As I mentioned before, today is Reformation Sunday – a day we mark to remember our historical roots and the theological principles that guide us into the future that God has in mind for us as God’s people. That may sound very institutional – and I guess it is – but its important to know what came before us and what grounds us. Given the great variety of expressions of what it means to be a people who follow Jesus, it’s important to know what makes us unique and what we might have to add to the great conversation about the good news of Jesus Christ.
For those who do not know, the Reformers were those that spoke out against abuses in the Roman Catholic Church in Europe in the 1500s. That led to the Pope telling them that they were no longer part of the church, and then different Reformers began to lead religious movements that coincided with the development of nation-states in Europe and consequently created different expressions in different nations. Presbyterians, for example, started out in Scotland.
We can talk more about that another day, but I want to lift up something essential that we still believe from those early reformers. One thing you may hear me say is that we are Reformed and always re-forming around the word of God. The original Reformers knew that they were not perfect and anything they formed – any church, council, or law – needed to be subject to revision by holding it up against what we know about God and about ourselves from scripture!
Of course, being Reformed and always re-forming means that we also constantly grow in our understanding of what we know about ourselves and God through scripture. The words themselves don’t change, but our understanding of them does. Before we go further with that, I want to acknowledge that it’s no coincidence that Reformation Sunday is set as the Sunday before All Souls Day (or All Saints as some say). Of course, most people associate All Hallows Eve as the night before All Souls Day, and this is not an attempt to counter that in any way. It is simply a reminder that we are part of a tradition that expects us to recognize our faults, find reconciliation through the sacrificial love of Jesus, and move ahead as people whom God has called to demonstrate love and mercy and hope and redemption.
In case you are wondering about a Reformed position on Halloween, there isn’t one. It’s a secular holiday that has evolved through the centuries into various of expressions and projections of fear and hope and community. If I were pressed by the question, as I recently was, about all the satanic and evil imagery that is so common on Halloween, I would say that there were cults and rituals in the time of Jesus, but he did not address those. He demonstrated what faithfulness to God looked like. He taught. He healed. He condemned those who were self-righteous, and he was a lot more concerned with poverty and injustice than he was about pretty much anything and everything else.
Paul did address pagan festivals and the food they served in 1 Corinthians 8, but he basically said that those gods weren’t real and if it causes a friend to think they might be then y’all just skip the buffet and head on home, OK?
Now I’m sure there is more to say about our fascination with death and our discomfort in talking about it, but today we have a different kind of horror story waiting for us as we seek to be reformed around the word of God. You may not have thought of it that way in the past, but given our current understanding of what we call “trauma-informed care,” I’m going to say that splitting the baby is about the worst thing that Solomon the wise could have said that day on the judgment seat.
Effective? Yes, but wise? It certainly gave him the reputation of being wise. V28 said, “All Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to execute justice.” They stood in awe of him. Therein lies the rub.
There are some parts of the story that we are missing here that I think may help to shed some light on the idea that the wisdom of Solomon is, at least in part, more of a cautionary tale than we want to admit – especially when we receive it in light of the prayer of Jesus, “Thy will be done – thy Kingdom come – on earth as it is in heaven.”
Stick with me, now, this is going to be a lot. Think of it as that part at the beginning of the show that catches you up in case you aren’t actually binging 14 episodes at once like a normal person. The larger story that we’ve been considering over the last months and weeks began with God’s covenant with Abraham that he would be the father of nations and that all families would be blessed through his family. This promise was expressed through Joseph in Egypt which led to the survival of many during a famine and also to the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel under Egyptian rule – which quickly become oppressive. As God liberated God’s people they moved from being wandering tribes to becoming a nation, which included conquering and continual waring with others and a longing for the security of a monarchy, like the other nations had.
