the box, my biggest problem is that I don’t realize that I’m the problem. I blame others, but I’m really betraying myself. And the worst part of it all? I chose to be in that box without even realizing it.

See, when I’m in the box I can wind up inflating others’ faults, inflating my own virtue, and inflating the value of the things that justify my self-betrayal. In other words, I’ll make a bigger deal out of my “busyness” or the need to teach the others a lesson. Lastly, I’ll blame them for the whole situation in the first place. Now, that seems like a lot of work…probably more than emptying the dishwasher, eh?

Now, I read this book at the same time I was preparing this week’s sermon and two things occurred to me. One, whoever gave me this book did so for a reason and now I get it! As a leader, I’ve sometimes had a tendency to put myself in the box—to think of the church more as an organization than a collection of people with their own hopes and dreams and feelings and their own boxes. As a leader, I’m prone to wanting to take credit for all the success but blame the failure on others. It’s a classic pitfall of leadership. So, to whoever gave me this book I want to say a big thanks! Message received!

But the second thing I learned is that the real secret to finishing well has a lot to do with staying out of the box. My theory is this: the more one is concerned about one’s reputation over and above one’s character, the deeper they go into the box and the more likely they are to fail.

Look at what happens to David in 2 Samuel. He is the King. He has all the success in the world. But look closely at the first verse of chapter 11: “In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the whole Israelite army…But David remained in Jerusalem.” Here is David, whom God had made successful and who was always out in front with his troops, leading them by example, now making a different choice. He knows that’s where he’s supposed to be, but he chooses to stay back. Why should he go out and risk his neck? It’s somebody else’s turn. I do and do for these people and now it’s time for a break.

So there he is, lounging on his couch, strolling around the roof when from his high perch he sees a beautiful woman bathing on her own roof. Here again is another choice. David knows this woman is off limits to him, but he’s in the box. So, he thinks to himself, “Wait a minute…I’m the king. I can have whatever I want! I deserve it, nobody else knows the strain I’m under. My other wives give me grief all the time, blah, blah, blah. In the box, David sees only himself. Bathsheba, the woman on the roof, is simply an object to him that he wants for his own self-gratification. He knows she can’t refuse him, he’s in a position of power over her, so he sends for her and he has a sexual affair with her.

But then she’s pregnant. He’s in his box and that’s a threat to his reputation, so he starts manipulating people like pawns. He tries to get her husband, Uriah, a loyal soldier, to come home from battle and sleep with her so that everyone will think the baby is his. But Uriah isn’t in the box. Look at his response in v. 11: “The ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my master Joab and my lord’s men are camped in the open fields. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and lie with my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing!”

Notice the contrast. Uriah’s only concern is his fellow soldiers still in the field. Unlike David, he chose to do what was right, what a good soldier would do. David tries a second time to get him to go in to his wife by getting him drunk, but even then Uriah is loyal.

So, David, now needing to scramble for a cover-up, decides to have Uriah killed. To demonstrate the extent to which David was deep in the box, look at verse 14-15. David orders the army commander to put Uriah in the front of the fiercest fighting so that he’ll be killed, but get this—he has Uriah be the one to deliver the order!

Things were spiraling out of control. Uriah is killed. David gets Bathsheba for himself as a kind of trophy. And he stays in the box. When the prophet Nathan confronts him by telling him a story about a rich man who steals a poor man’s beloved sheep for himself, David is enraged. He says to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!” He still doesn’t realize that he is the problem! That is, until Nathan utters those convicting words:

“You are the man!”

How many leaders, how many pastors, how many husbands or wives, how many people have gone up like a rocket in success, but have come crashing down like a stick because they became so deep in their boxes that they never realized that they were the problem?

As I stood at look at the grave of the David I had respected so much I couldn’t help but feel a shudder of fear. What would it be like to have worked so hard, to do so much good, to be loved and respected so much, only to be remembered by many, in the end, as a failure? If it could happen to this David, if it could happen to the David who slew Goliath and was a man after God’s own heart, then surely it could happen to me. Or to anyone.

The results of such a fall are long-reaching. For the David of the Bible, the consequences were grim. The child born of his affair died. His other offspring, sons of different mothers, are rivals of each other and one, Amnon, rapes his half sister and then is himself murdered by her brother in retaliation. Eventually, his own son will try to overthrow his Kingdom in a coup. His son Solomon will build God’s Temple in Jerusalem, but will suffer the same temptations as his father and die under a cloud. Solomon’s sons will spark a civil war that rent Israel in two. All because he chose to do the wrong thing.

There are two lessons I draw from these stories. One has to do with finishing well. How do we do that? How do we avoid the pitfalls of success and the blindness of being in our own boxes?

