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David part 5
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit the commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:My name is Joel and I am grateful to be up here sharing with you again this evening. There's a benefit for me on weeks when I'm teaching and that's I spend a lot of extra time diving deep into these stories, into their histories, into their different perspectives and then using everything that I gather up and paying attention to what that's doing in me, what that maybe is forming in me, and then how I think that maybe translates into something for the rest of our community here. Basically it's just beautiful to be able to pay close attention to God and to myself and to these stories for the sake of standing up here for half an hour on Sundays. I was up a few weeks ago. I was talking about David and Goliath.
Speaker 2:But a lot has happened in those few weeks. Bobby and Scott have continued our journey through the summer series, the life of David. I also got a haircut and shaved my beard. Nice. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No reason. I just missed my face, which I think some of you understand. Other things that happened in the last few weeks. Michael Phelps raised a shark on Shark Week, but then not really because deep down, we're all liars, but especially the Discovery Channel. Sorry.
Speaker 2:I got duped. Last week, Scott ended with this beautiful imagery of the power of sticking to the ideal of a relationship, but also acting on the commitment of that relationship. And in first Samuel chapter 20, Jonathan's commitment to David helps get David the getaway that he needs into the desert and away from Saul who's now trying to kill him. And that is what we're focusing on today, David and the desert. And as the teaching schedule went out this spring, I will admit that I was excited to have pulled David and Goliath.
Speaker 2:I was excited for that one. It was a really fun sermon to write. But this week, David in the desert. As I prepped for David and Goliath, I had weeks of ideas and notes and jokes and reading lists, and it was really, really fun. And as today got closer and closer, I realized that I had written an entire sermon on David and the dessert.
Speaker 2:And I was super disappointed in myself because not only is that a painfully bad dad joke, it was also sort of true because all I had for the longest time was that joke itself. This was harder. This was harder for me at first. Our story today covers multiple chapters from first Samuel and multiple incidents. Again, like a lot of these stories that we're covering each week, we follow David.
Speaker 2:And then these secondary pieces, Saul, Jonathan, Goliath, the wilderness, they all pop in and out while we watch David wrestle with the limits and the weakness of his humanity. As well, we watch him be formed by a constantly deepening authentic relationship with God. And that's the benefit of walking through his life this summer. Two weeks ago, Bobby spoke on liminal space. These spaces in and in between transitions.
Speaker 2:In the 2009, I was in one of these transitional spaces like Bobby mentioned. That summer, I was leaving a job that I think I was good at. I was leaving some families in a church that I loved and that loved me. I was taking this crazy adventure with my wife, to leave a job without a new one in place and to move west, maybe partially because she was a huge Michael W. Smith fan, which, no, I don't wanna talk about.
Speaker 2:And that same summer before we moved, we took this huge trip with the high school students that we were working with. They all knew that we were leaving in a few weeks, and so the trip was great, but it was also tense. There were some hurts, and there were just some raw relationships in those moments. In the midst of all of those transitions, that same summer, I took a two week trip to Israel with the denomination that I worked for. It was liminal.
Speaker 2:I was liminal. I don't actually know if that's possible. I had to ask Bobby. We'll check. I have photos from this trip to Israel, like this one where I awkwardly corrode a camel with my friend James.
Speaker 2:We actually weren't friends before this ride, but we sure are now. Because, yes, we cheaped out and didn't pay to each have our own camel, which was a good call. That's instead, we just shared snowball there. The problem is that I am not the best at remembering things in any normal season of life. Looking back on that summer and this transitional time and my trip to the Holy Land, I feel like I wasn't present at all.
Speaker 2:I just was worried that it was this huge waste. And so this week even, I went back and I found the journal that I used and brought on that trip. And in the midst of this crazy transitional time and space in my life, it turns out that being in a different physical space for a different physical amount of time did have a significant impact on me and my relationship with God. Bobby encouraged us with this reality that liminal space matters. Liminal time and space matter.
