June 14, 2015, Highlands United Presbyterian Church, Jacksonville, Florida
THE GOOD CHRISTIAN ANSWER
My question for us today is this: Can we be new? Now the Good Christian Answer is, of course, YES! The Apostle Paul proclaims the heart of the gospel promise today: So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
Such confidence!
The same confidence of God, who tells Samuel: for goodness sake, stop grieving for King Saul. His time is over, and I am making a new king, who will make things right.
The same confidence of Jesus, who says, sow the seed, and God will make it grow. The harvest will come and that tiny mustard seed will become the king of all shrubs! New life will flourish!
Do you have that confidence? Do you believe we can be new?
I don’t know. I don’t know if I have the confidence of that holy trinity of Father, Son and the Holy Paul (I’m sorry-bad theology and bad joke). But the Apostle Paul sure does have that confidence, and he knows it.
Me? Sometimes I feel like I just believe things can be new because I’m supposed to. Sometimes, in some situations, I just can’t believe it.
It’s hard to be confident when children dwell in cancer wards and natural disasters ravage communities and our jobs are lost and our families fracture.
I don’t know. Do you feel that doubt too sometimes?
But Paul says, Behold, in Christ, everything has become new!
I want to believe it, but it’s hard to relate to sometimes.
SAMUEL’S STORY
Now, Samuel, Samuel I can relate to. In our Old Testament lesson today, you heard of a remarkable moment in his ministry, in the history of Israel, in the history of our faith, when Samuel anoints David as king.
Yet this is no grand celebration, but a secret mission, and a dangerous one too. And Samuel? He doesn’t have that confidence like the Apostle Paul. He is unsure and he is afraid that this new king will be not be something new, but just the same old disaster.
This confidence differential between Paul and Samuel is ironic, when you compare their backgrounds. Paul, of course, was another Saul, and just as notorious as the King. He persecuted the early church and oversaw the murder of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, before his conversion. Samuel, on the other hand, before he was even born, was dedicated to God’s service! In fact, he was a gift from God to the previously barren Hannah. As a boy, he served the holy priesthood, and all his life, listened for God’s voice and spoke it faithfully to the people of Israel. Shouldn’t he be the confident one?
But he’s not. And that’s why Samuel makes so much sense to me. Like us, he has had experiences which have scarred him, which cause him to doubt that things can become new. And they start with his service to the Priest, Eli.
We first meet Eli when Hannah, Samuel’s mother, makes petition to God for a child at the Israelite shrine at Shiloh. Eli starts off on the wrong foot by accusing Hannah of drunkenness, when she’s simply praying passionately to the Lord. Not very perceptive, though he is kind to her once she clarifies her act of devotion.
Eli’s obliviousness is highlighted again in later years, as his sons, now priests in their own right, abused their power and abused the people and held God in contempt.
And so Samuel, promised to the service of God, working at Eli’s side, grew up, watching this priestly family in disarray. One night, when he was still a boy, he heard a voice, and he woke Eli three times. To be fair, it was the middle of the night, and I imagine Eli felt as groggy as I feel when I stagger to my 4 year old son’s bedroom to comfort him after a nightmare. But still, Eli, predictably, is a bit dense, and it’s the third time before he realizes that Samuel is hearing what he hasn’t heard for many years: the voice of God.
He coaches Samuel on how to speak to God, and Samuel returns to dialogue with the almighty. And it’s not good news. Things will not become new. Eli will not become a competent priest. His sons will not turn over a new leaf. They will be punished, and before long, all three men will be dead.
Now, Eli was clearly incompetent, but he was also kind. He was kind to Hannah and her petition for a son, and he took that son under his wings. Samuel knew his as his father figure, and learned from him how to speak with God. I wonder if Samuel thought, why couldn’t Eli become new? Why did he have to die?
I wonder if Samuel remembered Eli all those years and decades later, in his old age, in our passage today, when God called on him to stop grieving for King Saul and anoint the new king. I wonder if he remembered Eli’s failures as he faced his own, this king who he anointed rejected by the Lord. I wonder if he remembered how things never became new for Eli, a failure to the end and with two sons who failed the people and failed God. Would these two kings be Samuel’s two failed sons? Can there be a new creation in all of this? Or will the new king be just the same old disaster, like Saul, whom Samuel fears?
We’re not so different from Samuel, are we? We have our baggage and scars, which make it difficult to trust that things can become new.
So what do we do when we’re afraid things can’t become new?
