Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons

First Shade of Grey

Rev. Dawn M. Hand

Judges 16: 4-9; 15-19

Too Good To Be True

Rev. Dean Snyder

Psalm 51:1-19

Israel wanted a king like other nations had.

God said no. Israel pouted and complained until God let them have a king.

I want to suggest that Israel wanted more than a king. Israel wanted a hero.

Israel’s first king was a mistake. His name was Saul and he was chosen, at least in part, because he looked like a king. He was handsome and he was tall. I Sam. 9:2 says “There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he; he stood head and shoulders above everyone else.”

Handsome and tall. He looked like a king, he looked like a hero.

But he wasn’t. He turned out to be insecure and anxiety-ridden and cowardly.

This young man appeared, a boy really. A boy, not tall like a king or hero, but with ruddy checks and bright eyes, I Samuel 16 tells us. His name was David. He became Israel’s second king, their true hero. A person after God’s own heart.

Israel loved to tell stories about David … about his courage. When he was shepherd boy,  yet hardly a teenager, and he tended his father’s sheep he protected the sheep by wrestling and killing with his own hands a lion and a bear.

When he was hardly more than a boy he fought a giant named Goliath and defeated him with only a slingshot and five smooth stones.

He was a musician. He was first introduced to the palace because King Saul had insomnia and awful nightmares and the only way he could sleep is if David played him to sleep with his guitar, his lyre. David was more courageous than any other man, but he was also a rock star.

Israel loved David.

When King Saul saw David’s growing popularity, Saul put David on his hit list. He determined to kill him. But David never hated Saul back. David became best friends with Saul’s son Jonathan. Twice David could have killed Saul but he did not because he honored Saul as king. David was never revengeful, never less than loyal, and never petty.

Israel loved David, a man after God’s own heart. God loves David like God has never loved another, Israel said.

David was a wise king and a smart king. Under his leadership Israel grew and grew until Israel, a nation that others had told jokes about, until Israel, always the butt of a joke, became one of the great world powers, a nation to be admired, a nation to be respected, and a nation to be feared.

David did that.

Israel finally had a true king. Israel finally had a true hero.

 Then it happened.  It was a story we could have read in yesterday’s newspaper. Why did it happen? We don’t know. Why do our heroes betray us?

Maybe David had a midlife crisis. Maybe David had been so successful and accomplished so much that he got bored. Maybe because everyone said God loved him in a special way that he was so special, he thought the rules did not apply to him.

Who knows why these things happen.

One day David was sitting on the roof deck of his palace where he could see out over his capital city of Jerusalem, and he saw a woman bathing. At the moment, David thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

David had a wife. In fact he had wives, we don’t know how many. He had concubines. Second Samuel tells us he had at least 10 concubines. This was biblical family values at the time. A powerful man, a hero, could have as many wives and concubines as he desired.

But suddenly David wanted this beautiful woman he saw bathing. Her name was Bathsheba. He could have as many wives and concubines as he wanted, but David could not have Bathsheba because she was already married.  

He took her anyway. And she became pregnant.

Bathsheba’s husband was Uriah, a general in David’s army. David ordered Uriah to come home from battle to Jerusalem figuring that is Uriah slept with his wife Bathsheba no one would be the wiser when Bathsheba had a child 8 months later.

But Uriah was a man of honor and he refused to sleep with his wife when his soldiers back in the field were not able to go home to sleep with their wives.

So David ordered Uriah send to the head of the lines in the fiercest place of battle where he would be likely to die. Uriah obeyed orders and Uriah died in battle.

And David took the pregnant Bathsheba to be yet another one of his wives.

David had a prophet he kept on staff. Nathan was his name. He was a prophet who lived in David’s household. Today we might call him an ethics officer, I guess.

Nathan told David a story about a farmer who had many sheep, many more sheep than he would ever need. There was another farmer who had only one sheep whom he loved dearly. The farmer with many sheep wanted his neighbor’s one sheep so he killed him and took the sheep.

