August 30, 2009
An Instinct for the Truth - 1 Kings 2: 10-12, 3:3-15
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI am training for a marathon on October 25th in Washington, DC. I signed up for this thing back in February and I have been training very hard for it since the end of June. Many people have asked me what my goal is for the marathon, which is a complicated question. I would like, ideally, to qualify for Boston, which I think would require that I finish in 3:15. I’ll tell you right now, as much as I believe in myself, that’s just not going to happen. I would love to do it, I have trained hard, and I might possibly qualify one day if they lower the times for older people and if I get faster, but right now, it’s not going to happen. As Lance Armstrong once said, there are mules and there are racehorses. I am a mule (maybe a good-looking one, but a mule nonetheless), and, regardless of how much I train, I always will be. I am specifically unqualified to qualify for much less win Boston. I do not have, nor can I attain, what I need to make Boston. It is out of my reach.
As I just read out in 1 Kings, King David was dead. His youngest son, Solomon, was now the king, and Solomon, very much like I am with Boston, was specifically unqualified to be the king. In fact, the very first thing that we read about Solomon was not favorable to him. Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and married his daughter, thus violating Old Testament Law. Solomon built his own house before he built the Lord’s house. Solomon loved the Lord, we read, but he also sacrificed on the high places. Solomon may have loved God, but he held a few other gods on retainer just in case his first love didn’t work out. It would be like your husband holding a few other wives on retainer in case you didn’t work out. Good luck. Solomon was most definitely, in every way, a mule before he was king and while he was king. He may not have been useless, but Solomon was no more qualified to be the king of Israel than I am qualified to win Boston. It’s just not going to happen without a whole lot of divine intervention.
And in the 5th verse of Chapter 3, divine intervention is exactly what Solomon got. It’s important to note here that God appeared to Solomon, and not the other way around. If you remember nothing else about this sermon, remember that because it’s crucial. Solomon did nothing at all to invoke God’s presence. God simply, and gracefully, showed up. Furthermore, God gave Solomon an open invitation to whatever Solomon wanted.
One of my favorite questions to ask people is if you could make one wish, what would it be? That sounds very similar to God’s question to Solomon: “ask what I should give you.” Let me rephrase the question. If you could wave a magic wand and make everything in your life right, what would your life look like and how would you know that it was right? Initially, many people would ask for money. It would be nice, would it not, to hit the jack-pot. Imagine what we could do with a bottomless pit of money. We could live in the nicest house, drive the nicest car, and wear the nicest clothes. We could fund the underfunded charities in our town. We could pay off our building next door. We could hire additional staff. We not only could live fat and happy ourselves, we could also solve many of the world’s problems.
But we sure couldn’t solve all of the world’s problems and when we get down to it, we couldn’t solve the world’s most pressing problems, or even our own most pressing problems. Solomon knew that, and so do we. Do you want to know what I personally would ask for? I would want to know how to raise my children. I love my children, like we all do, and at least as I see it, for good or bad, nothing is more important to me than raising them. And yet, nothing is harder either. I am less qualified to raise my children than I am for winning Boston. Winning Boston would be a breeze compared with raising my children. I would want to know how to raise my children in the knowledge and fear and love of the Lord. There are thousands of books on that subject, many of which I have read, but not one answers that question.
In the event I had the chance to ask two questions, I would also like to know how I could be a good and faithful pastor. I do believe that I am called to be a pastor. But what constitutes a “successful” pastor? We all know, or at least we have our own opinions on what constitutes a successful pastor in our own eyes, but I have yet to put my finger on what constitutes a successful pastor in God’s eyes. In fact, come to think of it, I have yet to put my finger on what constitutes a life well lived, or successful discipleship in God’s eyes. I pray that at the end of my life, I can honestly say, as Paul did in 2 Timothy, that “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” But as hard as I can try, I really cannot put my finger on what that means here, to have kept the faith, in Charlotte, NC in 2009. You would think that after three years of seminary and with a “Rev” in front of my name in the Presbyterian Church that I would know the answer to that like I know my own name. But I honestly, when it gets down to it, simply don’t. It would be awfully nice, then, if I did. What I would really like is an instinct for truth. I would like to know the truth, and I would like to live accordingly, but I myself am unqualified to know the truth.
This text is often lifted up as an example of how to pray. And while I will admit that Solomon’s prayer is very noble, Solomon does more here than pray. In fact, it’s not so much what Solomon did but what happened to Solomon that’s important. Solomon himself has mixed reviews here. Solomon may have hedged his bets with God, but he certainly had an ace in the hole. And, not to even mention, Solomon was completely unconscious when the most important thing happened. Solomon was sound asleep (how holy is that?) when God appeared to him. “It is the very human, selfish, negligent Solomon who benefits from God’s self-revelation and gifts,” writes C.L. Seow from Princeton Seminary. The whole point is that God takes the initiative. God reaches out.
One of the ironies of this “Great Recession” is that we have learned that it doesn’t take much money to enjoy the finer things in life. Many of us can no longer afford to drop $200 on a nice dinner, so we have to settle for pinto beans and rice and cornbread with a slice of onion. We have discovered the pinto beans, rice, cornbread, and a slice of onion is actually pretty tasty. But we had so much money two years ago that we overlooked it. So instead of cooking pinto beans and rice and cornbread with our children (and spending a whopping $5 on dinner), we would go a fancy steakhouse without their children and drop $200. And yet, the whole time, what we always really wanted was right in front of our faces.
Not one of us can get what we really need. We really need an instinct for the truth. But we just can’t find it. We don’t have the knowledge to solve all our problems, let alone the world’s problems. We can’t ultimately do anything about the fact that we’re sinful, that we may be made in God’s image, but we have been corrupted. We need to be saved. We need to be salvaged, because as it stands now not one of us is qualified to have what we need. And I think down deep, even in this narcissistic, self-indulgent, ego-maniacal culture that we live in, we know that. We know it well.
And so we work, and we go to school and make good grades, or we forget school and go drink a lot of alcohol and sow our wild oats. Or we try to get the promotion at work, or the better pay check. We try to make the right investments and get to know the right people. We read all the thousands of books on how to raise our children. We pig out on junk food all day just to get overweight, and then we pig out on diets just to get skinny again. We try, and we try, and we try. Maybe we can even turn to religion to get our best lives now. We have around 150 people here today and we have a 150 opinions on how to try, but they all center around we, which means they are destined to fail because we are sinful and are not qualified, and can no more obtain the truth than we can jump to the moon.
And yet this whole time, we forget that it’s not about us anyway. We forget that God has taken the initiative and saved us from that which we could never save ourselves. The world is not about our stories, it’s about God’s story. And God has graciously appeared to us in Jesus Christ and has made it possible for us to become a part of what God is doing. That’s the whole point. This whole time, God has offered this incredibly gracious invitation, just as he did for Solomon. What we all need is a basic instinct for the truth. Yet, we’re just not qualified to ever get it. So God meets us in our dire need, in our own slumber even, and, in Jesus, gives us none less than himself. That adds a whole new light on everything else in our lives. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus tells us. In Jesus “we can know the truth (after all), and the truth will make us free.”
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
