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David Part 4
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:For those of you I may not have had a chance to meet personally, my name is Scott, and I am one of the people privileged to serve in this community as a pastor. My family and I are currently thorough we're thoroughly enjoying our first summer back in Calgary after fourteen plus years away. And like many of you, we've had some chance to get out camping and steal away for some day trips, that sort of fun stuff. And on one of those trips recently, I had several impressions from my childhood flash into my memory from when my parents owned a cabin in the Cypress Hills of Southern Saskatchewan. Because for me, there's something particularly grounding in the aroma and the solitude of the Alpine forest that we have access to just west of town.
Speaker 2:This is a sensation that I've actually searched for in other places that I've lived. What restful experiences like this have done for me, or given me actually, during this exciting season with all of its busyness and challenges, it's given me a tangible sense of being at home in the time and the space that I occupy right now. And I hope that as many of you are traveling and you're resting and you're pulling back a little bit maybe from everyday life in the summer, I hope you're finding your soul drawn to holy spaces and encounters that are rest filled and recharging for you. And related to this, we're hoping that our current David series will be a beneficial contribution to your summer life. Cause there's a whole wide sweeping nature to how the scriptures talk about David's life.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I've found so far is that as we've settled down into particular episodes or characters, there's been a tremendous correspondence between the text and my lived experience. And Bobby's thoughtful and challenging sermon last week was no exception as she walked us toward a theology of the liminal spaces in our lives. Now with this idea, she was referring to some of the places in our lives that are marked by ambiguity or disorientation because of change or transition or transformation. And I don't know about you, but I found some expansive meaning right on the heels of her words because this has been a year of change for me. We moved across the country.
Speaker 2:We joined a new community. I went through a complete shift in career, and there's been lots of twists and turns along the way. But guess what? This has also been a year of change for our church. In fact, some of you who've been around longer than me, you're sort of looking at me like, yeah, when has it not been changing?
Speaker 2:Right? And we find ourselves in the middle of a transformation into being a church living and breathing in two communities, and we negotiate that change with a keen sense that in this in between place we're in, that we're being invited to become a more mature version of ourselves, leaning further into what it means to put Jesus at the center while remaining spiritually and intellectually vibrant. As individuals and as a community, Bobby turned our attention last week to the contentious and emotionally layered relationship between David and Saul as a way of exploring these types of seasons in our lives, as a way of engaging the ascension and the waxing and the waning that we can experience in our lives. That is a story of embattled and future kings, of the tension between old and young, of has been and will be. And the two men in that story, David and Saul, they illustrate the myriad of circumstances that we face when we're displaced from who we are or who we were, and we're unable to make sense of where we're going.
Speaker 2:Bobby encouraged us just to pay attention to the work of the divine, to affirm a trust in God's nearness, and to seek mature and fruitful supports in such times. And I trust that wherever you are in your story, that you found yourself gently comforted by God's good continuing work in the mix of beginnings and endings that maybe you're living through right now. Today, we turn our attention to the story of David and Jonathan to themes of vulnerability and fidelity. But before we do that, I wanna invite you to pray with me. Oh, creator God, we're thankful for this time and this space that we share today where we are able to make confessions of your kindness and where our eyes are lifted even for just a moment from our various situations to consider your faithful presence in our lives.
Speaker 2:And I pray that you would guide us gently toward a clearer understanding of your great love today, of your continuing work of making us whole, and that you would give us grace to live in agreement with that work, surrendering all of our clamoring search for control. We pray these things in the name of Christ and by the spirit. Amen. Alright. So we return now to the Hebrew Bible, the tale of Israel's greatest hero king and his relationship with a man named Jonathan who as just so happens is the son of king Saul from last week.
Speaker 2:Now like most players in this story, Jonathan is a complex participant, and we don't have time today to scroll through all of his activity and his appearances, but I do need to say that even before David shows up in the biblical story, Jonathan's already there and he's showing himself to be a qualified warrior and an effective troublemaker. In first Samuel 13, it tells us that Jonathan had a habit of attacking Israel's technologically advanced enemies, so he's stirring up trouble, And chapter 14 tells a great tale where, like David would just two chapters later, Jonathan wins a startling victory for Israel in the face of startling odds. In addition to this, he accomplishes these exploits while appearing faithful to Jehovah, which contrasts him with his father who is finding it difficult again and again to do the right thing. And what this means then, if you happen to find yourself here and you're not intimately connected or familiar with the story, it makes sense that you would look at Paul's life. He's the king, and he's making a mess of things.
