The man s name was Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth! What were his parents thinking?

Transcription

1 June 8, 2014 heros without halos Heroic Kindness: David Scripture Lesson: 2 Samuel 9:1-13 Dr. Victor D. Pentz Senior Pastor With his tongue twister name, the marginal biblical character Mephibosheth offers huge insight into the vastness of God s love. King David lavishes the kindness of God on this poor man he s never met. Could God really love us the very same way? We had Vacation Bible School this week. If you could have harnessed the energy in our hallways, you could have powered the city of Atlanta 913 children, a record number, with 411 teachers and all 1300 were wearing tie dyed shirts. When I stood up to talk it looked like a Grateful Dead concert. Fortunately it did not smell like a Grateful Dead concert. God gave us one of our greatest weeks ever. The man s name was Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth! What were his parents thinking? You find a lot of these little characters who seem penciled into the margins of the Old Testament. They come on stage with their unpronounceable names say a few lines, then exit. Only in the case of Mephibosheth, this little man is going to bring us a huge insight into the vastness of God s love.

2 2 Heroic Kindness: David HEROS WITHOUT HALOS To wrap our minds around how significant David was in his day, you have to come up with a fantasy figure with the athleticism of LeBron James, the poetic gifts of Shakespeare, the military prowess of General Patton, and the spirituality of Pope Francis all wrapped up in one titanic figure, and then you put him in charge of running the nation for forty years. But most of all, says I Samuel 13:14, David was man after God s own heart. Of course, David wasn t perfect. He was a hero without a halo. You may have heard of an incident known as the Bathsheba affair that almost brought him down. But at his best, when he was on his game, in David we glimpse into the very heart of God. And that s what we see this morning as we meet this man with the tongue twister name, Mephibosheth, in II Samuel chapter 9, verses 1-13:1 1 David asked, Is there anyone still left of the house of Saul to whom I can show kindness for Jonathan s sake? 2 Now there was a servant of Saul s household named Ziba. They summoned him to appear before David, and the king said to him, Are you Ziba? At your service, he replied. 3 The king asked, Is there no one still alive from the house of Saul to whom I can show God s kindness? Ziba answered the king, There is still a son of Jonathan; he is lame in both feet. 4 Where is he? the king asked. Ziba answered, He is at the house of Makir son of Ammiel in Lo Debar. 5 So King David had him brought from Lo Debar, from the house of Makir son of Ammiel. 6 When Mephibosheth son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, came to David, he bowed down to pay him honor. David said, Mephibosheth! At your service, he replied. 7 Don t be afraid, David said to him, for I will surely show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan. I will restore to you all the land that belonged to your grandfather Saul, and you will always eat at my table. 8 Mephibosheth bowed down and said, What is your servant, that you should notice a dead dog like me? 9 Then the king summoned Ziba, Saul s steward, and said to him, I have given your master s grandson everything that belonged to Saul and his family. 10 You and your sons and your servants are to farm the land for him and bring in the crops, so that your master s grandson may be provided for. And Mephibosheth, grandson of your master, will always eat at my table. (Now Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty servants.) (That s a lot of people to eat at David s table.) 11 Then Ziba said to the king, Your servant will do whatever my lord the king commands his servant to do. So Mephibosheth ate at David s table like one of the king s sons. 12 Mephibosheth had a young son named Mika, and all the members of Ziba s household were servants of Mephibosheth. 13 And Mephibosheth lived in Jerusalem, because he always ate at the king s table; he was lame in both feet. One day out of the blue King David asks (verse 1): Is there anyone still out there of the house of Saul to whom I can show kindness for Jonathan s sake? Again in verse 3 he asks, Is there no one still left of the house of Saul to whom I can show God s kindness? Hesed: Covenant Love vs. Retail Relationships Kindness is sort of a weak translation of one of the greatest words of the Bible. The Hebrew word is hesed. Hesed is the word for God s super-love. What agape is to the New Testament, hesed is to the Old Testament. In the Psalms it s often translated steadfast love or covenant love. It s an open-ended, unconditional commitment of self-giving love. It s giving a blank check and saying, All that I am is all for you no matter what. David says, I want to shower God s super-love on a total stranger to whom I will give the wealth and blessings of my kingdom. If that shocked people then, to us this seems like something that came from Mars. Today instead of covenant love, we re into what Tim Keller calls retail relationships. Instead of all I am is all for you no matter what, we say, If you do this for me, I ll do this for you, as long as it works for me. If you meet my needs, I ll meet your needs. That s a retail relationship.

