Promises, Promises (sermon, July 5, 2009)

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Mark 6:1-6

A friend of mine who is a pastoral counselor with a decade of experience counseling couples and families has a saying: You marry the right person...for all the wrong reasons.

You marry the right person for all the wrong reasons. What this means is that when we fall in love we have ideas about why this particular person is the right person for us. It’s because they are beautiful or funny or kind or smart or a person of faith or whatever it is we always hoped we’d find in a spouse. My therapist friend would say that even though we think these are the reasons we are marrying someone, these are actually not the reasons this person is the right partner for us.

Most of us have experienced this, right? If not in marriage, then with a family member or a friend. Because in almost every close relationship, something happens over time. We discover that this person who could once do no wrong in fact does a lot of really annoying things. Maybe it’s the way he chews his food or that he squeezes the toothpaste tube from the middle instead of rolling it up from the bottom. Maybe it’s the way she never has dinner ready at the same time two nights in a row or that she turns everything serious into a joke. Some of these things may even go beyond annoying and actually hurt us deeply. Maybe it’s the fact that he refuses to turn off his cell phone, even when the family is on vacation. Maybe it’s that she won’t come home until the work is finished, even if it means missing the family dinner three nights in a row. Whatever it is, in most relationships, we discover that there are things about the other person that we neither knew nor could have predicted when the relationship started.

Now, believe it or not, these are the things my therapist friend would say are the reasons this person is actually the right person for us. We’re smarter than we think, she says. Because most of us end up in relationships with people who have a lot to teach us about ourselves and about life, if we let them.

You see, what it means that we marry the right person for the wrong reasons is that the things that drive us crazy about the people we spend the most time with can actually be opportunities to learn about ourselves and ultimately to become better people. This may sound simple, but it is an extremely painful process, which is why so many marriages (over half) end in divorce, why so many friends drift apart over time, why so many family members ultimately become estranged from one another. Because it’s easier to blame the other person, to say that he is the one who needs to change, rather than to look at how changing ourselves might improve our relationships. Another favorite saying of many therapists is that you can’t change someone else, you can only change yourself. But changing someone else seems so much easier, so much less personal, so much less painful than looking honestly and objectively at our own deep-seated issues.

In today’s text from 2 Samuel we come to the end of what has been the first half of the story of David. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann labels this half of David’s story the “Rise” of David (1). All of the stories up to this point have been leading to this moment when David becomes king, not just of the tribe of Judah, which he has already led now for the seven and a half years, but of all Israel.

What happened was this: after King Saul died, Saul’s son Ishbaal became king over all the tribes of Israel except Judah, which anointed David king. There was a long war between David and Ishbaal, during which David grew stronger and Ishbaal grew weaker. Eventually, Ishbaal was murdered, and the elders of the remaining tribes accepted the inevitable: David was destined to be their king. So they came to see David and to remind him that when he was little more than a boy shepherd God chose him to be the shepherd, the ruler over all the tribes of Israel. And so David made a covenant with them to be their king, a covenant that was upheld for thirty-three years, through richer and poorer, through sickness and health, through battles lost and battles won.

We don’t know the exact terms of the covenant between David and the people, because the text doesn’t say. But a covenant is simply a promise between two parties -- not unlike the promises two people make when they get married -- so we can imagine that David promised to lead and protect the people and the people promised to be loyal to the king.

These promises David and the Israelites made to each other weren’t just political promises. They were sacred promises, promises made in the context of the sacred promises God had made to David and the Israelites. God had promised all the Israelites that he would be their God and they would be God’s people -- always. And God promised David that he was the chosen king and that God would always be with him. In the context of these promises, David and the Israelites made a covenant with one another, trusting that God would guide and support them in keeping their promises to each other -- even when David made some bad political and personal decisions, even when they people did not follow him they way David thought they should. Because just like any human relationship, David and the Israelites would discover that the things they loved about each other when they first got together would at times be overshadowed by things that drove them crazy about each other as time went on.

We’ll get to some of the details of the ongoing relationship between David and the people over the next few weeks. For now, the text gives us this glimpse of David’s future. What it says is this: “David became greater and greater.” But David didn’t become greater and greater just because he was a talented leader and warrior. He became greater and greater, the Bible says, “because the Lord, the God of Hosts, was with him.” That’s a reference to that promise that God had already made to David: God promised to be with David always.