Speaker 2:And this week, the story of David and the desert teaches us that physical time and physical space matter. We'll continue in a minute, but would you pray with me? God of love, God of the physical world, in these moments together, would you open our hearts and our minds to see you in this story? As we look at David and his time in the desert, would you be present to us in a way that reminds us that you are good and that you are grace and that you invite us to spend our physical time with you? And as we ask some questions, as we sort through some history, would you reveal yourself in a way that is new to us today?
Speaker 2:Whether it's through something we hear, something we see, something we sense, or even something that we realize that we knew. Reveal yourself to us this evening, dear God. Amen. So I'm only gonna spend a few moments on how time matters because I think we all get this already. No one has enough.
Speaker 2:Everyone would like more, and a lot of us have guilt about how we end up spending some of ours. Time matters. Right around here, I was going to slowly read some of the lyrics to Cindy Lauper's time after time and see how long it took for people to catch on. But then when I practiced it, it sounded way too much like a worship song. If you're lost, you can look, and you will find me.
Speaker 2:If you fall, I will catch you. I will be waiting time after time. Who in this room was even alive in 1983? Okay. Couple of us.
Speaker 2:Okay. But I just wanted to be honest for a second. That song is hugely underrated. Also, it's in all of your heads now, so you're welcome. The ultimate irony is that today I've already spent too much time talking about how important time is, so I wanna move on.
Speaker 2:Time matters, end of point. Just like the Goliath story from a few weeks ago, I cannot read the whole desert narrative that today encompasses. But chapters 21 through 24 of first Samuel are David running for his life because Saul wants to kill him, because Saul feels threatened by this up and coming David and his approach to the throne. The way that David moved around in the desert is like a combination of one of those epic board games that takes forever to play and an epic action movie. There's strategy.
Speaker 2:There's alliances. There's attacking. There's regrouping. There's hiding just enough spaces away. First Samuel 23 ends with this near encounter where David and Saul are on either side of a mountain, and they can almost run into each other.
Speaker 2:But then Saul has to fall back and fight off one of the armies of the Philistines that's attacking them. It's tense. The way they write it is very well done and very tense, but the writers want us to know how confined and how tense these things felt in such wide open spaces. Part of my point today is that physical space matters. And so an opening directional question is what happens to us when we are in different physical spaces than whatever is normal to us?
Speaker 2:I live in the neighborhood of Silver Springs. It's gorgeous. It has tons of green space and paths, and it's up along the river valley. And it has a prayer labyrinth in one of the forests. So I made a video of myself walking this prayer labyrinth, and we're gonna show it.
Speaker 2:So this is me walking the prayer labyrinth with Kevin's GoPro. Also, we're gonna speed it up really fast. I wanted to be the first person ever to make a super sped up video of a person walking a prayer labyrinth, both because I wanted to become YouTube famous to see if that's a thing. Because I searched, no one else has done this. Also, I just thought it would be fun to play in the background while I talk about this story, or it's just gonna make some of you sick.
Speaker 2:Either way, fun for me. As I considered this message that I was up for, I set out to walk this labyrinth as often as I could in the days leading up to this message, and one of the first nights I got the idea for this video. And the funniest part for me as I did this practice, as I committed to this, was noticing how my very human brain interacted with this labyrinth from the first time that I started right up until this morning. My first few times I just couldn't help myself. I would take a few steps when I would look to the side a little bit, and I would think, I wonder when this path gets on that path, or shouldn't I actually be on that path now?
Speaker 2:Is this the leg that takes me up to the center? Or is this even going the right way on all the way down to, I think this is going the wrong way. I think someone built this labyrinth wrong. Which if you have done a labyrinth, is essentially the opposite of where you're supposed to get to when you encounter one. Instead, you aim for quiet.
Speaker 2:You focus on one step at a time. You create space in your head and in your heart to experience God in a way that you are not controlling or directing. And when you do get to the center, the point is to take a deep breath and then go back out. The center has not unlocked some secret level into God. The point is that you keep going.