CONFIDENCE IN TIMES OF TRIAL (PSALM 20)
If the good Christian answer to “Can we be new?” is Yes, then the good Christian practice is to pray. “Just pray about it!” Now, you’ve heard that before and I’ve said that before, but it can seem a bit too simple at times.
It reminds me of the story of the man who lived in a house threatened by a flash flood. A friend drives by in a truck and invites him to jump in so they can flee the rising waters. But the man exclaims, “I’ve prayed and God will keep me safe!” The waters rise and the man goes to the second story of his house. Now a boat coasts up to the second story window and the driver shouts, “I’m here to rescue you!” But the man exclaims, “I’ve prayed and God will keep me safe!” So the boat leaves and the waters rise and the man has to climb to his roof. As the raging waters close in on him, a helicopter comes roaring in, and a ladder drops, but the man shoves it away, and shouts over the commotion: “I’ve prayed and God will keep me safe!” And then the waters swept the man away, and he died. As his spirit came before God, he had a bone to pick: “God, I prayed and you were supposed to keep me safe!” And God said, “I sent you a truck, boat, and helicopter—what more do you want from me?!”
Now, hopefully we can be more aware of how God answers our prayers than this man, but we can learn something from him too. He asked God for what he needed. He trusted that God could do a new thing. Maybe he was absurd-yet sometimes it feels no less absurd for us to trust in prayer.
The same confidence is held by the Psalmist in Psalm 20. This our lectionary Psalm for today, which was not included in our readings, but I want to share a little of it with you, because I think it reminds us of those moments when, despite dire circumstances, we find the courage to trust God.
In the end, the Psalmist is very confident, believing that God will answer the people when they call and grant victory to their king. Yet the subtext of the whole Psalm is that things are not going well, which begins very clearly in the first line: “The Lord answer you in the day of trouble. The name of the God of Jacob protect you.”
And if we look even closer, we can see that the first half of the Psalm is not confident in a positive outcome, but rather is confident in asking God for help:
May he send you help from the sanctuary,
May he remember all your offerings,
May he grant your heart’s desire
May we shout for joy over your victory,
May the LORD fulfill all your petitions.
It’s only then, after this earnest prayer, that the Psalmist says, Now, I know the Lord will help. Maybe the answer to our prayers sometimes is that change of heart that allows us to trust that things can be new.
So, it seems a bit obvious, but sometimes we forget the obvious: we should pray for what we need. We should pray for the newness that we need in our lives, in our relationships, in our churches.
WHAT TO DO WE DO? WORK THE SOIL AND TRUST (MARK)
But what else do we do when we’re afraid things can’t become new? We don’t want to be like the man in the story, only praying, and never taking action. We don’t want to miss the truck, boat, or helicopter.
Let’s try a new metaphor. Jesus gives us a couple great ones in our Gospel lesson today.
Jesus says, a farmer scatters seed in a field. Then he waits. He has no choice but to trust God with the seed he scatters. And eventually, the crop grows, and is harvested. Even such a small seed as the Mustard seed produces the king of all shrubs, which is a hilarious phrase. But Jesus is saying, it may start small, and it may not be the tallest tree in the end, but there is something beautiful about it, because God has made it grow.
This is what the Kingdom of God is like, the new creation breaking in to our world. It’s in the small things, the scattering of seed.
So what fields do you need to scatter seed in? Where are you hoping for newness? Maybe in this church. Maybe in your family. Maybe at work or in your career. Maybe in your own heart.
Scattering seed is farmer’s work, and farmer’s work is tending to the fields every day. With care. Paying attention. Doing the little things. Sweating. And continuing to do the next right thing, day in and day out.
SAMUEL AND PAUL: PRESSING ON
And that, ultimately, is what Samuel did. In the midst of his doubt and his grief about King Saul, he did the next right thing. He listened to God. And though he feared another disaster, he trusted God in his actions, even if his heart had not caught up yet. He anointed the new king, King David, the greatest king of Israel, and the ancestor of Jesus.
We can be new too. May we trust in our actions even when our hearts have not yet caught up yet. May we pray and find our hearts changing a little more toward hope. May we scatter seeds of hope and kindness and reconciliation.
So work the soil of your heart and of this world. Press on. Wait on God. Trust. We may not be at home in this moment, or in every moment. But a new creation is breaking in. A new creation is our destiny. And behold, one day, maybe a day we can see coming, or maybe a day which will come as a joyful surprise, on that day, the old will pass away and there will be a new creation.
And in the meantime, I’m glad to be in this together with you. Amen.
Matt Hartley 