3 3 Heroic Kindness: David HEROS WITHOUT HALOS Of course that s not always bad. Suppose you hire the teenager down the street to mow your lawn every week, and the kid s a go-getter. Every Saturday like clockwork every grass clipping gets tied up in a Hefty bag that goes out on the curb. It s great. So you set up an electronic transfer, $25 a week, which goes into the young man s account. You couldn t be happier. But then something happens he turns 16 and he gets his drivers license. He misses the next Saturday; he s a no show. Hmmm! A week goes by. You see him drive by actually you hear him drive by blasting Wiz Khalifa music. You know he s paying for his gas with your money. You wave. Well, okay, let him get it out of his system. Next Saturday he s still a no-show, then he drives by with a girl in the car. That s it! You sit him down and say, Look dude, I m paying you. Either mow my lawn every Saturday or that s it. That s a retail relationship. Either mow the lawn or you re out of here. In a retail relationship you will sacrifice the relationship to meet your needs. But in a covenant relationship you sacrifice your needs in order to keep the relationship. You stay in the relationship even when your needs are not being met. Of course, the ultimate human covenant is marriage: for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for as long as we live. The retail relationship dies on the altar of covenant love in a commitment that transcends all changes in time and circumstance. Believe it or not, one of the greatest examples I ve ever seen of covenant love is with a dog and not a very nice dog, either. I won t mention the breed for fear of bringing down the wrath of you who love this particular breed of terrier. We got Checkers at the pound, and before long Checkers turned nasty and snappy. Then one morning at breakfast I dropped a piece of bacon on the floor and as I bent over to pick it up, Checkers came flying through the air and bit my hand so hard he drew blood. I was ready to send Checkers back to the pound when a friend told us about a pet therapist who comes over and helps you work through your issues with your pet. So we staged an intervention with Checkers. We had a couple of sessions, but then the dog bit me again. I said, That s it. This dog is not meeting my needs. This is a retail relationship. Say goodbye to Checkers. Tomorrow I m taking that dog to the pound. (You know the likely outcome for the dog.) My daughters started sobbing and hugging the dog as if this were Lassie who d saved their lives. They went to school. I went to work. I came home in the afternoon to take the dog to the pound. It was Friday. I got caught in rush hour traffic and by the time I got to the pound, it was closed. Now imagine my dilemma, driving back home with Checkers. If you know anything about female emotions, you know that dog now had a Supreme Court pardon. Meanwhile that night Becky got online, googled that breed of dog, and found a dog rescue organization for that specific breed. I called. Within two hours a couple showed up at our door. They said they so loved this breed of dog that they had built four kennels into their bedroom wall, and one was just waiting for Checkers. I avoided eye contact with these people. Great. Just take the dog, I said. Away they drove. Here s the point. Checkers did not change. He was still a jerk. Checkers didn t last more than a month with those people. For at least the next two and a half years, Checkers bounced around from one house to another of people in this dog rescue organization across the whole United States. We knew because they always had to call our vet to get Checkers medical records. We got calls: Checkers is now in Tallahassee. Checkers is now in Reno. Checkers is now in Chicago. Relentlessly and indefatigably and with covenant love they cared for that crummy little canine, and that s good. When we re kind to animals, we glorify God. But

4 4 Heroic Kindness: David HEROS WITHOUT HALOS I couldn t help thinking, how many humans get loved that way? So many of our human relationships are disposable: You re not meeting my needs; I m out of here. The more you put your own needs at the center, the more your relationships are disposable. One way to tell if that s you, is if you have a lot of exes: ex-friends, ex-dogs, ex-colleagues, ex-churches, ex-spouses. Why? Well, my needs just weren t getting met in that relationship. The Vulnerability of Covenant Love A retail relationship is always on the surface. You re always on the lookout for a better deal, keeping your options open. Mark Edmonson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, writes, My students are possibility junkies... they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut any possibilities down, which means they cannot commit to one thing... Ask an American college student what he s doing on Friday night. Ask him at 5:30 Friday afternoon. I don t know will likely be the first response. But then will come a list of possibilities (longer than a Chinese menu): the concert, the play, the movie, the party, the stay-at-home chilling the monitoring of SportsCenter, the reading (fast, fast) of an assignment or two. [ ]And once you do get somewhere, wherever it might be, you ll find... at a student party, about a fourth of the people have their cellphones locked to their ears. What are they doing? They re talking to their friends. About? About another party they might conceivably go to. Can you say commitment phobia? David here says, I want to commit, and not to someone who s meeting my needs. To someone I have never met before. You don t suppose there s a surviving member of Jonathan s family somewhere, one who is of the house of Saul? Instantly the palace goes into a tizzy. Rumors are flying. It s like an episode of The Tudors or Game of Thrones. The only reason a king would bring in the heir to his rival predecessor would be to separate his head from his body. In ancient times, when a new regime came to power, they d find the remnants of the old dynasty and wipe them out, because each one of them represented a threat to the king. That s why Mephibosheth had been living on the run, in hiding. Imagine how Mephibosheth felt when the soldiers knocked in his door. Then in the palace David said to him, Do not be afraid. I love Mephibosheth s response in verse 8: I am a dead dog. In the logic of that day he should have been. David could have easily justified slaughtering him in the name of political stability, the peace of his kingdom, and the common good. But covenant love doesn t just mean setting aside your needs. Loving with God s love means taking risks and that means becoming vulnerable. And, boy, does David make himself vulnerable. Do you see what he did? The first thing he did was give Mephibosheth a power base: I will restore to you all the land that belonged to your grandfather King Saul. Instantly Mephibosheth is a wealthy man. And that s not the half of it. David goes on to say, Oh, and by the way, I want you to become my son. Verse 11: Mephibosheth ate at David s table like one of the king s sons. David said, Mephibosheth, you re not here to die. You re here to dine! Tonight at dinner you ll find your place with a card that has your name engraved in gold if we can spell it. You ll find a monogrammed robe waiting for you in the Lincoln bedroom. Welcome home, Mephibosheth! Meanwhile over in the corner David s political advisors almost passed out: The king has gone crazy. Putting Saul s heir so close to the throne was asking for trouble. His enemies now had a rallying point right there in the palace.