Speaker 2:You'd look at him, you'd say, oh, I get it. Jonathan's the good guy, and he's the chosen one, and he's gonna turn things around, except that's not what happens. Now what happens is that the ancient narrators of this tale turn very quickly to David. As Joel covered two weeks ago, his breakout moment happens when he defeats a giant in hand to hand combat, and then in the aftermath of that victory, he gets brought into the court of the king. And these events lead to a kind of tension between David and the ruling family, obviously, and Bobby sort of alluded to this last week.
Speaker 2:As the reading audience, we know that David's been chosen. We know that god's on his side, but nobody else in the story does. And consequently, we find ourselves wanting David to escape. We want him to succeed while we also loathe Saul's insecurity and manipulative tendencies. Now I think it's helpful to remind ourselves of how stories functioned in the ancient world.
Speaker 2:Jeremy touched on this in week one of the series where he talked about how god's spirit moved the ancient writers to write a literary account more than a literal one. And Bobby offered us another handle for this practice last week when she talked about or he she encouraged us to take a position of parallelism with the characters in each story where we see them as multidimensional and human just like we are. And I wanna place a finer point on this practice especially for us as a community that tries to study and interpret the text faithfully in the way that we do. It's important for us to acknowledge the limits of historical veracity in the story that we're talking about today because it's really, really, really old. To put it in perspective, our best historical reference points for the cultures of the ancient world at this time, they're actually found in ancient Greece, and the events of David's life predate those by roughly seven hundred years.
Speaker 2:And I realize that some of you, like my wife, you hear the words historical reference points, you and just immediately suspend listening until I move on. Your empty eyes betray you. K? But what I mean when I mention this or the the why it's important to mention it is that these stories say that we can't be sure of dates and locations maybe, but we can be sure that we are reading a deeply meaningful history rooted in cultures and places that we know existed to some extent. And the point of course is to just realize that we record history very differently today than they used to in the ancient world.
Speaker 2:And why this matters is because our commitment to being honest about the background and the context of biblical texts here at Commons isn't the end of our reading. We push into a literary understanding of these texts, This means that we might find ourselves reading the scriptures like we read the Iliad or Shakespeare or even Jane Austen, for instance. And in doing so, we stop thinking about the context and the history, and we just enter the story. I mean, honest. When's the last time you let plausibility get in the way of your favorite love story or your favorite period piece?
Speaker 2:Right? We just don't do that. We get into it. And similarly, our goal in teaching here is to expand our imagination for how the biblical texts inform our understanding of God's character by attending to history, not by being constrained by it. We wanna move into successive layers of interpretation that the contemplatives of our tradition give us where it's more than just our intellectual knowledge that's expanded.
Speaker 2:We want our spiritual sensibilities to be transformed, where you and I begin to see our lives in the text, and we begin to see the divine activity of the text in our lives. Now I say that as a way of clarifying Jonathan's place in this story that we're gonna look at. He comes in and out of the tale in a series of vignettes, and I wanna look at a couple of those today. But I also wanna tend to this way in which he does so in an episodic way. He shows up and then he's gone.
Speaker 2:And what I mean by that or what I mean when I say that is that we have to acknowledge as Walter Brueggemann writes that David is an engine for Israel's imagination and for Israel's public history. And consequently, Brueggemann and other scholars point to the way in which David's life, his story, and all of the details we have in the text, they've been constructed as a way or a project of nation making. And while that might bother some of us, right, the feeling of being intellectually manipulated by these ancient writers, I love that Brueggemann follows that observation with the assertion that similarly, we are, all of us, imaginative constructions. And isn't that true? Have you ever thought about how your life is a collection of stories and how you tell different versions to different people at different times.
