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The Rev. Frank
Logue
The Unlikeliest Hero Comparisons, analogies, and metaphors. These are the building blocks for sermons. We want to say something about God. We can and do say God is love. God is good. God is compassionate. But then we move on to describe what God is like and so we use analogies, comparisons and metaphors. On Father’s Day we can certainly remember that God our Father is not like bad fathers but like a perfect father. Jesus used this same technique, and gives us a couple of comparisons in our Gospel reading for today. He is describing not God His Father, but the Kingdom of God and compares that coming kingdom to seed scattered on the ground and then to a mustard seed. Of course, he doesn’t want us to think that actual seed scattered on the ground or real mustard seeds are the Kingdom of God. Instead, we are to puzzle for ourselves about the lessons we can learn from this comparison. We might see how the work of growing the seed is something that just happens in the depth of the earth and so the Kingdom of God’s growth is the work of God and not the work of humans alone, who just scatter the seed. And through the mustard seed, we could see how small things can have great effect. The little, almost unnoticeable seed growing into a great plant. We could pull more out of those comparisons Jesus made, but I want to leave them for now and travel back to our Old Testament lessons, which contains a scene more difficult to compare. Or difficult to find a comparison outside of the Kingdom of God. Our reading from the First Book of Samuel introduces David in a way that is comical and reveals him in a way to show that Israel’s great king was the unlikeliest hero. The comic element comes in with the punch line, but first let’s hear the story. Saul is king of Israel and God regrets this. The prophet Samuel has been told by God to go and anoint Israel’s next king. Samuel is then led by God to a small village near Jerusalem. The town he is to go to is Bethlehem. The little town of Bethlehem is famous today for both King David and David’s ancestor Jesus. But in the time of Samuel, it was an unremarkable little village like any other. Samuel goes and is told to anoint one of Jesse’s sons to be king. This is in itself unlikely as Jesse is not the choice one would usually make for king. He is by the standards of royalty just some guy. And by the standards of Israel he is an even poorer choice. His grandmother Ruth was from Moab. Israelis were not to marry Moabites. They were idol worshippers and marrying them was prohibited. But Ruth took on the religion of Israel when she followed her mother-in-law Naomi home after the death of her first husband. She then married Boaz, who himself was a product of intermarrying with Canaanites. Israel was concerned in those days with not polluting itself with intermarriage among other peoples and Jesse had at least two strikes in his family tree. So any son of Jesse’s should be right out of the running for king. But Samuel was following God’s orders. Then comes the line up. The eldest son naturally goes first. The society stores a lot by birth order. And as far as the prophet Samuel is concerned, Jesse’s oldest boy Eliab looks like he was sent over for the part of king by central casting. He is tall and good looking. Samuel is ready to pour the oil on his head right there on the spot. That’s what anointed literally means. It means to have oiled poured on you. It is a sacrament and the anointing is an outward sign of the inward grace of the gift of the Holy Spirit that comes with being the one anointed as God’s choice for a task. In this case, anointed to be the King of Israel. So with God directing him, Samuel passes over one boy after another. God chastises the prophet for looking at the ways the boys look. God tells Samuel, “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” He runs through all seven sons there and finds no king. He has to push Jesse to learn that the youngest boy is out tending the sheep. This is only natural. Someone has to watch the flock while the other boys are at home to greet the prophet. Samuel tells Jesse to send for him, adding that he won’t even sit until the boy arrives. Given that Samuel is advanced in years, he means for them to be quick about it. This is where we get the punch line to the joke. For after all that talk of how God is not concerned with outward appearance, but only the heart, David comes in and he is good looking, with beautiful eyes, a handsome boy. The point is that we had to see God passing over the tall, strong and handsome brothers to understand that David was picked not for his looks but for the content of his heart. Then Samuel anoints him as king. He is still just a boy, and Saul remains the king in his palace. David has yet to play the harp for the king and he has yet to defeat Goliath and catch the eye of every eligible girl in Israel. But already he is anointed to take Saul’s place. He will be king even if as the eighth son of a nobody of disreputable bloodline, he is the unlikeliest hero of all. This is where it is difficult to find comparisons outside of God’s kingdom. There are some that come close. Cinderella