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Sunday 16
19/7/2015

2 Samuel 5:1-10
Psalm 48
Matthew 22:41-46

The idol has a special place in our culture – perhaps in all cultures. We seem to need them, whether they be political, intellectual, fashion or music idols, or whatever. Idols image for us something we think to be central, most important or most support to us. To borrow the language of 1 Samuel, we desire that a “king” be appointed over us, to govern, to lead, to protect, to define (recalling the request for a king in 1 Samuel 8).

With this fascination comes the phenomenon of the fallen idol – the great one upon whom we projected our own images and expectations but who turns out to be less than we thought. This is not a desirable roll to play: no one wants to be held up as the warning to others about looking like one thing but being another, whether or not you’ve actually encouraged others to idolise you.

Many of our idols – the smart ones, or the lucky ones – will avoid public exposure in this way but all idols, human or divine, will finally prove less than we need or want them to be.

The dynamic of idols – our need for them and their inevitable failure – is central to the Scriptural story.

So far as the story of David’s rise to the kingship goes, it is so far so good. Our reading this morning is something of a climax in David’s story, towards which the whole thrust of the narrative has been leading and which now is achieved as the last resistance from Saul’s supporters is overcome and David establishes himself in the city of Jerusalem. It has been a remarkable story, with David effectively becoming king through no real effort on his own part other than simply staying alive: Saul died at the hands of the Philistines, Saul’s only successor was killed by two of his captains, Saul’s general was killed by David’s own – all of this against David’s wishes – and finally the northern part of the kingdom has come to acknowledge that David is the only realistic option for king. Our reading this morning ends with the declaration that “David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts, was with him.”

For David and for the kingship, then, all is going very well. In fact, it will be found in the end to have gone so well that David and the kingship will come to take on unprecedented significance for Israel. The heritage of Moses and Mount Sinai is now complemented by David and Mount Zion, so that when the early church comes to reflect on the ministry of Jesus, Moses and the law are somewhat overshadowed by the kingship of God and the promise of a new Jerusalem.

And yet we know the story, and so we know that for David personally things will slowly unravel. The story of trust and faithfulness which has been David’s story to this point will become complicated by the effect which being king has on the man himself. With the freedoms of being king comes the temptation to arrogance – claiming more for oneself than is appropriate. Perhaps we have seen a foreshadow of that in the treatment of the blind and the lame in our reading this morning; we will see in more detail what this looks like in the weeks to come.

For now, however, we will focus on what David “stands for” as king. In many respects the life of David reflects that of Adam (with Eve) in the garden creation myth – and many Old Testament scholars think that the story of Adam is told with the experiences of David in mind. For in David we see a figure to whom all is given, and who first revels before God in what he has received but then reaches out to take more than was offered. At the same time, David is not destroyed. He continues as king, and so do his successors for 400 years – long enough for Israel to imagine that he and his line were indeed favoured by God.

But David’s failures are not forgotten. And so the question has to be asked why his failures do not see him also cast aside. What is happening, that David and his kingship is not rejected? The answer is also given in the story of Adam and Eve. In the creation myth Adam and Eve, in the same way as David, are given dominion over all the world and live in direct relationship to God before overreaching and being cast down. And yet, even though God’s judgement is then spoken and hardship now becomes a dominant mark of their existence, still they stand – clothed now by garments of leather given by God to replace their own flimsy fig leaves. As we will hear in a few weeks, this corresponds very closely to the judgement on David following his taking of Bathsheba and the murder of her husband – the sword will ever be active in David’s house and, yet, he will remain king. David is not rejected, but his existence takes a different shape and style on account of the failures which are to come. It is perhaps this historical memory of David which colours the pre-history account of Adam in the Garden.

But, in the broader context of the Scripture’s reflection on the nature of the human being, David’s moral failings ought not to bother us, and neither should we be distracted by the form of the story as a story about a monarchy. It is, of course, about a kingship. But it is also something of a parable about every one of us. For the question is not the seemingly obvious one as to whether David is fit to be king, but whether any one of us would be. The answer of the Scripture writers, reflecting David’s own story in the legend of the Fall in the Garden, is No – the favoured one(s) will overreach. As it was for Adam, so it was for David. Or, as it was for David, so it must have been for Adam – and so also for us, for we are the same as they, before the same God.

And so wondering about the quality of David’s kingship, and whether David or we deserve God’s favour is to ask the wrong question. For the story of David’s failure as king, and the story of the failure in the Garden, is written not from the perspective of failure itself but from the inexplicable experience that the fallen, favoured one is still favoured. (How this can be so when, for example, it didn’t apply in the case of Saul, we will see in more detail in a couple of weeks when we come to God’s covenant with David). The amazing thing about the story of Eden – taking it at face value – is that the Scriptures do not end with the sad departure of Adam and Eve. And the reason is that it is that Adam and Eve still stand after exiting Eden, and David’s line continues in the kingship despite the fact that he and his descendants continuing to failure before God.

