George A. Mason 6 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 1 July 2018 Independence Weekend Dallas, Texas When the Mighty Fall 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27 My heart almost burst this week. I suspect yours has, too. Some of you have dealt with your anger and anguish by getting involved, protesting, letter-writing, posting on social media. Women of Wilshire have been representing. And some male allies, too. I m proud of you budding activists and advocates. You come to church expecting the preacher to help you. Others of you feel just as deeply, but you come to church hoping for a break, wanting to hear a word of gospel hope that doesn t always feel political. I get it both ways. Which is why this is about the third rendition of this sermon I have prepared for you today. As for me personally, I ve wanted to sound off like an Old Testament prophet at anyone who disagrees with me over what is happening in our country right now. I want to believe the dream is not dead of a world where every child is safely with her parents, where every refugee family has a country to welcome them, where every Latino has hope to share fully in the American dream, where every African American young man can trust a police officer to have his best interest at heart, where every journalist can feel safe in reporting the truth without being called an enemy of the people or being shot to death in the newsroom, where every restaurant owner will serve everyone who comes into her shop without political discrimination, where every church remembers that we worship God and not the flag, where every Muslim is safe within our borders, where every woman is trusted to make decisions about her own body, where every lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender person can feel confident that the courts and government will protect their hard-won rights to be treated equally under the law. This week, it didn t feel that way to me. But I decided not to go into it. I think. Kim (my wife) was telling me about listening to NPR this week and someone described our
country as not going through a Cold War or a Civil War but as going through a Cold Civil War. We are supposed to celebrate Independence Day on Wednesday. We are supposed to attend parades and waves flags that signal our unity as a nation, but I m not sure what side of the street to stand on. We seem more divided than ever. Too few of us want to try to understand anyone else s point of view. I admit to sometimes being part of the problem. I think my views about the gospel and the country are inclusive enough for everyone everyone, that is, who will not exclude themselves because they don t get their way. But because of my understanding of the gospel, I am impatient with the idea that people who look like me should always be deferred to and get to make the rules for everyone else. The answer can t be to treat incivility with more incivility. But civility has to be more than not tweeting or posting mean comments about those who hurt us or the people we care about. There have to be positive alternatives for people of faith. Our little-known text today about David s reaction to the death of Saul points to some. Last Sunday we considered the story of David and Goliath. After David slays Goliath, King Saul grows increasingly paranoid. He knows the people love David. He knows his own son loves David in ways that have made commentators wonder about the nature of their friendship. The prophet Samuel has anointed David to be the next king of Israel while Saul is still alive! God had given up on Saul, and his posterity will not ascend to the throne. This drove Saul mad. He was probably clinically depressed through much of his life, because in better days David had even calmed his spirit by playing the lyre for him. But now Saul is determined to kill David. He and his army have chased David all over the hills and valleys of Israel. David was even a refugee for a time with the Philistines, because he wasn t safe in his own homeland. Oh, and isn t that ironic and relevant? Once, David was hiding in the back of a cave when Saul came into the cave to cover his feet which is a euphemism, for going number 2. Sorry to talk dirty in the pulpit, but it s in the Bible, don t you know?! Well, David could have relieved Saul of his 2
life in that moment. In fact, he crept up on him in the dark and cut off a portion of his underwear to prove to him he could have killed him. Saul was God s anointed, David knew, for as long as he lived. And he would not lift a hand against God s anointed. Besides, David understood better than most that he was setting a precedent. What he did at that moment would be remembered and repeated when it was David s turn to reach his end. And since what goes around comes around, David stops the cycle right here. The report comes to David of Saul and Jonathan s deaths on the battlefield against who else? The Philistines. You might expect David be relieved. You might forgive him for a moment of schadenfreude the feeling of joy at another s misfortune. You might expect him to tell the people that it s time to make Israel great again, and he s just the one to do it, because the long nightmare of Saul s reign is finally over. That s not what he does. He laments. He tears his garments and cries out in grief. He tells the people to join him and writes a poem of lament unlike anything that appears in the Psalms. O, how the mighty have fallen, he cries without even a hint of sarcasm. He praises Saul and calls on the people to treat his memory with honor. David might have used Saul s death as a teaching moment to declare that the bigger they are the harder they fall, that pride goes before the fall, or that karma s an unmarried female dog. He could have begun his own reign as king right then and there and spent the first year of his rule cancelling everything his predecessor did and purging the kingdom of any loyalists to Saul. He might have seized that moment to get back at a deceased political enemy, who had publicly humiliated him. This could have been revenge time. Some people do handle things just that way. A few years ago, my friend Gioia Cohen was walking her dog in a cemetery in Sedona, Arizona. She came upon an epitaph on a headstone that stopped her in her tracks. She took a picture of it and texted it to me. I told you about it soon after Mother s Day, I think. Then I wrote an Advocate column about it and somehow it came to the attention of Mike Vanni, who, along with his brother and sister, wrote this on 3