Speaker 2:Just think your mom and your first date. Right? Really simple. How certain episodes loom large for a time only to become part of the geological foundation from which you launch a future pursuit, or how your memory of what happened can change as you change and move. And what I want us to see today is that significant truth, albeit maybe a mild cliche, that we don't write our stories autonomously, that as author and advocate Eugene Cho tweeted just recently, there's no such thing as a self made person.
Speaker 2:Somebody believed, encouraged, or invested in you. So today, let's tune our ears to the ways in which David's story, the story that we know well, is actually composed in and through his connection to Jonathan and lean into God's good work in our own stories. So the first vignette, I mentioned this is the count of John and Dave's first meeting in the moments of David's victory over Goliath right at the end of first Samuel chapter 17 where David is brought before Saul and the text says, still holding the Philistine's head. And thanks here to the medieval artist who sat in front of an empty canvas hundreds of years ago and could find no inspiration beyond this. And in a scene reminiscent of a Tarantino film, David stands there like a sling, twirling, sword wielding hero just drip, drip, drip, and there's this pregnant pause, and Saul looks at him and goes, who are you?
Speaker 2:And he says, oh, I'm Jesse's son, your servant from Bethlehem. And then the text says this, after David finished talking to Saul, Jonathan became one spirit with David, and he loved him as himself. And from that day, Saul kept David with him and didn't let him return home to his family. And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself, and he took off his robe that he was wearing, and he gave it to David along with his tunic and even his sword, his bow, and his belt. There's a lot going on here.
Speaker 2:Beyond the sort of underlying political political intrigue and the r rated scene, right, due to gory violence, this is just a bizarre way for a friendship to start. Right? I mean, we assume that David actually put the head down so that he could shake Jonathan's hand? But seriously, beyond all of the visual confusion, there's something significant going on here. Because while we as readers know that David has been chosen, we don't know how it's going to happen.
Speaker 2:We don't know how his kingship will arrive, and the truth is that this chapter and the ones following will show us that Saul's gonna become jealous, and he's actually gonna try to kill David. And in stark literary contrast to the maniacal and defensive monarch, we see here Jonathan, the high prince, the heir to the throne, aligning himself with God's shepherd of choice, giving him the symbols and the tools of royalty, affirming David's story not as it is but as it will be. And the vocabulary in the story is so interesting because this Hebrew phrase that's translated became one spirit or rather literally become knit together. It's curious because, yeah, it does sort of give you the sense of this inseparable devotion, but those terms actually have a double or a parallel meaning that's more political, referring perhaps to Jonathan being bound or indebted to David with the implication being that in this epic struggle between the purposes of God for David and Saul's belligerent opposition to those purposes, Jonathan is on David's side, and he shouldn't be. And he's walking into dangerous territory because as someone wise once said, in the game of thrones, you either win or you die.
Speaker 2:But more than that, what I like about that Hebrew phrase is the fact that it implies that their relationship was complicated. That whatever Jonathan saw in David, whatever it was that he admired and then affirmed, it's not as though their relationship was without gray areas, and the story makes that clear. Jonathan's the one who's supposed to be the king, not David, but here he is binding himself to the shepherd boy, and we don't know why he's doing this. And we need to settle down here for just a second because what Jonathan's doing here is modeling a form of companionship and support that we all need in our haphazard negotiation of our lives. Like David, we're always having to discern and apprehend God's work in the midst of our everyday chaos, and we feel as though it's often more undefined than we'd want it to be most of the time.
Speaker 2:Do you know what I mean? When we're caught between the expectations we have of ourselves and those of a friend or a partner or an employer, or when we have an opportunity in our work or career and we we're not sure if it's what we should do, if it's the best thing for us, or maybe we find ourselves in a place of difficulty with our health waning or we're in a relational conflict or we're looking at an undetermined future. If we're honest, we find ourselves in places like that more often than we want, and here's the catch. I think in this story, David's in one of those spots. While things might look okay while he's standing there holding that head, there's a lot of uncertainty floating around.
Speaker 2:Who should he be? Who can he trust, and which way should he go? And it's in that place of vulnerability that Jonathan comes into the story. And I wonder if there isn't a twofold invitation here for us, where first, if we find ourselves in a place where we're unsure of who to be or where to go, that we might find ourselves or be encouraged to listen for and be open to the generous voices that come to us in that very place. Those knit together with us in our challenging seasons, speaking to us about who we truly are and bolstering our fragile courage and helping us by sharing their time and their resources.