This is the critical thing, and the key to making sense of these stories: David is untrustworthy, and yet trusted to carry on. It is this situation which provides the answer to what is perhaps the question motivating the writers of Scripture, put so succinctly by the prophet Ezekiel: can such dry bones as these live (Ezekiel 37.3)? Can life come out of what is deathly? Can human fear and loathing and arrogance be overcome? Can divine faithfulness endure human unfaithfulness? The answer is, Yes: we who created are after God’s image and so are now all “literally” fallen images – fallen idols – nevertheless are raised again to our feet.

And here are the first intimations of the gospel. Although the story of David is the story of any one of us, it echoes another story which is strangely like ours, and yet is not. This is the story of Jesus, who comes after David and yet who finally defines David – as Jesus teases in his game of words with the Pharisees in our gospel reading this morning (off RCL: Matthew 22.41-46). If the story of David or Adam in their failure to stand properly before God might be said to be our story, the gospel is about Jesus who perfects what it means to stand before God. He also receives the life of the favoured one. As the true image – or idol – he suffers the fall into the death of the rejected and godless. He encapsulates David’s story and Adam’s story, and ours. Yet his new existence as the risen Lord is not the qualified and always potentially miserable existence under judgement which becomes the lot of Adam and David. Rather, he exceeds them, for in him is death and judgement put behind, no longer colouring and limiting his future.

We are Davids and Bathshebas, Adams and Eves, called and gifted, fallen and tarnished images. And yet – the most important and surprising thing – we are not discarded. In Jesus is the both act and the promise of perfection. What he suffers is our failure, and that God restores him would only be good news for him were it not that Christ himself returns to those who sacrificed him with the healing words: “peace be with you”.

This offer of peace to those who persecuted him is the beginning of our restoration. In this way we meet ourselves as we are – falling very short of God’s glory – and yet also overcome, forgiven, embraced. In this way we meet for the first time the God who created us in his image, and restores that image when we fall.

For the story of Jesus which meets, embraces and sets right our story, all thanks be to God, now and always. Amen.

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Sunday 15
12/7/2015

Galatians 2:15-21
Psalm 30
Mark 5:13-20

[Notes in lieu of a sermon, in response to an article by Lorraine Parkinson in Crosslight, July 2015]

In her response to Randall Prior in July Crosslight, Lorraine Parkinson takes issue not only with the ecumenical impetus which saw the birth of the Uniting Church but more generally with Christian faith and its reading of the significance of the person of Jesus. Her intention is to propose a better basis upon which to build human unity. Yet her dismissal of the church’s traditional christological understanding of the possibility of such unity in favour of an ethical basis for it – even an ethic purportedly from the lips of Jesus – misses the point of the kind of focus on Jesus the church has taken since the beginning.

This is indicated in her summation of the “greatest challenge” St Paul faces in his evangelical work as the death of the Messiah. This is not Paul’s greatest challenge, nor the New Testament’s as a whole. The theological problem – the surprise – of the New Testament is not that the Good dies, but that it dies at the hands of the good, the people of God. In this the elect act in a way expected of the Gentiles.

But this is no mere irony. The crucial Christological key here is that the crucifixion of Jesus was an act of piety on the part of the religious leadership, a gift to God which totally misread what Jesus represented. The fact of such an error is the reason even something like the Sermon on the Mount provides no basis for human unity. The hearing of the Sermon leads to the death of the preacher: precisely the kind of sectarian human division Lorraine seeks to avoid. This being the case for Jesus, how is it conceivable that a return to the Sermon will now work? Only wishful thinking, tinged with not a little critique of the ethical failures of others, could imagine it possible.

While Lorraine proposes discovering a general ethical basis for creating human unity, at the heart of the Christian story is a critique of such bases: the failure of ethical systems to give us certainty that we have acted righteously. The resurrection was a judgement on the ethical judgement of those who crucified Jesus. The problem of human dividedness – of which Jesus’ death is the epitome – is not religious sectarianism but the general human malaise: the presumption that we are able to judge ourselves as having acted righteously, the catastrophe of Eden’s apple.

Paul’s genius was not dreaming up the sacrificial theory for the death of Jesus but the realisation that our sense for what is right or wrong is unreliable: it is not possible to justify ourselves before God by keeping our understanding of religious or moral the law. We cannot know ourselves to be right before God, apart God declaring us so.

Thus Lorraine’s dismissal of the prayer for unity in John’s gospel as mere church theology much after the fact also misses the point. Whether or not Jesus actually spoke these words they are important because the church knew – and occasionally still remembers – that human unity is a gift of God, not an ethical achievement of Christians or people of any other faith or no-faith.

It is indeed true that the church continues to get its message and its unity wrong but we ought to take this failure with utter seriousness. Given that a community with a message of reconciliation at its very heart has failed to achieve human unity, what confidence can we possibly have that simply alighting upon some ethical system – even the lauded Sermon on the Mount (or, at least, bits of it) – will get us any further? A proponent for any such system is no better placed for success than Jesus, and in fact much less so.

