Lent 4A, March 30, 2014; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of Love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

We have just passed the half-way point on our journey through Lent – 22 out of 40 days. (Yes, the answer to “who’s counting?” is, “I am!”) How is it going for you? It’s time for a check-in. Have the first 22 days gone by quickly or slowly? Have you been taking the Church’s prescription for Lenten disciplines? Are you feeling that these disciplines are preparing you to be able to celebrate Easter? Have the been too hard? Too easy? Do you need to make adjustments in your Lenten exercises so that you are better prepared to celebrate the abundant glory of God in another 18 days (not counting Sundays)?

The words of the Proper Preface for Lent – that part at the beginning of the Eucharistic prayer that changes depending on the day or the season – comes to my mind: (we pray to God) “you bid your faithful people cleanse their hearts, and prepare with joy for the Paschal feast; that fervent in prayer and in works of mercy, and renewed by your Word and Sacraments, they may come to the fullness of grace which you have prepared for those who love you.” I’ll sing it in a little while – but I want to ask you to reflect with me now about your response to the bidding that you cleanse your hearts and prepare with joy for Easter – through prayer and works of mercy, through engaging scripture and sacramental worship – so that your experience of grace becomes fuller than ever. And I want you to check in with yourself about how it is going. Any surprises? I hope so.

Russell Rathbun, a pastor of the House of Mercy Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, has maintained a blog for the past several years that reflects on lectionary readings and liturgical seasons. He discourages his readers from thinking that we already know how our Lenten journey will end before we even begin. He suggests that “any delusion that we know where we are going or how it will end keep us from living in some fuller or truer way.” [1] It seems to me that all of our scripture readings for today have something to teach us about not being overly invested in the ways we think things will or should go along the paths of our spiritual journeys (wherever we are).

The story from Samuel is exhibit A. It begins with a question that Samuel hears the Holy One asking: How long will you grieve over Saul? You might recall that Samuel is grieving over Saul, but it’s not because Saul has died. Samuel is mourning the fact that things have not turned out the way he had hoped with Saul. It’s a curious story – the people of Israel, the story goes, tired of their tribal organization, their loose affiliation that strained to stand up to their enemies, namely the Amalekites and Philistines, among others. They wanted a king. They wanted to be like the other nations and consolidate their resources, pool their wealth and power under a centralized leader who could save them. The late Episcopalian theologian, Verna Dozier, called this desire for a king, the second great fall from grace (the first being the desire of earthlings, represented by Adam and Eve, to live a different way from the way that God had offered them). [2] The ancient Israelites thought that God’s quixotic system of judges with God as king just wasn’t effective. But this is a modern problem too, isn’t it? Don’t we long for a God who is more effective?!

Samuel tried to tell the people that a king wouldn’t work out, but when they couldn’t be persuaded, he and God made a plan to anoint the most handsome man in the land – a man named Saul, and Saul became the first king of the people of Israel. Samuel then gave King Saul explicit orders to kill all of the Amalekites – including their king and all of their livestock. Saul didn’t do it. He led a victorious battle over the Amalekites, but spared the best livestock, and he spared the life of the king. Samuel was furious over Saul’s disobedience and, especially furious that the king was still alive, so Samuel personally cut the king of the Amalekites to pieces. The story goes that God regretted making Saul king, even though Saul was the king of God’s own choosing. This deeply disturbing story is what happened immediately prior to our nice Cinderella type of story of the anointing of young David. You can imagine why it’s left out of Sunday School lessons and children’s Bibles.

Although young David was anointed to be the next king over the people, it was a secret for a long long time. It was many years and many adventures later, after Saul died in battle – either by asking an enemy to kill him or by falling on his own sword, that David finally became king. And, although David clearly had a heart for God, he was not exactly the kind of guy that any of us would want our kids to grow up to emulate.

What draws me into these stories is this fantastic ancient record of a people’s struggle with the Divine – and an imagination of God – or a dream of God – Who is actively engaged, learning, changing, regretting, repenting, regrouping, trying new things, and believing in people against all odds. Our Bible is a collection of testimonies – organized into two testaments – of people’s imagination of God’s belief in people, no matter how unbelievable we are. The folks that seem to get chosen to lead God’s people are most often the left behind, left out, least likely characters – and they/we don’t always behave the way God hopes, according to both testaments.

Jewish Biblical scholar, Martin Buber, wrote that Samuel confused his own human impulses with God’s will. “The story of Samuel…, far from being a simple promotion of prophetic ideology, enormously complicates the notion of prophecy by concretely imagining what may become the imperfect stuff of humanity when the mantle of prophecy is cast over it.” [3] Indeed, what we never know, what we can never know, is whether what we imagine God wanting or saying or doing is what God wants or says or does. We simply cannot know (as far as I can tell, anyway). The question that I return to, that seems edifying, is, how long will you grieve? It’s a question I hear being posed by the scripture to me – or perhaps to you. How long will any of us mourn the fact that things have not worked out the way we wanted them to go? How long will any of us stew about people not doing what we wanted them to do or being the way we wanted them to be? Is any of us grieving, not death, but utter disappointment that our plans have not worked out? Is any of us mourning that our experience of the Divine has contradicted our expectations, subverted our assumptions, or challenged our perspectives or do we interpret the contradictions as evidence that God must not exist? The response from the first Book of Samuel seems to be a directive to pick ourselves up and move along, looking not on outward appearances, but looking deeper, looking to the heart.

If the question posed in Samuel is, “How long will you grieve?” it seems to me that the question posed in Ephesians is, “How long will you sleep?” How long will you keep one foot in the grave? as our cantata text begins today. “Rise from the dead and Christ — the redeeming love of God — will shine on you,” Ephesians says. It’s an interesting order of things – rise from the dead is the command and the consequence, the result, is that the redeeming love of God will shine on you – not the other way around. It reminds me of the Buddhist wisdom teaching that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. How long will we sleep through the love of God that is all around us? How long will we not live in love, in spite of our struggles? The other day, our beloved parishioner, Betsy Bunn, wrote to tell me that her sister had died after a long illness. Betsy forwarded her nephew’s email that contained this lovely tribute to his mother: “Love was always her watchword… and her answer to every moral/ethical dilemma was always, ‘What does this have to do with loving one another?’” [4] We would do well to have that question always on the tips of our tongues.

Or put another way from our Gospel lesson today, “How long will we stumble around, wondering who is to blame rather than getting to work so that God’s glory can be revealed?” How long will we be indifferent to injustice? How long will we reject the authenticity of another’s healing? How long will we claim to know or pretend to know the will of God rather than humbly hoping that what we say or do is pleasing to God? One of the most refreshing things I ever heard a bishop say in a public forum was when The Rt. Rev. Jane Holmes Dixon, Bishop Suffragan in Washington, D.C. was asked when she knew that God wanted her to be a bishop. She laughed and said something like, “oh honey – I don’t have any idea if God wants me to be a bishop, but I do hope that God is pleased because I am having so much fun.” She was a bishop, in my experience, filled with so much love that it just oozed out of her pores.

Perhaps you know the famous prayer written by Thomas Merton. [5]  I’ll close with it.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that
I think I am following your will does not mean that I am
actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that, if I do this, you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

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