Well, to begin with, I think it has a lot to do with changing our foundational assumptions about the world. We can’t get out of the box unless we first realize that we’re in it! We need a healthy sense of self-evaluation, to recognize when we’re treating others as less than ourselves, to recognize when we have the opportunity to do the right things. Scripture helps us do that by giving us these stories to ponder over and over. A trusted accountability partner can help with that, too. A wise mentor of mine once said that a key to being a person of integrity is having someone in your life who’s not afraid to tell you when you’re full of it—someone with whom you can be brutally honest about your hopes, your fears, your temptations, your frustrations…someone who will help you realize when you’re in the box! The old adage goes, “It’s lonely at the top,” but it’s that loneliness and isolation that so many successful people experience because they set themselves apart that causes them to go deeper into the box.

The other piece, though, is all about practice. Can you recognize the little places in your life where you’re in the box? When you start thinking that guy who cut you off on the highway is an idiot, or when you start seeing your kids as nuisances when you’ve got important things to do or your conversations with your spouse are only about coordinating schedules or arguments about who’s supposed to take out the trash…that’s when you need to stop and realize that you’re getting in the box. If you can start recognizing that in the little decisions you make every day, then it should be easier to catch yourself when those major temptations come along. Treating others as being as important and valuable as yourself is the best ticket out of the box!

But here’s the other lesson. When we do fail, and even if that failure is a big one. We don’t have to see all hope as being lost. Both Davids I’m talking about today repented of their sin, they took responsibility for their actions and accepted the consequences. God forgave them both. Our relationship with God is never irreparable.

I feel sad for both Davids, but I’m also reminded through them of the grace of God. While we can’t avoid the consequences of our sin, we can be assured that God loves us no matter what and that God wants to restore us to spiritual health and wholeness through his saving love. God’s forgiveness helps us to get out of our boxes and to see others as ourselves—as sinners in need of grace.

So, how about you? Are you in a box this morning? Are you keeping a secret that has the potential to wreck your reputation? Have you been treating others as pawns in the game of your life? If so, it’s time to break out. Confession helps us do that—it helps us to name our pain and our failure and when we name it we have power over it or, better, God’s saving power can overcome it. Who do you need to talk to about your box?

And if you’re feeling like none of this applies to you, well, then you especially need to hear it! Remember, the box is most destructive to us when we don’t realize that we’re in it in the first place.

I want us to share in a prayer this morning…actually, a prayer that the biblical David wrote after his sin. As we pray it, may it become your prayer. It’s an out of the box prayer, one that we all need.

The Criteria for a King - 1 Samuel 8:1-22

We have taken a little detour from our journey through the Bible over the last couple of weeks as we celebrated Easter Sunday. Actually, it’s not so much a detour as a way of peeking toward the end of the book and seeing all the action leading up to the climactic moment through the lens of the cross and resurrection. Easter is where the whole Bible is leading us toward, so keeping that in mind periodically is a good thing.

I know that many of you have been reading along through this series so far (we’re in week 15), but some have told me that you’ve gotten behind. Others have joined us somewhere along the way and may want to jump in and start reading along with us. Wherever you find yourself in reading through the Bible I want to encourage you to pick up with us here as we move into one of the more interesting and important parts of Scripture—the story of the monarchy. It is the typology of kingship in these historical books of the Old Testament that pave the way for us to understand the kind of King that Jesus becomes in the New Testament. The books of 1 and 2 Samuel are a treasure trove of stories about the kind of leader God desires for God’s people and yield a lot of lessons for those of us who are leaders in our homes, our workplaces, and our community.

But before we dive in there I want to take a few minutes to review where we’ve been. When I was at Asbury a couple of weeks ago I picked up a book by Dr. Sandy Richter, who teaches Old Testament at the seminary, entitled The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament. If you’re looking for a book that puts the Old Testament into an easily manageable framework, this is it. There are some great charts in the book, one of which is a timeline of the Old Testament (I emailed her and she gladly shared an electronic copy with me). On this chart you can see where we’ve been.

One of the ways in which Dr. Richter frames the Old Testament is through the understanding of covenant—a general law or organizing principle that holds all the stories together. The Old Testament or Old Covenant is thus organized around five central figures, four of whom we have already met. Those five are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and, as we’ll see over the next several weeks, David. The whole theology of the Hebrew Bible is found in God’s interaction with these important figures.

