“Memory of the Future” (Psalm 27)

Second Sunday of Lent, March 17, 2019

            Your child works hard and makes A’s because he wants to get into the best college.    His test scores are tremendous, and he is near the top in class rankings.  He deserves it. Yale - no, rejected.  Stanford - no, rejected. You read of a scandal in the paper.  Wealthy parents spend hundreds of thousands to bribe the way in for their kids.  Their kids are wonderful young people, but did not earn that admission; yours did, and didn’t get it.

            You fear the gangs, the crime lords, and the murderers who run rampant in your country.  You’re afraid your 6-year-old child will grow up to be a criminal or a victim.  Neither the police nor the government in your country are any help.  So, you join throng of people who want to escape the deadly chaos and step into American freedom.  You walk across Mexico to the American border.  But, when you try to cross the exact thing you feared happens.  Your child is taken from you and you are put in one cage and your child in another.

            Struggle - so many people in so many different life situations struggle.  In our own church, we see people struggling with death as loved ones are taken from us and all we have is memory and grief.  

            We see American Christianity in a struggle for survival.  Disagreements over questions of LGBTQ inclusion rip through the Methodist Church, and through ours.  We look at all these issue - wealth disparity, border security v. Christian compassion, personal loss, and assaults on the church.  These struggles feel like threats, like attacks on our way of life or even on our very lives.  And I have not mentioned personal struggles you may be facing.  

            Struggle is an odd place to begin when Psalm 27 is our passage.  Psalms were songs sung in worship in Old Testament days, in the days of Jesus, and in our day.  One of my favorite Christians songs when I was in seminary was the text of Psalm 121 set to music and performed by Susan Ashton.  

            What’s the message in the song, Psalm 27?

“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid” (v1)?  What do we hear?  “My adversaries and foes ... shall stumble and fall.” (v.2b).

            Is cancer your adversary?  Is poverty the foe who threatens you?  If Psalm 27 is your song and you sing in worship today and believe in God as David sang and believed in his day, then Cancer shall stumble.  If Psalm 27 is true, then poverty shall fall. 

            “Though an army encamp against me,” David sings in Psalm 27:3.  Though an army encamp against me, “my  heart will not fear.”  We join David, singing along, claiming his words as our own.  We sing, “Though war rise up against me, yet we will be confident.”  We are confident in God and confident in our confession of faith in God.  Dark times may come, but we face them knowing God’s got this.

            Here’s the problem.  The phrase “dark times” is a nebulous, undefined thing.  It’s vague, even meaningless.  But the struggles I named at the outset are real.  For that mom whose son has knocked himself out to get A’s only to hear Yale and Stanford and Southern Cal and Princeton all say “no” it’s real.  She knows he might get into another school, but to him, it feels like the world is crashing in.  How does she help him cope in a world so clearly unfair?

            For the mom, fleeing violence in Honduras only to be thrown into a cage and called an illegal immigrant in Arizona, the stakes are even higher.  How does she protect her child when she is powerless and there is no safe place in the world for her to go?

            And what about in your life?  Singing Psalm 27, cancer is your adversary and the adversary stumbles and falls.  Except it didn’t.  You prayed and cancer claimed your wife or your mom or your child.  That faith we confidently proclaim did not produce your desired outcome.  Now what? 

            Walter Brueggeman, a scholar who has written quite a bit about Old Testament theology, identifies lived experience and lived faith.  Lived experience violently collides with our first faith statement.  Our first faith statement is “God, is good.  God is in control.  Thus, things in my life will go well.”   That’s our sterile word of belief.  But then life crashes in and does so in very specific ways.  In one family, conflict between mother and daughter is so severe, years of estrangement ensue. In another family, a son signs up to serve his country and dies in the war; age 19.  In a church, the beloved pastor has brain cancer and has to step down when the congregation thought he would lead them for another decade.  Another church breaks its members’ hearts when it splits over a political issue even though the members agree on what they believe about Jesus.

