June 8, 2009 Sermon

Saul Disqualifies Himself
I Samuel 15:10-35

Last September seven young people from this church began working together as an Odyssey of the Mind team. Last Tuesday their season finally ended, at the World Finals. I have not spoken much of them. This is by design; though I am terribly proud of them and their accomplishments, they are but seven of the many wonderful youth with whom God has blessed our congregation. But this team has earned recognition. They won an award for creativity so rare that only one was given in all of Michigan this year. They became state champions. And this week they finished 26th in the world.

The team worked all year to build a vehicle that drove on battery power and performed four tasks. That sounds simple, but the rules actually demand far more than that. The team chose a medieval theme and made their vehicle a horse. It had a tie-dyed “hide”, a 2x4 body and a head made of plywood. It smacked a soccer ball with a polo mallet using a bungee cord for power. It flung a ping-pong ball with a team-designed miniature trebuchet. The youth installed a crossbow made from a bowstring and those fiberglass rods snowplowers use to mark the edges of parking lots. And they added a music box engineered from a couple of cafeteria-sized peach cans, a toy xylophone, dowel rods, cardboard, caulking compound, eye hooks, duct tape, fishing line and a bag of weights that fell through a scaffold. It is impossible to know how many hours the team spent on that horse. But once they competed at the World Finals, they had to junk it. We had no way to bring it back to Traverse City.

Now from our very first moment on the campus of the University of Maryland, where the OM World Finals took place, we heard the blare of those long plastic horns that sound uncomfortably like an amplification of a person who has eaten too many beans. Kids blew them through dormitory windows. They blew them from the swimming pool. They blew them walking along the sidewalks. They blew them during the opening and closing ceremonies. At the end, as I watched Chris Doherty and Jake Perrin struggle to hoist the horse’s “body” up and into a dumpster, and as unexpected tears came to my eyes because that horse had become such an important part of nine lives—including my own—some kid in a room directly above the dumpster blew one of those horns.

We never like to throw away precious things. And when somebody disrespects the moment, it stings all the more. We just read how the Lord discarded King Saul almost immediately after he rose to power in Israel. To be sure, God had resisted naming a king for the Chosen People. God wanted to be king—as well as Lord, protector, provider, judge, jury and more—for the people. But the people kept clamoring for a king. All the other nations had kings. And not to put too fine a point on it, the Israelites were losing far too many battles against those other peoples. Their attitude hardened against the very God who had delivered on every promise. They preferred to put their trust in a human king. Imperfect though he might be, at least they could see him! The Lord God Almighty they no longer trusted to show up every time they felt they needed him.

The Lord finally relented. Working through the prophet Samuel, the Lord chose Saul to become king. Saul did not want to become king. But the Lord had decreed it. Samuel anointed Saul with oil and proclaimed him king of the Israelites. Saul started well. He defeated several local enemies, including the hated Philistines. Then the Lord—again through Samuel the prophet—told Saul to make war on the Amalekites, killing every last one of them. Saul led his men into battle. They destroyed the Amalekites, but Saul spared the life of their king. Then he directed his men to steal their crops and herds.

Saul could not seem to obey God, even when he tried. He cheerfully greeted Samuel with the claim he had done all that God commanded. And to be fair, he had killed almost all the Amalekites, sparing only their king. But Samuel asked why he heard sheep and cattle. Saul admitted he and his men had kept them alive in order to sacrifice them as offerings to the Lord. This is not what God had commanded. As Samuel put it, God desires obedience more than sacrifice. Because even on his best day Saul could not obey the Lord, the Lord rejected him. Saul remained king, but without the sponsorship, the approval, the protection of the Lord God Almighty.

Because Saul disobeyed God, God dropped Saul. Though Saul thought he had actually gone above and beyond God’s commands, God disagreed—and made him pay a heavy price. This story raises hard questions. Why would the God whom we know as Love require that an entire tribe (the Amalekites) be erased? And why would this God lower the boom on a king who was only trying to make a bigger, better offering? In a sense, these questions apply to the entire Old Testament. Why does the God of Love act in ways we consider unloving? And why does this God require perfect, slavish, inhuman obedience from His people?

I had a Boys’ Club basketball coach who had many rules. One that especially irritated me was the rule that if a player said even one word to a referee, that player would sit for the next 10 minutes on the game clock. In a tournament game we had a ref who called me for traveling several times. I knew the rule. I knew the move he called traveling was not traveling. But what I had not accepted at the age of 14 (and still have not, deep down inside), is that if the ref calls it traveling, it’s traveling. I bit my tongue the first few times it happened. Then he called it again. Frustrated beyond the boiling point, I demonstrated the move I had made and mouthed (did not say) the words, “Not traveling!” But here came a substitute. We lost the game by a small margin. Had I stayed in, we likely would have won. The coach never said a word to me. He had made his point. He made the rules. He enforced the rules. On one level our relationship with God follows this pattern. God makes the rules. God enforces the rules.

But if God limited Himself simply to making and enforcing rules, then God would not also be the God of grace. The very fact of the incarnation, of the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, into this world to save us from our disobedience, proves that God’s plan transcends the rules. Still, the rules exist. And we must try to obey them. One of the great themes of the Samuels is that God punishes disobedience. If God did not, the grace of God as found in Jesus Christ would not come to us as such incredibly Good News. We worship a God who commands obedience but who forgives our disobedience. Praise God!

Had I more time to examine the text I would deal more fully with the difficult questions it raises. If you would like to explore them with me please contact me. For now, we must keep our eyes on this one point: God commands obedience, but forgives our disobedience. Saul tried to plead weakness. But Samuel would not listen to it. “Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord has anointed you king over Israel.” Most of us live smallish lives. We have little power, little authority. But this does not exempt us from obeying God.

The prophet Micah, another Old Testament figure, asked the right question: “What does the Lord require but that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God?” Everybody must try to obey the rules of God, which when properly understood lead us to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God. When we fail to obey these mandates we can (and indeed, must) confess our failing. Even King Saul did as much. When we do, we (unlike him) can trust that God will not discard us. But then, we worship the God who has, in the fullness of time, sent His son to die for our sins. Obey that God as best you can. Confess it when you fail. And thank God that we know his Son as Savior.