Look Where You're Going

Wow - nearly a year since my last post here - which was also a sermon text!  Well, I have another sermon text to post, this time a message I shared with my folks at St. Peter's Church in Purcellville.  We've been using the OT reading this summer, and have been following the life and times of King David.  Lucky me, I got the first half of the story of David and Bathsheba! (2 Samuel 11:1-15)

I hope that it not only feeds your soul, but keeps you on the road... :)
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This morning we’re continuing to consider the life of King David – one of Israel’s heroes: a great king, a great warrior, a man who loved God so much that he is called a man after God’s own heart.

But today, we get to take a look at David’s dark days and bad behavior.  It’s a sorry circumstance that’s as much at home in a modern newspaper as in this 3,000 year old story:  A political leader starts from humble roots, operating with a sense of purpose and morality and “what’s right”.  He does things the way they should rightly be done, wins success after success, and gains power and fame.  But eventually, he starts to think a bit too highly of himself and his desires, and before you know it, power leads to corruption, and the tawdry story of a pregnant mistress and a murder plot hits the tabloids.

When we dig into this story, we notice that David’s been king of all Israel for a while now.  He’s got the powerful Ark of God residing in his capital city.  He’s defeated his enemies.  He da man!  Powerful, well-loved, and surrounded by servants just waiting to do his bidding so they might bask in David’s reflected glory.  It’s good to be king, and I think David is finding himself just a little too wonderful in his own mind…. 

Because you see, it’s spring, the scripture points out, the time when kings go out to battle, but David has chosen to stay home.  Why?  Maybe he was trying to give his general Joab some space to make a name for himself, or maybe David was feeling a bit run-down, a little sickly and thought it best to stay home and rest.  But the way this story is told, it sounds like David doesn’t think he needs to go, he’d rather stay in his comfortable palace than go and sleep rough on a battlefield -  he’s important enough, blessed enough, that he doesn’t need to go himself and be inconvenienced…

So here is David, pampering himself in his pleasant palace, looking out over his city, when he catches a glimpse of a lovely lady, the beautiful Bathsheba.  And he might have appreciated that little look and then gone back to his duties.  But David is a great king, so why not find out who this lovely creature is and enjoy her in his bedroom? 

That she’s a married woman doesn’t even seem to register to him – he just sends for her and has his way with her, and sends her back home.  When she finds she’s pregnant, they have a big problem, because her husband Uriah has been away with the army so that the child could not be his.  David calls him back to report on the war, but the honorable Uriah won’t go sleep with his wife– he doesn’t feel right having that sort of comfort while his fellow soldiers are at war.

David then arranges to send Uriah back into battle to a position where he will surely be killed, and that is where our reading for today ends.  It turns out that Uriah is indeed killed in battle, and David is now able to marry Bathsheba to hide his adulterous secret.   

What a sorry situation!  Israel’s great and honorable king David has descended into adultery, lies, and murder.  Oh how the mighty have fallen!  But – how did this happen?  How did David wind up like this after such a great start, and what can we learn to avoid this sort of thing ourselves?

It all comes down to this: You look where you’re going and you go where you’re looking.  It’s driving 101 – when you’re behind the wheel, you need to be looking where you want to go, because that’s where you’ll tend to steer to.  If you want to drive straight down the road but you’re staring off to the right at something along the side of the road, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself in the ditch instead!   And when you have to do emergency maneuvers, its even more important to look where you want to go – you need to look at the gap you want to steer through and NOT at the tree you want to avoid! 

As in driving, so in life – your life tends to steer toward the things that you allow to engage your attention, whether that’s where you say you want to go or not.  And that’s where David went wrong.  Instead of brief glance at Bathsheba and then turning his eyes back to the road, he let her become an obsession, focusing his thoughts on having her, and then on covering up his little indiscretion, until he wound up in a flaming wreck in the ditch. 

Fortunately for us, we have a God who can make all things new, and even a fiery wreck like David’s smash-up with Bathsheba can be forgiven and restored and set back on the road if the driver can just realize their error and repent.  We’ll see how this happens for David in next week’s readings, so I’m not going to delve into repentance this morning.  I’m going to stick with accident avoidance. 

So – if we tend to go where we’re looking, what sort of distractions are likely to take our main attention off of following God and striving to be like our Lord Jesus, and send us off the road into the ditch or worse?  It’s all the same old things that have always distracted people from God: power, sex, wealth, with all their combinations and variations, from the mild and subtle to the wild and outrageous.  The distractions range from anything to everything!

And with such a vast array of things to lead us off of the road to Godly living, how can we possibly hope to stay on track?  Well, God in his wisdom has given us some tools, and there are three in particular that I’ll share with you.