In this chart, which is also provided by Dr. Richter, we see how the covenant has come forward thus far—the original covenant with all of humanity, represented by Adam, was broken by humanity, who chose to reject God’s protection and provision as the more powerful and benevolent partner in the relationship. The result was a break in the relationship between God and humanity, a relationship broken by sin. God decides to begin all over again with one man, Noah, who survives the purging flood with God’s help. God promises to be faithful to humanity, even though God knows that the ways of humanity are rebellious and sinful. With Abraham, God thus begins a covenant designed to repair the divine-human relationship. It is through his family that the world would come to know God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of the whole world. From that one family, a nation is born called Israel. God makes a covenant with this nation, much like larger empires made treaties with their client states in the ancient Near East. God promises them protection, provision and purpose if they will stay faithful. If they do not, there will be consequences, which come in the form of invasion and dominance by foreign pagan nations. The covenant God makes at Mount Sinai with Moses is a binding contract. Richter writes that the reason Moses gets two tablets from God is not that there are 5 commandments on each…rather, the two tablets each contain the whole covenant but there were two copies: one for Israel and one for God. They were to carry the tablets with them in the Ark of the Covenant, which was the representative of God’s presence with them. Both God and Israel could thus continually review the covenant.

We’ve seen already, though, that Israel has a hard time keeping their end of the covenant. They invade Canaan and establish themselves there, but they are still under the constant threat of foreign domination. The Book of Judges reveals a constant cycle of apostasy. The Israelites fall away from God and pursue relationships with other pagan gods in the form of idols. They are threatened with destruction by a pagan power. God raises up a leader from among the people, empowers that leader and fights for him or her and the nation. Israel is saved, the people vow allegiance to God. But then the leader dies and the people go back to flirting with other gods and betraying the covenant.

The conflict here is really about who is in control. God is the one who has kept Israel intact, preserved the nation, protected it in the desert and in Canaan. God has even fought for Israel, as we have seen. And yet, Israel constantly continues to look at its pagan neighbors and want to be like them, worshipping gods of convenience and sexuality. The Israelites didn’t fully abandon worship of Yahweh, their one God, but simply added on to that worship a deeper affection for the Canaanite gods, particularly Baal and Asherah. Baal was the storm god and Asherah his female consort. The Canaanites believed that rain, so vital to that drought-prone area, was the result of a sexual union between Baal and Asherah, so the rituals of Baal worship were sexual in nature and, thus, very attractive to the Israelites as well. As one commentator I read this week put it: “[The Israelites] had one God for crises and another for everyday life.” They ran back to Yahweh when they were in trouble, but otherwise they were preoccupied with the sexual delights of Baal worship.

This was, of course, unacceptable to Yahweh. The division of loyalty was destructive and threatened to derail Israel’s mission as the chosen people. The constant call of God/Yahweh was to choose. Choose God and see your mission and purpose in life fulfilled or choose the false god Baal and face the consequences of life apart from God.

That choice would also be couched in political terms. Who was going to lead Israel? Would it be God, the one who had preserved them all along, or would the people continue to reject God and pick their own kind of leader? That’s the crisis we encounter at the beginning of 1 Samuel.

The end of the Book of Judges is very clear about the problem in Israel. “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit” (Judges 21:25). I like how Dr. Richter describes the situation: “Rather than allowing the covenant to set the parameters of their behavior, these people (who claimed to belong to the covenant) were creating their own morality. And their self-centered lifestyles (influenced by the ideals of their culture) were resulting in a ‘people of God’ who looked and acted just like…the Canaanites…Interestingly, from the perspective of the Israelites, the problem was foreign oppression. They thought that what they needed was a better army. What they did not see was that the role of foreign oppression in their covenant was disciplinary—its purpose was to bring Israel back into right relationship with Yahweh. Hence, the solution to the problem was not a more effective military; it was adherence to the covenant.”

So, as the writer of 1 Samuel tells us, the Israelite solution was to get a king. Notice their request of the prophet Samuel, the last of the judges: “Appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have” (1 Samuel 8:5).

Now, it wasn’t as though having a king was a bad thing altogether. Even God had anticipated the need for leadership in Israel all the way back in Deuteronomy. Look at Deuteronomy 17:14-20. God anticipates that Israel will have a king someday, but that the king should meet specific criteria: 1) He should be someone chosen specifically by God, 2) he should be a native Israelite, 3) he must not spend his ambition acquiring horses (military power through chariotry), or wives (which were taken to form international alliances) or money (which corrupts) and 4) that he should “write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll” and read it every day of his life” (v. 18-19). The King, in other words, must be fully submissive to God in his leadership of the people and not rely on his own wealth, power, or military prowess to overshadow his relationship with God.

But when we come to 1 Samuel, we see how God’s idea of kingship has been distorted. The people want a king who is very much like the kings of the Canaanites. Notice what they ask for in 8:19-20: “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

Problem was that up until this point, God was the one who had ruled Israel and fought its battles, often miraculously intervening to preserve the nation in the face of impossible odds. The people’s typology of kingship was not God’s, but reflected their own fascination with the Canaanite religion and practice. They wanted a king who would solve their problem with foreign oppression, but hadn’t God told them all along that the problem with foreign oppression wasn’t a military problem but a problem of their covenant unfaithfulness? A king would no better solve that problem than the Judges had before him as long as the people continued to live outside the covenant.

