Choosing the Little One

And to make sure that folks didn't miss the point, Jesus refused to shoo away the children who were part of the crowds around himself, but instead greeted them, held them, blessed them on their way.

The Lord God thus has a very long history with us of making choices that we do not expect and keeping his own counsel in the matter,

because he sees the heart and not the external things that we count so highly.

Our First Lesson today is about another of those surprises, the selection of David to eventually succeed Saul as King of Israel.

We would have structured things differently, and even Samuel was startled by the choice of David.

We would go for the one who looked best on television,

or the one with the biggest advertizing budget,

but God chooses the youngest son of a family from a small clan in the smallest tribe in Israel.

For persons who are comfortable with privilege and power, this may be distressing,

but for those who know they are being victimized by oppressive government and the like may hear good news in this story.

God can make use of the inconsequential person or resource just as much as he does with others.

We need not get lost in speculations as to why Jesse didn't arrange things so that David was present from the start:

jealousy, absent-mindedness, lack of servants to tend the sheep instead of he boy, or whatever....

For the sake of the story, all we need to know is that he was not present and was summoned after all the other sons had been considered and put aside.

And what we need to know next is that David consented to the call of God.

He was not expecting it and he had not done anything that folks would consider him worthy of it.

Remember how Samuel as a child had responded to the voice in the night: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”

It is a similar willingness to listen that moves David at this time.

Does he understand all that he will need to know? Certainly not.

It will be learned and discerned in the doing and the living of a faithful life.

We're heading toward a different definition of “child-likeness.”

We usually think of that as being uninformed.

Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian of 50 years ago, says that what we are lifting up here is a child-likeness that recognizes the limits of human knowledge, and thus approaches life with awe, hope, and fear.

With awe, because this different spirit of child-likeness knows that the mystery of life is something more than an unknown region not yet explored by an advancing science;

with hope, because “it does not yet appear what we shall be” [1 John 3:2], and no record of past history gives us an adequate clue of what God's creative power may bring forth out of the infinite possibilities of existence;

and with fear, because it knows the possibilities of evil that pop up each day, which are not adequately anticipated by looking at the past.

Persons who hold this appropriate kind of child-likeness will prefer hope to their anxieties because they know that good is more primary than evil, that the world could not exist at all if it were not good since creation is God's triumph over chaos and nothingness.

We can thus approach life fearful and yet unafraid.

And this attitude will be stronger than a culture which is based on the illusion that our human intelligence can overcome the chaos that is around us and within us, that we are smarter than God.

What made David great was not that he turned out to be a perfect king; he was not.

Actions such as playing favorites with his sons, and his dalliance with Bathsheba, are far too serious kinds of blunders to claim innocence and perfection.

But he could be called back to awe, hope, and fear of God when he walked into the swamp of sinful separation from God and man.

Remember that it was the task of Nathan the prophet to speak the sharply-worded parable of the ewe lamb to him and point to the king and say “You are the guilty one.” [1 Kings 12]

David repented of the evil and returned to proper awe and fear of God.

There is a passage in Deuteronomy [17:16-17] that speaks of the proper awe that a king of Israel should have: He must not acquire many horses for himself, or return the people to Egypt in order to acquire more horses...And he must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; also gold and silver he must not acquire in great quantity for himself.

Why these three strictures?

Horses are a reference to excess military power which becomes more trusted than God;

foreign wives bring along other gods to be worshiped and thus begin to lead others away;

gold and silver are reference to a lavish and expensive court.

From a class or group sometime in years past I wrote in the margin of my Bible at this point “but not like Solomon.”

Solomon, for all his purported wisdom, broke all three of those guides, and thus could never be a model king the way he should have been.

He engaged in prideful foreign entanglements, cemented the treaties with many extra wives, and developed a very costly court.

And as even more of a problem, he was unable to pass the right attitude on to the next generation; his son was a disaster as a king, with little of the childlike awe which a king was supposed to have and lots of the arrogant pride which leads to greater disaster.

Paul observes in 1 Corinthians 1:28 that God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, in order to reduce to nothing the things than are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

And Jesus chose to heal the man born blind, one held in disdain by those around him, a “little one” of another sort.

It is good news for all who recognize their poverty of spirit.

May that healing become our story as well!

We've already remembered Jesus' attitude toward little ones.

What a contrast Jesus' attitude is to the general opinion around the ancient world.

For example, we have a papyrus letter from an Egyptian worker to his wife while he was working far from home.

He expressed his concern for his pregnant wife, but then said “If by chance you bear a son, let it be, if it is a girl, cast it out to die. I urge you not to worry.”

A child was a nobody, a nothing, unless his father accepted him as a member of the family.

Otherwise the child is abandoned or left to be taken up by someone and raised as a slave.

Are we any better?

We have passed absolute life or death decisions these days from the father to the mother.

What did Jesus do with little ones?

He touched them, took them in his arms, blessed them, laid hands on them.

These are the official actions of a father designating the new-born for life instead of death, accepting the child into the family rather than casting that child into the garbage.

It is Good News for us whenever we are feeling low, small, abandoned, or alone.

God his children [of whatever age!] never forsakes;

His the loving purpose solely

To preserve them pure and holy.[LBW#474.4]

And the spirit of the Lord came upon David mightily from that day forward. [1Sam.16:13]

May it be so with us as well. Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.