Sermons

“Wisdom to Build On”

I Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14, 5:1-8, 8:1, 22-24, 41-43 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – August 19, 2018

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might open our hearts to your guiding spirit and seek your ways in all we do. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

What is it about royalty? We’ve been living here in a representative democracy for 242 years now. We had a king a while back, but we overthrew him, because we didn’t like it. Monarchy is certainly not a particularly Christian form of government. But offer us a royal wedding, or a prince whose name hasn’t been announced yet, and we’re all agog, reading magazine covers in the grocery check-out line with delight and getting up in the wee hours to watch it all on TV. Our fairy tales and movies aren’t populated with president’s daughters and bureaucrats; they’re about princesses and knights.

Despite our mind’s understanding of monarchy as an unjust system, our hearts seem to insist on romanticizing royalty. And our scripture readings today are no help. They told us all about Solomon, the wise king who ruled over Israel in peace. We skipped over the parts about all the laborers he conscripted to build the temple and the 300 concubines held in slavery for his pleasure. For now, we’ll take the Bible at face value and see what we can learn about the workings of God from the story of this king. But let’s not pretend that having a king is somehow better than the messy political situation we find ourselves in.

So what can we learn from this story of King Solomon? Are there similarities to our own circumstances? Surprisingly, I think there are. And Solomon’s response to his situation can teach us something about our own. One of the most important things to notice about Solomon here is that he’s living in a time of transition. These stories come at the very beginning of his reign. There is a lot of uncertainty. He’s young. Will the people accept him as king? Will he know what to do? Can he fulfill the prophecies about him that require him to accomplish things his famous father could not (namely, building the temple)?

So how does Solomon respond to all that pressure? When he’s talking with God in the dream he had in Gibeon, he seems thankful and humble, while also a little bit overwhelmed. Transitions are stressful; we know that, right? Becoming the generation that’s in charge is one of most stressful shifts we go through in our lives. But staying grounded in that humble gratitude helped Solomon do five things that we can fruitfully imitate in our current season of transition. The first thing is probably the most important: God told Solomon to ask for whatever he wanted, and what did Solomon ask for? Not riches. Not long life. Not the lives of his enemies. Solomon asked for wisdom. He asked for the understanding to discern right from wrong so he could effectively lead God’s people. He asked for God to guide him. He didn’t desire a short cut or ask to take the easy way ‘round. He sought the capacity to do what needed to be done, the right way. This is an important lesson for us. We want to grow. We need to grow. Should we just ask God to send us 20 new people? Or should we ask God to help us become a church that those 20 people will see being faithful and fruitful and thus want to join? Solomon didn’t want superficial success as king. He wanted a kingdom sustained by deep faithfulness, where people lived in peace because they had a ruler who was just and wise.

The next two things Solomon did are a bit of a contradiction to each other, but there’s nothing unusual about that. Our lives are full of contradictions and values that pull at one another, requiring careful balance. Solomon was faithful. He spent time in prayer, following the ways of his father David, but also going back to even more ancient rituals, sacrificing at the high places. He wanted to keep up the old ways and honor God as he’d been taught to. But he was also charged with being the one who would finally build a house for the Ark of the Covenant, the temple that David had wanted to build but been told he could not. Solomon wanted to remain faithful to the religion of his ancestors, but he was charged with making one of the biggest innovations that religion had seen in centuries.

These assignments feel familiar to us as well, don’t they? We want to be faithful to the practices we learned from our grandmothers and grandfathers, from our mentors and friends in our church family here and beyond. And yet, we know that the church’s place in our society is shifting, that we must change if we are going to be a relevant influence in people’s lives. It’s not that we need to build a temple, but the changes we’ll need to make might feel like that much work. Some of the “high places” we’ve cherished will, no doubt, be left behind in the process. But God is calling us to help build this new thing, a church that will serve God’s people in the 21^st century. We’re going to need all these things to answer that call. We will need to continually seek God’s wisdom. We will need to honor our past. We will need to have the courage to change.

The fourth thing Solomon did is something we often forget about. He remembered he had friends and he asked for help. He needed to build a temple, and as he said to King Hiram, “who knows how to cut timber like the Sidonians?” What we’re doing here is not an easy thing. There is no reason to expect that we have all the answers. There is no reason to think that even I have all the answers, though I may try to convince you I do. We have friends. We can ask for help. There are so many people out there working to figure out how to transition the church into what it needs to be in this time. Some of them may have even stumbled on helpful ideas. We must remember that this step comes after the first one in which we ask God for guidance and wisdom, so that we have the capacity to discern which offers of help are the right ones for our situation. But to pretend that God has only given that wisdom to us is foolishness, akin to trying to build a temple all on our own.

The fifth thing Solomon did, that I’d like to lift up from these excerpts of his story, comes in the prayer of dedication he gave when the temple was finally finished. He’d worked hard. Many, many people had worked hard to build that temple, the house for the ark of God that had been a wandering altar for so long. But even so, when it came time to dedicate that edifice, Solomon remembered that it wasn’t a monument to him. It wasn’t a thing the Israelites had built for themselves. It was a house for God, and that meant that it belonged rightly to all people. When the foreigners come, inspired by your presence, O God, hear their prayers, Solomon prayed. This is not our temple alone. It is a house of prayer for all people, for it is your house, O God.

This is a big deal. When you work that hard at something, you develop a sense of ownership. Usually we think of that as good thing; it means you’re invested in something, you care about it. But we humans have a tendency to become territorial easily. When we work at something – building something, caring for something, repairing something, cleaning something – we come to think of it as “ours,” even when it is the house of God. Solomon had done something even his father couldn’t do. Surely history would see this as “Solomon’s Temple,” right? But Solomon did not. At least not in that moment of dedication. Maybe he had his moments, but those prayers he’d prayed – seeking God’s wisdom, asking for the understanding to be a good ruler – helped him know that this temple was bigger than him. It wasn’t his. He came to understand that in order for the temple to be God’s house, it had to be a house of prayer for all people. He came to understand that the temple they had built would glorify God’s name so broadly and fruitfully that peoples from all over the earth would be drawn to it, to worship and pray and seek wisdom. That openness, that expectation of sharing the presence of God with outsiders, is one of the fruits of the wisdom Solomon received from God.

We are not royalty around here. We don’t traffic in carriages and gowns and crown jewels and all that pageantry. And thankfully, we don’t have to deal with all the drama and violence that biblical or historical successions of the throne entailed. But there are a number of lessons we can learn from Solomon in his time of transition. Our first step and continual practice must be seeking the wisdom of God. We must spend time in worship, prayer and study, learning God’s ways and soaking up God’s values.

We must balance an appropriate honoring of our past with all we must do to bring about the change required of the church in the 21^st century. God is doing a new thing here. We can’t get where we’re going from anywhere other than where we are, but we will need to let go of some of what has been to make room for what is coming.

We need to remember to ask for help; we are not alone in this quest for relevance and vitality. And finally, we must maintain a humble openness, remembering that this is God’s house, not ours, and welcoming all who come.

Let us strive to be God’s people – humble, grateful, faithful, creative, and welcoming. This is how we help to build the kingdom of God. Alleluia and Amen!