THE FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT 2002

Who would have thought of David as a candidate for King? He was, after all, Jesse's youngest son, still a boy, without any of the normal qualifications for being King, certainly not, at first sight, as qualified as any of his seven older brothers. And yet, David was the one whom God chose to become King in place of Saul. Of course, if you read back into the earlier stories of God's people, you'll find that unlikely choices were more often the rule than the exception when God was involved. Cain was the older of Adam and Eve's two sons, and yet it was his younger brother Abel's offering that was acceptable to God. Jacob, the younger of Isaac and Rebekah's twin sons, was the one whom God chose to be the heir of the promise. (Hebrews 11:9) And of Jacob's twelve sons, it was the next to the youngest one, Joseph, whom God chose to keep God's people alive in time of famine. God, it seems, makes unlikely choices, choosing, in Paul's words, "what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;...what is weak in the world to shame the strong;...what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God." (1 Corinthians 1:27-29) And so God chose David, the youngest of Jesse's sons, to replace Saul as King, because, as Samuel had said, David was "a man after [God's] own heart...." (1 Samuel 13:14) What a wonderful phrase and what a wonderful idea to be a person after God's own heart. Hundreds of year's later, Paul would refer to that statement of Samuel's as he preached in the synagogue at Antioch: "When [God] had removed [Saul], he made David their king. In his testimony about him he said, 'I have found David, son of Jesse, to be a man after my heart, who will carry out all my wishes.'" (Acts 13:22)

There it is, in a nutshell: a description of what it means to be a child of God. It means being a person after God's own heart and a person who will carry out all God's wishes. Those are really two sides to the same coin; to be a person after God's own heart is to be a person who desires to carry out all God's wishes. Our ancestors in the faith understood this well, knowing that what made Israel different from the nations around them was that God had chosen them, and that that choice was an act of love. They also knew that God's love called for a response, a response of loving obedience. The writer of Deuteronomy captured that understanding of the relationship between God and Israel in these verses: "So now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you? Only to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the LORD your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being. Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the LORD your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet the LORD set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples, as it is today." (Deuteronomy 10:12-15) God's requirement of obedience grows out of God's love. We are to love God because, as the First Letter of John put it, God first loved us. (1 John 4:10) Our obedience is our loving and thankful response to God's love, and it is for our well-being, for our good, that we are obedient.

When we look at the Christian faith this way, we see it not primarily as doctrine or as ethics, as doctrines to be believed or as a way of life to be lived, but as Good News.

More and more in recent years I see the Bible as a love story. Not as a rule book, or even a book of theology, but as a love story. And not only a love story, but a story of unrequited love, the story of our rejection, again and again and again, of God's love. Even in parts of the story, like this morning's Gospel reading, where there is an obvious undercurrent of conflict, deeper than that there is God's offer of love. In this story of the healing of a blind man, the important underlying theme is that of the offer of love and of people's unwillingness to see and accept that love. At the outset, Jesus responded to that odd question from his disciples, with his own affirmation that what was about to happen was the revelation of the works of God, the revelation of the creative and healing power of God's love. The disciple had gotten stuck for a moment in that all too human enterprise of trying to figure out who was responsible for the blind man's condition, so maybe their question wasn't all that odd. Maybe they were doing the same thing that you and I do when we get stuck in trying to blame someone for whatever problem we're facing, whether the problem is the Enron crisis or the state of the economy or the condition of Saint Matthias Church or some problem at work or at home. I'm not suggesting that determining responsibility is never important, but we ought not to get stuck there. The important thing is moving on to see and be part of God's works, to see and be part of the bringing of God's love to the situation.

But even when that happened in this story, even when Jesus moved beyond the question of who was responsible for the situation to an expression of God's healing love, even then there were those who rejected that love, those who refused to see in the healing of the man's blindness an expression of the same love which had made Israel God's people. And if this is, indeed, a love story, that kind of a response, that kind of blind rejection of God's love, is more a cause for sadness than for anger or condemnation. How sad to have God's love at work around us and not to be able or willing to see it or to accept it. How sad to be so caught up in something else that we can't see how God loves us. How sad to be so intent upon success or the pursuit of wealth or even the pursuit of our own brand of religious righteousness that we fail to see and accept God's love when it is offered. And how sad for God to have this offer of love rejected or overlooked. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" (Matthew 23:37; Luke 13:34)

We are now just a little more than halfway through Lent; Easter is only three weeks away. We are also, here in this parish and in this diocese, partway through our annual Episcopal Community Services Appeal. We can deal with both Lent and the ECS Appeal from at least two different points of view, and which we choose, in the words of Robert Frost, will make all the difference. We can approach Lent and the ECS Appeal as grim duties, as obligations to be fulfilled, perhaps grudgingly, but fulfilled because it's expected of us. Or we can keep our Lenten disciplines and give generously for the work of the Church through ECS because we have been caught up in this incredible love story, because we have come to know ourselves as beloved of God, even though we are as unlikely candidates for God's love as David was for becoming King of Israel. The choice is ours, the choice between Christianity as duty and Christianity as a joyful and growing relationship with the incredibly generous God who shared fully in our humanity that we might share in that community of love which is called the Holy Trinity.