Two weeks ago I helped out for a couple of days at Westminster Presbyterian’s Vacation Bible School. Each day there was a saying for the day. Every time the kids heard that saying, they were supposed to enthusiastically respond “Fear not!” The first day the saying was “God is with us.” So every time any leader or teacher happened to say those four words, the kids would shout out, “Fear not!”

That sounds pretty good to me. How about to you? I think that sounded pretty good to those kids in Vacation Bible School too. Wow -- someone who will always be with us, who will love us no matter what -- that sounds like the perfect god for me. This might be the way many of us first approached our faith. But if that’s the way we did it, then guess what: we chose the right God for all the wrong reasons.

Let me ask you something: if your daughter or son or best friend or sibling told you on the eve of their wedding that they were afraid of the commitment they were about to make, would you simply say to them: “fear not!”? If you’ve been married for any length of time, then if you were really being honest, you would probably tell them that a little healthy fear is a good thing when you’re about to make promises for a lifetime. And what is the really scary thing about marriage or any genuine relationship? Is it not that living with and loving another person might force us to see things about ourselves that we don’t want to see, to change in ways that we don’t really want to, even if those changes might be for the better?

Now, I love the fact that “God is with us” was the underlying theme of Vacation Bible School. I pray that if they learned nothing else that week, the kids learned that. But after hearing “God is with us” followed by “Fear not!” about a hundred times on the first day alone, I got to thinking about it. And, just as I think a little fear is a good thing when you’re making a lifetime commitment, I also think that when it comes to God, we have good reason to fear. In fact, when you look at stories in the Bible when God or angels visit a person, the common response is fear. Why do people fear God? Well, one reason is because God is God -- the creator of the universe and of us. And what goes with that is that God knows everything about us, even the things we wouldn’t tell anyone, even the things our parents and spouses and best friends don’t know. Worse than that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we might admit that some of these things are things we could and should change for the better, things that God wants us to change so that we can be the people God created us to be. So fear not? How about fear everything?!

So what does it mean that God is with us, and is there anything about that promise that’s comforting? Well, today’s text tells us that David grew greater and greater because God was with him, so there must be something positive about God’s constant presence in our lives. And the stories of David teach us something about that. David is so very human; in some areas of his life and work he was very successful, but in other areas he utterly failed. What it meant that God was with David is that whether David succeeded or failed, he turned to God to rejoice or repent, to receive the comfort that only God’s grace and presence can give. Now David knew that God was with him because David had been anointed king by God’s prophet, Samuel. We know that God is with us because God came to us in the descendant of David, the person of Jesus Christ. When Jesus suffered death on a cross and rose to new life, God chose us, God established a new covenant with us. God promises us that even in the midst of our greatest suffering, even during moments that feel like hell on earth when we have to face things about ourselves and other people that we’d really rather not see, God will always be there with us, loving us, creating new life out of what looks and feels to us like death.

Today in our passage from the gospel of Mark, Jesus says something to the people of his hometown that make them wish he had never been a part of their community. Unfortunately, the text doesn’t tell us what exactly Jesus said, but it must not have been what the people were hoping to hear, which leads me to believe that he was showing them a side of God that they did not want to see. In other places in the gospels, we see people get particularly upset when Jesus shows them that God is interested in extending God’s promises to all people, not just the descendants of the Israelites. People are offended when Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinner, when he heals non-Jews, and when he suggests that God’s laws are sometimes meant to be broken. And the reason they are offended is because this reveals a side of their God that they didn’t know about and that they don’t particularly care for. And they can either say that Jesus is wrong or they can take a long, hard look at themselves and make some big changes in the way they do things.

Like marriages or other close relationships, our relationship with God can teach us things about ourselves we would rather not see. David had to face many such things: his tendencies toward lust, greed and, corruption, just to name a few. But each time he faced these unpleasant truths about himself, he discovered a wondrous truth about God: that God’s promise to be with him was true at David’s best and at his worst. And so it is for us. When we are willing to look deep within ourselves, to develop our greatest gifts and come clean about our worst faults, we not only live into the comfort and joy of our closest relationships, we also deepen our relationship with God. We might even find that God’s grace has been at work in the relationships that challenge us the most, because God uses those relationships to shape us into the people God knows we can be. In all of life and love’s many challenges, may we discover that although we may have chosen the right people for all the wrong reasons, God has chosen to be with us, to make us God’s beloved people, for all the right reasons. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Brueggemann, Water, An Introduction to the Old Testament. Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, chapter 12: "The Books of 1 and 2 Samuel."