4 Pentecost B 2024
Samuel 16:7
..the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.
Ancient Israelites did not believe that the heart was the seat of emotion. For them, the heart was the seat of the will. Less the heart that loves than the heart that desires.
Humans “look on the outward appearance,” you might paraphrase it, “but the LORD looks at the desire of the heart.” the unifying drive that gets a human being out of bed every morning.
Now, I’m not sure any of us really thinks about our prime motivation for all the things we do. We are motivated and so we become motive. No thinking really required. I wonder what I’d say if someone put me on the spot, “What is the desire of your heart?”
As it happens, I have thought about it, and I wish I could say that my lifelong desire has always been to know and serve God, but I can’t say that. My heart’s desire has usually been obscure to me, while the obsessions of the hour have been ongoing and front-of-mind.
How about you? If someone asked you what was the desire of your heart, the thing that has driven you all your life, what would you say it was?
Hard question to answer, isn’t it? But it’s what God looks at, what God sees, what God cares about.
Psalm 20, verse 7
Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the LORD our God.
Israel was always a small nation, and God only gave Israel a certain lot of land and commanded that they take no more. For the period of the Judges, Israel had no standing army, no chariots, no horses. And they won every time.
David, the traditional author of the Psalms, was precisely that king who was small and weak, but made powerful by the God whose Spirit spoke within him, and who marched into battle before him on his throne, the ark of the covenant.
The theme of power made perfect in weakness, as Paul later wrote, is central to the story of Israel. Who or what is recognized as the greatest, the most powerful and consequential in our world? It’s certainly not you and me. We all know the big names: world leaders, entrepreneurs and billionaires, Beyonce and Taylor, two global marketplaces all by themselves.
They have the chariots and they have the horses, and they are rightly very proud of them. But, as David sings, they will collapse and fall, but we shall rise and stand upright. No, I’m not condemning anyone. A hundred years ago, everyone was just as charged up about everything as they are now, everyone knew the big names, everyone knew who the players were. But do we now? Anyone?
They are gone, all of them, but the people of God remain, as does the good news of the realm of God in Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 5:17:
“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”
In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthian church, he seems to be answering charges that he’s not in his right mind, and that he displays too much of his depression and inner struggles and doesn’t properly preach or exhort people to righteousness, as his critics would want him to. In today’s passage, he refers probably to his own mystical experiences, which he refers to in other letters, where he leaves the body and communes with the Lord. It would seem that some in the larger church found this disturbing, as I suppose modern Christians might as well.
But it’s a real thing, and something that I do when I meditate. The word of God is flowing through my mind and I am visualizing the people in my life and in my church, it’s like a conversation is going on, though I certainly don’t hear voices or hallucinate. I would call some of my experiences visions though. They don’t originate in me. It’s something anyone can do, if they want to.
But he makes an important point, that whether here or in out-of-body communion with Christ, he aims to please God (2 Cor. 5:9). And he tell the Corinthians that he’s not exactly boasting (which he was quite rightly accused of), but giving them a reason to boast, against those who look good on the outside, but don’t have the desire of the heart for God.
What gets Paul out of bed every morning, he says in verse 14, is the love of Christ, who died for all, meaning then, for Paul, that all had died with him. But then Christ rose for all, and all rose with him; so now no one is who they were before this happened. Paul sees everyone, literally everyone, as a person who doesn’t yet know they have died and risen from the dead, by God’s amazing grace in Jesus Christ.
And you know, Paul is absolutely right. Jesus died for the sake of one particular small, oppressed nation, one of many such nations under Roman rule. But this people, the Jewish people, were a nearly stateless people, spread throughout the Roman Empire, speaking many languages, and most importantly, regularly making pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
The news about Jesus’ death and resurrection therefore spread when they returned to their little home nations and told what they’d seen and heard. The news rang a bell in every one of the those small, oppressed nations, a bell of hope and joy, and above all, love. It said something terribly counter-intuitive: with God, the little one wins against the big one, the nobody wins against the somebodies, the poor are far wealthier than the rich, and the weak are far more powerful than the strong.
In fact, it’s God’s chief way of revealing God’s self. He always has chosen the morally compromised over the upright, the barren over the fertile, the lesser over the greater. All the better to shine his light.
So, yes, we don’t see anyone from a human point of view anymore, this one important, that one not. Christ died for all, and raised all. We’re surrounded by a bunch of newborn creations that don’t even know it happened!
Halleluia!
Mark 4:26-29
“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”
Jesus used parables to confound those whose hearts were not in the right place, and to reveal powerful truths to those whose hearts longed for God. No one tries to figure out a parable if they don’t want to know and do God’s will (unless they’re a literary scholar, maybe).
Jesus was talking about his own upcoming work, and the impact it would have. His death was not unlike thousands of others at the hands of the Roman Empire, many of them of innocent people, nothing but a tiny seed in the midst of many others like it. But none of those other victims rose from the dead or offered a way to be saved from the coming of a just and loving God who was about to do away with all earthly empires, including Rome’s.
What does all this have to do with Father’s Day?
As some of you know, I had three fathers, one after another, and all were gone from my life by the time I was four.
My birth father grew up in a Catholic orphanage because he’d been taken from his parents who were alcoholics. He served a tour in the Korean War and came home with the intention of entering the priesthood. I suppose he wanted to have a fling before he made his vow of celibacy, and that was how I came to be. When he found out I was on my way into the world, he panicked and ran.
My second father was a tall, handsome World War II veteran (he lied about his age and entered the war at the end of it), a race car driver and all around good-time guy. He also had a drinking problem.
My third father, from whom I get my last name, was a wealthy coal executive who apparently married my mother and adopted me to prove to the court that he could provide a better home to his two daughters by his previous marriage than his ex-wife could. When that gambit failed, he ran off with his secretary, leaving my adoptive mother to raise me. He died some years back; his obituary did not mention a son.
But I am aware that Father’s Day is a far more important holiday to those who had fathers who were faithful and loving to them than it is to me. Most people find far more spiritual and emotional meaning in their families than in their religion, and a lot of conservative Christianity is obsessed with the family and the private household, even though Jesus himself and most early Christians, including Paul, saw genetic heritage as a source of pridefulness, and many New Testament Christians were disowned by their families for following the carpenter from Nazareth. Just last week, we heard Jesus, whose family had come to lock him away as a lunatic, redefine his family as those who do the will of God.
Conservative Christians says “the family that prays together stays together” but Jesus says, “those who pray together are my family.” Which, as you may imagine, is a great comfort to me, for whom Father’s Day is simply a reminder of how little one can trust human faithfulness.
But here’s where today’s scriptures and Father’s Day intersect: The fruit that the seed of the gospel produces is the desire to know and do God’s will. This desire is the one thing that pleases God, and no matter how upright and moral any Dad might be, if his heart doesn’t desire to know and do God’s will more than it desires anything else, including his family, then nothing he does matters in the least to God.
It’s another of those difficult Christian paradoxes. Desiring God more than your family means you will love your family far better than if you put your family first.
My second adoptive dad, whom I called Huff, came back to me in only a partial and incomplete way, but his coming back in a very real sense ultimately led me to my Father in heaven, because he returned, risking my anger and rejection, precisely because he had decided to put his Father in heaven first above even his family. Not only that, but he dedicated his life to serving Christ in the church as his congregations’s lay leader for decades. He modeled compassion, humility, love of the neighbor, and forgiveness for wrongdoers.
In so doing, he inspired me to want to be like him; he planted a seed which grew, he knew not how, until the fruit of my faith bloomed.
This is the measure of a Father.
Amen.
1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13 and Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5:6-17
Mark 4:26-34