For this reason the gospel is not an ethical program. It is a word of ethical realism. While we are constantly called to love mercy and live humbly before God – and must heed this call – even our obedient response does not finally create human unity, for things are too broken. Rather, in the face of the same kind of rejection Jesus himself met, such an ethic testifies to a unity which does not yet exist but which we wait for God to call into being – in spite of us, but for us.

In this way, the gospel wrapped up in the church’s traditional confession is beyond ethics. It is no mere call to be good, but the promise of a goodness made out of human ethical failure: This is my body broken by you, given now that you might be healed.

The “authentic role” of the Uniting Church, with all Christian communities, is not merely issuing the call to love, or even being loving. It is to point to a source of unity and reconciliation which has comprehended us, and yet still loves us. In this the church has something not simply to say to the world but to celebrate in spite of the fact that the world can be as deaf to the news as we are ourselves.

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Sunday 14
5/7/2015

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
Mark 6:1-13

As I was growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, one of our household institutions was to pause soon after lunch before the television to hear the (almost?) immortal lines: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives”, and then to sit through the next engrossing episode of the classic soapy. (Or, I assume that they were engrossing, because I don’t think we missed many when we were home!) As much as those opening lines have been parodied, in fact they reflect a deeply-rooted philosophy about life. It’s not a very good philosophy – and its outworking is seen in the worst manifestations of soap opera – but it has a strong hold on us: the times of our lives are sand upon sand upon sand.

As we follow the story of the kings of Israel, we might ask: Is this another soap opera? With our reading this morning we come almost to the end of the story of Israel’s first king – Saul. We have skipped over a large section of the narrative, most of which has had to do with the pursuit of David by the increasingly envious and threatened Saul. If you have read the skipped material in the last week you might have a question about the sincerity of the passion and sorrow which fills David’s song of lament as we have heard it today, as David has spent most of the last 14 chapters or so trying not to get killed by Saul.

And yet, David is not being inconsistent here. Despite that fact that he knows himself to have been anointed by Samuel as the one to succeed the king, David has continued to honour Saul as Israel’s king. Twice David has had Saul in hand – a sitting duck, as it were – and both times he chose to use the opportunity as a means of illustrating to Saul that he constituted no threat to the king and that the king was pursuing him unjustly (1 Samuel 24 and 26). When his own men castigate David for not taking advantage of having Saul at his mercy, his response is that he would not presume to kill the Lord’s anointed (1 Samuel 26.9). Our reading this morning has also conveniently skipped over the ghastly story in which the messenger who brings the news of Saul’s death falsely claims to have killed the king at the request of the mortally wounded king himself; David has the messenger himself executed for having presumed to do what David himself refused to, even if Saul did request it (See 1 Samuel 31.1-2 Samuel 1.16). All of this is simply to say that, whatever we make of David’s song of lament, he is not being two-faced here; he has honoured, perhaps even loved Saul as king, even though David himself has been promised that the kingship will be given to him.

But at the same time we should be wary of any impression that Saul is exalted as a fallen hero here, given the wider context of the narrative. He has been rejected as king by God on account of disobedience and told that another will take his place. “Historically”, we might say that Saul dies at the hands of the Philistines in a military miscalculation. At that level his death is tragic, and perhaps even heroic and certainly a devastating blow to Israel. Theologically, however, Saul dies because he was destined no longer to be king. Saul, then, is supposed to removed from the picture, and God has presumably been in the process of painting him out ever since Samuel delivered the bad news to the rejected king. Saul falling on his own sword is God’s final stroke across that part of the canvas. In making sense of David’s lament, then, we have to reject any thought that here we are dealing with a lament over a fallen hero. This would be to read the Scriptures as confirming that common habit we have of telling none of the bad stories about the deceased at his or her funeral, as if having died in particular way – or even just having died – constitutes a righteousness which obviates everything that has gone before. The Scriptures are not so disingenuous: Saul reaps what he has sown. He dies not because the Philistines had a stroke of good luck but because God abandoned him.

But what, then, is the meaning of David’s magnificent song of lament? With its three-times repeated refrain “how the mighty have fallen”, the lament lends itself to all kinds of borrowings to express grief in response to the demise or decline of any of our great ones, but this is not to use the lament in a way true to its use in the story. Central to a proper understanding of the lament is the meaning of the kingship itself in Israel, and in the ancient near East more generally. Whereas in our more individualistic age we are likely to hear David’s song as a eulogy for Saul himself, in its context it is much more than this. The relationship between the king and the people over whom he reigns is such that what happens to the king happens to the nation. Thus David sings of Saul as the slain “glory of Israel”. This is not about Saul in himself but about Saul as the king – as that which for which the people had asked, in which it sought to find it security and strength. What is lost here is not only the man Saul but the hope of Israel – that in which it chose to trust. The death of the king is the end of the dream. But, as we have seen, neither is this simply an accidental thing, as if Saul might have survived to die of old age if perhaps he hadn’t ventured out that day. If the king has failed so also has Israel who trusted in the kingship. There is a judgement here which is executed not only upon Saul but also upon Israel. And so we have here not simply a loyal man mourning the death of his king, but rather a lament over Israel itself – both glorious as chosen and blessed by its God, and yet also rejected in judgement as it itself has rejected God (1 Samuel 8). David’s song for Saul is God’s own song for Israel: How the mighty have fallen.