First off, our weekly worship is a very overt and intentional directing of our hearts and minds toward God.  Scripture and preaching and hymns and prayers not only connect us with God, but may show us places where our attention has been inappropriately wandering.  Have you ever had the experience of hearing something that seemed to be illuminated with a sort of Holy Hiliter, pointing out some sinful thing you need to change but have perhaps been ignoring?  I know I’ve felt that sort of conviction!

So weekly worship is essential, but that leaves an awful lot of the week without guidance.  You can get WAYYYYY off the road if you only look to God for an hour or so on Sundays!  We need guidance during the week, and the surest way to get it is with God’s own roadmap, Holy Scripture.  Daily scripture reading makes it easier to keep our attention on God – and to hear Him calling out for our attention when we’re heading off into some ditch that we haven’t noticed.  Add daily prayer and you’ve got the second great tool to keep you turning back to God.

But weekly worship and daily prayer and scripture may still not be enough to keep us straight – after all, I bet David himself did those things, but still he got off-course.  What David didn’t have was friends and advisors who might actually confront him if they knew he was doing something wrong.  David sent his army off to war – who was left to advise him?  No one but servants…  So the third tool we have is fellowship and accountability through others. 

We all need spiritual friends with whom we share our lives – people who have our permission to tell it like it is when they see us heading for a ditch.  Friends who will speak the truth to us in love and help keep us on the road to life in Christ.  If David had had someone to poke him in the arm and say “what do you think you’re doing?” when he sent for a married woman to sleep with, maybe this whole incident may have been avoided.  God himself said it when Adam was created – “it is not good for the man to be alone.”  We all need companions on this way.

You see, we live in an age that prizes “following your nose.”  If it feels good, do it.  Whatever captures your fancy should be pursued, and there is no notion that there is even a road that should be followed.  So it’s imperative that we use the tools God has given us if we want to follow His ways and have eternal life.  Worship.  Study and pray.  Let yourself be accountable.  Do everything in your power to keep your attention on God. 

 

Look where you want to be going, or you may go where you find you’ve been looking.

Again I say, Look where you want to be going, or you may go where you find you’ve been looking.

With All Your Might

(a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Purcellville, VA, July 12, 2007)
6th Sunday after Pentecost: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Ephesians 1:3-14 ; Mark 6:14-29 ; Psalm 24

As I was thinking about our readings today, a scene from “The Blues Brothers” movie came to mind. Have you seen “The Blues Brothers”? Basically, John Belushi and Dan Akroyd play Jake and Elwood Blues – “the blues brothers” - and they’re on a mission from God. They need to raise $5,000 to save the orphanage they were raised in. Early in the movie, an old friend tells them they need to get to church, and somehow they wind up at a black Baptist church, where worship is lead by a character played by the one and only James Brown.

This preacher quickly inspires the congregation, who start speaking and then shouting in response to his message. And when that preacher starts to sing, everyone’s on their feet, and people start dancing until the whole congregation has joined in, and the intensity just builds and builds. They’re leaping and running and bounding around the sanctuary in their enthusiasm and joy.

Meanwhile, at the back of the church, the Jake and Elwood stand out like a couple of sore thumbs, impassive and unmoved in their dark suits, dark glasses, dark fedoras - merely watching the worship going on before them. Until… until it all changes when the brothers get a sudden inspiration of how they can raise the money they need. A light from heaven shines on Jake, and he realizes they can re-form their old band and raise the money. Filled with that inspiration, they both join in the joyous dancing of the congregation.

And that whole scene captures the feeling of our Old Testament reading. “David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the LORD with all their might.” And just so you don’t miss it, it’s in the passage twice: “David danced before the Lord with all his might.”

This is what David and the Israelites were doing as they transported the Ark of God from the town of Baale-judah, back to David’s new capitol city in Jerusalem. They were bringing the visible presence of God to dwell in their midst, and so they danced before the Lord with all their might. And it could well have looked a lot like that worship scene from the Blues Brothers.

But isn’t it a bit unusual to think of dancing as a thing to do “with all your might”? When I think of doing something “with all my might”, dancing is not one of the things that comes to mind. I asked a couple of friends, and their first responses were of two sorts. The first was physical labor - like exercise, gardening, pushing a car out of the snow, opening a jar, splitting wood – things that require the concentrated application of your full physical strength to accomplish. The other sort was heart labors, like loving or praying – things that require the concentrated application of your heart.

How curious, then, to think of dancing “with all your might”, unless you happen to be a dancer. Dancing is just about having fun, right? Where’s the concentrated application of strength? Where’s the concentrated application of heart? What’s the thing to be accomplished?