is the girl no one notices who comes to be the princess, but she was born to noble parents. It was only her step mother that worked her like a slave in her own home. Or there is Luke Skywalker, the guy shooting varmints on a nothing planet as the epic saga begins. But we also find that he too was the son of great leaders, even if his dad turned out to be Darth Vader. Again and again we can find stories of this sort of rise of a nobody, who it turns out was really just an unappreciated somebody all along. But when we turn to scripture, we find real nobodies get noticed by God. Moses was just one of thousands of babies born to Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Though God arranged for him to be raised in Pharaoh’s household, no one thought of Moses lineage as anything to brag about. He was the slave child who became the leader of a nation, despite a speech impediment. Or there was Amos, the great prophet who lived in a time of a professional group of prophets. But he was not the son of a prophet, but a dresser of sycamore trees, who gave God’s word of judgment. In fact, we find throughout scripture that God does not look for great people and choose them. God looks to the hearts of ordinary people and there finds the extra ordinary. Look at Mary of Nazareth. She was of no account until God took notice of her and from then until now, all generations have called her blessed. Jesus’ apostles had no pedigree. These were not a dozen of what King Herod would have considered the best and brightest of his land. In fact, if Jesus had not singled them out, they would have remained nameless and faceless to history. Move forward in church history and one can find countless other examples of people who could be described as nobodies unless God had considered the content of their hearts and singled them out for great things. Take Thomas Aquinas who was considered to be big and stupid. He was a slow learner at times and his classmates called him The Dumb Ox. But God looked to Thomas heart and guided him to become the best known Christian theologian of his time, and his writings are still value centuries later. All this though he would in the last weeks of his life have a powerful mystical encounter with God in worship that caused Thomas Aquinas to say that all he had written was straw in comparison to his experience of God. Within the kingdom of God the comparisons are endless, for God looks to the heart, and sees not as the world sees. Now if we are honest with ourselves, this is a pretty scary proposition. After all, while I have done the wrong thing for all the right reasons, I often do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Do I really want God poking around inside my heart checking out the contents? Trust me. None of us are clean. Within out heart of hearts, any of us has some chambers we might prefer remain closed to God. So if we are looking for good news this week, it might be difficult to find it in the statement, “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” If we took that statement seriously, makeover shows would take on a whole new meaning. Forget losing weight or getting a face lift or heavens knows what else lifted, separated and tucked. None of that could make your heart more lovely. No a makeover in a world where the contents of your heart are what matters probably looks more like soul searching. It probably feels more like forgiving others and asking for forgiveness for yourself. If the content of the heart is what matters, then the only makeover that will make a difference would be to realize that you have sinned, change your habits, stop sinning, and then having truly changed and regretted your actions, ask God to forgive you. That is a makeover for your heart. This makeover for your heart is exactly what we here at King of Peace are here to offer—a place to come and recognize your failings and start again. This doesn’t mean we want to judge you. We can’t. We are too busy working on the ways we still fall short of God’s ideals and our own. But to really take this on. To really change in the ways you know God is laying on your heart is not a bad thing. To really change your life is to realize that God sees you, knows you completely and loves you fully. God sees the content of your heart as it is and wants something better for you. For you are the hero of the story God has for you. You might be the unlikeliest hero, but you are a hero nonetheless. For it will take heroic action for you to live into being the person God created you to be. Coming to saving faith in Jesus does not mean acknowledging that you believe in Jesus and then continuing as you are. Coming to saving faith in Jesus means to begin a lifelong journey of changing more and more into being the men and women God created us to be. And in this, you and I are no different from David, that greatly flawed leader of Israel who God anointed as king. David’s story is full of twists and turns with lots of sin and redemption. This shows us how God knows what it is like to choose and work with unlikely heroes like you and me. And when it comes to making somebodies out of nobodies, God is incomparable. Amen.
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