Of course, God warned them that Kings tend to abuse power and that God would be with them, monarch or non-arch, as their true source of security. They said, “We want a King,” and they got Saul, who did not honor God and was replaced by David, a man after God’s own heart. Except that David was not a man after God’s own heart, either. One of his primary abuses of power was to have Bathsheba’s husband killed so he could essentially add her to his collection of seven other wives. The son that is born from their inequity dies, and Solomon is then seen as a promise of redemption for deeper faith. As David ages he gives credit to God for helping him hold the kingdom together, although it is a very Game Of Thrones kind of thing that happens all through 1 Kings.
Now we get to Solomon, who married the daughter of the Pharaoh and goes to the high places to sacrifice bulls. In his day it was believed that there was a pantheon of gods enthroned above the heavens. High places were the places to get the best reception and were not necessarily specific to one god or another. He may have been calling out to the God of his ancestors, but this is clearly not anywhere near the Temple that David began and he would finish nor is it anything like the practice prescribed by Moses.
That’s important, because over and over through this story – which is really just a few generations from the experience of slavery in Egypt – God tells the people, “Put away your foreign Gods.” Just two weeks ago we read the story of Joshua telling the people to do that. Now, Solomon, the wise is not only hedging his bets with his faith but is also married to the daughter of their former oppressor! As the story goes, we find that while Solomon may be seen as someone who executed justice he was also levying higher taxes and creating allegiances and alliances with foreign powers that eventually set up the division that will follow him when his time comes to an end.
The moral of the story here is that Solomon was a man with flaws and limitations. He asked God for wisdom as it related to statecraft and resource management, and I suppose he got it. I do wonder if his decision with these women was wise. It might have even been the only truly wise thing that he did if wisdom results in justice. Clearly, it brings up the notion that when we love truly and fully, we will sacrifice our ability to love in order to protect who and what we love.
I said before that the words of Jesus turn the wisdom of Solomon into a cautionary tale, and love is the key to understanding it that way. Solomon built his kingdom in the image of Egypt – in the image of empire – rather than the image of the Kingdom of God. I think we struggle with the same problem today as we grapple with the legacy of the doctrine of manifest destiny, with the original sin of slavery, and a political culture that honors strongmen and ideology over and above justice and righteousness.
How to get past all of that? How do we make way for the coming of God’s Kingdom? How do we even know what that means when all we know of Kingdoms is the language of the empire?
If we want to demonstrate the Kingdom, we cannot glorify the empire or any elected official or person of power, wealth, and prestige. If we long for the Kingdom and the will of God to be done, we cannot expect a nation-state to be it or to do it simply because those with the controlling interest say that it is so. The Kingdom of God is not like any earthly kingdom that has been or will be. It transcends our borders. Its priority is inclusion, and its goal is to bring us all into what Dr. Martin Luther King called “a beloved community.”
I do wonder what invoking Dr. King’s name conjures up in your hearts, and I expect that for many of us it is the idea of people being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That is how it was for me for most of my life. Strangely, or perhaps not so very much, I was never taught about his inclusive vision for a world in which there could be no poverty, hunger, or homelessness because we, as a human race, would come to realize how immoral it is to allow these conditions to exist.
In a speech in 1957 called, The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation's Chief Moral Dilemma, he wrote, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philia, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape which is understanding goodwill for all [people]. It is an overflowing love that seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of [people]. This is the love that may well be the salvation of our civilization.”
This love is what we pray for when we say, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.” It is this love that the Apostle Paul called “a more excellent way.” It is this love that Bishop Michael Curry wrote about in his book, Love Is the Way, which encourages the types of political discourses that we shy away from over ideology and fear of conflict. Bishop Curry says that instead of digging into a winner takes all attitude, we need to find the common high ground. We need to ask whether or not an issue or a piece of legislation exemplifies the law of love and doing to others as you would have them do. Apparently, it was that very question that defeated a law in North Carolina that loosened the restriction on the inhumane treatment of migrant workers. In his words, “The results weren’t perfect, but they were an improvement over what might have been.”
