June 14, 2009 Des Moines

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

Mark 4:26-34

Prayers of the People

God of surprises, who keeps popping up where we least expect you, surprise us again we pray. We settle so comfortably into our routines and preferences, prejudices and points of view that we could do with a little eruption of unexpected holiness; an outbreak of astonishing glory. While we traffic in headlines and billboards, you move in mustard seeds and mangers. While we work to get life buttoned down, you sprout a sprig in the midst of the pavement and flourish new shade where we would least expect it. We can be so conventional. Sure, when pressed, we can color and scribble wildly, but for the most part even our wildness is contained between narrow lines of decorum and order and practiced comfort. We have “better” thoughts, on occasion, but rarely “new” ones. We are grateful, then, that you are making all things new. So bless us, we pray, were we least expect it.

Sow new seeds among us, O God. Surprise us with the new things you are doing in our midst, we pray, for it is in the name of Jesus – the source of constant surprise and consternation and innovation to those around him. Amen.

Sowing Holy Seeds

So many joys and promises have their birth in sadness and disappointment –

· Missing a flight, only to bump into an old friend in the airport.

· Losing a spouse, only to discover in the void a new vocation within yourself.

· A child leaves home for college, leaving an empty nest in which is birthed new life for a worn out marriage.

Gifts, graces that couldn’t have been expected or designed that breathe new life where life had fallen conspicuously still. Shade from an unexpected tree.

I think about how many times – not that many years back – many of us wished for an inexpensive and inconspicuous way we could simply slice off the top one or two or three floors of our building. We didn’t have much need for them, they cost money to maintain, and their echoing emptiness was simply daily reminder of all the wonderful ministries that animated them back in the good old days when we were a “significant” church; those vacant spaces just needling us with the irritation over our impotence.

But thank goodness we never found a way to accomplish that square foot reduction. Where, if we had, would we have housed LOGOS this year? Where would we put the Burundians who now worship on that fifth floor? Where would we house the Boys and Girls Club which gathers close to 100 neighborhood kids for safe and supervised activities every weekday? Those, just to name a few of the ministries that once again fill those spaces with laughter and heartbeats and evidence of the creative Spirit of God at work?

And so it is with the stories of new beginnings we have read this morning. In the first, the great saga of Saul has unceremoniously ended. Saul, himself, is not yet aware of that fact and neither are the people of Israel, but God knows it and Samuel knows it, and we, seated in the spectators’ gallery, know it as well. Saul has proven to be a failure as king. Capricious, unbalanced, and unfit, he has become an intruder in a house that is no longer his. “God,” says the narrator, “was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.”

Given the manner in which Israel was given a king -- begrudgingly, ominously, jealously -- it is a moment that you might think would elicit a smirking “I told you so” from both God and Samuel. But strangely this failure brings no joy. Quite the reverse. As with the end of anything significant, it hurt, and hurt long. “How long,” God asks of Samuel, “will you continue to grieve over Saul?” Despite this vivid confirmation of Samuel’s sensibilities and fears, sadness overshadows any satisfaction. The air is heavy with the scent of grief, and there is a lethargy in the heart.

Such is the beginning of this story whose vision and promise is obscured by a melancholic nostalgia for what has been and what wasn’t to be. The future, imprisoned by the shape of the past -- except for the God who has moved on and chosen something new -- again, where we would least expect it.

Samuel, shaken out of his inertia, is sent to interview Jesse’s sons. One by one they pass before him, and each, in turn, seems fit and attractive. But Samuel gets no confirmation. As if to suggest that “all that glitters isn’t gold, God advises Samuel: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

It isn’t until the youngest son is fetched from the fields where he has been minding the sheep that the search is finally concluded. And there, in David, in the youngest, the least imaginable candidate -- blatantly invisible to the casual eye -- God discerns for Israel a king that is to become an icon for all time.

“God does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

In fact, said Jesus, the Kingdom of God is something like a mustard seed -- tiny and inauspicious, but yet when grown is the greatest of all the shrubs, putting forth large branches, so that the birds can make nests in its shade. Shade beneath an unexpected tree. It is, it seems to me, a precious bit of good news. God has new things in store for us; is building new realities for those who have the willingness to see them. They will have different shapes, perhaps, and will not fit at first like the softened blue jeans and broken in shoes to which we have grown accustomed, but they are filled with no less joy and no less grace, and no less capacity for nourishment and inspiration.

But it is shade that only comes to those who are willing to walk by faith, not by sight -- those who, with God, attend not to outward appearance, but to matters of the heart. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Our vision for such things is sorely undernourished. It is sadly true that, as the old truism puts it, that “You only get one opportunity to make a first impression.” The sadness has nothing to do with the first impression itself, but that we so often rely only on those first impressions for our total impression. We lock in as definitive what we have taken in with a glance. But an ocean is not merely its waves; a melon not merely its rind. People are more than their appearance and the first words out of their mouths, and circumstances are not always what they seem. God is doing a new thing -- casting shade from unexpected trees -- and we are invited, as people of faith, to find ourselves beneath their branches.

It must be, however, as people of faith. Don’t construe this as one more paean to positive thinking. Broken hearts, dead ends, and falling plaster don’t necessarily become happy and productive just because we change the way we think about them. The invitation is not merely to change the way we think about our realities, but to make room for the new things that God is doing in the midst of OUR very circumstances, no matter how promising they may or may not appear.

A few years ago Federal Express had an ad campaign that talked about the golden package that is somewhere among all the packages that they handle. The only problem was that they didn’t know which it was. Therefore every package must be treated as if it were the one. We don’t know where, or in whom, or in what moment God will interrupt our tired perception of the way life is with a fresh glimpse of the way life can be. Therefore every moment, every circumstance must be treated -- embraced -- as if it is.

A king from the youngest of the children. A shady bush from the smallest of the seeds. God, moving here, among us, in this place. I look around us at all the holy seeds that we are holding in our hands and have already strewn around and grow silent with the wonder. Who knows what shoots and stems might be emerging around us even now? And who can anticipate the taste of the fruit?