So God saw their desire for a king to be what it was and told the prophet Samuel, “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly what the king who will reign over them will do” (8:7-9).

Samuel explains to the people who a king in the Canaanite mold will draft their sons for battle and their daughters for forced labor, how the king will exact heavy taxes from them and take some of the best of their produce. But the people are persistent and impatient. And so God says to Samuel, “Listen to them and give them a king” (v. 21).

I’ve said it many times, but often God’s best way of disciplining his people is to give them exactly what they want. Be careful what you ask for.

So the Israelites get a king—one who fit their profile exactly. We see a description of Saul in 1 Samuel 9:1-2: “Now there was a son of Benjamin whose name was Kish…He had a son whose name was Saul, a choice and handsome man, there was not a more handsome person than he among the sons of Israel; from his shoulders up he was taller than any of the people.”

Saul is the matinee idol, the dashing king, the military hero type. So God instructs Samuel to anoint him with oil, the traditional sign of kingship. Interestingly the Hebrew verb for anoint is masah, the origin of the word “Messiah.” The people thus get their king.

Saul takes over as leader of a tribal confederacy that occupies the central hill country of Canaan. The flatter and more fertile land on the coast is still occupied by the Canaanites, but from their hillside stronghold the Israelites gradually begin to expand their control.

That is, until they run into a buzzsaw. See, here on the coast are a race of people known as the Philistines, who were immigrant sea-faring people of Greek origin who had fled the collapse of the Mycenean civilization in Greece that happened around the same time. The Philistines were heavily armed and skilled as warriors, thus now you have two peoples fighting for their lives pushing toward one another in the confines of a small strip of land.

Saul doesn’t fare well against the Philistines, which is a very bad sign. We also see that Saul himself is not following the prescription of kingship laid out in Deuteronomy. Two incidences show his failure. In chapter 13, Saul is about to engage in battle with the Philistines but needs the prophet Samuel to offer the proper sacrifice to God in order for the Israelites to have any hope of success. Samuel is delayed and Saul becomes impatient and performs the sacrifice himself, usurping God’s command and procedure.

Then, in chapter 15, Saul engages in battle with the Amalekites, another Canaanite people, and fails to carry out God’s instructions, keeping all the spoils of war (namely sheep and cattle) for himself instead of dedicating them to God by slaughtering them. In one of the most interesting exchanges in the Bible, Saul sees the prophet Samuel approaching after the battle and says to him, “See, I have carried out the Lord’s instructions.” But, Samuel said, “What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears? What is this lowing of cattle that I hear?”

Saul’s confession reveals the major problem with his leadership. Look at verse 24—“I have sinned. I violated the Lord’s command and your instructions. I was afraid of the people and so I gave in to them.” And later, Saul keeps begging but with a self-serving tone. “I have sinned,” he says in verse 30, “But please honor me before the elders of my people and before Israel…” Saul reveals that his career and his success is ultimately more important to him than God’s Kingdom.

Saul’s reign would end in disaster. Instead of triumphant victories, Saul will ultimately die on the battlefield, falling on his own sword. The Philistines would take his body and hang it from the walls of Beth Shan as a sign of their own victory and, once again, Israel’s failure. Before that, though, God would reveal a new kind of king—one after his own heart. David would replace Saul as king even before Saul was dead. We’ll begin our look at the David story next week.

There are a couple of important lessons for us to draw from these chapters. One has to do with our own faithfulness to God. Are we looking exclusively to God in our life of faith, or do we, like the Israelites, syncretize our belief in God with the values of the surrounding culture? Other pretender gods and goddesses are paraded in front of us every day on our TV and computer screens, which sit like altars in our homes and offices. They lure us with the promise of sexual gratification, with the promise of wealth and the promise of pleasure. We believe in God, we may even go to church, but the pull of these other gods is strong. They deliver an instant high, whereas Yahweh is in our lives for the long haul.

When we choose God, when we choose to follow him and give our obedience to him, even when it isn’t culturally popular, we see purpose, preservation, and provision for our lives. That’s no promise that life will be easy. In fact, it’s clearly harder to serve God. But the outcome is favorable for the long term—a life that means something. If we choose the gods of the culture, however, we begin down a road toward destruction. The breakdown of community and family are the inevitable result of a failure to follow God and look to our own self-gratification instead. The story of Israel is a cautionary tale for all time. Who are you going to serve? You can’t serve both God and the gods of this world.

