1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13 ; Mark 4:26-34
June 14, 2009
There is a part of me that hesitates to preach on the Old Testament. My belief that there are ways to do it that are potentially helpful and meaningful overrides that hesitation most of the time. But there is an inherent problem in how we read and preach on these texts.
Last week we talked about the call of Isaiah – the beautiful, fantastic, dramatic scene where Isaiah’s lips are touch with coal being held by seraphim. And, we talked about it in complete isolation from the rest of Isaiah’s life, an approach that could be seen as irresponsible. While I think there were valid, possibly important, insights that could be gleaned from last week’s text, we most certainly missed some meaning by not looking at all of Isaiah’s career at the same time we looked at his call. And this is at the heart of my hesitation.
The stories of the Hebrew bible are long, complicated, and span thousands of years. In our day and age and in our church we are not accustomed to gathering together and reading through all of 1 and 2 Samuel in one sitting. We don’t have long conversations about these faith ancestors and tell and retell the stories so that we know them backward and forward. The Israelites living in exile 3000 years ago did. There is an overall arc to the whole of the Old Testament that really can only be understood by looking at all of the long, complicated sagas that we find within these books we call scripture.
I bring that up because this week I have included – or actually the lectionary has included – another call story of sorts, and we run into the same issue. So, in an effort to expand what meaning we might draw from this passage in 1 Samuel, I am going to give a very, very brief overview of the larger story in which it sits.
Together, 1 and 2 Samuel tell us about the transition between two systems of government in the early Israelite community. Samuel is the last of the judges. Judges were the closest thing to organized government the Israelites had, and they ruled from the beginning of the Hebrew people’s time in Canaan, the promised land. Judges were leaders raised up by God only when they were needed for particular events in history. There was no king, no centralized authority. But, the people convinced God to help them move from a nation of disjointed tribes led by peculiar judges, to a nation united under a king. God eventually relented and then turned to Samuel and told him that he would be responsible for anointing the new king.
Saul was the first king of this united nation. Samuel anointed him but, as we later learn, he was working more on his own – or at the behest of the people – than in concert with God. Saul seemed like such an obvious, natural choice. He was the best hope for defeating the Philistines who were threatening Israel’s very existence. But, while Saul had some initial success, he proved to be unstable and unreliable as a ruler. God made it clear that Saul was a failure and it was time to try again.
The next king was anointed by Samuel, but this time with God’s approval – if not the people’s. And the choice was David – the youngest; the runt of the litter. Saul was a mighty warrior, David tended the family sheep. Not exactly what the people expected. Which brings us to this morning’s reading.
God begins by sending Samuel to the house of Jesse – a name that should sound familiar to us Christians as the root of Jesus’ family tree. As the drama unfolds, each child of Jesse passed before Samuel to determine whether they were to be the next king of Israel. I can only imagine the surprise and dumbfounded looks when it wasn’t the oldest son. And that surprise surely grew each time the next son was rejected. But it was so inconceivable that David would be anointed that Jesse didn’t even bring him to meet Samuel. Samuel, being the brilliant deducer that he was, had to guess that there was a 8th son because God had rejected the first seven.
Sure enough, David is the one God chooses, and clearly God is using a different set of criteria than everyone else. David is not obviously a king on the outside. He’s not as old, as big, as powerful as his brothers. But God makes it clear that these are not necessarily the qualities of a good leader. God tells Samuel, “Yahweh does not see as mortals see; mortals look at outward appearance, but Yahweh looks at the heart.”
We all know that outward appearances, like looks and brute strength, eventually change and might even disappear. The heart, on the other hand, is what’s left in the future. When you look up the word leban – the word we translate as “heart” – in the Hebrew dictionary, the definition seems to go out of its way to indicate how expansive the meaning of this word is. Leban has 10 alternate definitions. But more importantly, the primary definition, before we even get to the alternates, reads: inner human being, mind, will, heart, soul, understanding. That is far more expansive than what any one word can indicate. We often find distinctions in these words: heart, soul, mind, understanding, will. But given this definition, we see there is meant to be no distinction between them. Heart – leban – is the true, whole person.
God is looking at the whole of David when deciding on the next king of Israel, because it is the whole of David that will be present even as the outer self fades away. God is looking toward the distant future, as well as the present. The hope for Israel is not just in what David can accomplish right now – like maybe fighting some great war – but in what David will be long into the future.
So far, this sounds like a Disney movie. The unlikely runt becomes the god hearted king and everyone rejoices. But, when God looks at such deep and intimate parts of a human being to know who they are and will be, God sees what we all know is present in our own hearts, souls, and minds – a mix of goodness that comes from being created in God’s image, and shadows from which we are capable of defying God’s Word and causing harm to ourselves and others.
As we continue to tell the longer story, now moving past our text into the future, we find that David would prove to be just a human being – not a Disney king. He did amazing things, but he would give into the shadow side in very destructive and repulsive ways. But, like every human being, he had a choice – God knew that. David had inside of him the capacity to choose to be a king that was concerned with building and protecting God’s realm or to choose to be a king building his own kingdom and protecting his own self interests.