            These struggles call into question the confident words of faith we want to sing along with David.  We want to be bold.  We know Good Friday ends on Easter Sunday.  Yes, we can see how bad that cross is, but we know it ends with resurrection.  We know it ... until we’re actually stuck on that Friday.  In that moment of utter loss and bone-wrenching pain, it’s tough to believe Easter will ever come.  It gets to be hard, if we’re honest, to believe God is really there.  Or, if he is either he’s not powerful, or he’s not good. That’s how it can seem we will feel the full force of the specific pain we’re trying to endure.

Don’t lose heart.  Read all the way through Psalm 27. David, the confident singer of verses 1-6, shows the same uncertainty in verses 7-12.  Lived experiences yields lived faith. 

The singer, in verse 8, sings, “‘Come,’ my heart says, ‘seek his face!’ Your face, Lord, do I seek.  Do not hide your face from me.”  Why pray this prayer?  David, the singer, is worried God might hide His face.  David has had days he looked to God and could not see God.  All he could see were those who threatened him. 

His anguished prayer continues.  “Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help.  Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation” (v.9).  He has had those days.  He has felt God’s anger, and worse, God’s absence.  He’s pleading, God please don’t leave me. 

How do we pray, when we feel like God has left and we are powerless and alone?  

Psalm 27’s tension is resolved in the final two verses.  “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord” (v.13-14)!  How does the singer move from uncertainty to this grounded faith that concludes the song on a high note?

I think the way David did is to remember the future.  I know that works for me, once I takes my eyes off my struggles and do the work of remembering.  How, you should ask, does come have memory of the future?

·         I recall specific answers to prayers.  The God who has answered prayer in my life will do so again.  Answered prayer.

·         Through its indescribable beauty, the created world, nature, testifies to God’s presence and goodness. The God who made this world good is still creating. The Testimony of Creation.

·         On retreats, in times of prayer, in times of solitude, I have felt the tangible presence of God.  As vast God is, the creator of all things has taken a moment, on occasion, to reach out to me.Some call these mountain top experiences.

·         God has given us a testimony - the Bible - and in it, we meet Him. The God who inspired the Bible still speaks through it. The Testimony of Scripture.

·         In the Bible, I read that resurrection is promised by one - Jesus - who has already done.  The God who resurrected His Son will do so again, resurrecting you and me, his adopted children.  Resurrection.

·         God promises to be present in the world through the Spirit and through the body of Christ - his church.  As flawed as we are, God still speaks through The Testimony of the Church.

           

These witnesses - answered prayer, creation, mountain top experiences, scripture, resurrection, and the church - tell who God is by reminding us of what God has done.  When we take in all God has done, then we can be assured that God will act in the days ahead of us.  The grief, the anxiety, the frustration - we feel these things in our lives.  That’s why our worship is an active act of seeking God.  No matter how hard our individual struggles get, we sing the words of David.  “One thing I asked of the Lord, that I will seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, to inquire in His temple” (v.4).

            The seeker shall not be frustrated.  God has a promise of eternity in His kingdom, a kingdom of love and fellowship.  And God promises that no matter how rough life is here, God walks with us.  The seeker shall find God.  I can’t promise how life will turn out.  But I believe that when we seek, we find God, and finding God is the very best we can hope for.

            Whatever is happening in your life right now, seek the face of God.  Our church is here to help you do that.  The promises of scripture are here to help you find your way to Him.  Seek the God who loves you, who is waiting for you with open arms.

AMEN

Messiah in the Old Testament (W. Kaiser) – Psalm 110, 2, 118

            Kaiser quotes J. Barton Payne as writing that the Psalms are “The greatest single block of predictive matter concerning the Savior to be found anywhere in the OT.”[i]  In The Messiah in the Old Testament, Kaiser devotes two chapters to review the so called messianic Psalms.  I prefer anticipatory to Payne’s predictive.  I think the writers, singers, and preservers of the Psalms were people with dynamic relationships with God.  They expected God to act and reacted when they believed God was not acting quickly enough or in the way they thought God should act.  But I don’t think they were predicting in the sense that I predict the Lions will beat the Packers this weekend (a guy can dream). 