Secondly, we learn a lot here about godly leadership. If we’ve been chosen by God to lead, be it in our families or our businesses or our community, then we must continually guard our hearts and minds against the temptation to be the kind of leader that can be used by others or use others for their own purposes. It’s important that we not use leadership to build our own kingdoms, but rather to see everything we do as being subject to the vision of the Kingdom of God. How do we do that? Remember the prescription God gives back there in Deuteronomy—to read the Scriptures every day and follow it carefully, not to consider yourself better than anyone else, but stay on a faithful track with the vision of God’s Kingdom ever before you. That’s God’s secret to effective leadership!

I want to encourage you to read through these texts with an eye toward your own life situation. Where are you compromising your faith in God by chasing after the lure of other gods? Are you constantly checking your faithfulness and obedience by spending time daily in God’s Word, in prayer and in reflection?

Faithfulness to God doesn’t just happen. It takes work and diligence. The Israelites were looking for someone to bail them out, even though God had been doing that all along. May we put our full trust in God and find our way to life!

A Sermon for Easter 2009--Dead Man Down Under (Luke 24:1-12, 36b-49)

For Michael O’Neill of Middlesbrough, England, death was just a vacation.

See, on June 2 of last year, Michael decided to take a last-minute trip to Australia to visit a friend and made his plans without telling anyone. His neighbors, who had seen neither hide nor hair of him for days, grew worried and called the police, who broke down the door of his flat only to find that he had disappeared, leaving behind no evidence of what had happened to him.

Honest mistake, right? But it gets weirder. A few weeks later, a death notice appeared in the local paper for a Michael O’Neill, another resident of Middlesbrough, who was about the same age as the intrepid traveler and who had brothers named Kevin and Terry. In a bizarre coincidence, the vacationing Michael’s brothers are also named Kevin and Terry.

Friends and neighbors of the very-much- alive O’Neill figured that their worst fears had been realized. That is, until one of them received a postcard from him, confirming that, while he was indeed Down Under, it wasn’t in the way they had thought. Michael arrived home on August 11 to find his front door smashed in, police watching the flat, and his neighbors, once again seeing him on the street, believing in ghosts.

“Everywhere I am going, people I know are grabbing hold of my hand, saying, I thought you were dead!’” O’Neill told The Daily Telegraph. “They can’t believe it’s me and I’m still alive. I’m a nervous wreck because everywhere I go people keep grabbing me!”

Reminds me of the old movie, “Death Takes a Holiday.” Or of that story that’s been floating around the internet for a while about a couple from Minneapolis who decided to go to Florida to thaw out during an icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Due to their hectic schedules, the husband left Minnesota and flew to Florida on Thursday; his wife was to fly down the following day.

The husband checked into the hotel and sat down at the computer in his room to send his wife an e-mail. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her e-mail address, and without realizing his error, sent the e-mail to the wrong address.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned home from her husband’s funeral. He was a minister who had passed away following a heart attack. The widow decided to check her e-mail, expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and fainted.

The widow’s son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen, which read:

To: My Loving Wife

Subject: I’ve Arrived

Date: October 16, 2007

I know you are surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you are allowed to send e-mails to your loved ones. I’ve just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.

P.S. It sure is hot down here!

It’s not hard to imagine the shock of seeing someone who’s “dead” returning from Down Under! Jesus himself experienced a similar reception when he, too, returned from the down under of the grave — except that his friends and neighbors had seen him die and it was no vacation.

The events of that Friday left Jesus’ disciples, his closest friends and his casual acquaintances no doubt shocked at the brutal, painful and shameful way that Jesus had died on a Roman cross. The only saving grace of the whole experience was that at least his body was allowed to be laid in a tomb by his friends instead of left hanging for days to rot in public humiliation, as was standard Roman practice.

But it wasn’t as if Jesus hadn’t told them where he was going. Unlike Michael O’Neill, Jesus was very clear with his friends that he would be taking a trip down the road toward the cross and the grave. In fact, Jesus had given them his fateful itinerary three times but “they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said” (Luke 18:34).

They were surprised, then, to find the tomb door open, the flat stone of his resting place empty and no indication of Jesus’ whereabouts on Sunday morning. Matthew even says that the Roman cops had been watching the place but to no avail (Matthew 27:62-66). Instead of being missing and presumed dead, Jesus was dead and presumed missing. No one needed an obituary to determine which Jesus bar Joseph of Nazareth had died, only where his body had been taken.

It was the angelic messengers who provided a postcard description of his whereabouts. Reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, they said. “He is not here, but has risen,” they said, and then reminded the women again of his travel plans (Luke 24:1-12). Two disciples traveling on the road to Emmaus got the same reminder, only to find that it is the risen Jesus himself who was delivering it (Luke 24:13-26).

