"Go Big or Go Home"

That's the motto of our culture. Everything has to be big. Everything is evaluated on size. The size of our homes. The size of our bank accounts. The size of our office (metaphorically speaking as a symbol of how high on the corporate ladder we have climbed). The size of our social networks.

In the church world it translates to the size of our congregations, our buildings, our offerings, our events, etc. Bigger is always better and the bottom line on our statistical reports often determines whether or not a church is perceived as healthy or dying.

And if all of these things are not getting bigger, it is often assumed that something is wrong with us.

But sometimes bigger is not better…

"Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright..."

While I have a hard time believing that baby Jesus didn't cry at all, or that giving birth among the livestock was a calm and peaceful experience, there is a very real sense in which God's grand entrance into our world was done in silence. Even the priest was unable to speak about the birth of his own son who would be the prophet proclaiming the coming of the Lord…

Imagine you’re reading the Bible for the first time. You decide to read it straight through like any other book. Genesis goes pretty well. It’s filled with great epic stories like Creation, the Flood, Abraham, Joseph and so on. Exodus starts out pretty well too. Baby Moses put in a basket and floated up the river to the palace of the very pharaoh who would have had him killed with all the other male Hebrew infants. Then he grows up among the Egyptians only to turn on them and set his people free from slavery. God parts the Red Sea and leads his people through the wilderness to the promised land. The story moving along just fine and then we get stuck. Our exciting pageturner almost instantly becomes a boring and sometimes incomprehensible file box of ancient legal documents. We might skim through to a couple of other highlights…. stories like David and Goliath or Daniel in the Lion’s Den, but for the most part we have a tendency to get lost in this ancient text.

Then some well-meaning Christian friend tells us we should start in the Gospels. “That’s the good part,” they say. “It’s the story of Jesus.”

Great, back to the story…. and so we turn to Matthew Chapter 1, the first page of the New Testament. If Moses’ story was exciting, surely this story about Jesus will be even better.

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham: Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah and his brothers…

17 verses and 14 generations later, we finally get to Jesus. That is, of course, assuming we make it that far without giving up. What kind of a story is this. No “Once upon a time,” or even “It was a dark and stormy night.” All we get is an ancestory.com report for a family we know nothing about…

For centuries Israel had been praying for a fulfillment of God’s promise, a king to sit on David’s throne for all eternity. For generations they had been a marginalized people under the oppressive rule of one empire after another, and they had gone through a number of “would-be messiahs” who promised to save them only to be killed in the end. Would God ever send a Savior?

Now the savior stands before the Roman authorities accused of treason. His own people declare that he is a threat to Ceasar. “We have no king,” they say, “but the emperor.”

How did we fall so far? We went from a people who would do anything to be set free from Roman rule to a people who would ultimately reject God’s own Son in favor of the Roman Emperor who the world calls the son of God.

We shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Perhaps we are more alike than we care to admit…

… In our culture we would say that David should be glad, or at least relieved, by Saul’s death. It was business, not personal. Or perhaps we might say it’s just politics, not personal. In any case, the path to the throne was now clear for David and more than that, he no longer had to fear for his life with Saul hunting him down around every turn. Saul died in battle and David was spared the guilt of having to kill his enemy himself. From a business or political perspective, all’s well that ends well.

But for David, all is not well. David understood that it’s never just about business or politics. It’s always personal. No matter how evil, hateful, and even murderous Saul had been, David knew that Saul was still God’s anointed. God loved Saul. God had chosen Saul. Saul’s sin, in David’s eyes, did not make him any less God’s anointed King…

On All Saints Day we remember and celebrate the lives of the Great Cloud of Witnesses who have passed through the veil of death to feast at Christ’s heavenly banquet. Despite this celebration, however, it is easy for us to be uncomfortable with our own mortality. We don’t like to think about death.

In some ways, David’s example prepares us for this final stage of our journey into God’s eternal kingdom. King Saul gave his armor to David to protect him in battle against Goliath, but the armor clearly didn’t fit. It was too big and far too heavy for this small, agile shepherd boy.

In the same way, the things we hold onto in this life to protect us at some point become too big and too heavy for us to bear. All our “stuff” becomes too hard to manage and most of what we have collected doesn’t seem nearly as valuable at the end of our lives. Dying is, in part, a process of shedding the “armor” that we have put on throughout our lives to protect us…

King Saul was ready for battle. His army was prepared, and the favor of the Lord was on his side. There was only one thing left to do… wait.

Saul understood that a ritual sacrifice must be made to the Lord before the battle began, and he waited seven days for the prophet Samuel to come and do just that. Apparently, Pastor Samuel was on vacation, or at least that’s how it must have seemed to the soldiers.

They grew restless and began to fall away. The longer they waited, the more they feared an attack from their enemy. They began to lose faith in their king and Saul knew it.

And so, he did what most any of us would have done. He took matters into his own hands. He had seen Samuel perform the ceremony. He knew the right words, the right actions, he could do the ritual as well as any prophet or priest. After all, he was God’s chosen king.

This act of disobedience was the beginning of the end of Saul’s reign. To us it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Why does it matter who makes the sacrifice? God is still being honored.

Samuel’s response in chapter 15 says it all… “Plain listening is the thing, not staging lavish religious production.”…

…We expect our politicians and our military leaders to protect us from other nations, to protect our jobs, our bank accounts, and our wallets, to keep us healthy and well-fed and educated, to maintain a comfortable infrastructure of roads and schools and public servants, etc., and to uphold a particular moral and ethical code for society to function freely.

Though we all have different ideas about how our leaders should go about meeting these needs, how they should fund their projects, and how involved they should be in our everyday life... we are all ultimately asking for... or voting for the same thing.... We want leaders who will make us strong and competitive like "other nations" and who will "fight our battles for us".... whether our battles against foreign governments, against poverty, against sickness, against crime... against anything that may disrupt our comfortable lives.

Yet in our "more civilized age", perhaps we have reverted to a way of life before God ever established a King in Israel...

excerpt from Steve Chalke:

… You see, before [God] gives any of the Ten Commandments, he introduces himself as the God who loves Israel. He lets them know that his is for them not against them. He wants the best for them. God didn’t sit in heaven making a list of all the things he knows human beings like to do and then outlaw them all to spoil our fun. Rather he knows the pain and heartache that we will cause others and ourselves if we pursue agendas that are contrary to the way he made us to be. The Ten Commandments is a loving God saying, ‘Look, I am the God who loves you. I’m on your side. I got you out of slavery. I’m the best deal you’ve got going for you. Trust me. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t abandon me. Don’t commit adultery because if you do it will unleash destructive powers that will slowly overshadow you, destroying you, your families, and your society. Trust me. Don’t be stupid.’”…

… Abraham had tried many times in his life to make God’s promise come true on his own terms. He had deceived others and put his wife in harm’s way to protect himself. He had a son with his wife’s maidservant just to make sure there would be an heir. Over and over, Abraham’s outward faith is challenged by his anxious behavior.

But this time is different. God had fulfilled his promise and was asking Abraham if he was willing to give it all up to trust God? When God’s promises or God’s blessings in our lives become more valuable to us than God himself, we have a serious problem.

But look at the rest of the story. A ram comes in the thicket and God spares Isaac. Abraham names the place, “The Lord provides” …