            Jesus directly quotes Psalm 110:1 in Matthew 22:44.  The legal experts had been trying to trap him with rhetorical games and he turns the tables on them.  If Psalm 110 is of David and is about the Messiah, and if David calls the Messiah ‘My Lord,’ then how can they say the Messiah came from David?  A father does not call his son “My Lord.”  The Pharisees knew this and knew Jesus had exposed a hole in their messianism – a hole that had been there all along.  Matthew writes, “No one was able to answer” (22:46). 

            So Matthew took Psalm 110 to be Messianic, but what about the original Psalmist, presumably David?  Kaiser points out 4 characteristics of Messiah that come from the Psalm.[ii] 

(1)   The messiah is a priest.

(2)  The messiah is anointed by God.

(3)  The messiah is an eternal officer holder (“priest forever” – 110:4).

(4) The messiah is pre-Aaron, and is in the order of Melchizedek.

Psalm 2 serves to warn the kings of the earth that nothing can thwart the success of God’s anointed.  God laughs at the schemes of the kings (v.4) and tells them their best course of action is to fear the Lord (v. 11) and reverse his anointed one (Messiah) (v.12).  Verse 12 literally says they are to “kiss his feet.”  Could we imagine today’s world leaders, a Vladimir Putin or a Kim Jong Un willingly kissing Messiah’s feet?  This Psalm clearly establishes God’s might and God’s favor given to the Messiah. 

Psalm 118 does not initially strike a messianic tone, but it is probably a Psalm of David[iii] and it clearly sets out the singer’s confidence in the face of his foes.  He believes that in spite of his struggles and sufferings, the Lord is his salvation (118:14). 

The key verse of this Psalm is 22 in terms of a messianic link.  The three synoptic Gospel writers have Jesus quote this specific verse in making the case that he is God’s anointed.[iv]  David is the “rejected stone” that became the capstone, as his own father Jesse did not find him suitable.[v]  In quoting the verse and relating himself to both the Psalm and to David’s experience, Jesus saw himself as stepping into that role.  Jesus, in the crucifixion, would be the rejected one that became the cornerstone.  At the heart of the Christian faith is the idea that Jesus is the foundation of our lives and the cornerstone for each of us.  All that we do is dependent upon who we are in Christ.

Thus in these three Psalms, we grow in our understanding of Jesus.  As I said, I am not convinced the Psalmists knew they were singing about Jesus.  They were singing about God and what God was doing and would do in the future.  Jesus came and supremely filled the roles the Psalmists described.  They knew God would act.  Jesus showed in specific terms what God did.  In the way Jesus became the Melchizedekian priest (Psalm 110), the king before whom all kings must bow (Psalm 2), and the cornerstone (Psalm 118), those roles would never again be filled by anyone else.  Indeed, they never could be as Jesus’ fulfillment is the ultimate fulfillment.

While I will not review every Psalm Kaiser analyzes, what I have shared here and what I will I share in the next post will suffice to show that there is a messianic thread that runs throughout the Psalms.  The Psalm are for worship, the Psalms reveal a dynamic relationship with God, and the Psalms have an eschatological thread that ties together the Messiah with an end-times judgment. 

---

[i] Kaiser, p.92.

[ii] Kaiser, p.95.

[iii] Kaiser, p.100.

[iv] Matthew 21:42-45; 23:39; Mark 12:10; Luke 20:17.

[v] Kaiser, p. 101, 1 Samuel 16:11.  

Good Friday Message - 2014

God on the Cross (John 19:28-30; Psalm 69)

Friday, April 18, 2014 (Good Friday)

        As Jesus was dying on the cross he said “I am thirsty.” The author of the 4^th gospel adds the editorial comment that he said this in order to fulfill the scripture.  That notion, that Jesus did things to fulfill scripture, is sprinkled throughout the gospels.  What scripture was fulfilled when he said, from the cross, “I am thirsty?”

          Psalm 69:21.  It is from a prayer of David who says in this verse, “they gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” 

          The Psalm begins “Save me, O God, from the waters that come up to my neck” (v.1).  Early in David’s life, he stared down lions as he protected his flock.  He battled the Philistine giant Goliath.  Then, as he rose to prominence, the jealousy of King Saul led him to repeatedly attempt to kill David. 