Well, in the case of David and the Israelites, the thing to be accomplished is worship. What we have in this story is a picture of worship. David and people dance before the Lord with song and music, with instruments and shouts. After the Ark is put in place, offerings are made to God. David blesses the people in the name of the Lord. Food - a meal - is distributed to the people, and then everyone goes home.

It’s just like what we do here at St. Peter’s. We sing and make music to the Lord. We bring offerings. We share a meal in the Eucharist. We are blessed. And then we go home.

There are a couple of differences between what we do in worship and what David did in the particular story we’re looking at today, but the one thing I want to consider is how we express ourselves in worship.

David and company danced with all their might before the Lord. In that Blues Brothers scene, the congregation was dancing in the aisles. I’ve never seen anything even close to that here, with the possible exception of when we played “Carter Says” last week. When we get wild and crazy, we might be so bold as to raise our hands as we make our offering.

I’ve heard Episcopalians referred to as “frozen chosen”, and our worship here is definitely formal, it’s generally restrained, and it’s carefully ordered. And when you consider the contrast between what we do, and the picture of David’s unrestrained exuberance, it might make you wonder whether our worship is okay. Whether it’s adequate. Whether we need to loosen up and dance in the aisles ourselves.

My answer to you is this – “It Depends.” It depends on whether we’re worshipping with all our might, or whether we’ve just shown up to put in an appearance and go through the motions. Remember, to do something with all your might, is to do something that requires a concentrated application of strength or heart.

In David’s case, they applied both their muscles and their hearts to their dance of worship before the Lord. Our manner of worship doesn’t really require the application of muscle, although some might agree that kneeling through the entire Eucharistic prayer can require strength of body and will to accomplish. So that leaves the application of heart. Are you applying your whole heart to worship this morning? Are you giving it your all?

You really cannot answer “yes” to that question unless you know who it is that we’re here to worship. True worship – whether exuberant or more restrained – will always flow from a heart-knowledge of God – who He is and what He’s done for us.

That’s the key question – who is our God? You can be easily mislead if you listen to the wrong people. Even back in Jesus’ day, when his ministry was in full swing, and people were flocking to hear him teach and experience his healing touch, even then most people didn’t know who he really was.

That’s where our gospel passage starts this morning. King Herod thinks that Jesus is John the Baptist come back to life. The people think that Jesus is Elijah returned, or perhaps some new prophet like the prophets of old.

You can hardly blame them for getting it wrong, though. The Jews of Jesus’ time were not expecting God to take on flesh and dwell among them. The Messiah they were expecting was not God incarnate, but a man anointed to do God’s will and to free the Israelites from their bondage to Rome – a new David - a warrior and a politician, not a humble teacher and healer who ultimately got himself killed.

But what excuse do we have for not understanding who Jesus is? We know that he was killed – fully dead – then raised to new life, defeating death in the process. It’s all in here – in the New Testament - a powerful witness to Jesus’ life and work and identity. Why don’t we all believe it? Why do so many people poo-poo this testimony? “Jesus was a good man – a wise teacher – but he wasn’t REALLY God. He wasn’t REALLY raised from the dead. It’s all just a metaphor, or maybe a conspiracy by the disciples – but it didn’t REALLY happen like that!”

If you listen to people who are preaching that sort of message about Jesus – you are not going to understand who he really is. Instead, listen to God’s own testimony from the Bible. Listen to words like these that I’ve taken from our epistle reading, so beautifully summarizing what God has done for us – and who we are in Him!

“… God blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing….
He chose us in Christ… to be holy and blameless before him in love.
He destined us for adoption as his children….
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.
In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance… so that we… might live for the praise of his glory.”

Letting that kind of information penetrate from your head into your heart - truly acknowledging who our God is, who Jesus is – that’s what transforms us. Until you find that sort of heart-knowledge and understanding, you’ll be like Jake and Elwood Blues, standing at the back of the church, looking on curiously but not participating, and certainly not understanding what everyone is so excited about.

I can personally vouch for this truth because I myself spent many years sitting in these very pews, looking on curiously but not fully participating, and certainly not understanding what everyone was so excited about. It was only when the truth made it to my heart that I finally “got it” – that I finally had some notion of the wonder and glory of what God did for me and for all of us.

And if we live our lives in praise of that God – that God who has done so much for us - then we will surely worship “with all our might”. Whatever our worship together may look like, whether it’s dancing in aisles, or just calmly sitting, standing, kneeling as we move through the communal “dance” of our liturgy, whatever our style, it will be flowing from the sure knowledge of the love of God, to the praise of His glory! Amen.