Now gathered together in Jerusalem, with the anxiety, grief and wonder of the last three days on their minds, all the disciples and friends of Jesus tried to sort out the evidence. But then, suddenly, there he was among them saying, “Peace be with you” (Luke 24:36). Like the perplexed and astounded neighbors in Middlesbrough, the disciples thought they were seeing a “ghost” (v. 37). Death is a trip from which no one is supposed to return, so it’s little wonder that the disciples were “frightened” and that even “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering” (vv. 39, 41). Yet, unlike Michael, Jesus had no problem with people grabbing on to him to see if he’s real. “Touch me and see,” he says to his incredulous friends, “for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (v. 39). Luke makes it clear that this was no projection of imagination or collective fantasy. The risen Jesus was touchable and even hungry, asking his friends for a little fish on the barby (vv. 41-43).

These physical details about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances are offered by Luke as a form of proof, cataloging and foreshadowing the essential thrust of the message about him that his disciples would carry into the world. It’s instructive for us to remember that the “good news” the disciples preached was not bound up in the teachings of Jesus as much as it was focused on the pivotal events of his death and resurrection. The risen Jesus, wiping the crumbs of fish off the table, reminded them that it was not a philosophy they were dealing with, but a real and resurrected person in whose name “repentance and forgiveness” would be proclaimed “to all nations beginning from Jerusalem” (v. 47).

Later, in the book of Acts, Luke tells us that the disciples did not go around the Roman world setting up Jesus memorial societies or simply repeating his parables.

Instead, they insisted that Jesus was alive, that his death and resurrection had ushered in the new age when God would set a fallen world to rights, and that they had been witnesses to the fact.

They also understood that, after his ascension, they were to continue to embody his scarred hands and feet, feeding a world hungry for the hope of salvation, wholeness and promise of new life made possible by his sacrificial death and bodily resurrection. They hadn’t seen a ghost or a resuscitated corpse (two of the most accepted ideas of life after death at the time). They had witnessed something utterly new, surprising and overwhelmingly joyful. No matter how bizarre their story seemed to be and no matter how much the prevailing powers tried to crush their movement, they continued to be “witnesses” to the reality of resurrection. We must not lose the connection here that the root of the Greek word for “witness” is the same as the root for “martyr” (v. 48).

There in Jerusalem, sometime on that amazing Sunday, Jesus mapped out for his disciples just how the journey had been leading God’s people to this precise point in history. He led them on a biblical travelogue through the liberating stories of the exodus, on to the warnings and exhortations of the prophets, and through the pain and hope of the psalms to his own journey to the cross (v. 46). His death had been an essential part of the journey and was now to be seen as a holiday instead of a day of mourning. Jesus had journeyed downward from heavenly exaltation into humanity, had taken the trip to the depths of pain and death, and had returned in amazing triumph. Because of him, death is no longer our final destination.

Jesus was the original dead man Down Under, but the passage of time since that Sunday can distance us from the feeling of surprise. Easter comes every year, but it usually finds Christ’s followers arguing and debating theological points and social issues among themselves while the rest of the world yawns in indifference. Perhaps that’s because we’ve forgotten the sheer, audacious surprise of the resurrection. We can become so enamored with our lives, our structures, our positions, and even the day to day work of our churches that we neglect the incredible claims of the gospel. We act as though Jesus has gone on some kind of long vacation, and while we do things in his name, we don’t usually expect anything to change as a result.

Coming back to these familiar texts reminds us, though, that the risen Christ is among us in the Spirit and will return to us and with us in his resurrection body to finish the work he began. In 1 John 3, one of this week’s other texts, the writer offers a word of encouragement and motivation for those for whom the resurrection is a distant memory or a theological conundrum. “Beloved,” he writes, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he [Jesus] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have their hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).

The friends of Jesus came “looking for the living among the dead” that Easter Sunday. The promise of resurrection means that we’re always looking for the dead to come to the land of the living!

The point of the resurrection is not simply that Jesus went to heaven when he died and, someday, we can too. No, it’s really about the fact that God is going to renew this creation and make it “good” again, as it was in the beginning. God is not seeking to suck us up in the heavenly Hoover into the great beyond someday, but rather to bring new life to a world deadened by sin and brokenness. Jesus’ resurrection was the first sign that God’s Kingdom, God’s reign, God’s ultimate plan for the renewal of creation was becoming a reality—a reality that we pray for everytime we say the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done…where?...on earth as it is in heaven!”

Jesus rose from the dead to demonstrate to us what is possible for this world. Death will not have the last word in our world. God will raise us all to new life—not just spiritually, but physically and wonderfully—a renewed people in a renewed creation.

In the meantime, we are to be living and working with that resurrection renewal in mind. This world matters to God—that’s one of the key meanings of resurrection—and if it matters to God, it should matter to us. Caring for the physical and material needs of others is a major theme of Jesus’ preaching. Being stewards of the earth and its resources was the first command to Adam and Eve in Genesis. Resurrection tells us that we are not a people whose religion is simply about qualifying for a ticket to heaven somewhere far away. It tells us instead that we are part of a movement that the Bible has been talking about all along and that finds its climax in Jesus—a movement that is all about making God’s creation “good” again. As Leonard Sweet puts it, “Our job is to make earth look so much like the Kingdom of God that when it comes it won’t be such a culture shock!