          After Saul’s death and David’s rise to the throne, problems continued.  He fell into deadly conflict with his son Absalom.  At times, Saul had armies hunting for David.  Later, it was Absalom with armies on the hunt.  More than once, surrounded by enemies David felt himself to be as good as dead unless God saved him.  And God did.

          The Messiah was to be a descendant of David.  Raised by Joseph who was in the line of David, Jesus met the requirement.  As a ‘son’ of David, Jesus had the qualification needed to be the Messiah. 

Jesus was also David’s Lord.   He lived differently than the great king.  David, in desperation, prayed that God would save him.  God did as David made it through many treacherous scrapes.  In the end, David died of natural causes.  In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus likewise asked God to take the cup of suffering from him (Luke 22:42).  This time, God did not. 

Another difference was the attitude toward tormentors.  Both had enemies intent on killing them.  Who was it that hated David (Psalm 69:4)?  The Psalm does not say but in his life, we see many candidates.  Any number of people might be opponents who David, in the Psalm, asked God to punish severely. 

Let their table be a trap for them, a snare for their allies.
²³ Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and make their loins tremble continually.

²⁴ Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them.

²⁵ May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in their tents.

²⁶ For they persecute those whom you have struck down, and those whom you have wounded, they attack still more.^[b]

²⁷ Add guilt to their guilt; may they have no acquittal from you.

²⁸ Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.

        When the mob came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter using a sword, cut off the ear of one of the men.  Jesus healed the man as he rebuked Peter (Luke 22:51; John 18:10-11).  When the soldiers whipped Jesus, crowned him with thorns, and nailed him to a cross, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).  Unlike David, he did not pray “May their camp be a desolation … let them be blotted out of the book of the living.”  Jesus did not ask for God’s wrath to fall on those who were so cruel.  He asked God not to hold their sins against them.

          Yes, David lamented that his tormentors gave him vinegar.  Obviously he spoke poetically using metaphor to pour his heart out to God.  Yes, Jesus fulfilled that line from David’s poem, not in metaphor but literally.  As he hung dying on the cross he said “I am thirsty.”  A soldier jammed a vinegar soaked rag in his face.  The Fourth Gospel rightly sees the threads of Israel’s scriptures in Jesus’ story. 

          David was a man of his times, an era of visceral, up close violence.  He could not launch missiles that would kill his enemies who were 100’s of miles away.  He could not stay safely out of sight as warriors do today.  He had to look them in the eye as he stabbed them in the heart.  David’s prayer that God blot out his enemies may not sound holy, but it was honest.  The Bible calls him the one after God’s own heart; but not the Savior.

          That’s Jesus.  Yes, as John says, his actions fulfilled scripture.  What he demonstrated in word and deed and heart also re-imagined the Bible.  Jesus cast a new light on everything humanity thought about God.  In Jesus, we see God working in new ways.  People knew of God’s mercy and love prior to Jesus but he brought God closer than ever before.  Because of him, the path to God was opened to all people.

          “It is finished,” he said.  Then he died.  The old day was done. 

          In our somber remembrance we are painfully aware that like David we would like to call down curses on our enemies.  Like the religious authorities who killed Jesus as a matter of convenience, we would remove anyone who obstructed our path and foiled our personally made planes.  Like the Pilate, we are blind to truth.  Like the rage-filled Roman soldiers, violence pumps in our veins.  Jesus hangs crucified because of sin – because of my sins.

          Remembering, we grieve how our sins crucified him.  We also do well to set our hearts’ attention on the one who died for us.  Think about whom he was, who he is.  He did not die so much as he, as the gospel says, bowed his head.  Even in this moment, nailed to the cross, seemingly immobile, shamed, and beaten, it is Jesus who is in control. 

          Jesus provided for his mother’s care as he hung cross (John 19:25-27).  Nothing more happened until he determined it would.  He said, “I thirst,” and then scripture was fulfilled.  Jesus declared, “It is finished.”  Only after making that statement did he give up his spirit (v.30). 

