Saga: The Story of David: A Disarming Grace
July 10, 2016
Rev. Thomas Harper
I Samuel 24:3b-7
Dr. Pace: Today we continue our series of sermons on the life of David. You’re privileged to hear Rev. Thomas Harper preach today about a part of the Scripture that has to do with David and his relationship with Saul and the difficulties that were there and what God did in the midst of that.
So if you would listen as we hear the Scripture read today from the twenty-fourth chapter of First Samuel.
Now David and his men were sitting in the innermost parts of the cave.The men of David said to him, “Here is the day of which theLordsaid to you, ‘I will give your enemy into your hand, and you shall do to him as it seems good to you.’” Then David went and stealthily cut off a corner of Saul’s cloak.Afterward David was stricken to the heart because he had cut off a corner of Saul’s cloak.He said to his men, “TheLordforbid that I should do this thing to my lord, theLord’s anointed, to raise my hand against him; for he is theLord’s anointed.”So David scolded his men severely and did not permit them to attack Saul. Then Saul got up and left the cave, and went on his way.
Rev. Harper: Good Morning! As Dr. Pace said, my name is Thomas Harper. I’m one of the pastors here at St. Luke’s United Methodist, and I’m very honored and humbled to have the opportunity to speak to you this morning.
Now we’ve been going through a series this summer called “Saga, the story of David,” the life story of David. And the reason why we call this a saga is because David is not a flat character throughout. There are times in David’s life where he makes some morally questionable decisions. And then there are some other times when he unquestionably makes the wrong decision.
No, the series isn’t about the good guy dressed in the white cowboy hat that comes back with new adventures every week and vanquishes the bad guy that’s dressed all in black. And at the end of each story there’s some great moral wrap-up. This saga is about a very flawed and relatable king who had ups and downs in his life but went on to be known as a “man after God’s own heart,” and one of the more influential and memorable characters in our Scriptures.
Now if you’ve never had the opportunity to read the story of David all the way through in the Bible, I recommend that you do that sometime this summer. It is a dynamic story.
I’ve been reading on the internet that people have suggested books or TV shows or even movies that will help fill the gap now that the last episode of “Game of Thrones” is over for the season. Let me tell you that I’ve never seen an episode of “Game of Thrones,” but if you’re looking for sexual immorality, for violence, for political intrigue, this story is filled with it.
But before I begin I’d like to confess something to you. When it comes to reading this story of Saul and David I really struggle with it at times. It seems like when I see how things went for Saul and the way he disobeyed God, versus how things went for David and the way he disobeyed God, why is it that Saul is remembered one way and David is remembered as a “man after God’s own heart?” I really struggle with that whenever I read the story. I find myself sympathizing with Saul as a sort of tragic character. That bothers me.
So I want to do two things this morning. What’s nice about working on a sermon is that you have to kind of work through your own stuff in the Scripture. So this morning I want to do two things. I want to continue the story, move the saga down the line, and pick up where we left off last week. But the second thing I want to do is to lift up two truths that happen in our story today that I think reveal a little bit to us about the heart of God and how God deals with us. I believe they speak into this struggle that I have.
Will you pray with me first? Lord Jesus, I pray now that you will speak through me or in spite of me and give us a word today. Give us some truth that we may know the heart of you better. And, God, if there is anything said that is not in line with your heart or your will I pray in the power of the Holy Spirit that that would leave us before we even leave this room. God, would we know you better today, and not just so that we would have that knowledge, but that would spur us on into transformation and action. In your name, we pray. Amen.
So we come to the part of the story, if you remember last week, that Jonathan is having dinner with his father Saul. And he’s asking Saul, “Why are you going after David? Why do you have such a problem with David? David’s done nothing wrong to you.”
And Saul in his continuing rage is now lashing out at his son and takes a spear and throws it at his son Jonathan. Then Jonathan runs to his best friend David and says, “Look, my dad means it. He wants to hurt you and he’s coming after you. It’s time to go.”
So at this point in the story David is essentially an enemy of the state on the run for his life. And the first place he goes to is a town called Nob to a priest called Ahimelech, and asks the priest for some food. Because when you’re on the run for your life you don’t stop to pack a lunch. David comes up to the priest and says, “What have you got? Give me whatever you have.”
Now the priest is kind of confused by this request because it’s odd. David is here without any royal guard and without the king, and he asks, “Why are you coming to me like this?”
David does what most people who are afraid for their lives and who are desperate would do. He straight up lies to the priest. He says, “I’m on a secret mission, and Saul sent me on this mission. And he told me to tell you to give me whatever I want. So what have you got?”
Now the priest, probably not wanting to get in trouble himself, is ready to oblige this odd request. But the only problem is that he doesn’t have any food, except for the food that is the holy bread, for worship. The food that Leviticus 24 says is only for priests of Aaron. It’s unlawful for David and his men to take. But David says, “That’s okay. Give it to me. The king said it was all right.”
