1Samuel 15:31-16:13
Mark 4:26-34
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
I currently find the church today fighting about rules. Some people scour scripture looking for commandments, laws, rules, instructions—mitzvah. Fence posts that border a straight and narrow path to righteousness. Others look toward rules that are less formal. They look at stories and narratives and draw lessons from them. I confess, I love a good rule, but it’s the unwritten rules, ones learned by the examples of faith, that I find fascinating and more important.
Kingship follows a set of rules that have been handed down for generations. And let’s not think that Americans are immune to this. It was only a few weeks ago that American news followed the BBC awaiting the birth of Princess Charlotte, now fourth in line for the British throne. How do we know she’s fourth in line? Since 1689 the Protestant descendants of Sophia the Electress have formed the line of succession to the British throne. The first king in this line was George the First. Sure, there were about 50 closer blood relatives to Queen Anne, but they were all Catholic and the new rules, and blah, blah, blah, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera… How well established is this line today? There are currently over 5,000 members of the royal family ranked in order for succession to the British throne and Charlotte is firmly in fourth place.
But there is also the informal; for those of you who prefer fiction, George R. R. Martin’s “Song of Fire and Ice” saga (or as it’s better known by its HBO title “Game of Thrones”) has such wonderful intrigue behind the Iron Throne that many of you are nodding your heads as I speak. (And isn’t the big question “Who is John Snow’s mother? Because if she’s a royal he may have a legitimate claim to the Iron Throne of Westeros and if that’s true… I’ll leave it at that. I’ve made my point.)
In the days of Samuel Kingship was just as formal and filled with intrigue. Saul was king. He wasn’t a good king anymore, but he was king. It saddened Samuel. He mourned the state of the kingdom, but the Lord had other plans, plans of succession that did not include the sons of Saul.
The Lord set Samuel on a mission, a mission to anoint the next king over Israel. The Lord even laid out an alibi in the event that word got back to Saul that the prophet was on the road. Samuel reaches his destination, sees the sons of Jesse, and declares “Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.” The Lord replies, “Yeah, but slow down and wait for it. Don’t judge a book by the cover.”
Ordinarily, the line of succession would be Saul’s eldest son, Jonathan. The Lord had decided this wasn’t going to be the future of Israel. Seeing the progeny of Jesse, Samuel thinks he sees the next king of Israel in the eldest, but that isn’t what the Lord has in mind. Nor is the next son nor the next. Not even the seventh son, and seventh sons have a special place in the world, not even he is good enough for the Lord. It’s the least likely of all of Jesse’s boys, the youngest, the eighth, he is the Lord’s anointed. David is anointed by Samuel and the journey of the king who knew God’s own heart is begun.
King David knew God’s own heart and we ask what is the kingdom of God like? Jesus gives us so many images, today we are given two agricultural parables. There are many ways to interpret parables, but today I want us to take mystery from these parables.
“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow and he does not know how.” Now I’m sure that some of these agricultural mysteries are now known, but hey, I was a business major in college. I’m amazed by the concept that from a single seed a plant will sprout. From that plant, a head of grain will rise. From that head, more seed will be formed. It amazes me, from a single grain many are born. From the poverty of one comes many, I find that glorious! And as Jesus says, it’s a mystery, we don’t know how this happens.
You know my penchant for the texts, so this is my tangent into that rabbit hole. One of the literary devices of Hebrew poetry like the Psalms is that in couplets the second half amplifies the first. Jesus uses that here when he goes from the general mystery of plant life to the specific mystery of the mustard seed. Jesus begins with a general and focuses it sharing how the very smallest of seeds can produce a plant big enough to provide shade; a plant big enough to house a family.
How does this happen? How does the glory of God work? How is the kingdom of heaven made? It’s a mystery.
You have heard me talk about some of my favorite TV shows. Another of my favorites is a Canadian show called “How It’s Made.” First run episodes are found on The Science Channel in the US and reruns can be found on Discovery. As the title suggests, the program shows how things are made. In a six minute segment, a voice over explains a manufacturing process as video takes us through it. I love it because while it demystifies a product, at the same time it opens my up new ways of seeing things. Things that seem simple show their complexity and things that seem complicated become simple. That yen and yang of mystery and demystification fascinates me.
Kingship, we know how it’s supposed to work. We know how a king is supposed to be crowned but that’s not how a king is made. What it takes to rule, well, that’s a mystery. We will come to know that David knows God’s own heart. David will be a great king. David will follow the ways of God. Well, for the most part he will. He will also fail. He will murder Uriah the Hittite. Yet, he is still the man who knows God’s heart, and that’s the mystery. As a piece of the eternal mystery we need to be good custodians of it.
So where do we begin?