Yes, God is the one who flooded the earth but protected Noah, split the Sea so Moses could pass through, stopped the sun in the sky for Joshua, and closed the lions’ mouths for Daniel.  God is the mighty God of the whirlwind in the book of Job, the God praised by the most powerful forces of nature in the most thrilling of Psalms, Psalm 148.

          God is also the humble savior who washed his disciples’ feet, who healed the ear of one of the guards sent to arrest him, who shared truth with the governor who tried to intimidate him, and forgave the soldiers who mocked and crucified him.  We can see God in the scriptures leading up to the Gospels but we are invited closer in the Jesus we meet in the Gospels. 

          Good Friday is a day to be as honest as David was.  We come fully clothed in sin and hang our sins on him as he hangs.  Naked we stand before him.  He drapes a robe of light onto us, his divine light.  We shine because his name is affixed to us.  It is a day of sadness on one level.  We enter that sadness and do not minimize it.

But, it is a remembered sadness, not a felt one.  We know where story goes.  More importantly, entering it at this point, at the cross, we know that is a day that we see God.  This is a day we understand how it is that God loves us. 

          The gospels tell us nothing of the Saturday after the crucifixion.  I do not know the proper spiritual practices for that day.  I do not believe there is any one way to observe ‘holy Saturday.’  I offer this.  Why not spend that Saturday quietly, fixing our minds on the crucified God.  Do it early, so that the sense of Jesus being for you sets in.  Do it intensely enough so that truth that you are forgiven and free becomes so real, you live it.  Saturday is a day for washing; Jesus cleanses our hearts, polishes our souls, renews our minds.  He brightens our smiles.  We are bathed in the redeeming, creating love of the crucified God.  We come out new because Jesus makes all things new including you and me. 

AMEN 

King Solomon

Lessons from Solomon (1 Kings 3:1-15)

I was reviewing a list of books I had read, great works that had walked across my path, filling my mind – The Brothers Karamazov; Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger; Pilgrim’s Progress, and the like. It’s similar with movies. I was around some guys watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade this past week, and I had sit in with them. I’ve seen the movie 20 times, but it is still good.

I wonder if it is like that with books in the Bible that go unread for periods of time. Some people have read the Bible from cover to cover multiple times. Some are well versed in the New Testament or the Psalms, and some have never actually picked up a Bible and read it. That’s just reality.

I am not sure of your level of Biblical literacy, but I know you have not heard a sermon from 1^st Kings in the last five years here at HillSong. I keep track of these things. So, like revisiting a favorite old movie or book, we turn to the Old Testament. The saga of Israel’s greatest king, David, is told in 1^st and 2^nd Samuel. 1^st Kings begins with the reign of his favored son, King Solomon.

The assumption about Solomon by many readers is that after David struggled to establish Israel, his son ruled during the nation’s golden age. He accumulated vast amounts of wealth. His empire was envied and feared by surrounding nations. He was the one to build the temple – one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Furthermore, part of the legend of Solomon is his wisdom. Tradition identifies him as the author of three Old Testament wisdom books – Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Song of Songs. He was endowed with sage knowledge from God.

From success and wisdom, Solomon moves, according to popular perceptions, to excess. He becomes enamored with his own power and he sins against God. He turns to his wives and concubines – women numbering in the thousands, many of them foreign to Israel. To please them, he practices their religious traditions and acknowledges their gods. Such syncretism is an affront to Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. David was the man after God’s own heart, but Solomon uses religious faith to acquires power, so the story goes.

Can the story be believed? In 1^st Kings 3, we see the beginnings of the the Biblical story behind for the legend of Solomon. As we look closely, we hear God speaking to us.

Immediately, chapter 3, reveals a problem. Solomon marries the daughter of the Pharaoh. One thousand years or so earlier, Pharaoh was the main enemy of Israel. He enslaved the people. Moses led them out of bondage and toward the Promised Land. God killed all the firstborn in Egypt, including Pharaoh’s son. So Pharaoh pursued the Israelites and God swallowed up Pharaoh’s men in the Red Sea. The Egyptians were Israel’s ancient enemies. They were not Jews. The book of Deuteronomy, probably the source of the moral law that underpins 1^st and 2^nd Kings, says marriage to non-Jews is forbidden (7:3).