This isn’t a perfect analogy but bear with me. Imagine I walk into a church and I go up to the pastor and I say, “Pastor, I’m hungry. Do you have anything for me to eat?” And it’s quite obvious by looking at me that I’m not homeless. I’m wearing a full suit. I’m not in any kind of a desperate need that’s obvious right up front. The pastor is very nice and sits me down and honestly says, “Look, I’d love to give you some food but we don’t have any.” Then I kind of look over the pastor’s shoulder and I say, “What about those five loaves of King’s Hawaiian bread that are sitting on your bookshelf? Why don’t you give me that?”
The pastor says, “No, I can’t do that because that’s the communion bread. If I give that to you now we won’t have any bread for communion this afternoon.” Then I say, “Tell you what, the bishop sent me here on a secret mission and she told me to tell you to give me whatever I want. So it’s okay. Go ahead and give me the communion bread.”
Now, so David lies to a priest and breaks a Levitical law. Big deal. If it was my purpose this morning to lift up examples of how David was immoral in his life I could do better than this. But I bring this up for a reason. I bring this up because Jesus himself brought it up in the Scripture.
Listen to what it says in Mark 2:23-28: “One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grain fields and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And the Pharisees said to them, ‘Look, why are you doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?’ And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he was in need and was hungry? He ate and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God in the days of Abiathar the High Priest and ate the Bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat.’ And he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for men, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’”
So Jesus straight out says that David broke the rules, that David broke the law. But if that’s the case why is Jesus bringing this up now?
So I just got out of seminary, and I had the opportunity during seminary to kind of hone my theology. Seminary is the place where you get to study the thoughts of Christians throughout history, and you get to struggle with the tough questions. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is there so much evil and darkness in the world in light of a good and loving God?
And during my time in seminary I really felt like I started to know the heart of God, know why God’s laws were in place, know why what happens when you break the laws and the darkness that results in it. My moral theology over my time in seminary became very comfortable and very systematic. I was ready. I felt ready for ministry. Because when I left the classroom and people asked me the touch questions, I was going to have the answers because I knew them. I was ready to go.
But it didn’t take long at all for me to realize that knowing God’s laws is not all you need to do ministry. So one of the first things I did as a terrified intern was to go on hospital visits. One of my first hospital visits was with an older woman who told me not five minutes into our conversation that 43 years ago she divorced her husband because he had cheated on her. I watched the pain in her eyes as she told me that she spent weeks struggling with this decision, talking to pastors and priests and her family about whether or not she should do it. She told me that she never told her two children why she divorced her husband so she could protect them from that knowledge.
So her children were full grown at this point and waiting right outside in the hall. So as she’s pouring out her life to me, she looks up to me and all of a sudden asks, “Pastor, did I do the right thing?”
I wanted to throw my hands up and say, “I’m just an intern.” I mean, come on! I went to school. I had all this stuff in my head, but when it got to the relationship all that went out the window. I could have grabbed the Bible and said, “Well, I think Jesus says something about divorce in here somewhere. Let’s find that and we’ll read it….”
No, God showed me in that moment that someone who has been carrying this for over forty years doesn’t really care what one more young pastor thinks about the universal rightness or wrongness of divorce. No, her question was much deeper than that. She was asking, “Does God still love me? Is Christ still okay with me? Are we good?” And I was able to comfortably and emphatically say, “Yes, you are Christ’s beloved child.”
And that encounter really stayed with me, and I remember during the next week kind of asking God about that. I‘d think, “Now, God, this is kind of interesting. What should she have done? Did she do the right thing divorcing her husband or not?” And God wouldn’t even answer me. God was telling me, “Look, I don’t even care about that thing that happened like fifty years ago. I’m over here with this woman in her heart and in her pain. And, Pastor, if you want to be where I am get out of over there and join me over here in the relationship.”
God deals in relationships, not in the rules. And guess what? Relationships can be really messy sometimes. David broke a law, a law that was probably there for a reason, but Jesus said, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath. I made the rules, so don’t tell me what to do with the relationship.”
Now this is great news. This is the Gospel. On the one hand this means that the thing you’ve been hanging onto for ten years or five years that is kind of made up who you are that you think you are found in that choice or in that decision God is saying, “Let it go. We’re not there anymore. We’re here, and I want you now.”
But the other side of this, my friends, is that we can’t look around at the “people who are breaking God’s rules” and know how God is going to deal with them every single time, because rules are stagnant, rules don’t move. But relationships are dynamic. Relationships are sacrificial. Relationships bend the rules for purpose of reconciliation.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the rules. I think the rules are very important. I think the rules are there to protect us. I think the rules are there to show us the heart of God. I love the rules. But make no mistake. God cares more about your heart than your ability to follow the rules. That’s truth number one today. God wants your heart, not a rule follower.
So fast forward a little bit in our story. For a while David’s been running from Saul, and Saul’s been chasing after David. So finally someone comes up to Saul and says, “I’ve seen David in the wilderness. I know where he is.” So seeing an opportunity to end this, Saul gathers up 3000 of his closest friends and goes after David. But it just so happens that Saul and his men make camp right next to where David and his men are. The Scripture tells us that Saul wanders off by himself. It’s as if God has hand delivered Saul over to David. For literally from Chapters 21 to 24 Saul has been trying to get David to kill him and now David has the upper hand. David has the chance to end this himself.