Speaker 2:It might be a grandparent or a childhood friend, could be a perceptive professor that you have or a sensitive employer, whatever. Might just be a trusted confidant. Someone present to us when we don't have the strength and when we've made a massive mess or when our daily life becomes a burden rather than a joy and when we feel like we're our own worst enemy. It's in moments like that that the spirit of God is present to us, shaping our stories through the voices, the hearts, and the commitments of people that look like Jonathan. They just show up, and we're encouraged to step into opportunities, responsibilities, and fruitfulness by these people, things that maybe we suspected or hoped were ours but had never really leaned into.
Speaker 2:One of the recent examples for me in my own life of this came a couple of years ago. I was working on my PhD, working with graduate students, things were going well. We loved our home. We loved our church. We loved our neighborhood.
Speaker 2:Our life was more stable than it had been previously, and I'd just been recently invited to participate in an international colloquium of scholars in my field. So this is awesome. Right? But I had this sense that as the doctoral program of my story was drawing to a close, that things were gonna have to change, but I didn't know how. And in the middle of that, someone had the audacity to ask me if I was interested in serving a church.
Speaker 2:They asked me if I was interested in pastoral work, and the question threw me off. I was like, no. And then I started saying to people close to me, can you believe this? Somebody asked me if I wanna be a pastor. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Right? And I'll never forget my best friend whose name is Jonathan, and not just for the purposes of the story. Right? Jonathan says to me, he looks at me calmly, and he said, why don't you lean into that? What do you gotta lose?
Speaker 2:And you know what? In that moment, my friend spoke to something in me that I was uncertain of, that I'd been unwilling to claim, but something that I saw clearly just because he had been carefully willing to point it out. And while his affirmation didn't mean that everything just fell into place right away, his companionship in that key moment of my life placed me on a trajectory that would bring me to moments like these. Now in addition to instances like that, where we're able to be open to those who might come alongside us and shape us, I wonder if there isn't another invitation here in this story where some of us might be compelled to be present to someone like Jonathan was to David and this might sound altruistic I realize because most of us walk around saying, I'd like I'm a good person. I'd like to shape someone's life.
Speaker 2:I'd like to be great at that and it shouldn't be lost on us though the complicated nature of Jonathan and David's friendship and in similar fashion how for many of us those that we have the greatest capacity to shape, to speak into, are those that we have the most tension, baggage, competition, and history with. Where our tendency might be because of past events or future conflicts, we might avoid those opportunities because they will require us to be kind and generous and vulnerable and it's those relationships that this story we're looking at calls to mind. The story invites us to consider how sincere compliments or just checking in with someone or having a conversation over coffee, these things have the capacity to shape another person's narrative. How how to offer an apology or to collaborate with a competitive colleague or even to just give someone a simple unexpected gift can change the tone of that person's life, and my prayer is that you can catch a glimpse even in this moment of how such simple gestures have the potential to partner with God's unfolding work in someone else's life near you. Now I wanna explore one more quick vignette before we close today.
Speaker 2:And for this one, we fast forward a couple of years where after multiple attempts on his life, David comes to Jonathan for guidance and help. He's convinced that Saul is gonna get lucky one of these days, and he's he's gonna get it. And on top of it all and maybe most tragically, Saul's sustained pursuit has David thinking that maybe, just maybe, Jonathan is gonna back out of their covenant and he's gonna betray him. And he actually says to Jonathan in the text, look, before you do that, just kill me yourself. And Jonathan responds.
Speaker 2:It's such an emotional conversation. He said, never. I would never do that. I'm gonna figure out a way to help you. And then from first Samuel 20, Jonathan says this, may the Lord be with you as he's been with my father, but show me unfailing kindness like the Lord's kindness as long as I live so that I may not be killed.