Jesus returned from Down Under, shocking the world. We are called to join him in a journey toward a new world full of God’s renewing grace—to shock the world with a message of renewal and hope in the face of death and destruction!

I hope you won’t leave here this morning thinking it’s just another Easter. This is the most important news the world has ever known. May you seek the living Christ—the one who returned from Down Under to bring us new life!

(Note: This sermon is adapted from one I wrote for the March/April 2009 issue of Homiletics.)

The Mess in the Message

Many of you have been asking about our trip through the Lands of the Bible a couple of weeks ago. It was a great trip filled with breathtaking and important sights (See photo album on the left for pics).

This is the second group I’ve taken to the Holy Land and I hope there will be many more because I really believe that there is great value in walking the land where Jesus and Paul and the other people we read about in Scripture lived and worked. To borrow a phrase I once heard, the Holy Land is a “fifth gospel”—a three dimensional reminder that these stories we’re reading are set in real places and within the stream of human history. We’re not talking fables here, nor are we speculating about some faraway fantasy land. When you put your feet on that ground, you’re walking with a new sense of understanding of God and God’s people.

Last week we talked about some of the stories of violence in the Old Testament and when we read those texts from the detached distance of history we can become very critical. How could this be? Surely, God could not be involved in this. We want a kinder, gentler vision of God. We’d rather that God give us a systematic theology than these stories of blood and guts.

But when you walk the ground, be it in Egypt, Jerusalem, or anyplace else in the world for that matter, you remember that human history is pretty messy. Cities and civilizations come and go, but the evidence of human achievement and folly are always left behind. As we walked through the ruins of several millennia of history during our trip, the one thing that kept coming back to me was a very real sense that if God was going to truly be involved with the mess of humanity, then God was going to have to get messy himself.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Bible is as full of violence, love, lust, failure, betrayal, hope, and heartache as the rest of human history. Again, we’re not talking about a fantasy world here—we’re talking about reality.

As singer Rich Mullins once put it, "The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart. It is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that befits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice. It does not so much nibble at our shoe as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from bone to bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our smaller minded questions but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask."

When you stand in the shadow of the Pyramids in Egypt, you are reminded of the cruelty of slavery and the ego of dictatorial kings. When you ride through the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel you are reminded of the thousands of people slain there over the course of centuries in hundreds of battles—battles whose names are even lost to history. When you travel anywhere in the Mediterranean you see the remains of the Roman Empire—it’s glory and might now reduced to broken columns and piles of rubble. Human history is full of mess.

But one of the things the Bible also tells us is that this God is one who’s willing to get messy and not just in a figurative, theological sense. If you’ve been reading along with us this week, you’ve been getting into the Book of Judges, which is another series of stories about the messiness of Israel’s history. They are constantly going through the cycle of being faithful for a time, then falling away from God, getting in trouble, threatened by a foreign power, then being rescued by God through the actions of a tribal leader. Even God’s people, who have witnessed God’s miraculous provision for them over and over, have a hard time being consistent and ordering their life of faith. They are tempted, conflicted, violent, fearful, frustrated and, sometimes, faithful. We learn that God works with them through it all, but we also get a sense that God is frustrated, too. God will have to take extraordinary steps to reach these people.

On this Palm Sunday, we have the opportunity to peek ahead a little bit in the story and get a glimpse of how God will ultimately deal with all this human mess. Theologically speaking, it’s about “incarnation”: God coming in person.

Phillip Yancey, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew, describes the incarnation beautifully:

“I learned about incarnation when I kept a salt-water aquarium. Management of a marine aquarium, I discovered, is no easy task. I had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the nitrate levels and the ammonia content. I pumped in vitamins and antibiotics and sulfa drugs and enough enzymes to make a rock grow. I filtered the water through glass fibers and charcoal, and exposed it to ultraviolet light. You would think, in view of all the energy expended on their behalf, that my fish would at least be grateful. Not so. Every time my shadow loomed above the tank they dove for cover into the nearest shell. They showed me one “emotion” only: fear. Although I opened the lid and dropped in food on a regular schedule, three times a day, they responded to each visit as a sure sign of my designs to torture them. I could not convince them of my true concern.

To my fish I was deity. I was too large for them, my actions too incomprehensible. My acts of mercy they saw as cruelty; my attempts at healing they viewed as destruction. To change their perceptions, I began to see, would require a form of incarnation. I would have to become a fish and “speak” to them in a language they could understand.