David was outraged. Tell me who this man is, he told Nathan, and I will have him executed.

Nathan said to David: “You are the man.”

 

And David for the first time in his life realized that he was a sinner. That he had committed a great sin. That he was capable of evil.

The psalm we read this morning is credited to David … it is said to be the prayer he wrote after Nathan spoke to him the words, “You are the man.”

It is a painful prayer to read:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.

Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation,

But David was never the same again. David never lived in the illusion of being an untarnished hero again. The Bible starts to talk about David in a new way. It begins reporting that David has the same kind of messy life we all have: Family problems and family joys; Failures and successes; Generosity and selfishness. David …and Israel… had discovered David was human.

We are looking at stories of strength and weakness in the Bible.

David was the greatest hero Israel had ever known - A brave man, an honorable man, a man without guile, a man after God’s own heart.  A good man. All the superlatives.

My mother, who was a bit of a cynic, had a saying she repeated. If it is too good to be true, she’d say, it probably isn’t. David –it turned out-- was too good to be true.

God did not stop loving David. Israel did not stop loving David.

But they began loving him not as a golden boy, not as a god, not as an angel but as the flawed and glorious human being we all are,

Martin Luther, who began the Protestant reformation, taught that all of us –you and I, each of us—are both saint and sinner. We are all capable of goodness and we are all capable of selfishness and evil. 

The problem happens when we begin to view ourselves or others as pure saints or pure sinners. We are each one of us both. 

When we so need a hero that we turn someone into a pure saint, we will always be disappointed. When we need a hero too badly, someone to idolize and worship, whether a parent, star or priest, we will always be disappointed.

There is no one more a saint than you are. You and I are as much saint as anyone. We have the capacity to love and to sacrifice and do amazing good, caring, saving things.

Do not give your sainthood away.

 And you and I are as much sinner as anyone. We have the capacity for great selfishness. We have the capacity to harm others. We have the capacity to see others hurting and not really care so long as we have a warm place to sleep and food in our bellies.

Do not give your sinner hood away. Do not turn anyone into a pure saint or into a pure sinner.

These are two ways of avoiding our own responsibilities.

Something inside us longs for a world of heroes and villains -- Superman and Lex Luther, Batman and the Riddler, Republican and Democrat, Seahawks and Broncos, America and whatever country is our enemy lately.

“Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think,” the Apostle Paul writes to the members of the church at Rome. But then he goes on to use a metaphor and the point of the metaphor is for us not to think of ourselves as worse than we ought.

Israel so badly wanted a hero that David became a cartoon, a phony to himself and others, when one day during a conversation with Nathan he stopped believing his own press. He realized that he had been a sinner from his birth. He had within him the capacity for great harm. 

But he also had within himself the capacity for great good. So he could pray: “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” And he could pray: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.”

You and me too.

We debate sometimes the old doctrine of original sin. When we baptize a baby, so innocent and beautiful, we say how could we believe in original sin. The problem is that we don’t talk enough about original saintliness. They are both true – saint and sinner. 

You are a saint, you sinner. You are a sinner, you saint.

Let no one make you either pure saint or sinner.  Give neither your sainthood or sinner hood away.

Because, as the meal we are about to share reminds us, fullness of life is not found in being saint or sinner but in being part of a community where we all are forgiven and we all are honored.

Frank Schaefer: Stepping Out On Faith

With special guests Jimmy Creech and Beth Stroud

Luke 8:22-25; Matthew 14:25-32

Click here to watch the services and the panel discussion
     Top video (64:31) is the panel discussion
     Middle video (74:28) is the 11 am service
     Bottom video (83:51) is the 9:30 service

Cheryl Anderson: But What if You're Tired of Struggling for Justice?

Dr. Cheryl B. Anderson

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

Losing Everything...but Love

Rev. Dean Snyder

Ruth 1:1-8; 16-22

It was the time of Judges in Israel before Israel adopted the monarchy.