Speaker 2:You keep focusing on your steps until you exit the labyrinth, till you maybe choose to enter it again, having created an opportunity to be formed in some way by your encounter. Now this isn't just about me becoming YouTube famous, and maybe some of you are sick. So we'll stop the video. We'll come back to that a little bit later. The wilderness is our secondary character this week.
Speaker 2:As I said, we've had Goliath and Saul and Jonathan, each of those characters helping form the narrative of David's human story as he becomes the god anointed king. So I wanna spend some time talking about the character wilderness. The Judean Desert is not like the desert that we think of in the movies with endless rolling hills of sand and nothing else. There are cliffs. There are rocks.
Speaker 2:There are a million and a half places to hide, and there are 10 times that many places to get hurt or be killed. And in the midst of this, David runs and hides and runs and hides. Physical space matters. What we're gonna talk about today is that while David is on the run-in this physical space, in this physical wilderness, he has a metaphorical wilderness experience as well. He has nowhere to go.
Speaker 2:He's surrounded by Philistine enemies. He can't go back to his family. He's not yet who he's supposed to become king wise. And if he slows down or stops, he'll get killed. So as I thought about this this week, I felt like the story in these chapters is it culminates in this merging of the ideas of the physical and the metaphorical wilderness.
Speaker 2:And just so we don't lose each other, the metaphor for wilderness and the literal wilderness are gonna be interchangeable as we move forward in the story today. Scott said last week that we often find ourselves in places of difficulty, waning health, relational conflict, or an undetermined future. These are pictures of metaphorical wilderness. As for physical wilderness, the physical wilderness, we are all drawn to it. We live about an hour's drive in some of the most beautiful, rugged wilderness that you could dream of setting up a curated Instagram selfie.
Speaker 2:If we are in this wilderness long enough, we begin to change. We begin to see, to hear, to feel, and maybe to know God and ourselves differently. Nancy Newhall says, the wilderness holds answers to questions that we've not yet learned to ask. I asked, one of my friends who's a pastor this week who was with me on that Israel trip to maybe share with me any of his pastoral insights into our time in the desert in the wilderness in Israel. And he just texted me back and said, my pastoral takeaway is it was freaking hot.
Speaker 2:And I said, thanks. And that didn't help. So I actually, went and looked to a different pastor, Eugene Peterson, and he writes that in the wilderness, we see more, hear more, and, yes, believe more, which is why it holds such a prominent place in our traditions of spirituality. Again, physically and metaphorically, wilderness space matters. Now Peterson goes on to use this term circumstantial wilderness.
Speaker 2:And this is when we end up in a desert or in a wilderness not by our choosing, but because of what is happening to or around us, losing a job, the ending of a relationship, etcetera. And I wanna compare and contrast that circumstantial wilderness to this idea of intentional wilderness, times where we choose to put ourselves in the wilderness. Because in first Samuel, David is forced into the wilderness. He didn't just choose to go wander outside and look for God, and there's a significant difference. We have to keep that in mind.
Speaker 2:One of the questions for today is where am I choosing time and space away? Where am I choosing that kind of intentional wilderness? Maybe sometimes we think we need to get as far away as we can for true wilderness. I've gotta get to the right spots. I need two weeks in Israel, or I need a full long weekend in the mountains.
Speaker 2:I just need a few days to get my stuff together. Maybe some of you even need to pilgrimage up to Silver Springs and experience some trees and grass. But wilderness can be just across the street or in your living room. Wilderness can be a break from whatever control you are exhibiting over your life. It's a place where we break from the routine, where we create physical time and space and opportunities for God to do something new in us.
Speaker 2:As this story unfolds in first Samuel, the other thing that we witness in the Judean wilderness is that as he chases David, Saul just comes undone. Saul spends all of his time focused on himself, What he doesn't have, what he fears he's losing or has already lost, and what he cannot control anymore. And he loses himself. He loses his grip on his kingship. He loses his people.
Speaker 2:He loses his character, and he loses sight of God. And too often, when I am faced with a difficult season of wilderness, I exhibit Saul's tendencies. I focus too much on myself or on the problem and less on who God is and what God is doing in me. Now keep in mind, this is easy to say from outside of a physical wilderness moment. And if we're honest, maybe a lot of us default and begin to come undone like Saul does when we're faced with some circumstantial wilderness.
