June 13, 2021 – Third Sunday after Pentecost

“We need God to know and act on God’s will.”

Let us pray.  Holy and gracious God, we give you thanks for your presence in this time and place and within each one of us in the many locations we have gathered this day.  Help us now to open our minds, our hearts, our whole lives, to receive the gift of your living Word for us this day; and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Well, as I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon last Sunday, the focus in the Scripture readings has now shifted to us – meaning in the sense that God is speaking to us as disciples of Jesus Christ, instructing us how to live faithfully – letting us know what God expects of us, and the grace of God that is available to us.  So if we look at the first two sentences of today’s Collect Prayer, we pray these words, “Almighty God, without you we are not able to please you.  Mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.”  When we first read those words, they really do sound like a kind of standard religious language.  They roll off our tongues almost like, “The Lord be with you.  And also with you.”  Hopefully, though, by the end of this sermon we’ll grasp those words with greater truth and humility.

Let’s go first to the First Reading from 1st Samuel.  We began the story of Saul last week – Israel’s first king - who was appointed against Samuel’s better judgement.  But God instructed him to go ahead and anoint Saul as king.  And things have not gone well for Saul, such that the writer of this chapter states, “And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.” And one verse later God says to Samuel, “I have rejected Saul from being king over Israel.” 

So what went wrong?  If we were to read the chapters of 1st Samuel between last week’s Sunday reading and this week’s, we would find these things.  There were recorded at least three major problems with Saul’s reign as king.  In the first one, Saul is poised with his army to go to battle against the enemies of Israel.  He agrees to wait for seven days for Samuel to arrive to the scene.  Samuel is coming to lead the special worship and sacrifice before the armies go into battle, so that they will go with God’s blessing.  But Samuel shows up late and Saul has already gone ahead and led the worship himself.  It would be a little bit like, on a Sunday morning at All Saints here, if Don doesn’t show up by 11 o’clock, then one of the other lay leaders, perhaps Dietrich, or Yanna, or Glory, goes ahead and presides at the Holy Eucharist and serves Communion themselves.  In the second incident, Saul is really zealous to defeat his enemies.  And he orders that no one in his army is to eat any food until they’ve won the battle.  The problem is that his son, Jonathan, doesn’t hear the order, and so he samples a little wild honey on the way.  And it almost causes Saul to execute his own son!  And then, the third incident with Saul, involves a particular enemy where God orders Saul and the Israelite army to totally destroy them – even kill all their sheep and cattle.  But instead, Saul spares the life of the enemy king, and the soldiers keep for themselves some of the enemy’s choicest cattle and sheep.  The point here is not that Saul has necessarily done things that are morally or ethically wrong – it is that he has not followed God’s will.  That’s what the writer of 1st Samuel is trying to get across.  Saul has taken things into his own hands.

Now it may seem to us that some of his pragmatic decisions seem quite reasonable.  In the first instance, the delayed worship before battle – some of his army were starting to leave in the delay.  So imagine if today’s Worship Team, assuming that we had a congregation here in church, were waiting for me to arrive, and they noticed that people started getting and up walking out because they’d given up on the service.  It would seem reasonable for them to take the situation into their own hands and lead the worship themselves.  And then, in the third instance, sparing the life of the enemy king seems like a merciful thing to do.  And at the end of today’s First Reading we hear about the rise of the next king – young David – who is held up as Israel’s ideal king; and yet he committed adultery during his reign and Saul certainly didn’t do that!

But what Saul did not do was have the humility to realize that in order to serve and follow God, he needed to communicate with God and constantly be seeking and obeying God’s will.  Recall the words in the Collect Prayer “God without you we are not able to please you.”  It is not there there’s something wrong with us, or that God wants to ‘lord it over us’.”  It’s just that we’re not God!  We can’t fully comprehend God’s will or God’s ways.  We need God’s help, in the form of the Holy Spirit, in order to do that.  We need to be in an active relationship with God all the time.

Now, in today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus tries to show this gap between our understanding and God’s – this mystery between God’s ways and our limited understanding of those ways.  And he does so in the teaching about the Kingdom.  He says, “The Kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”  Now while we in the 21st century understand a little more of the chemical and biological processes of plant growth, we are not able to make it happen ourselves!  And then Jesus paints another farming illustration.  He says, “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs.”  Again, we know enough about plant biology to know sometimes smaller seeds make larger plants.  But we have no control over that.

What is the point of Jesus’ teaching?  The emerging Kingdom of God that Jesus has initiated does not proceed in a simple, linear progression.  Sometimes it can even appear to take one step forward and two steps back – or maybe a lot of steps back!  How do we fit a global pandemic into the emerging Kingdom of God?  Or what about 215 residential school children buried in unmarked graves while under the care of church representatives?  Or four members of a Muslim family being struck down on a London, Ontario street?  Of course, we conclude that this is not God but evil at work and, yes, that is true.  But how does it fit into God’s emerging Kingdom?

In the present time we do not know.  And because of that we’re tempted to leave God out of the equation when dealing with those things, and respond simply as best as we know how on our own.  But that may not always be the best course of action, as Saul discovered in today’s First Reading, because God is very much with us in every situation.  God cares about a global pandemic.  God care about 215 indigenous children disposed of in Kamloops.  God cares about the murder of four members of a Muslim family in London.

So in our grief, our anger, our defensiveness, and our discouragement, we need to turn to God first – even if it is in anger or lament, shame or pain.  Because God is continually building God’s Kingdom of justice, mercy and love, and is trying to do it through you and me.  Can we understand all God’s plan?  Of course not!  But this we do know – God loves this world more than we can even fathom.  And recognizing both our own limitations as well as the inestimable love and power of God’s Spirit at work in us, we need to pray and act on the reality expressed in today’s Prayer after Communion, at the end of our service, “Guide us with your Holy Spirit that we may honour you, not only with our lips, but also in our lives.  This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.