Most importantly, however, this song is sung not just by anyone, but by God’s own solution for the problem of the kingship – David himself. The lament rises in response to an executed judgement. Yet, the overcoming of the judgement is as close as the lips which sing this very song.

And this brings us to something much more important than the mere historical details of who was king and when. Here we encounter the particularly Hebrew-Christian conception of sin and judgement: that sin named and judgement enacted are sin forgiven and judgement overcome. History is written by the winners – so the saying goes – and the Hebrews had come to understand themselves as the winners, in that God had found a way to turn their grief into gladness, their death into life. The request for a king was a failure on Israel’s part, and yet God would turn the kingship into a means of grace. This is not because of the possibilities of the situations themselves, but because of who God is.

Here the way in which God related to Israel through Saul and David becomes relevant to God’s relating to us here today. We don’t worry much about kings these days, but we have a strong sense of “better” and “worse” in our personal and community lives. We might imagine it better to repair a broken church and tower, but our confession must be that if God blesses us subsequently in will be as much in spite of the tower as because of it. We might imagine it better to sell up and travel “light” in terms of property, but the same caveat will apply. In our personal lives, achieving the dream job, finally reaching retirement, having the family, emptying the nest – whatever: these are never the self-justifying ends we imagine them to be. As much despite what we think we have achieved, God will bless us, or others through us.

While we have noted a number of times lately that there are no true beginnings in history, it is also the case that there are no endings. There is no end with God but God himself – God as faithful, as keeping to the covenantal promise to remain with his people, despite where they might wander. This “end” is not a completion. The end, the thing we meet at our various conclusions, is the faithfulness of God. This meeting is always a new beginning which casts new light on who we are and what we have done. A judgement is made as God makes good of what we have done: God’s promises to David are the making good of the request for a king; Saul’s departure was the judgement on that request. When the word of judgement was spoken – the death of Saul – the shape of salvation from the judgement is already at hand – the promises to David.

These promises found a kind of fulfilment 1000 years later in the person of Jesus, but the dynamic of judgement and salvation remained the same. The judgement on the crucifixion of Jesus is the resurrection, the vindication of Jesus. Yet Jesus is raised not to condemn but to invite to understanding and healing: look, see, understand, believe, repent, follow. To eat and drink in Holy Communion is to receive human failure as a source of healing, in the hands of this God.

The days of our lives are no mere passing story – sand upon sand, risings and fallings, cycles of history. Saul and David are not just a characters in stories which happen to be found in our holy book. Here, as if through a glass darkly, we see God dealing with us all in judgement and grace, the grace meeting the judgement head on, and overcoming it.

May this grace – known in its perfection in Jesus the Son – meet us, and overcome us, and set us free. In that may we know the peace which passes all understanding, our hearts and minds kept in the knowledge of God’s love for his fallen creatures and of his refusal to do anything but work for their salvation. Amen.

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Sunday 13
28/6/2015

1 Samuel 17:57-19:9
Psalm 9
Mark 5:21-43

There is a trick to the reading of Scriptures which involves, well, actually reading the Scriptures, closely. By this I mean that what is going on in the stories is not always as straightforward as it might at first seem.

Our reading from 1 Samuel this morning follows on from the account of David’s victory over the Philistine giant “Goliath”. Most of us have probably heard sermons which conclude from the tale what David himself seems to conclude, which is that if God is with us, nothing finally can stand against us. This must be true. But what if it is the case that God is against us? If God is against us in the same kind of way that we believe God was for David, then we have no hope. This is obvious enough for Goliath, about whom most of us don’t give a second thought.

But there is another player in the story, against whom God also stands, who is a much more nuanced presence, and so who might play on our sympathies rather more profoundly than Goliath: King Saul. We can dismiss Goliath because he stands for all that is bad. We don’t have much sympathy for him or real interest in him because he is defined as the problem, and so he is rather a one-dimensional character. But Saul is much more complex or, more to the point: Saul is much more like us.

In the unfolding of the story, we now know that Saul has been rejected as king. Saul knows this himself although he doesn’t really seem to know what to make of it, and who would? Does the rejection mean that he should simply stop being king, and go back to farming? That’s hardly going to work for anyone, God included, for David is not ready to be king either.