a tombstone: To our mother, Mona Herold Vanni. You spent your life expressing animosity for nearly every person you encountered, including your children. Within hours of his death, you even managed to declare your husband of fiftyseven years unsuited to being either a spouse or a father. Hopefully, you are now insulated from all the dissatisfaction you found in human relationships. Buddy, Jackie and Mike. I remembered that because I got an email from Mike again last week with a link to a Yahoo news story about how so-called revenge obituaries are a growing trend. The desire to settle the score and set the record straight when the mighty fall or fail is overwhelming for us at times. Parents are our first mighty ones. Whether we re talking about parents or bosses or bullies or neighbors or politicians, the mighty all fall eventually. What then? David s example is godly and prescriptive. First, mourn them and ask others to do the same. How we deal with these crucial events in the cycle of life determines much about who we will be and how our family or our company or our church or our nation functions going forward. At these pivotal moments, the windows of the soul of a people are opened, and the demons will fly in or fly out depending upon how we handle things. Mourn first. Grieve the fall whether the fall into the grave or the fall from grace. It doesn t matter if the person deserves it. It matters that the cycle of bitterness be broken within us and among us. Next, find everything possible to praise about the mighty one who has fallen. David sung of the glory and achievements of Saul for Israel. He found what was good and focused on it. Everyone is both good and bad, and no one is one and not the other. By lifting up the good, you raise the moral bar for people to reach for. It ennobles and unifies. I learned this in my early years at Wilshire. My predecessor, Bruce McIver, was dearly beloved. I m sure he wasn t a perfect pastor, and I know I m not. Bruce s health forced him to retire earlier than he hoped, and he stayed in the church as pastor emeritus for 12 years until his death. He was incredibly kind to me, and I m sure that influenced my response to him. We had a mutual bless-fest. Because we 4
wouldn t let anyone or anything come between us, the congregation didn t have to choose loyalties. Many difficult things the church addressed in those early years could have torn us apart, but they didn t. And I believe it was partly because of the mutual honor we showed one another. It s easy to let our anger and ambition dictate our words and deeds. I m not saying we shouldn t protest policies we find immoral and abhorrent. I m not saying we shouldn t try to elect people who represent our point of view. Resistance to wrong is right, but we can be right wrongly; and that won t right wrong. If we treat our fellow citizens who disagree with us as the enemy, this mighty nation will fall and fail. Allyson Robinson is a minister colleague, and although I don t know her well, I would call her a friend. Allyson is married with four children. She was Daniel Robinson when she graduated from West Point, married Danyelle and then graduated from Truett Seminary in Waco. Like all transgender persons, Allyson s anatomy, chromosomes and brain gender (yes, that s a thing!) didn t line up the way they do for most of us. After a lifetime of struggle, Allyson finally saved her life by making the courageous and difficult choice to become the woman she felt she was supposed to be. The Sunday after the Supreme Court s marriage equality decision came down on June 26, 2015, she was providentially scheduled by her former pastor and friend Amy Butler to preach at the Riverside Church in New York City. I couldn t wait to hear what she would say. What she said surprised me. She believed the culture war was over and her side had won. She talked about having been a warrior for LGBTQ rights, having prayed and protested and advocated for what seemed hopeless for so long. In her moment of joy at victory, though, she said that her heart was burdened for those who now felt defeated. She said she had known what it was like to be reduced to whispering your views in private and feeling the weight of opinion against you. She was making a choice to reach out with compassion and urged others to do the same. This was a time for healing, not for celebrating others defeat. We live in a time when a voice 5
like Allyson s can and should finally be heard. She was wrong about the culture war being over, but I don t think she was wrong about how we should treat those who have done us or our loved ones harm. I don t know anyone more qualified than she to teach how to move forward in these days. Unless it s David. Or Jesus, who cried from the cross, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Sometimes being a Christian is just hard, isn t it? Amen. 6