Really!?!

In a sermon for the festival of homiletics, Dr. Amy Butler tells a story about a conversation she had on a plane. Now, for those of you who do not know, there is one rule about plane conversations according to her. The rule is: DON’T! However, after she put her headphones in and seemed as unfriendly as possible, her neighbor engaged her in a conversation. This went back and forth for a while. After Dr. Butler put her headphones in another time; the lady went on to ask her yet another question. The question was: Do you know Jesus? For those of you who do not know, Dr. Amy Butler is the interim pastor at Community church in Honolulu HI. She is the former senior minister at the historic Riverside Church in New York, NY, where Martin Luther King Jr preached 6x and is the second tallest church in the western hemisphere. She also has pastored several other churches. So, she knew what this lady was asking her. She was asking if she had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. However, during this sermon, she was speaking to other preachers and she said as much as we study the scriptures and build sermons, she had to ask herself, does she know Jesus, really?!?

I would say that I do. I mean I grew up in church. I had some of the best Sunday School teachers. I have walked with Jesus most if not all of my life. I pray and study diligently. I feel comfortable saying, “Yes, I know Jesus.” I would bet Samuel felt the same way. If you don’t remember, Samuel was promised to serve God by his mother. She was childless and she prayed and prayed. She prayed so much that Eli, the judge at the time told her to go home and stop drinking! However, she prayed and God granted her request. Samuel, as we heard last week, had been leading the people until they got a king. Well, the king was not so great of an idea after all. Well, God had moved on. God told Samuel to go see Jesse to select a new king. Samuel and Jesse offer the sacrifice and all his sons, well all but one of his sons were presented before Samuel. Samuel had walked with God all his life. He knew what God would do right?!? He even says after one of the sons comes past him, “ "Surely the Lord's anointed is now before the LORD." We can get comfortable knowing the Lord right?!

In Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about two girls from Christian Missionary Alliance Church who knocked on her door her sophomore year in college. She writes, “They were certain who God was, what God wanted from them and from me, and where they were going to spend eternity, and what I needed to do to join them in heaven. At nineteen, I could not answer any of the questions they asked me from scripture. So, stunned by the sheer volume of the information they possessed about God, I wilted before them. Rev. Taylor figured out she didn’t know as much as she originally thought she did. Neither did Samuel. All of Jesse’s sons walked before Samuel and God told Samuel, not this one. Nope, not that one either. After all of them came forward, Jesse said well there is one more but he is tending the sheep. Surely, God doesn’t want him. Sure enough, after Samuel gets with David, he is it. He is anointed with oil and proclaimed the future king.

It is such a well known story for people who have grown up in church. I mean David is the celebrity of celebrities in the Bible, beside Jesus. Here is the problem. Samuel was told, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” Yet, consider the description of David. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The LORD said, "Rise and anoint him; for this is the one." He is it. Don’t look at the human aspects, except, the guy God picked has beautiful eyes and handsome. Now, as mentioned, the story plays out perfectly. David is described as a man after God’s own heart, but it looks like God goes against his own advice. So, it leads me to say, God looks at the heart of a person not the outward appearance, but according to this story is that really true? I mean really?

I think Samuel introduces us to a wonderful concept known as the mystery of God, because some things just don’t make sense. By the time she resigned from Grace-Calvary, I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty. I trusted God to be God even if I could not say who God was for sure. I trusted God to sustain the world although I could not say for sure how that happened. Our parable in Mark gives us some insight into this God sustaining business. “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.” What I love about this parable is that line in verse 27: “He does not know how.” Yes, you heard it right, an admitted “know it all” is ok with not knowing something!

After she resigned, Taylor started learning things. She classifies these things as the mother church. She says things like the mother church kept her safe. When she was challenged by a different reading of some of these gospel texts, she had a tough time getting beyond what she already knew. She started to learn that there are aspects of God that she never knew. She became fully engaged in the mystery of God. Jesus describes this mystery with another parable. Jesus said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It 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, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” It’s funny, isn’t it? Here is this image of the restored Kingdom of David becoming a large tree like the one outside, in which the birds of the air can nest. You would expect Jesus to say that the coming Kingdom of God is going to be even bigger than that—but instead he says the Kingdom is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds on earth. And yet, he says, “When it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs. Puzzling isn’t it?

In Jesus’ time it was against the law to plant mustard because it’s the kind of weed that can take over your garden if you’re not careful, and if you were foolish enough to throw the seed around it could take over someone else’s garden as well. It can get out of control, but we don’t like that. We like to control things. We like to measure it. We want to know what we know and be comfortable with our knowledge of Jesus. Except God invites us to more. God invites us to experience faith in ways that cause us to lose control. God invites us to a love that can spread like a mustard seed. God invites us to a mystery. God invites us to consider everything we know and are comfortable with God and invites us to mystery. God invites us to ask the wonderful question, Really?!?

Do you know Jesus? I mean really?!?