Friends, my hope for you and for me in all of this is not only that we might have the wisdom of Solomon and King and Curry, but also the love of an unnamed temple prostitute who cried out for love and for life. May we all have the strength to cry out as she, even as we pray, “Thy Kingdome come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” and to God be the glory, now and always. Amen.
For those who do not know, the Reformers were those that spoke out against abuses in the Roman Catholic Church in Europe in the 1500s. That led to the Pope telling them that they were no longer part of the church, and then different Reformers began to lead religious movements that coincided with the development of nation-states in Europe and consequently created different expressions in different nations. Presbyterians, for example, started out in Scotland.
We can talk more about that another day, but I want to lift up something essential that we still believe from those early reformers. One thing you may hear me say is that we are Reformed and always re-forming around the word of God. The original Reformers knew that they were not perfect and anything they formed – any church, council, or law – needed to be subject to revision by holding it up against what we know about God and about ourselves from scripture!
Of course, being Reformed and always re-forming means that we also constantly grow in our understanding of what we know about ourselves and God through scripture. The words themselves don’t change, but our understanding of them does. Before we go further with that, I want to acknowledge that it’s no coincidence that Reformation Sunday is set as the Sunday before All Souls Day (or All Saints as some say). Of course, most people associate All Hallows Eve as the night before All Souls Day, and this is not an attempt to counter that in any way. It is simply a reminder that we are part of a tradition that expects us to recognize our faults, find reconciliation through the sacrificial love of Jesus, and move ahead as people whom God has called to demonstrate love and mercy and hope and redemption.
In case you are wondering about a Reformed position on Halloween, there isn’t one. It’s a secular holiday that has evolved through the centuries into various of expressions and projections of fear and hope and community. If I were pressed by the question, as I recently was, about all the satanic and evil imagery that is so common on Halloween, I would say that there were cults and rituals in the time of Jesus, but he did not address those. He demonstrated what faithfulness to God looked like. He taught. He healed. He condemned those who were self-righteous, and he was a lot more concerned with poverty and injustice than he was about pretty much anything and everything else.
Paul did address pagan festivals and the food they served in 1 Corinthians 8, but he basically said that those gods weren’t real and if it causes a friend to think they might be then y’all just skip the buffet and head on home, OK?
Now I’m sure there is more to say about our fascination with death and our discomfort in talking about it, but today we have a different kind of horror story waiting for us as we seek to be reformed around the word of God. You may not have thought of it that way in the past, but given our current understanding of what we call “trauma-informed care,” I’m going to say that splitting the baby is about the worst thing that Solomon the wise could have said that day on the judgment seat.
Effective? Yes, but wise? It certainly gave him the reputation of being wise. V28 said, “All Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to execute justice.” They stood in awe of him. Therein lies the rub.
There are some parts of the story that we are missing here that I think may help to shed some light on the idea that the wisdom of Solomon is, at least in part, more of a cautionary tale than we want to admit – especially when we receive it in light of the prayer of Jesus, “Thy will be done – thy Kingdom come – on earth as it is in heaven.”
Stick with me, now, this is going to be a lot. Think of it as that part at the beginning of the show that catches you up in case you aren’t actually binging 14 episodes at once like a normal person. The larger story that we’ve been considering over the last months and weeks began with God’s covenant with Abraham that he would be the father of nations and that all families would be blessed through his family. This promise was expressed through Joseph in Egypt which led to the survival of many during a famine and also to the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel under Egyptian rule – which quickly become oppressive. As God liberated God’s people they moved from being wandering tribes to becoming a nation, which included conquering and continual waring with others and a longing for the security of a monarchy, like the other nations had.
Of course, God warned them that Kings tend to abuse power and that God would be with them, monarch or non-arch, as their true source of security. They said, “We want a King,” and they got Saul, who did not honor God and was replaced by David, a man after God’s own heart. Except that David was not a man after God’s own heart, either. One of his primary abuses of power was to have Bathsheba’s husband killed so he could essentially add her to his collection of seven other wives. The son that is born from their inequity dies, and Solomon is then seen as a promise of redemption for deeper faith. As David ages he gives credit to God for helping him hold the kingdom together, although it is a very Game Of Thrones kind of thing that happens all through 1 Kings.