Israel then was barely a nation. It was a loose confederation of 12 tribes, each tribe led by a Judge.  Being a Judge was a part-time job ruling on serious disputes between families and raising a volunteer army when there was a military threat.

During the time of the Judges, as happened with some regularity in the ancient world in one region or another, a famine hit Israel. During a famine people did what they needed to do survive.

There was a man who lived in the town of Bethlehem in the region of Judah named Elimelech who was married to a woman named Naomi. They had two sons named Mahlon and Chilion.

Elimelech and Naomi did what they needed to do to survive in the time of famine. They moved to the country of Moab where there was food.

It may have been a difficult thing for them to do because Israelites as a people hated the Moabites more than anybody on the face of the earth, more even than the Egyptians who had enslaved them.

The Israelites blamed the Moabites for denying them food centuries earlier when they were in the wilderness on the way to the promised land. They blamed the Moabites because even thought they had plenty they would have allowed the Israelites to starve to death in the wilderness.

Years ago I knew a Yugoslavian United Methodist pastor. The failure of the Yugoslavian experiment devastated him. He wrote a book about it entitled Yugoslavian Inferno.  The reason the Yugoslavian experiment to bring together the people of different ethnic groups in southeast Europe in the 2oth Century failed is this, he said. People of each ethnic group in every neighborhood, town and village would get together on a Saturday night to drink. As they drank, they would start rehearsing grievances and resentments against the other ethnic groups based on events that had happened 500 years ago. By Sunday morning when they went to their separate houses of worship, they hated each other again the way they did 500 years ago.

That is the way it was with Israel and the Moabites. On a Saturday night when they were drinking they rehearsed 500 year old grievances and hated the Moabites as thought it had happened yesterday.

Israel even passed a law and they put the law in the Bible. Deuteronomy 23:3-4 says: “No … Moabite shall be admitted to the Assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt…”

Israel had very strict laws mandating that aliens and foreigners were to be treated well. It was called the law of the ger or alien. But someone had gotten an amendment passed that basically said the law of the ger shall not apply to the Moabites. Israel hated the Moabites.

But during a famine you do what you need to do so Elimelech, his wife Naomi and their sons Mahlon and Chilion moved from Bethlehem of Judah in Israel to Moab.

After they had lived there for a time Elimelech died. Naomi’s son’s married Moabite women.

In those days, most women were dependent upon men to provide for them. Even though her husband had died, Naomi was okay because she had two sons to provide for her.  Until 10 years later when both her sons died.

Suddenly Naomi found herself alone, an Israelite woman with no husband and no sons, only two Moabite daughters-in-law, in the land of Moab. She believed God had cursed her. 

After the funerals, Naomi sat down with her daughters-in-law Orpah and Ruth. Naomi told them that she was returning to Israel in the hope that some distant relative would take her in as a servant, a weak hope because she was old and had little to offer in the way of hard work. But it seemed to her best option out of many bad ones.

Naomi told Orpah and Ruth to go home to their parents’ houses and find new husbands while they were still young enough to get married again. Because a woman without a man was vulnerable, susceptible to all sorts of abuse and without a way to live.  This was the only practical, sensible thing for them to do.

They wept together, these three women. Orpah kissed Naomi and did the only thing that made sense. She left Naomi and went back home to find a new husband.

Ruth would not leave Naomi. She begged Naomi not to make her go. Then she spoke the words that are such a deep statement of commitment that they have often been repeated in wedding ceremonies:

Ruth said to her mother-in-law Naomi:    “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” (Ruth 1:16-17)

Cheryl Anderson says in her book Ancient Laws sand Modern Controversies if this statement had been made by a man to a woman or a woman to a man in the Bible we would assume that it was an expression or romantic love and commitment and that it is only because we read the Bible with a heterosexist bias that we do not see this statement as an expression of romantic love.

“Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

Naomi and Ruth travel together to Bethlehem of Judea in Israel.