But the text’s account of the shape of God’s rejection of Saul is in fact rather more terrifying than the expectation that Saul might simply step down. We heard that “an evil spirit from God rushed upon Saul”, whereupon Saul attacked David twice with his spear. It is the second time we have heard that Saul has received an evil spirit from God, the first time being even more strongly stated (see the end of the anointing of David narrative – 1 Samuel 16.13f – in which the spirit of YHWH comes “mightily” on David, leaves Saul, and an evil spirit from YHWH torments Saul.). I suspect that the sending of the evil spirit raises a serious moral problem for many of us. How is it “fair”, we might wonder, that Saul is actively influenced in this way? Do we not pray, Deliver us from evil, or similar, expecting that God will actually do this? What could one possibly do against a God who afflicts someone in this way? In what sense could this be the act of a “loving” God?

In fact, our moral objections here are likely to be somewhat confused and unclear even to ourselves. If God is for some things and those who do them, surely God is also against others. And, if God might act on behalf of those things God is “for”, might not God also act against those things God is against? But if we look to what happens in the story, it is more complex than this simple justification implies. Saul is as much the cause of his own downfall as anything God does.

We hear that Saul fears David because Saul perceives that God is on David’s side. This is rather strange. If God is on David’s side, and I want to be on God’s side, ought I not simply position myself next to David? Why not side with David rather than oppose him? This, of course, Saul does not do because, despite having heard from Samuel that he has been rejected as king he cannot, and does not, simply stop being king. And, in continuing in the role of king, he necessarily defends his kingship against perceived threats. It is seemingly a self-contradictory condition, but Saul can’t extract himself from it.

He does, then, the kinds of things which anyone might do in his situation. Perceiving him to be a threat, Saul removes David from the royal court, sending him out on military missions. David, however, is wildly successful, and this just further exacerbates the problem. Saul’s son Jonathon has already declared himself devoted to David. Jonathon has given David his own sword and armour and so has, perhaps, declared David to be Saul’s rightful successor. Further, Saul’s daughter Michal falls in love with David. This becomes the basis for another plan by Saul to deal with David. The wedding dowry demanded is the foreskins of 100 Philistines. Saul expects David to die trying to deliver, but he delivers 200 instead, further cementing David’s fame in contrast to Saul’s decline in the people’s imagination and David is now within the royal household as son-in-law. Saul grows more afraid of him and so, we hear, he becomes “David’s enemy from that time forth”.

If it is the case that Saul is tormented by an evil spirit from God, it is also the case that he makes perfectly rational and free decisions, each of which just makes the matter worse from his own perspective. He twists and turns against David – and so against God – each turn tightening the noose around Saul’s own neck. Every effort to destroy David brings David more strength. All of Saul’s political cunning works against him. He is, then, both destined to fail because God has abandoned him – as the story has it – and fails by his own hand; it is not possible to tease the two causes apart.

This is not exactly a heart-warming story but, whatever our emotional response, what does it have to do with us? Why might it be valuable to hear this story still today?

It is ostensibly on Saul’s behalf that we object to the suggestion that God sent an evil spirit to torment him, or even that God rejected him. Yet, if we are honest, we protest not on behalf of a long-dead Saul but on our own behalf. What if we are more Saul than David? What if God has abandoned us, only that we had no Samuel to deliver the news. Or perhaps our Samuel did come, and we did not know how to handle the announcement, as Saul himself clearly did not, or perhaps simply didn’t notice. Is this why things are as they are, why we are in this situation, why this or that has happened to us or to me or to you? What I mean by “this situation” could be anything: the condition of the mainstream church in the 21^st century, or my failing health – anything for which we might be tempted to attribute some kind of divine judgement as the cause, anything in which an outcome might be thought somehow to be an “act of God”.

How baffling is the thought that not simply I might be against God but that God might be against me; for God must be against some, and not only one-dimensional nasties like Goliath but perhaps sometimes even against his own anointed, Saul. It is baffling because we tend to imagine that we are – whether as church, or as a nation, or as individuals – in some way, God’s anointed, enjoying the rights and privileges of God’s elect. We live in the expectation of the favour of God, or the world more generally. We live as if we are right.

The point of all this is not to make accusations. It is rather that the story of Saul and David suggests that, in fact, I do not know whether, when, or how God is for or against me, or you, or us here and now. Saul could not really know this. David could not really know it. As we noted last week: no one in the story has read forward to the end. For us in the midst of our own stories – and who have not read forward to their conclusions – the crucial point is that it is God who is at work in Saul and David, and here. The kingdom which is beginning to take shape in these stories is not that of Saul or even of David, but God’s own kingdom. As this unfolds the players are not mere pawns on a chessboard, directed here and there against their will, and neither are we. David and Saul are both free agents, both just doing what comes naturally under the circumstances. And yet, not their kingdoms come, not their will is done but, finally, God’s.

