What do you do with David?
It’s almost as if, in our
idealized history that we draw from the Bible, David becomes a perfect and
flawless individual – the great King who ruled over Israel
When I was a little guy, I
came across a book that was called ‘heroes of the faith’ – I have no idea how
my family got it; we weren’t really ‘heroes of the faith’ kinds of people. But I read that book, and it stuck with
me. It had Noah, Moses, David, Solomon,
Paul…everyone you should expect. I
Googled that book a few years ago, and it turns out there’s an updated one: it
includes people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa…You can probably
add your own names to that list.
As I got older, though, I
realized that so many of those heroes…weren’t.
We’re reading through the
story of David. I met an older Baptist
minister who once told me that four elders of his church once met him in his
office after he finished a series of readings on 2 Samuel, following the life
of David. They told him that if he
wanted to keep his job, he’d better stick to preaching, and not destroying
people’s faith in God’s chosen.
My colleague (who was well
into his seventies) told those elders that he was simply reading from the Bible
– after all, that was his job as preacher.
But that wasn’t the point, it was argued – he should emphasize the great
work that David did, and not mention his failings.
David was an adulterer, and a
hypocrite. You heard Nathan’s accusation
against him today: “YOU are the man
who has acted so unjustly.” David, so
ready to wreak terrible vengeance against a greedy man, ignores his own black
sins.
But David isn’t alone. Noah was a drunkard; Moses a murderer and
Paul joined him in that dubious company.
If you’ve read some biographies, you’ll know that King, though faithful
to God was not always to his wife; and Mother Theresa….Mother Theresa lived in
a dark night of her own soul almost from the moment she entered her convent up
until the day she died. She doubted God
– doubted God cared, doubted God was even aware of what was going on, doubted
God even existed – but still she
prayed. Still she served.
I think you can probably add
your own names to a life’s list of fallen heroes: people who we think we’ve
known, or trusted, or learned from, but who’ve we then learned have failed, or
made mistakes. When people learned of
King’s infidelities and Theresa’s doubts, many made noise that they should be
forgotten, that they were somehow not worthy of being considered ‘heroes of the
faith’ because they were not perfect people.
We tend to feel a lot of
pressure as Christians. Pressure to be
holy, pressure to be right, to be perfect, to somehow live like we don’t desperately
need God’s freely-given grace and
forgiveness. We act – and tell ourselves
– that’s God’s grace should be earned.
We should work for it. We should
somehow try to “pay God back” for grace that we’ve been given.
We live in a debt-ridden
culture that can’t fathom being beholden to God for something as amazing as
grace.
I’ll share with you something
that Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written about our
problem with being in debt to God:
…a human being is holy not because he or she triumphs by will power
over chaos and guilt and leads a flawless life, but because that life shows the
victory of God’s faithfulness in the
midst of disorder and imperfection.
The church is holy…not because it is the gathering of the good and the
well behaved, but because it speaks of the triumph of grace in the coming
together of strangers and sinners, who miraculously trust one another enough to
join in common repentance and common praise…humanly speaking, holiness is
always like this: God’s endurance in the middle of our refusal of him, his
capacity to meet every refusal with the gift of himself.
Grace, then, is God giving us
what we need before we even know we need it.
And it is God continuing to give us what we need after we’ve found out
we need, and then insist that we can somehow provide it for ourselves.
However, visible blessings we can’t get enough of. It’s like we’re the family that is in over
our head in debt, but still scrimping together the monthly payments on the
Escalade so the neighbours think we’re doing fine.
That’s the crowd that hangs
out with Jesus. They go looking for him,
but he’s left. So, they all go looking for him. Remember, this is the same crowed that
numbered 5000 men, plus women and children.
That’s a lot of boats on a fairly little lake. But they go looking, and they do find Jesus.
When they find him, though,
Jesus doesn’t seem to pleased with their effort: “truly, I tell you, you are
looking for me not because you saw
signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Ouch.
But how many time do we hear
that? The millionaire athlete giving
credit to Jesus for touchdowns, runs batted in, or more goals made. Singers, actors, everybody loves the blessings. Jesus is easy to love when there are blessings
to be had. But strip away those
blessings…and who wants to put forth the effort – the investment – in something that doesn’t seem to offer a high
return?
The crowd loves the work of
God. They love the loaves, the healing,
the blessings. It’s all good. It’s so good, in fact, that they want to be
able to do it for themselves: “what must we do to perform the works
of God?”
Surely, Jesus, there must be
something we can do to make us able to be just like you.
And Jesus does give the crowd
an answer. But to a crowd that is used
to the system of the Law with its requirements and obligations, it’s not the
answer they want. They want the economic
system they’re expecting. You give
something tangible, you get something tangible, touchable.
But Jesus says: “This is the
work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
That’s it. That’s all.
The great work of God that we partake in is nothing less than to believe
in the One sent by God; the Alpha and the Omega; our beginning, and our ending.
God’s economy doesn’t look
like the temple. It doesn’t look like
the Pharisees. It doesn’t look like the
Law, which is meant to establish order and keep people in line. God’s economy looks like grace – given but
not deserved, and recognized the most by those who know their relationship with
God has been fractured beyond all hope of human repair.
Because when things are
beyond hope of human repair, we finally realize that our only true hope – our
only true sustaining force, our only true bread – is Jesus Christ, the Saviour
of the world, the grace of God, and our only true repentance.
That is the gift that David
found. Having known that he irreparably
fractured his relationships in the world, all he had left was to trust that God
would remain faithful in the face of David’s own incorrigible faithlessness.
And God did; the fruit of his
promise to David realized in another promise to a teenage unwed mother that the
child in her womb would save the people from their sins.
And that child did just
that. From the womb, to the cross, from
the cross, to the grave, and from the grave to everlasting life Christ bore out
the promise of God’s own unending and unbelievable grace – the promise that YOU
are the beloved of God.
You are the beloved of God
because of Jesus’ love for you; the beloved because you believe. Not what you do. There is nothing you will ever do that will
make God love you more; there is nothing you will ever do that can make God
love you less.
Believe in the Son. Find what it means to never hunger or thirst
again; because all you need has been given.
Find what grace is: those
things of the Father, and of the Son, of the Holy Spirit; those things that are
part of you in your baptism.
Let the people of God say
amen.
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