We have to begin by knowing, and I mean really knowing that God is a rule breaker. Rules that we have established mean little to the Lord our God. The rules of succession are today’s example. David, the youngest son, the eighth son of Jesse is tapped by God to rule Israel. There is no earthly way that David becomes king, no way on earth! And that’s the rub. The way to David’s kingship is not an earthly way. The way to David’s kingship comes through the grace of God. Our understanding? Our wisdom? These are swept up in the mysteries of God.
Further, rules that come from God that we think we understand are still shrouded in Holy mystery. What we think we know we really do not, not as well as we think we do. Mark 3 provides an example with Jesus explaining the Sabbath to the people, his disciples, and the temple elite. The people who are charged to know, the people who are trained to know do not. Jesus shows them that the mystery is deeper than they have seen. The commandments, laws, rules, instructions, and even the mitzvah are fractured because we think we know more than we do.
Jesus shows us that what goes on behind the scenes, or in the case of the seeds and the plants what happens underground, is beyond not only our understanding but our control. Jesus shows us that we see a reflection on the surface of the water and tells us that these waters run deep. It’s what is below the surface that matters. It’s what we can’t see, it is in that mystery where God lives and works.
What this ultimately means is that as Christians we need to be a little softer with one another because we don’t always know what we think we do. We need to lean into the mystery of God in Christ. We need to open ourselves to grace because we don’t fully know the laws we think we think we know so well.
The brouhaha de jour in the PC(USA) concerns the 1001 Worshiping Communities initiative. If you want more details I commend you to the Presbyterian Outlook website with a cup of good coffee and the better part of an afternoon. In a thumbnail, four of the 1001 leaders took $100,000 from the initiative and created a corporation to set up New Church Initiatives in California. When the Presbyterian Mission Agency, the parent of 1001, discovered this they were not happy. The four men who organized the corporation met with PMA and the $100,000 was returned. From there, well, it gets a little hairy.
The way I understand it, when this began in October 2014 the four men were reprimanded and told to “go and sin no more.” Then on November 15, 2014 the four were placed on administrative leave and an investigation was launched. On June 1 the four were dismissed for ethics violations, which they evidently found out through the media after PMA sent out a press release. I grieve that I probably found out about their dismissal the same time they did through Facebook.
Since then there has been a storm in the Presbyterian Mission Agency. The agency spent $850,000 on their investigation and there’s still one more lawyer left to be paid. They spent a million dollars on $100,000 that had been returned! The four were dismissed the way you would fire a banking executive from ING (well, actually not, ING execs got bonuses, but that’s another story). They were not disciplined like Teaching Elders using the PC(USA) Book of Discipline. And the report, a report paid for by generations of Presbyterians who intended their donations to be used to spread the gospel, is under lock and key in Louisville, unseen even by the men who were dismissed because of its words.
Please understand, I don’t know what the report says. I don’t know what the investigation turned up. Were there ethical lapses as claimed? I don’t know. I do know that nobody ever claimed that what happened was criminal, nobody ever. That would be different.
What we do know is that in the ruckus in the church the PMA spent a million dollars on legal matters when it might have been better served to use church discipline instead. It spent a million dollars to find guilt. This is what happens when you treat pastors like employees, ministers like executives; and it’s not pretty.
If we as the church had the faith to lean into the mystery rather than rush into commandments, laws, rules, instruction, and yes, mitzvah, we may not be in this boat; and maybe that’s one of the harsh lessons we take from this. When we lean on formal laws instead of the example of Christ we leave no room for grace. When we seek commandments we bind ourselves to legalistic actions.
When we ignore grace, we only remember David’s crimes and neglect his kingship. With David and with these men we must remember they are servants of the Lord and they have erred. The question is “where do we go from here?” The question may even be “have we gone too far?” All I know is that it could have been different.
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes-and ships-and sealing wax-
Of cabbages-and kings-
And why the sea is boiling hot-
And whether pigs have wings.”
Human beings are naturally curious. We want to understand. We want answers. We want to know how it’s made. We want to know how kings are made. We want to know what the kingdom of God is like. Today I invite you to relax in the mystery of shoes and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. Know that there are holy things we will not understand and because of this we need to cut one another some slack. When we rely on rules we will only find rule breakers. When we seek the Lord we can say there are mysteries we do not understand and we don’t have to understand them. When we seek the Lord we find forgiveness, we find grace.
Love God, love the mystery of the mustard seed and rest under its shade. Know the only truly worthy king is Christ our Lord. Know that when we rely on rules we miss opportunities for grace and spend a million dollars when it may be enough to say “I love you, I forgive you, now go and sin no more.” Through forgiveness, through grace, this is how peace is made.
Amen.
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