In the beginning, in the anointing by Samuel, there was great hope. But in the end, our analysis would surely have to be that this hope was both realized at times but left ultimately unrealized as God’s realm did not come in full to the people of this world. David did succeed in uniting Israel into one, great country. But he also raped a woman and killed her husband to cover it up. He was definitely a mix.
But it’s that hope that I find most fascinating and challenging. Could David have really chosen otherwise? Is there ever truly hope that any human being can choose to be completely obedient to God? Is there hope in David’s story that we can take for ourselves, or does it just invite resignation to a cycle of progress and regression that continues forever?
I would never claim that I would do any better than David, or Clinton or Bush or Obama for that matter. Leading is not only hard, but the power given to leaders almost inevitably evokes the worst in them at some point. But isn’t there hope in God choosing us, no matter how unlikely we are, how powerless, how runt-like? God believes that we – even us – have the heart necessary for building God’s realm here on earth. That’s hopeful to me. And I don’t think it’s naïve hope. It is possible for us to choose God’s way, because we have God’s image stamped on our hearts. More importantly, God has built hope into the very fabric of creation. It’s what I call the constant tug of creation; it is the pull toward God we all feel if we are attuned to the best of who we are and what creation can be. This built-in hope never goes away – we can’t destroy it.
This is affirmed in the ongoing stories of both the Hebrew bible and New Testament. David was not the first, and David was not the last runt “tapped” by God. God the creator – creation itself – it seems, never gives up. When this story is read in context, as a small part of a much, much larger story, we realize that this passage is not about David. It’s about all who came before and all who came after. It’s about us – and it’s about the ongoing presence of hope.
Look at the first parable in our passage from Mark. It affirms this presence of hope – of constant possibility in creation itself. The realm of God is like this: growth and goodness is always possible, no matter how carelessly the seeds have been sown. In fact it is what is meant to happen. The character of the soil, of creation, is what makes growth inevitable. “The earth produces of itself,” Mark writes.
If God is creation, the earth that produces of itself, then we are both seed and sower. As the sower, it is our free will and our choices that affect how we participate or don’t participate in the building of God’s realm – we can choose how well we do at planting the seeds so they will grow fully until harvest. At the same time, as seeds, our very nature, our heart/soul/mind/understanding/body/whole of human being, is part of the fabric of creation that is always being drawn toward the good, sometimes even in spite of our sower-selves. We will grow regardless of how and where we are planted – maybe not to fullness in this life time, but Jesus says it is inevitable for this world because of who we all are at our core: which is people with good hearts.
Both of the parables are pointing out a contrast between what we see now and what we will see. It is the same contrast in the anointing of David. God sees the hope – the possibility – in a person that appears to others like an unpromising, poorly planted seed. And that is because hope is found not just in us. It is found in all of us together with creation. Ultimately, hope’s goal is not a state of individual bliss, but a community of justice and peace.
But, asserting hope can be rather meaningless unless we have some experience of fulfilment in the here and now. Certainly Jesus' word about future hope never came true for most of the poor and hungry. Hope takes a hit when someone walks into a museum in Washington D.C. and tries to kill people because he hates Jews. Hope is empty if we can see no evidence of it at all. Which brings us back to the larger view – we can, most of the time, only see the seeds and not the full plant. We are asked to trust in something only God can see. There are no short-cuts and most of us aren’t waiting for quick-fix divine interventions. There is a big picture which can only ever come partially into view.
Look at the bible – the whole thing. In some ways it tells the same story over and over and over again. Promise and hope in a new beginning, then shattering that hope through human failure, suffering terrible consequences, then a new start through God’s love and forgiveness. One way to look at that cycle is with pessimism and resignation. Another way is to see the hope in such a story.
There is a school of thought in psychology that I find compelling. I also think it is consistent with what we see in our scriptures. The idea is that we are constantly, subconsciously replaying our own stories, as individuals, and I would argue as humanity, until we get it right. We are built this way. We are drawn again and again to things we know are destructive to us and others because our deepest desire is to actually do it differently this time. In the present, it can be immensely frustrating and feel hopeless. Why do I keep setting myself up this way? Why can’t I do it differently when I know I should? How did I end up here again and again even when I know this is not where I want to be? But I think this dynamic is really grounded in hope…hope that we will change, that we will do it differently this time.
Our inner selves, our hearts, take us back through the story because we desire change in our souls. The hope that we can choose differently is imbedded in our heart – our leban. Obviously, if it were true that nothing ever changed, this would be cause for hopelessness. But, each of us can surely point to something in our lives and the lives of others that has changed for the better. We do change. That experience is what keeps hope alive – not just for us, but for humanity.
The story contained in the books of Samuel tells of the extraordinary change in the way Israel is governed. In some ways they did end up just playing out the same old story…but in some ways they broke through. David becomes a model of hope as well as a model of flawed human being. But the story goes on. And in the end, we learn that Jesus is descended from David – that flawed little runt. David was the seed of our savior. Amen.