Is this not what we pray for each week: “…your kingdom come, your will be done…”? Perhaps, mindful of what the unfolding of God’s kingdom among us might look like, we might pray that prayer with a little more fear and trembling. It may well be that for God’s kingdom to advance, we need to be removed. Yet this is the prayer we are called to pray. To pray for the coming of the kingdom of God is not to presume with Saul that we will reign with God against all pretenders to our position and privileges. It is a prayer which asks that we will be humbled, as were both Saul and David.

This is not, in fact, bad news. To be humbled in this way is to shift interest from the anxious enacting and telling of our own story to the awareness, or confidence, that there is another story to be told, another who acts in and through and, sometimes, against us. This actor plays so that, whatever we might do, he will be found to be faithful to the promise of blessing. For we cannot bless ourselves. Saul was rejected as king because he presumed to become a blessing to God, and so to himself. David, on the other hand, does nothing to bring about his ascent to the throne and, as we will see next week, even laments what it takes for God’s promise to him to be fulfilled.

Through Saul’s waverings in and out of madness and David’s struggle simply to stay alive we see the slow process of the revelation of God’s own reign. There is no predicting of outcomes, no reading of signs from the events around us. No cleverly devised strategy or business case will guarantee us a future. We will not finally be sure whether God has worked with us or against us. We can know only that God always works through us, his kingdom to bring. We can only know that, in the end – sometimes because of us, sometimes in spite of us – God will triumph.

Even as we must calculate, risk, act or not, succeed or fail, our faith is that with this God the poverty of human morals and politics will be overcome – life out of death.

And, thanks be to God, we will wonder that it could have happened.

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Sunday 11
21/6/2015

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20
Mark 4:35-41

When it comes to hearing such a Bible story as the one we have heard this morning – the anointing of David as king – we are at a disadvantage in making sense of it: we know how the story ends. The disadvantage here is that the story then becomes simply a story. It might be an interesting story – perhaps providing a good structure for a TV miniseries – but there is nothing much here but history, nothing much here but the past. And the thing about the past is that it is easy – we have it already sewn up; it is already comprehended. What is hard is not what these stories seem to convey to us but our own stories, for these are not yet finished, not yet past, and so we don’t have the comfort of knowing how it all ends up.

Our reading this morning is one filled with the tension of change and not knowing what is going to happen next. Samuel, who initially opposed the establishment of the kingship in Israel, has come to have a lot invested in Saul and now grieves that Saul has been rejected by God. At the same time, he is afraid of Saul, and goes to anoint the new king under the cover of fulfilling a religious duty. Samuel is convinced that he can see in David’s brothers the qualities he noticed also in Saul, but is told not to look to appearances. The principle contrast between the impressive-on-paper Saul and David is the contrast between the strong man and the man with heart. And from this point to the end of 1 Samuel the story is filled with the tension of the struggle between David and Saul.

These tensions are not what we are used to calling “creative” tensions. This is a messy business. It is the tension of shifting times, the uneasiness of knowing that something is changing but not quite knowing what or how. None of the players in the story have read forward to end; they are like us: David is no better a bet than Saul was. No one knows where things are heading, what tomorrow holds, who will live or die. The tension is going to last no small number of years for the actors in the story. David is anointed in the episode we’ve heard this morning, but then nothing actually happens in relation to the kingship for years, and even after Saul dies there is an ongoing struggle between him and Saul’s son and military commander as to the appropriate succession. At the same time, even though he has been told that he is to become king in Saul’s place, David remains devoted to Saul, even as Saul declines into a kind of manic-depressive madness.

The story is about the presence of the new in the midst of the old but there is more going on than simply the cycles of history, with fresh green growth replacing that which is withered and dying. Theologically, there is underway here is the process of establishing in Israel God’s own “heart” (cf. 1 Samuel 13.13f; 16.7).

The story of Saul and David is unfolded in such a way as to display the stark contrast between the two. David is something new in the history of Israel; there has been nothing like him before, and nothing like him again until Jesus. David is vitality and freedom, contradicting king and priest as it is necessary simply to survive, that God’s own promise be fulfilled. He moves through the pages with passion and energy. In contrast, Saul is heavy and slow moving, caught in up in ritual and sacral duties, even summoning for advice the dead Samuel via a witch, twisting and turning, seeming never to “get it”.

Of course, David is far from perfect. The labels “adulterer”, “coward”, “murderer”, “vengeful” could all be applied at certain times, and a few other labels besides. The Hebrews were not afraid to tell the truth about the great figures in their sacred stories. Yet, for all this moral imperfection, there is something extraordinary taking place here – something of such scope that it provides a large amount of the backdrop to the attempts of the early church to speak of what it had met in Jesus (who was himself proclaimed the “son of David”; see, for example, Matthew 15.22; 20.30; 21.15). Flawed as he is, David trusts himself to God. By contrast, Saul lives by transactions with God. It is an economy in which he fails miserably and he ends up bewildered as to what has happened. But David at his best is simply alive – vibrantly alive to God and to what is happening around him. Trusting himself to God, he is secure. And so he is free. And so he can act – not with impunity but without fear.