They survive by Ruth gleaning. Our junior high youth glean with the Society of St. Andrew every summer. This year during one of our great days of service we distributed thousands of pounds of potatoes gleaned by the Society of Saint Andrews to hunger programs here in Washington.  After food has been harvested, famers voluntarily allow Society of Saint Andrews employees to do a second harvest of food that was not picked up by the harvesting machines farmers use. So they harvest the food that was too small for the machinery to pick up or that the machines missed for to her reasons and distribute the food to hungry people.

In ancient Israel gleaning was a law. Farmers were allowed to harvest their crops only one time. Any food they missed the first time had to be left in the field for poor and hungry people to gather so that they could survive - By law.

As a result of this law, farmers had become very proficient at harvesting almost everything the first time, leaving as little left over as possible.

When Naomi and Ruth arrived in Israel it was the time of the barley harvest. Ruth was gleaning wherever she could and she came into the fields of a rich farmer named Boaz who was a relative of her late father-in-law Elimelech.

Even though Moabites were hated, Boaz was kind to Ruth and allowed her to gather more grain than she could glean because he respected her commitment to care for Naomi.

Boaz said to Ruth: "All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before. May the Lord reward you for your deeds, and may you have a full reward from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge!" (Ruth 2:11-12)

There was another law in Israel at the time called the law of leverite marriage. The law of leverite marriage said that if a married man died before his wife had had a child; his closest male relative should take the widow as his wife and have children with her.

Surely the law of leverite marriage would not apply to a Moabite woman. An Israelite would not be expected to take a Moabite widow of an Iraelite man as his wife. It would be unheard of.

But Naomi instructed Ruth to make the levrite claim to Boaz, and Boaz accepted and married her. And Boaz and Ruth had a son and Naomi moved into their home to become the baby’s nurse. 

We are talking during the season of Epiphany this year about stories of strength and weakness in the Bible as part of our 6 month theme of Strengthening Our Core.  

Two widowed women of two different nationalities and cultures and religions in the ancient Middle east were as weak and vulnerable as any two people could be.

But they had something that made them strong. Ruth had an absolute and unconditional and impractical love for Naomi. She would not let her go. She would give up everything to stay with her – her family, her nation, her religion. She had a powerful love.

Naomi had another strength, perhaps even a harder one. She had the strength to let Ruth love her.

The Bible says a very interesting thing. After Ruth made her vow -- “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die” – the Bible says this:

“When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.”

Naomi said no more to her. Allowing herself to be loved this much was hard for Naomi.

It may take as much strength to allow someone to love you as it does to love unconditionally.

It was Ruth’s unconditional love and Naomi’s willingness to allow Ruth to love her that saved them … that made it possible for them to survive and, more than to survive, to thrive.

We do not know what happened to Orpah, the daughter-in-law who did the practical, sensible thing and stayed in Moab. We do not know what impact or significance her life may have had.

But we do know about Naomi and Ruth.

Ruth and Boaz’s child was named Obed. Obed grew up and had a son Jessie. Jessie had a son named David who became Israel’s greatest king.

Ruth, the Moabite woman became the great-grandmother of Israelites greatest king. Because he was part Moabite by Israel’s own laws, David should not have been allowed to sit in the assembly of the Lord. God broke Israel’s own laws, what they assumed to be the Lord’s own law, when God anointed David king.  

And for we who are Christians, especially we who are gentile Christians, when we read Jesus’ genealogy in the Gospel of Luke, we find this gentile Moabite woman named Ruth there, and we understand that Jesus belongs to us too.

When we have no other power, when we have no other resources, when we are weak and vulnerable, we still have a power than no one or nothing can take away from us. We have the power to love and to receive the love of another.   

It reminds us that the community of Christ is not strong when the budget is strong or attendance is strong or its programs are strong. The community of Christ, the children of Naomi and Ruth, the community of Christ is strong when we are growing in love for one another and learning to let ourselves be loved.

Love somebody this week. Let somebody love you.