Speaker 2:But in David, we at least see what's possible. Because seemingly the more David is in that wilderness, the more he deals with God. The more he deals with God, the more he becomes himself. It's the opposite of Saul losing it. We can actually watch David become more of his true self as he's created by God.
Speaker 2:We witness this in some of the desert psalms. The psalms that are attributed to David that he wrote while he's on the run-in the wilderness. Psalms like Psalm sixty three and fifty seven. These are just some of the lines from those psalms. I earnestly seek you.
Speaker 2:I thirst for you. My whole being longs for you. Your love is better than life. I cling to you. Have mercy on me, God.
Speaker 2:In you, I take refuge. My heart, God, is steadfast. My heart is steadfast. In spite of the fear, in spite of the oppression, in spite of the wilderness, we find these kinds of words dominating the music that David is writing. As we do every week in this series, though, we are not going to gloss over David's imperfections.
Speaker 2:We have to notice that David is no longer this innocent and unknown shepherd boy. His political savvy comes into play as he works his way across the wilderness hiding from Saul. He's forming allegiances. He's making some alliances. He's gathering people to himself.
Speaker 2:One of the funny things that happens is in first Samuel 21, David acts crazy when a potential Philistine alliance starts to go wrong. So I feel like this is that all action movies that have been made in the last fifty years follow this trope. The bad guys catch the good guy, and they're like, we're gonna kill him. And then the good guy starts acting crazy and talking weird. And they're like, Otto, we won't kill him.
Speaker 2:He's just crazy. Let him go. He's just crazy. This actually happened in this story. But at the beginning of his run-in the desert, David actually lies to some priests to get some bread and to get a weapon.
Speaker 2:He's unsure about the priest's allegiances in this story, but he's still kind of this dirty trickster in this moment. He's just intent on saving his own skin. So, again, we get both. His very human nature lying to save himself and his character developed in these wilderness moments. We begin to see these moments where David moves beyond those expectations, and a god formed character takes root more deeply in him.
Speaker 2:As those priests that David lied to in order to get away, Saul is chasing David, and he ends up a few days later at the same place where David was, meets up with those priests. And Saul orders them and their families all killed just for helping David. Word gets back to that this this has happened. Word gets back to David. And Walter Brueggemann points out that Saul has just flown off the handle.
Speaker 2:And yet it's David who feels responsible for the death of these priests that unwittingly helped him. When looking at this story closer, all David has done so far is accept the anointing of a future kingship. David owning this moment speaks to his character development in this story. God's development of David's character, it actually comes to this climax for me that I see in this moment with Saul in a cave. So in chapter 24, while he's in pursuit of David, Saul stops for a second, and he leaves his army, and he steps into a cave for a potty break.
Speaker 2:Listen. You do not understand the amount of self control that it takes for me to not take this into super inappropriate places. So thank you. And I would leave it at that. But junior high Joel noticed this week that a lot of the commentators translate what Saul does in that cave into the word defecate.
Speaker 2:And I was like, oh, I forgot about that word. That's the word I wanna use whenever I talk about this stuff, which is way too often. Okay. But what's insane in this story is that the cave that Saul steps into is actually the exact same cave that David and his men are hiding in a little bit further back. So Saul is there.
Speaker 2:He's doing his thing. And David's men, they cannot believe it. They genuinely believe that God has delivered Saul into their hands. This is it. It is over.
Speaker 2:We can easily, quickly, quietly kill him. And in the most embarrassing situation that we could have dreamed up, This is awesome. But David doesn't kill him. He sneaks over and he cuts off a corner of Saul's robe partly to prove that he was there and that he could have done it. And when Saul leaves the cave, David comes out and he calls to him and he tells him that he could have killed him, but he doesn't intend to.