David can act in this way because, in return for his trust of God, God trusts him. This is not say that David is trustworthy: there are no shortage of instances to be cited where David fails. And yet – and yet – God gives over to David “the kingship” of which he was previously jealous. God effectively gives up his own claim to be king and settles for “having” a king, one who will stand in God’s place in the world.

Here our familiarity with these stories almost blinds us to just how extraordinary a shift is taking place here. God invests in David in a way which hasn’t happened before and will not happen again until the humanity of Jesus himself. Biblical scholars even suggest that David himself was the model the Scriptural writers used to give shape to the humanity of Adam in the garden, created in God’s image to have dominion over creation in communion with God (Cf. Brueggemann, W. (1973). In man we trust: the neglected side of biblical faith. Richmond, Va., John Knox Press, p44. The ideas of Brueggemann in this book have been important for developing this sermon). The kingship under David, and much more so under Solomon and the many who then followed, was certainly an imperfect work, but it became the sign of a new humanity – a humanity which bears the image, the kingship, of God. Perfection of this humanity was coming: a shoot from the stump of Jesse, the key of David, as we sing in Advent. Jesus himself is the one who finally trusts completely, and in that trust finds himself fully secure, and fully free.

But staying with David for the time being: if there was one true actor in the story of Hannah – God himself, as we noted when we looked at the birth of Samuel a few weeks ago – there are now clearly two on the stage. The first remains the God who continues to be faithful to the people despite their turning from him in their request for a king, and the second is the actual king who now steps onto the stage. This one is a game-changer because he has the elements of the kind of heart which is required for God to be free to be God and the king himself to be free to be a human being. For David does not know what will happen next, whether Samuel’s anointing is the action of a true prophet or a crazy old man. He doesn’t know whether all Saul’s efforts to kill him will succeed or not. He knows only himself in relation to God, and this is enough for him and for God. Everything else is only a matter of detail.

What else do we need but this – God in God’s place, and we in ours?

The story, then, is not told to tell us about God and his kings, but about us ourselves. It is not David’s kingship which matters here but the new, partly formed humanity seen in David’s career: a humanity after God’s own heart in the heart of David and offered for us all – a humanity which is learning not to fear, which is learning how to love, which can acknowledge its failures and seek forgiveness, and keep moving with God.

In Saul we see a man who did not know himself trusted, but sought always to do the “right” thing – the thing which “God” would do, were God in his place. This is an anxious place to live – always running back to check that I’m doing OK, that Mummy or Daddy or mentor approves. There is no sense of trust here, only a sense that there is but one way – “God’s way” – and it is required of us to read (or guess) God’s mind. A large part of the church even has a slogan for this, cast in the form of a question: WWJD? – “What would Jesus do?” The implication here is that Jesus always did exactly what God required. Faith – our faith – then becomes a kind of religious science by which we discern or “divine” what would be the godly act in any situation. This is not a free life but a fearful one: I am ever wondering whether I am doing the right thing.

But in, in contrast to Saul, we see in David one who is free to say Yes or No, to fight or not to fight, to act or not to act, because his relationship to God is not on the basis of what he does, but on the basis of a common heart: being a son to a father, and not a servant to a master, as it were.

The point here is not that we ought to have a heart “for” God, as Christian lingo sometimes puts it. Rather, such heart as David had does God: the glory of God is a human being fully alive (paraphrasing Irenaeus, d. c. AD 202), fully aware that as a daughter, a son, we are trusted, loved, free.

The gospel is that God looks not to appearances and efforts but to the heart, and declares that the human heart might yet belong to him: that we might know ourselves as God’s children – brothers and sisters of David and David’s greater son Jesus, the sign and promise of such a life.

By the grace of God, may all his people be open to such renewed and cleansed hearts by the implanting within us of God’s own Spirit, for the sake of life and of love. Amen.

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Sunday 10
14/6/2015

1 Samuel 8:1-21
Psalm 138
Mark 4:26-34

In modern western societies which still concern themselves with kings and queens, the principle function of royalty seems to be to have babies, in order to increase magazine sales from the supermarket check-out aisle.

This being the case, it is not straightforward for us today to appreciate what is going on in Israel’s request for a king, and the shock this creates in Samuel and in God. There is a failure of some kind taking place here. But the nature of the failure is rather less clear than the simple fact of it suggests, and this is not least because the kingship becomes such an important part of the way in which God relates to his people.