Speaker 2:And do not ever cut off your kindness from my family, not even when the Lord has cut off every one of David's enemies from the face of the earth. So Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David and Jonathan had David reaffirm his oath out of love for him because he loved him as he loved himself. And we come here to what commentator Bill Arnold calls the thematic centerpiece of the story of Jonathan. In the scenes that follow, Jonathan's actually going to risk his life to defend David and get him to safety. And as the story unfolds, we're gonna find that David actually does come to power as promised, and we're gonna see him faithfully honor his promise and commitment to protect Jonathan's family.
Speaker 2:And here we see this language of covenant retrieved from the earlier chapters, except that in contrast to the earlier scene where we had no idea why Jonathan was committing himself to this guy, we see a glimpse of what a companionship marked by vulnerability and tested by time produces, fidelity. And not just a singular or individual commitment, but a mutual one between these two characters. And the Hebrew term translated here into the English word covenant refers to what Catherine's Ackenfeld calls covenant fidelity, and there are some significant theological implications to this term appearing in this text because the term is vital to our understanding of divine revelation throughout the Hebrew scriptures. We find it all over the place. It's often translated loyalty or faithfulness or kindness or love and this well rounded term often refers to God's goodness and his persistence in revelation.
Speaker 2:But there's also an underlying reciprocity to the term, which is why fidelity is such a compelling parallel term to covenant. The scriptures highlight as we discussed at length in our Roman series earlier this year that our relationship with the divine, wherever we find ourselves in it, it only comes about because God is faithful, endlessly pledged to all creation. And the scriptures then go on to tell us a compelling story of those who are haltingly responding and turning toward and identifying with that great faithfulness. Now what's compelling about this term in this story and its application to human relationships is that it's not an abstract idea. It's not a vague, oh, I get it.
Speaker 2:Those two guys are committed to each other. It's not like that. No. It refers to something that somebody does which is why it's translated show kindness to someone which is what we see in this exchange. Now it's intriguing to me that this concept appears in the text both as a noun and as a verb, both as an idea or ideal that David and Jonathan are holding to and as something that's enacted and lived into by both of them, And this is so true when you think about it.
Speaker 2:Right? How the relationships that we have that are the most robust and then the most healthily formative, they're the ones that have the closest distance between those two things, where we find ourselves day by day living into the verbs that those relationships require of us. In my relationship with my wife, for example, I name and I celebrate the fact that we are married, but I don't just stop there. I go about the business of being married, of marrying her in a myriad of ways, imperfectly though it is often. Engaging the ideal, but then also acting to define my relationship.
Speaker 2:Or in my relationship with my children where I get to be dad, that's awesome, but then I go about the work of fathering where my affection for them is measured out in daily comfort and boundaries and hugs and kisses that I give them. And this is the power of this scene because both characters remind the other of the agreement that they've made while honestly confessing their vulnerability. David realizes that if Jonathan betrays him, he's a dead man and Jonathan affirms that if David becomes the king that God says he will, his life and that of his family will be at risk when the regime changes And both commit in that moment to living into that covenant, and this is a commitment that or it's a commitment that marks their friendship in a way that it becomes a powerful example of the fidelity that steadies us and bolsters us as we love each other in our stories. And so wherever you are in your life, wherever you find yourself today, may you have grace to sense and acknowledge God's good work right there. His patient and persistent shaping of the story that you're living in.
Speaker 2:In moments where you're disoriented maybe or you're trying to figure out where to be, who to be, and where to go, may he give you grace to be open to those who bind themselves to you along the way, unexpectedly perhaps, bringing hope and affirmation that will help you to step toward your true self in ways that you would never have imagined. And may you find courage to be generous with those with whom your relationship is complicated, Those who you've been bound to in your love, in your work, and in your time. Knowing that by leaning toward fidelity, you have the capacity to participate with God, helping to write collaboratively a story marked by his faithfulness. Let's pray together. Oh, gracious God, we are present to you powerfully in this time and space, and we acknowledge that no matter how we think about the text and no matter how we explain the text, it can come off as being really simple when in fact we are gonna walk from this time into our daily lives.
Speaker 2:And we need your grace to be with us even in our failing and even in our fortuitous attempts at fidelity and vulnerability. Would you give us grace to shape each other's stories tenderly and with faithfulness that comes from your character. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.