5 5 Heroic Kindness: David HEROS WITHOUT HALOS So the question is why. Why would one of the most brilliant kings who ever lived pull such a crazy, irrational, dangerous stunt as this? For one thing that was David. Everything he did was bigger than life. He sinned big. He dreamed big. He loved big. But the key to the story goes back to that first sentence. David asked, Is there anyone still left of the house of Saul to whom I can show kindness why? for Jonathan s sake? King Saul had already had a son, Jonathan, all picked out to be his successor. Jonathan was supposed to follow him as king. Then the prophet Samuel went ahead and anointed as the next king the shepherd boy David. King Saul flew into a murderous rage and launched a manhunt to kill David. Jonathan, Saul s son, had even more reason to hate David than Saul did, because David was stealing his throne. Jonathan is one of the greatest figures of the Bible; in fact I think of him as the Christ figure of the Old Testament. Jonathan sensed God s will was for David, and not for him, to be king, and out of the blue Jonathan loved David with covenant love. At one point Jonathan even took off his royal robe, flung it around David s shoulders, and handed over his sword and his belt, saying David, I m stepping back. It s all yours. Jonathan then stayed in his father s palace as an insider to thwart the plots against David s life. But eventually Jonathan had to go to war with his father and in a disastrous battle against the Philistines, Saul and Jonathan both died on Mount Gilboa. David screamed like a wounded animal: I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than the love of women. All David had in life, even that he was alive and had the throne, he owed to Jonathan and Jonathan s covenant love. Unearned Riches How can we love with covenant love? Very simply, what happened to David has to happen to us. We need a friend who loves us with crazy, irrational, vulnerable, selfless, sacrificial love. And we have one, and that s why we are here, and why we have this table we are going to come to in just a few minutes. David had a friend who gave up an earthly throne for him; we have a friend who gave up his heavenly throne for us. David had a friend who wrapped him in his royal robe. We have a friend who went to a cross so he can wrap us in his robe of righteousness. Mephibosheth did not deserve anything he got. Everything he got had been paid for by Jonathan. You and I don t deserve this table. Yet here we are in the presence of the King who says, Y all come. I want to make you my child. All I am is all for you no matter what. There s a place here for you with your name embossed in gold, not because of you, but because of what someone did for you. David put himself at some risk to make Mephibosheth his son; Jesus loves you so vulnerably he died on a cross to make you God s child. Jesus set aside his needs to meet yours. Right now he s saying, Come to my table. Accept this bread as my body broken for you. Accept this cup as my poured-out love. After all I ve done for you, won t you love with covenant love like David did? You can put your needs on hold and hang on to someone even when they aren t meeting your needs. Can t you suffer just a little like I suffered for you, for the sake of covenant love? You come to this table this morning to get God s super-love, love without end, unconditional, eternal and forever.

6 6 Heroic Kindness: David HEROS WITHOUT HALOS Prayer: Lord Jesus, you are our Jonathan. You gave your throne, your robe you gave up your life for us. You ve given yourself to us in a one-sided way that it is beyond anything our minds can grasp. Now, Lord, help us to take that love out of this building, so that we might go beyond simple retail relationships and in your power and your love be able to cement our covenant with the person in our life that you want us to hold on to. Lord, go into us with the depths of your love that we might carry your hesed out of these doors and show the world what your love is like. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. NOTES:

7 NOTES: 7 Heroic Kindness: David HEROS WITHOUT HALOS

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