God’s kingdom of losers

RCL Year B, Proper 6   So in the saga of Israel’s kings, things have not turned out well with King Saul. Samuel told the people it was a bad idea to ask for a king, but they wanted one anyway. And Saul has not turned out to be a godly king. He has disobeyed […]

RCL Year B, Proper 6

So in the saga of Israel’s kings, things have not turned out well with King Saul. Samuel told the people it was a bad idea to ask for a king, but they wanted one anyway. And Saul has not turned out to be a godly king. He has disobeyed God’s commands, full of his own power instead of listening to what God wanted him to do. God tells Samuel that he’s going to replace Saul as king, but by now Samuel has gotten invested in Saul and is upset about this. So Samuel and Saul have a bitter argument, and Samuel chastises Saul for his disobedience – but God has decided, and so Samuel must as well. So Samuel, now even older than before, sets out again on God’s mission to anoint a new king.

God tells Samuel the new king will be one of the sons of Jesse from Bethlehem, but he doesn’t tell him which son.  So there is this elaborate process of each son passing before Samuel, while Samuel waits on the Lord to tell him which is the one. Samuel sees the eldest and thinks he must be it, but God says, that’s not him – remember, I see differently than you. And after all the sons have gone by and God hasn’t spoken, Samuel asks, aren’t there any more? Well, yes, says Jesse, there’s David, but he’s the youngest and he’s out watching the sheep. Samuel says, bring him. And when David is brought, God says, this is the one – he is good in my sight as well as yours. Anoint him.

There’s a whole play of words going on in this passage around seeing – some version of the word ‘see’ is used in this passage eight times, though it doesn’t show up that way in our translation. God tells Samuel to go to Jesse’s family because he ‘sees’ a king among those sons. When Samuel thinks Eliab must be the chosen one, God says, don’t see his appearance or height as the sign – for God does not see as mortals see. They see outward appearance; God sees the heart. When David comes, he is described as good to look upon – easy on the eyes, we might say. And God says, this is the one I saw as king. In the end there’s a happy coincidence of God-seeing and human-seeing in David – God chooses him, the ruddy, handsome one. It’s a sign that both God and people will find him to be a good king, indeed the model of good kingship for Israel for ages to come.

There’s also a happy coincidence for us of this passage with the parable Jesus tells in today’s gospel about the mustard seed. The kingdom of God, Jesus says, is like a mustard seed: tiny and insignificant to look at, but it grows and takes over before you know it. Humans look on the seed as not much of anything; God sees in the seed the potential for what is to come. And as one scholar, John Dominic Crossan, notes, ‘The point…is not just that the mustard plant starts as a…small seed and grows into a shrub… it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control…And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like…like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties.’ Mustard is a plant that grows without being planted, and takes over fields that are left fallow. It’s really kind of a nuisance plant, and the birds that come and nest in it are the kind of birds who might eat the seeds you’re trying to sow in the fields you’re cultivating. Not necessarily the image we might come up with for God’s action among us.

But there’s a lesson in these two readings, and it’s one that I for one need to be reminded of over and over again. In God’s world, what we think of as greatness doesn’t count. In God’s world, the weak and insignificant might be the very ones God has in mind to choose – and the ones who will change the world.

This week we had our Vacation Bible School at ECA. We spent the week focusing on the Olympic Games – we chose this theme because the Summer Olympics will take place later this summer in London. On the one hand, the Games are all about excelling and being the best: the one who beats everyone else is given the gold medal, the highest honor of all. Athletes train for years for the chance to prove their mettle in the eyes of the world. It’s two weeks of competition, and the stakes are very high.

On the other hand, there are a lot of stories that come out of the Olympics that don’t have greatness as their main point – or rather, that don’t have winning as their main point. We found some of those stories and told them over the week. Like the one about Jesse Owens & Luz Long at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the games known as Hitler’s Games. Luz, the Aryan German star, reached out in friendship to Jesse, the African-American competitor, helping him fix a problem with his long jump. When Jesse won the gold, beating Luz’s record, Luz was one of the first to celebrate, raising Jesse’s hand in the air and inspiring the stadium full of Germans to shout Jesse’s name. Or Lilo Ljubisic, an athlete blind from childhood who persevered despite her disability and won medals at five Paralympic Games in a row – and who now is an inspirational speaker, telling children to live with hope, even when all around them seems negative. Shane Gould, a 15-year old swimmer from Australia who was so good that her whole country expected nothing but gold medals from her – and when she won a bronze instead, she realized that instead of winning, God only wanted her to do her best. And on and on – too many stories to tell. All about people who saw through the focus on competition and instead looked with God’s eyes on themselves and others. Probably none of the kids who came last week will compete in the Olympic Games someday – but even in the ordinary world, these same truths apply. I hope they stick.

The thing is, our way of seeing is very limited compared to how God sees. God chooses the youngest as the king, not the oldest. God chooses Moses the brother with the speech impediment as the leader, not Aaron the gifted orator. God chooses backwater Galilee and a peasant girl for his incarnation, not Jerusalem and the royal palace. Jesus tells stories about weeds and says the Kingdom of God is like this. God’s own son gets killed in a shameful public execution, all of his followers deserting him. Poor fishermen and outcasts carry on the mission. The whole long story is all upside down.

That’s not the values of the world, of course. And sadly, the history of religion is one prime example of how even the followers of Jesus don’t get it. All the wealth and riches of churches throughout the ages; all the hierarchy and power plays; all the triumphalist crusader zeal; all the political rhetoric of the Christian right or whoever else is in the ascendant. It’s all one long story of us trying to remake God in the image we’d rather have – the power broker, the deal maker, the one who will get us rich. No one wants to worship a failure. Because none of us wants to admit that we’re a failure ourselves.

There’s a reason why the misfits and the broken people end up in church, though. One thing about knowing you don’t have it all together is that you know not to rely on your own power. You’ve already learned the lesson – at least for the moment – of your own weakness. When life falls apart – or when your life has never really come together in the world’s eyes – there’s a real home in the kingdom of God Jesus talks about. It’s healing to embrace a message of a God who embraces weakness, who cares for the lowly and goes out of his way to choose the losers instead of the winners. It’s a blessing to know that you don’t have to pull it all together for God to embrace and choose you too.

But for the people who are used to being the power brokers themselves, the successful ones in the eyes of the world, it takes a little more work to accept this message. And that’s true for all of us in those times when things are going swimmingly – when we’re winning, whatever that might look like to us – when we’re comfortable. We might hear the message of the mustard seed a little differently – here comes that pesky Kingdom of God weed again, ready to uproot the rows we’ve so carefully planted. We think we should get a gold star for being so great, but God instead seems to want to give gold stars to other people who don’t deserve it. We look around and feel a little embarrassed at the company God keeps – what am I doing here with these people? And when what we do doesn’t seem to be working, impressing the right people or gaining us status, then we just get discouraged – forgetting that it is exactly in these moments that God can do the most, ready to move in and grow us into the kind of creature God made us to be.

So it’s good news and bad news today – depending on how you see it. If you’re in a place where everything’s gone wrong, where you’re hungry for God to love you and hold you despite it all, it’s great news: God’s already doing just that. If you’re hoping that God and people around you today will admire and applaud you for how well you’re doing, well, this mustard seed news may not be as good. But whether you acknowledge your weakness or not, whether you know your own failings or think you’ve got it made, the gospel news is that God is working, growing the kingdom, raising up the lowly, breaking apart hard soil and loving us all into life. It is good news – may we all have the ears to hear it. Amen.