A sermon preached at First Church UCC, Middletown, Ct on March 19, 2023
Scripture: Romans 12:1-3, The Message Translation
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for [God]. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what [God] wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.
1 Samuel 13: 1-13
The Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul? I have rejected him from being king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.”
Samuel said, “How can I go? If Saul hears of it, he will kill me.” And the Lord said, “Take a heifer with you, and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.’ Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do; and you shall anoint for me the one whom I name to you.” Samuel did what the Lord commanded, and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, “Do you come peaceably?” He said, “Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the Lord; sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.” And he sanctified Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.
When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.” But the Lordsaid to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lorddoes not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. He said, “Neither has the Lord chosen this one.” Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, “Neither has the Lord chosen this one.” Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, “The Lord has not chosen any of these.” Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and bring him; for we will not sit down until he comes here.” He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The Lord said, “Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.” Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward. Samuel then set out and went to Ramah.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Years ago, I read Claudia Black’s book It Will Never Happen to Me and my life was changed. I’d been raised in an alcoholic family. While I knew that my father was an alcoholic, and I knew I didn’t want to live like that, I had not realized the extent to which that experience had formed, molded, even warped the way I saw the world. I thought how I experienced things was just who I was, and formed the limitations within which I lived.
Claudia Black’s book changed that perception. She helped me see that some of the characteristics which had formed & limited my life were not “me” but rather artefacts of my family’s challenges. That meant, to me, that I could move beyond them, grow into new and better ways of being.
In those days, I often found myself running book displays at church meetings. and talked the book up regularly. I’d sell maybe 10 or 20 copies at each book fair. (There are a lot of adult children of alcoholics here in New England.) I discovered to my astonishment, that for some people the book became for them an excuse to stay where they were instead of a get out of jail card.
They might simply refuse to acknowledge they’d been raised in alcoholic families — sure, they’d say, everyone drank, but so what? But mostly, they denied that growing up with one or both parents drunk much of the time had formed their lives in any way: “Yeah, I was never sure that dad would pick me up, but what’s new about that? Fathers are unreliable, you know.”
They were locked in a past that still held them captive. They were terrified about what they might find if they began to really look at their lives, to discover who they might be without those habits and assumptions, and so they pretended that they’d not been affected in anyway by their parents’ drinking.
But, you know as well as I that the what we’ve been raised with can be pretty comfortable even if it is warped, kinda, sorta… and it’s not just those of us raised in alcoholic homes who prefer the familiarity of what we know to the unfamiliar feelings of a life in the light.
Looking backwards, living in yesterday, is such a human temptation.
When Samuel the prophet went out to find a successor to King Saul, he went looking backwards, hoping to find someone who had the same kind of outward looks, the same height, the same whatever, as Saul, because Saul looked right to be a king. He looked backwards, even tho history told him that Saul had turned out to not be a good king; he looked the part but he didn’t fill the part. Samuel’s experience led him to look first at the tallest of Jesse’s sons, the oldest of the sons… and then to work his way down the list, in the traditional fashion, until each and every one that looked like a king had been rejected by God. Only then did he ask about anyone else. Only then, did he look upon David.
Do you remember the story about Jesus healing a blind man – and all the local folks, instead of celebrating, start whining because Jesus not one of them?
Jesus doesn’t live the right way, do the right things in the right order, doesn’t get permission. Jesus is looking forward, trying to find answers that fit that day’s problems. He sees the blind man, today, now, blind, and needing help. The establishment sees a temptation — sure the guy’s blind, but can’t he wait until tomorrow, until we get the right license, until we do things the way we’ve always done them?
Judging tomorrow’s capacities by yesterday’s standards is really our default position, and it’s hard, really hard for us to see that we have woken up in a new reality.
Jesus points us a toward new way to live, a way that is not grounded in living just as we did yesterday, but rather in seeing the reality of the world today. As a teacher writes: “even our most cherished practices matter little if they do not facilitate a relationship with the living God.”[1] Paul tells us that when we live our whole lives as one integrated experience, we can then present that life, our life, to God as a completely acceptable offering.
This is good news.
We don’t have to keep doing what didn’t work before in the vain hope that this time things will change.
We are free to learn from our experiences – to allow the living Christ to change our lives, to move in new directions.
We are willing to be vulnerable, open to truly seeing one another and our world, and to build a community in Christ’s name that takes everyone’s gifts, skills and future seriously.
We serve a God who loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us locked in yesterday.
Today, I am grateful for the call to look in a forward direction.
Amen.
© 2023, Virginia H. Child
[1] David J. Lose, In the Meantime, 3/26/17
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 