But before we get to that, it is worth thinking a bit more about what is taking place in the request for a king itself. Why the request for a king, and what exactly is being rejected? Most fundamentally, the request for a king is a request for a kind of security which has been lacking in Israel up until now. Since the time of their arrival in Canaan, the Israelites have basically been a loose confederation of tribes with not much binding them together other than some common beliefs, stories, practices and language. From time to time, when there have been crises, certain figures known as “judges” were raised up to respond to particular issues, and then disappeared again from view. Samuel is effectively the last of these judges. In the face of harassment from local warlords and more organised groups such as the Philistines, the sense that Israel needed something more substantial and reliable than the occasional strong leader was a natural one. They first looked to Samuel’s sons, but saw that they were not up to the task. The prospect of a kind of dynasty of prophets or judges not being realistic, the request for a king is the natural next step.

When the request is made, the first things we hear are Samuel’s lament, and God’s – both feeling rejected by this request. The warnings are given to Israel – effectively, “be careful what you pray for” – but the request is, somewhat surprisingly, granted, and God already has in mind the man he wants to do the job.

While it is clear, then, that the Israelites are seeking some political security in their request for a king, what exactly is the theological crisis this creates? What is wrong with this? God claims that his own kingship is being rejected – which we have to take at his word. But in what way could God be in any helpful sense “king”? The language of God as king, or King Jesus, is familiar enough – it is right through our hymns this morning – but what it actually means is much less easy to say than it is common to say it. Something of what the people are rejecting is suggested in what they expect the king to do: the king is to “govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (v20). Gods are not particularly reliable when it comes to these practical matters. Who today would want “God” running the economy, directing the troops, or setting social policy? Even if we did like the idea we would not be likely to agree that God’s “helpers” in these matters were doing what God required, and therefore not be likely to agree that God is actually in charge.

It seems, then, that the people bring to Samuel a necessary but impossible request. Good order is necessary for the well-being of the people, and they seek such good order and security, but it is impossible that good order flow from something other than God.

And yet God grants the people a king. Why? Because God is able to work without a king, or with one.

We get a sense from the text that God is almost indifferent to the mode of government the Israelites ask for themselves. The failure of the people is not so much their request for a king but the naïve belief that life under a king would be any better than life as they have already known it (vv10-18). The rejection of life under the judges and prophets is thought by the people to be the choice of a better life under a monarchy – a centralised governance, rather than a co-operative one; an established political order rather than one which needs constantly to be re-negotiated by tribal leaders.

The stories told in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, of course, relate just how unhelpful a monarchy can be. Life for the people of Israel doesn’t seem to be any better under the kings than under the judges. But this is not the end of the story. For even though God begrudgingly grants the people’s request, the kingship becomes one of the central motifs of the Scriptural story. God chooses the first kings – Saul, who is soon rejected, and then David, to whom God promises an eternal future. On account of this promise, the language of kingship becomes part of the theological language and expectations of Israel. And so the kingdom – or kingship, reign – of God comes to central to the preaching of Jesus, a thousand years later. The identification of Jesus as Son of God, Christ and Messiah is a use of royal language from the kingship tradition to identify what it is Jesus embodies and represents (re‑presents): to say that Jesus is “Son of God” is not so much to say that God is his “Father” as it is to say that Jesus is king.

The request for a king is a catastrophe because it rejects the order of things up to that point, understood to have been ordered in that way by God. In this sense, God is rejected. But perhaps even more catastrophic is the imagining that a different ordering would be more godly, more likely to give us what we think we need, just because it is a different ordering. The mistake is not simply failing to trust God but putting too much trust in our own sense of what we need – thinking that we need only to imagine a different future, and that our imagining makes it righteous.

As we noted at the beginning this morning, kings and queens are not much to us these days. But deciding for a better future does matter to us: having it better, as “the world” seems to, being safer, more comfortable, these are constantly on our minds.

As we reflect as a Synod on the future of the church we are, in a sense, seeking a “king, like the nations”. Once the review is done, we will be better placed to move forward, stand on firmer ground, be safer. Perhaps we will. The point is simply that “strategy” and “sustainability” are supremely kingly concepts.

As we reflect as a congregation on our future accommodations, how best to use the resources we have, we are doing the same thing: seeking stability, security. We are seeking sustainability by strategy in the same way as the Synod, only on a smaller scale.

It is not that we must not do this. Created in God’s image, we do as God did: we create, we shift things around, we change our world. The point is, though, that to decide – to choose one way of being rather than another – is not to make ourselves more righteous; it is to throw ourselves on the mercy of God. That is, to decide is to ask that God make good the work of our hands, whether the demand for a king or the development of a new risk management regime.

The form of our life before God is much less important than the God himself before whom we live. With a king, or without a king, with clear strategy or living wholly (holy?) unsustainably, the question of God’s relationship to us and ours to God does not change, only the form in which the question is put.

For this God will take whatever shape we give ourselves and make of it both a means of judgement and of grace. It is for us simply to receive that judgement and that grace, to confess and to give thanks, and so to give glory to the God whose ways are not our ways, and whose very difference from us is the possibility that we might be blessed with more than we could have expected.

This is the God we worship – the God who loves us as we are, that we might become so much more. For this God’s love and devotion to us, despite all our twistings and turnings, all thanks and praise be given. Amen.