Now we get to Solomon, who married the daughter of the Pharaoh and goes to the high places to sacrifice bulls. In his day it was believed that there was a pantheon of gods enthroned above the heavens. High places were the places to get the best reception and were not necessarily specific to one god or another. He may have been calling out to the God of his ancestors, but this is clearly not anywhere near the Temple that David began and he would finish nor is it anything like the practice prescribed by Moses.
That’s important, because over and over through this story – which is really just a few generations from the experience of slavery in Egypt – God tells the people, “Put away your foreign Gods.” Just two weeks ago we read the story of Joshua telling the people to do that. Now, Solomon, the wise is not only hedging his bets with his faith but is also married to the daughter of their former oppressor! As the story goes, we find that while Solomon may be seen as someone who executed justice he was also levying higher taxes and creating allegiances and alliances with foreign powers that eventually set up the division that will follow him when his time comes to an end.
The moral of the story here is that Solomon was a man with flaws and limitations. He asked God for wisdom as it related to statecraft and resource management, and I suppose he got it. I do wonder if his decision with these women was wise. It might have even been the only truly wise thing that he did if wisdom results in justice. Clearly, it brings up the notion that when we love truly and fully, we will sacrifice our ability to love in order to protect who and what we love.
I said before that the words of Jesus turn the wisdom of Solomon into a cautionary tale, and love is the key to understanding it that way. Solomon built his kingdom in the image of Egypt – in the image of empire – rather than the image of the Kingdom of God. I think we struggle with the same problem today as we grapple with the legacy of the doctrine of manifest destiny, with the original sin of slavery, and a political culture that honors strongmen and ideology over and above justice and righteousness.
How to get past all of that? How do we make way for the coming of God’s Kingdom? How do we even know what that means when all we know of Kingdoms is the language of the empire?
If we want to demonstrate the Kingdom, we cannot glorify the empire or any elected official or person of power, wealth, and prestige. If we long for the Kingdom and the will of God to be done, we cannot expect a nation-state to be it or to do it simply because those with the controlling interest say that it is so. The Kingdom of God is not like any earthly kingdom that has been or will be. It transcends our borders. Its priority is inclusion, and its goal is to bring us all into what Dr. Martin Luther King called “a beloved community.”
I do wonder what invoking Dr. King’s name conjures up in your hearts, and I expect that for many of us it is the idea of people being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That is how it was for me for most of my life. Strangely, or perhaps not so very much, I was never taught about his inclusive vision for a world in which there could be no poverty, hunger, or homelessness because we, as a human race, would come to realize how immoral it is to allow these conditions to exist.
In a speech in 1957 called, The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation's Chief Moral Dilemma, he wrote, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philia, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape which is understanding goodwill for all [people]. It is an overflowing love that seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of [people]. This is the love that may well be the salvation of our civilization.”
This love is what we pray for when we say, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.” It is this love that the Apostle Paul called “a more excellent way.” It is this love that Bishop Michael Curry wrote about in his book, Love Is the Way, which encourages the types of political discourses that we shy away from over ideology and fear of conflict. Bishop Curry says that instead of digging into a winner takes all attitude, we need to find the common high ground. We need to ask whether or not an issue or a piece of legislation exemplifies the law of love and doing to others as you would have them do. Apparently, it was that very question that defeated a law in North Carolina that loosened the restriction on the inhumane treatment of migrant workers. In his words, “The results weren’t perfect, but they were an improvement over what might have been.”
Friends, my hope for you and for me in all of this is not only that we might have the wisdom of Solomon and King and Curry, but also the love of an unnamed temple prostitute who cried out for love and for life. May we all have the strength to cry out as she, even as we pray, “Thy Kingdome come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” and to God be the glory, now and always. Amen.
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