A human being becoming a fish is nothing compared to God becoming a baby. And yet according to the Gospels that is what happened at Bethlehem. The God who created matter took shape within it, as an artist might become a spot on a painting or a playwright a character within his own play. God wrote a story, only using real characters, on the pages of real history. The Word became flesh.”

The Jesus who rides into Jerusalem is a conquering hero of another sort—a conquerer who comes not to kill, but to die. God’s Word becomes flesh in all the messiness of humanity.

On our trip went to Bethlehem and saw where it all began—where God came into the world as a helpless child, born in a cave in a small, unimportant village—a messy place.

We went to Galilee and saw where he spent most of his life as the Word become flesh, walking the shores of the lake, teaching people, laughing with friends, crying over the loss of loved ones, eating and drinking with neighbors, seeing the brutality of life under Roman rule…he experienced it all right there.

Then we went to Jerusalem…to the Mount of Olives where on that Palm Sunday long ago he looked over the city in all its grandeur—the sight of the Temple filling the foreground. We followed his ride down the Palm Sunday road, past the massive graveyard that was there even in the first century, down the steep traverse through the olive groves of Gethsemane and then up to the gates of the city. On the way down we passed the church of Dominus Flevit which is shaped like a tear drop. Here we remember that Jesus wept over Jerusalem, knowing that the messiness of human conflict and God’s judgment would come to a head in the destruction of the city by the Romans in 70AD.

We followed his steps into the city to the walls of the Temple itself and were reminded of the mess caused by the thousands of animal sacrifices brought by pilgrims day and night—the smell of blood and roasting flesh that permeating the whole city. We recall that Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers as an acted parable of judgment on the Temple. Jesus knew the mess that was coming and tried to warn them to flee the destruction.

But then, most powerfully, we walked down the streets of old Jerusalem along the route called the Via Dolorossa, where Jesus, the Word become Flesh, received the most horrible violence that humanity could conceive. Beaten within an inch of death by Roman scourges, forced to carry a heavy wooden cross, stumbling through the narrow corridors, Jesus and his mocking entourage came to that place outside the city walls where the Romans routinely executed the lowest of the lowest kind of criminals—nailing them to a cross, naked and low to the ground, letting the victims hang there until they suffocated and then leaving the bodies there to rot or be picked apart by dogs and other wild animals. The cross was a sign of Roman domination—the ultimate symbol of violence. It is here that God hangs—not as the God who fights, but the one who suffers.

It’s that picture that sticks with us 2000 years later and the picture that provides us with the flipside of those Old Testament images. The God who suffers. The God who is the victim of violence. The God who metes out his ultimate judgment on humanity not by smiting us all, but by hanging helpless on a cross—taking all that judgment on himself. It’s hard to imagine a messier, bloodier, more painful way to do it than this. But there God is…for us.

We learn from the Old Testament that God is a righteous judge who cannot tolerate sin and rebellion, but that’s only half the story. The New Testament teaches us that the righteous judge then turns around and takes the punishment of judgment on himself on behalf of all humanity. The judgment of God is ultimately borne by God himself. The violence and evil and mess of history are played out on a cross. And that cross proves to us, once and for all, how much God loves his creation…how much he loves us in spite of our sin.

I don’t know about you, but I never cease to be amazed at this story. It’s scandalous and confusing, and wonderful and life-changing all at the same time. It’s a story that couldn’t be confined to the pages of a book or to the realm of legend. It’s a story that has to be told over and over again.

It’s this story that came through the rest of the ancient world on its way to us. We followed Paul’s route through much of the Roman world—through the cities of Asia Minor—Antioch, Tarsus, Perga, Ephesus—cities of power and prestige, but places where the message of a God who suffers on behalf of humanity began to take hold in small communities of believers. We went to Athens, where Paul preached to the philosophers on Mars Hill, proclaiming to them this story of a God that was very much unlike the cruel and manipulative gods of their pantheon—gods whose statues and temples were everywhere in the city. This “unknown God” was the one true God—and we know this, said Paul, because he came and showed us in person.

The ancient world was a messy place—but no more messy than our own. But we are learning about a God who is not afraid to get involved in that mess…involved enough to die for us.

That’s the lens through which we look at the stories of the Bible and the lens through which we are called to see our own stories. We cannot know God only through the pages of a book…we must know him in person.

See, all our study of the Scriptures is designed not just so that you can know the Bible better. My prayer is that you’ll come to know the God within…a God who is righteous and benevolent, but a God who is also fiercely concerned about his people…a God who judges the world, but also a God who will take that judgment upon himself…a God who is mighty and powerful, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent…but a God who is also a helpless baby, a humble teacher, and a broken victim of human violence—a God who will get involved in the mess of humanity…a God who can deal with the mess in your life, too.

That’s the kind of picture we need to see. That’s a God we can believe in!