Speaker 2:He says in verse 12, actually, my hand will not touch you. The story says that Saul was so overwhelmed with David's acts that he turns and he says, may the Lord reward you well for the way you treated me today. I know that you will surely be king and that the kingdom of Israel will be established in your hands. This is a major turning point moment. As David's wilderness trained eyes, they looked on Saul in that moment of vulnerability, and they didn't see Saul the enemy, but Saul, the current God anointed king.
Speaker 2:David doesn't run through the wilderness, taunting Saul and mocking him. You missed me. I'm gonna take your throne, sucker. Again, because David seems focused on God, not the problem or his perceived enemy. Commentator Bill Arnold says that according to this passage, David isn't maliciously intent on taking Saul's life.
Speaker 2:He's not even culpable for Saul's demise. On the contrary, he seems motivated only by a genuine devotion to Yahweh and to the office of Israel's king. The idea of taking Saul's life is unthinkable to him. And I would add that not killing Saul has so much to do with the character that God is forging within David in the wilderness over time. We can't talk about David without talking about Jesus, and I can't talk about David in the desert without talking about Jesus in the desert.
Speaker 2:Because for forty days, Jesus was in the desert tempted. If you remember back to our series on anxiety, it was an opportunity for Jesus himself to break from the rhythms, the expectations, the culture of more, the culture of comparison, the culture of me first, a lot of those things that the devil tempted him about. And in fact, he just fought those things head on. He came face to face with them and found enough faith or courage in himself and God to put those things in their place. While Saul was the reason that David was in the wilderness, Saul didn't define or dominate the wilderness for David.
Speaker 2:While Satan tempts Jesus his whole time in the wilderness, Satan doesn't define or dominate the wilderness for Jesus. It's forty days. What gets us there does not have to define us. Like David and like Jesus, we are still defined by the divine. Both the physical and the metaphorical wilderness are just filled with the divine.
Speaker 2:And in any of our wilderness, we get the same chance that David and Jesus had to take physical time in some physical space and set ourselves in the wilderness and work with God as God puts things in their place within us and around us. And character develops step by faithful step. Trusting that God is present to us wherever we are regardless of what those steps might even be. However it is we need to step, the steps can be as unique as we each are. Usually, when my kids follow me to the prayer labyrinth, I take them out on walks.
Speaker 2:My four year old son, Frank, he wants to race through all the paths and win the labyrinth. So I appreciate that. And my daughter, Penny, who's one, she just walks straight to the center and starts dancing. There's just different steps depending on who you are. Character develops step by faithful step.
Speaker 2:Whether we're in a labyrinth, in the wilderness in Israel, when our careers are in upheaval, when our relationship has ended, if we've lost someone, if we feel angry at God or alone or lost. Bobby referenced the trailer for the upcoming Wrinkle in Time movie based on the book by Madeleine Lingle. In that trailer, Bobby said that she got chills when Oprah's character, missus Witch, says to Meg, be a warrior. I have my own love for that book and for the trailer. What's interesting is before Bobby even said that, I saw the trailer too because it came out that weekend.
Speaker 2:In that exact same scene, I get super emotional when Meg responds to the be a warrior charge with just a simple, I'll try. Walking faithfully in circumstantial or intentional wilderness is our our chance to respond to the wilderness with I'll try. And so whether you have chosen to be or if you have ended up circumstantially in some wilderness, may you have the courage to faithfully take one step at a time, not worried about the path beside you or the one you might or should be on, or if the path is supposed to go right or left or if it leads to the center or the end or where that even is. May you have the courage to faithfully try, to take one step at a time, looking for who God is and what God is doing. Trusting that as you do so, your character is being formed as you walk, and that the best parts of God's character can be revealed in our character as we come to know him more.
Speaker 2:I wanna close with a prayer for people in the wilderness today. This is an apt prayer whether you are in a circumstantial wilderness or whether you choose to be an intentional wilderness. I think that you'll find that this prayer of Thomas Merton, which we have prayed here before, beautifully echoes all of the Psalms that David himself wrote while he's in the desert. So would you pray with me? My Lord God, I have no idea where I'm going.
Speaker 2:I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end, nor do I really know myself. The fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I'm actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I'm doing.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Amen.