Solomon was a lover, not a fighter. He wanted those Egyptians as his friends. So he sealed the friendship with a marriage. Also in first Kings 3:1, we also see Solomon overseeing construction – two projects. He had to get his new wife’s palace built, and he had to build the Lord’s temple. Do we see the issue? His own creature comforts are listed before his attention to the house of worship.

That leads to a third significant error in perspective on Solomon’s part. Because the temple was not yet complete, the people and the king worshiped in high places (hill tops or man-made elevations, that usually involved worship to some god of nature, but not to Israel’s God). Solomon would say he was using Pagan form to worship Yahweh, the God of Moses, but worship in high places is consistently associated with idolatry and the worship of false gods in the OT.

First Kings shows us sinful Solomon. He makes a bad marriage choice, he makes the building of his own house equal in importance to building of God’s house, and he worships in a way that has consistently led Israel away from God.

Those were he mistakes. Did Solomon get anything right? Oh yes.

He goes to the most important of high places, Gibeon, to make an offering to the Lord. While staying there, sleeping, God came in a dream. God said to Solomon, newly crowned, “Ask what I should give you” (3:5). Like a genie in a bottle, God offered Solomon whatever he wished.

Solomon’s first response is to praise God, specifically referring to the history of relationship between God and Solomon’s father David. “You, [God], have shown great and steadfast love to your servant, my father David. … You have kept for him this great and steadfast love, and have given him a son to sit on his throne today.” Before Solomon sets a wish list before God, he acknowledges that God is the reason for David’s success and for his own privileged position. Just because he made serious blunders does not mean Solomon was all wrong; few people are all good or all bad. Reality is in shades of gray more than stark black and white. .

After the praise, Solomon sets his own inadequacy alongside God’s limitless power. He says of himself, “I am only a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in. And [I], your servant, am in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people, so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted” (3:7b-8). In all relationships, and especially in the relationship with God, we proceed in humility, not making much of ourselves.

Repeatedly, Solomon refers to himself and to David as God’s servants. This type of identification occurs throughout this passage. In this way, Solomon identifies himself with the king who was the man after God’s own heart. And he sees his own status as King in its proper light. Being King primarily means he is the most recognizable servant of God in the nation that is God’s chosen people. His calling is to serve more than it is to rule.

Solomon has exalted God. He’s humbled himself. Finally, he makes his request. “Give your servant … an understanding mind” (3:10). God loved this answer so much, unsurpassed wealth and honor were also promised, but with the condition of obedience. God would make Solomon the greatest king ever if Solomon was the most obedient and faithful king ever. “If you will walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your life” (3:14).

Maybe the reason we don’t read 1 Kings as often as the Gospels is the stories are about Kings. Jesus was a carpenter. He spent his time with unassuming, common people. Most of us are never written up in the newspaper. We go to the grocery store and no one notices. And we like it that way. Solomon enjoyed prestige than most of us will never know. What do the stories of a 9^th century BC Jewish monarch have to say to us? Maybe it is best we leave this classic on the shelf and flip over to Paul’s letters or Luke or John.

No, we must read 1^st Kings and read about Solomon because this part of our Holy Book was by the Holy Spirit to form us as people of faith. Solomon is a man before God. We are people – men and women, boys and girls, who live our lives with God or against God. If we want the abundant life Jesus promised then we have to consider the will of God and the way of Jesus today, right now, and every day of our lives. We aren’t kings. But like Solomon, we live our lives before God.

I summarized popular assumptions about Solomon. There are some assumed notions about believers too. If someone goes to church, pays his taxes, gives his tithe, and is generally a nice person, he’s in God good graces, right? We can be certain that the person that I’ve described is one of the good guys, bound for Heaven.

The late Christian pop-singer Keith Green smartly said, going to church makes someone a true believer like going to McDonalds makes someone a hamburger. As we stripped away the assumptions about Solomon, we will do the same regarding believers who attend churches.