And his men thought so as well. They said, “Look, David, here it is. This is what God gave to you. God had told you that he was going to deliver your enemies into your hands and here it is. No more running, no more living in fear for your own life. This is your chance to become the king that God has already anointed you to be.”
And David certainly could have done it. Let’s be honest, if this was a “Game of Thrones” episode that’s how this story would have gone. You know what? I bet that if David had ended it here that history would have had no problem with it. Now think about it. The one true anointed king finally vanquishes the angry tyrant who just a couple of chapters ago killed 53 priests and all the men, women and children and animals of Nob just because they harbored David. The story kind of writes itself, but not this saga, not this. Something different happens, something unexpected.
The Scripture tells us that David sneaks into where Saul is and kind of cuts off a piece of his robe, and then David’s heart strikes him. And out of nowhere he turns to his men and says, “Don’t touch him. We’re not doing this.” God supernaturally fills David’s heart with compassion for Saul. It allows him to see, “This is my father-in-law. This is my wife’s and my best friend’s dad. This is a man who is broken, who is in pain and who has lived in darkness lately. And I’m not going to be the one to lay a hand on him.”
Saul’s story need not end here. I wonder how it would have if it did.
I was in youth ministry at a previous church and over the course of my time there I had a co-worker who I just didn’t get along with at all. Have you ever had someone at work who you felt was just out to get you? There was this person, and it got so bad. Now I’m not going to say we were going to kill each other, but make no mistake, we had become enemies. It got to the point that I would walk into work already wadded up, all ready with my defenses, already angry because I knew I was going to see this person. And I’d have to deal with it again.
It got to the point where it wasn’t about reconciliation, but it was about what we had done to each other and about getting angrier at each other. Now as you can imagine this didn’t go on too long before people began to notice. So my supervisor calls us into his office. He says, “Look, I can see that you hate each other right now. But the ministry is suffering, and that’s unacceptable.” He put $20 down on the desk and said, “Here, you two go to Starbucks and fix it! And don’t come back till you do.”
That was quietest car ride I’d ever been in. And I was so angry with this person. The way they’d embarrassed me in front of my supervisor and made me look unprofessional. How this person had wronged me and put me in this situation, I was so mad. If I could have reached out and touched my anger I would have tasted it.
We were sitting right next to each other, but the space was miles apart. And then something happened to me. In that moment God broke my heart and filled it with compassion for this person. I went from blinding rage – I mean spots in front of my eyes – to seeing how this person was hurting and how this person was in pain. And, yes, how I had hurt this person. God disarmed the hatred within me. And all of sudden it wasn’t about who was right or wrong anymore. It was about two people in darkness needing to come into the light. And we reconciled.
I want to tell you, friends, there’s no way my heart would have done that by itself. God disarmed my heart and filled it with compassion.
I think that’s what happened to David here. I think when David’s heart struck him, God was saying, “Look, this isn’t what’s right. This isn’t what I want.” And the great thing about this story is that it happens to Saul right afterwards.
David goes out to everyone and holds up that piece of cloth and says, “Look, dad,…” He didn’t say, “Look, king…” or “Look, my enemy…” or “Look, you sleezeball who’s been trying to kill me for the last three chapters…” No, he said, “Look, Dad, I mean you no harm. Why are we doing this?”
Then Saul, who had been filled with demons and darkness and hatred to the point that he would kill his own family, is able to lift his head and say, “Is that you, my son? David?” And then he weeps. The same grace that disarmed David disarmed the heart of Saul and turned bitter enemies back to father and son.
So truth number two today – Christ’s grace disarms the darkness, turns the worst of enemies back into family - mothers and daughters, co-workers back into reconciled friends and, yes, even the worst racial tensions back to brothers and sisters again.
My friends, at the end of the day the difference between David and Saul, maybe it’s not that one followed God’s rules better than the other. Maybe David was known as a “man after God’s own heart” because David allowed his heart to continue after God, in spite of the ups and downs of his life, in spite of the decisions and choices that he made that God softened David’s heart, disarmed his heart so that the relationship would continue.
Now, look, it’s not for me to say or really for us to know what all happened between Saul and God or between David and God or even how that ended it up, because we don’t know the hearts of people. That’s God’s thing.
But I do believe this, and I think you can take this home today. God desires your heart more than your ability to follow his rules, and Christ’s grace can disarm the darkness and hatred and brokenness within it.
My friends, it will not be harsher language. It will not be stricter rules or more hate that will redeem the hatred that so fills our world today. It will be Christ’s grace disarming it. And as God’s people we’re called to join in. To open up our hearts and receive that disarming grace so that we can share that grace with the world that so desperately needs to know it.
Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, would you redeem this world? Would your grace strike the hearts of all of the hatred and brokenness, and do the things that seemingly only you can do? Then, Lord, start with us. Show us our hearts and what needs to be redeemed there. Thank you, Jesus. In your name we pray, Amen.