The Spirit and the Eagles

Sermon from 1 Kings 11:1-13 for February 4, 2018

So...

It’s not really that I hate the Patriots. And it’s not that I love the “iggles” as my Philadelphia relatives call them. It’s just that I can’t find it in my heart to love a team that seems so mechanical, so calculating.

What I really love down deep in my heart, is the sloppiness of a team that is just in it on the basis of passion and love of the game. That has serious skills and abilities but that ones that perhaps aren’t really honed and made perfect.

I love a bunch of big, goofy players, full of heart and spit and vinegar, completely filled with the spirit as it were, that are only doing their best, hoping to win even if winning is a really distant possibility. Winning on a hope and a prayer, when all the realities are against them.

I know that isn’t logical. Rather it is a deeply emotional and sometimes deeply flawed approach to life. But passion is much more important to me than raw calculation.

Which is why I can understand God’s amazing love for David, who seems to me to be much more of an Eagle, passionate, skilled, but wonderfully flawed, not only able to admit defeat with true sadness, but victory with wild and crazy joy.

David was in it because of his heart, and his heart belong to God.

Solomon was in it too, but it seemed his heart belonged to his wives.

The story here 1 Kings is a scary one. Not because it is the only one about God withdrawing his spirit from one of his “servants” because it’s not. It’s scary because it points out clearly how and why God would withdraw.

It turns out God can really get frosted with you! Especially if you choose to do what the first commandment admonishes Gods’ people to never do, have another God before Yahweh!

David, for all of his faults never even considered another God other than Yahweh. But as the little slogan goes, faith is only one generation deep. For people of faith there are no children, no grandchildren, not even brothers or sisters or grandparents. And Solomon it appears was one who never got the faith!

When Jesus admonished his disciples to leave the relatives behind, and suggested to one young man that he let others bury his family so he could follow Jesus, he was only stating the obvious – faith is individual.

Either you believe or you don’t. There is no giving your faith to another.

It’s not like the flu: one kiss, one handshake, one cough won’t do it. Faith is something that each individual must make up their own mind about, and that decision must be followed by a heart set on God and a will that that determines that no matter what happens in the fiery furnace, you remember that story from Daniel, that you will believe.

And Solomon wasn’t there.

He acknowledged Yahweh was God. But he was prepared to have a pantheon of Gods. He loved his wives enough to take them seriously and to provide comfort and care for them, even though most of them weren’t wives in the traditional sense, just political pawns used by families to secure trade and political security.

Solomon wasn’t a bad man, or a mean one. He was in fact wise, a man given a wonderful gift by God to guide and lead Israel. He had an open heart, but he also had an open heart in the wrong direction.

Instead of being asset on loving God with his whole heart and mind and will, and because of it loving others - he was instead a man who loved others and then as an afterthought considered Yahweh’s claims on him, which left him open to a failure of the worst order.

His heart was open to other Gods who were not about love and mercy and walking humbly, but rather God’s of conquest, the using of others, even sacrificing innocents to pave a way for personal success. To be clear, Yahweh’s way is never about personal success, it is always about the Kingdom of God, and stewardship in the care of God’s people.

David had learned the hard way that sacrificing others, specifically Uriah in war in order to marry his wife Bathsheba, was completely contrary to Yahweh’s insistence on holiness, mercy, justice, love, and faith.

David lost a son because of his failure to understand God’s greatest desires.

But Solomon had no understanding of God’s willingness to withdraw his spirit, even after having been told time and again that he was on the wrong path.

For him to understand would have required Solomon’s heart to be set on Yahweh and it just wasn’t.

We pray, “Our father, who are’t in heaven. Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

In the prayer we remind ourselves that we are God’s, that we are God’s children, his faithful servants, and that our lives are all about making this world and our own lives God’s kingdom.

That requires putting first things first, and the first thing is God! Otherwise our spiritual lives fade as the Spirit simply withdraws.

The story is told of an old Scots Presbyterian elder who had not been to church in a long time. The pastor went calling and after a greeting at the door both sat silently in front of a fire in the fireplace. Soon the pastor rose and with a fireplace tool, dragged a coal out of the red-hot middle of the fire.

As it sat by itself on the hearth, the coal cooled and turned ashen gray. Soon again the pastor rose and pushed the coal back into the center of the fire where it quickly began again to glow red-hot.

As the pastor rose to leave, the elder turned to him and said, “Ack, I will be in worship Sunday!”

Though faith is only one generation deep, there is a community of faith where brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren gather in faith.

Be sure you are there where the spirit glows red-hot, where passion is alive, and where our faith, sloppy & crazy, leads to all of us making a difference in this world on behalf of Jesus Christ our Lord.

May the “iggles” win. But much more importantly, may God’s kingdom come.

Amen.