“Bad” Solomon got into the wrong marriage, worshiped in an offensive manner, and put his own needs before or on equal footing with God’s priorities. Our sins are just ugly.

Sociologist and religion scholar Ron Sider wrote the book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. Citing statistics related to divorce, abortion, sex outside of marriage, spousal abuse, and substance abuse, he shows that Christians aren’t doing much better than the secular world with regards to holy behavior. We sin – a lot.

Moreover, we who are believers in America tend to be considerably more affluent than our brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But, our affluence does not lead us to greater generosity in combating hunger, poverty, illiteracy, and other forces that impose suffering on millions.

We behave badly; we fail to show compassion even though we have resources; and finally, some – not all of us – judge those outside our camp to be lost and hell-bound. We assume our brand of Christianity is the closest thing to pure orthodoxy, and we judge those who are too liberal or too fundamentalist. We judge those who practice others faiths. We judge atheists. I am not saying there won’t be a judgment. The Bible is clear – judgment is coming. It is equally clear that we aren’t going to be holding gavels. Jesus calls us to love, not condemn. Love includes telling the truth about sin and about God and about false religion. But the truth telling must start with our own sins.

Solomon had relationship problems, worship problems, and priority problems. We have moral problems, compassion problems, and perspective problems. But it’s not all problems!

Just as Solomon got some of it right, the church does too. First, we are possessors of the truth. The world may not believe it, but the only word that is truly Word of God is the Bible – the Old and New Testaments. The church is who has the Bible, and the church has the responsibility of sharing it with the world.

A second good thing about church, especially evangelical churches, is we do try to share Jesus with the world. Though we might experience distance from God and a sense of being lost even when we are in the church, we have worship, we know about prayer, we have the Word. People in the world have none of that, so we need to, in love and with humility, share Jesus with the lost. And we try to do just that.

A third good to mention about churches like ours is compassion. I know, I know! I just said in our opulence, we fail to share with our neighbors. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes, we are possessed of the Spirit and we demonstrate generosity, kindness, and Biblical justice. I think of our youth at Mission Serve, or our members who participate in Restoration Carrboro-Chapel Hill, or our year-end project, Operation Christmas Child. I think of all the members who sponsor extremely poor children in Ethiopia and Uganda and Rwanda and other places. When we set our minds on compassion and let what breaks God’s heart break ours, then compassion is a strength, not a weakness.

The ancient king, Solomon did some things well in his faith and in some areas he came up short. The same can be said of us. We are not kings, but like Solomon, we are people before God. Though God hasn’t given us the responsibility given to Solomon, God has a keen interest in our lives. We matter to Him.

What do we take from all this?

We should each do something Solomon did in his prayer. We acknowledge God’s holiness. Following the wise king’s example, we recognize, believe, and declare that God is sovereign – all powerful, all knowing, and present in all places. Along with this, we humble ourselves. God saw the great king as his servant. It’s something we have in common with Solomon. We too are God’s servants. Our reason for being is to serve God in whatever capacity he demands.

A second response to the Solomon story, after we’ve acknowledged God’s holiness and committed ourselves to His service is relationship. We strive to get to know God better. Through various forms of prayer, through worship, through scripture, and through practicing a life lived God’s way, we come to understand God’s heart. The God we serve loves us and we feel it. We, more and more, see the world as God sees it. Solomon did this early on in his reign, but then his faith waned. We stick with it. God’s part is grace. Our part is worship, service, and prayer, and we remain committed to all three.

Finally, we re-adjust our values. As we get to know God, we see what is most important to God, and that becomes most important to us. Solomon wanted wives, wealth, power; we recognize that the greatest pleasure we’ll find come in what God gives, not what we acquire. We find that the world is a better place, a happier place, when God has the power and we trust in His provision. So we don’t live to advance ourselves. We live by a set of values – God’s values.

Solomon’s life was mixed bag with much to be admired and much to be criticized. We can learn from all of it and when we do, we are on the road to becoming the disciples Jesus wants us to be. It begins when we trust that His way is the best way. I invite you to trust Him with your life today.

AMEN