All the Equipment and None of the Will

Transcription

A mustard seed, yeast, a pearl of great price, a dragnet, are all things that Jesus likens to the Kingdom of Heaven. Now, it might seem like all these images are a little bit different, and they can be grouped into pairings, or at least some closer to the other. Yeast and a mustard seed are both very, very minuscule and tiny, and eventually both grow.

The pearl and the treasure in the field are things that you will sell everything you have, give up, sacrifice everything you have to obtain. The dragnet is the outlier. It fits more with the parable we talked about last week of the weeds and the wheat, where God will discern where we are going.

But let me put this to you. There’s another parable we read today, the parable of King Solomon. Now, allow me to shine a little less of a bright light on Solomon. Solomon, we always think of him in certain ways and in a certain vein. He is the king of wisdom, right? He is the wise man. We remember that one story of the baby and the sword, and I’m not going to go any further because of kids. Stevie, I’ll tell you about it later. I’ll give you the version. Now, here’s the problem. Solomon didn’t exactly come to power clean. He has to do the things some kings do and eliminate brothers or relatives on his way to power. But when he gets there, after a period of scripture that reads more like the Godfather or Game of Thrones, he’s visited by God, as we’ve read, and God asks him a very open question.

What can I give you? Remember, this isn’t your parents asking at Christmas. This is God, God Almighty, who is saying, what can I give you? You’re a new king over my people. What do you want? I’ll give it to you.

Now, I’m most impressed by the fact that Solomon doesn’t bat an eye. I probably would have spent almost a year trying to figure it out, research it. What’s the best thing I could use? I would have overthought it to the nth degree. But Solomon knows. Solomon knows and asks God one thing. But when we look at that one thing he asks, we need to consider the other options on the table. Wealth, power, victory in battle, all are possibilities. But to an extent, those are all in some way self-serving. Wealth, if the king is wealthy, if the king is powerful, that’s just him. It does not necessarily mean that the nation, God’s people, benefit. He could have even gone a little further and said, I wish for never having a famine, Lord, during my reign. I wish for no famines so that the people can produce. But he asks for an understanding mind to govern God’s people. Now, we call that wisdom. But the ability to discern good from evil doesn’t necessarily make you wise. It makes you a good ruler. Not necessarily wise. So perhaps it’s more nuanced than just calling him the wise king.

Now, God is so pleased by this answer. What does God do? God does give him riches and honor his whole life. But then there’s more to Solomon. This isn’t the end of his reign, so to speak. This is just the beginning. There are great deeds of his wisdom like the story I shared earlier. There are stories of merchants and trade fleets going here and there. There is the penultimate moment when Solomon builds the temple of God. And ream upon ream is written about how absolutely beautiful the temple is. It’s absolutely amazing. The king is discerning and knows the right thing to do. He does the right thing. Everyone has enough to eat. Things are going well for the people of God until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it is directly because of Solomon. You see, Solomon is given this great gift. But he doesn’t always use it.

He builds temples for God. He builds the temple for God. But he’s also got a lot of wives. Wives who are the daughters of all the little petty kings all around. He’s making alliances with these kings. And part of the agreement of that alliance is he marries the daughter of the king of Moab. And the daughter of Egypt. You get what I’m saying? Well, when those ladies come to Israel, come to Jerusalem, do you think they convert? They bring their gods with them. And because Solomon likes to keep things happy at home, he lets them build temples in Jerusalem, in God’s city. Because his wives need to worship their gods.

Now, that would have been bad enough. But something else happens. Those wives, or at least according to scripture, and in reality, Solomon needs to bite the bullet and own a lot of this. They start to pull him towards those other faiths. Towards Molech and the other gods. And we hear this from 1 Kings 11. He had 700 wives of royal birth and 300 concubines. And his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods. And his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord, his God. As the heart of David, his father, had been. He followed Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians. Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord. He did not follow the Lord completely. As David, his father, had done. He had all the ability to know right from wrong, good from evil. And yet, what does Solomon do? He does wrong. He does evil. He walks away from God.

I want to call this a tragic story, but there’s something more at hand in it. It’s not just a tragedy, it’s just frustrating. You have a man who is given the great gift from God to discern right from wrong, and he can’t help but do wrong. He is given all of this discernment, and what does he do? He wastes it. He ignores it. Now, I don’t know if he chooses to shut it off, because that still small voice in his head that says, Solomon, are you kidding me? No, no, no, no, no, no. Is it drowned out by the other things? We don’t know much about why this happened.

Did he gaslight himself into believing that even though the evil sensor in his brain was going off, red lights and alarms, saying, don’t do this, Solomon, he did it and thought he was right? The parable here, that is Solomon, is a man was given this great gift from God. A gift that allowed him to govern and rule well, to discern good from evil, to do what God desired, and yet, and yet, he ignored that gift, chose not to use that gift, and because of that, he wandered away or was pulled away from God. Now, we could go down the rabbit trails of why, and the reasons, and honestly, scholars have argued and debated back and forth. Maybe it was my mom’s old phrase about Solomon reading his own press clippings. He forgot that it was God who gave him the gift and he thought he knew better than God. Maybe, maybe, another piece, maybe it was just the ease of keeping those lives of his happy and desiring that it was easier to displease God than to displease those 700 wives.

Solomon also does other things, because there’s more to this than just the marriages. He makes alliances for both peace and trade with all of those different rulers. He seals alliances with marriage, and there are two things that early on in scripture God says to the people of Israel. Don’t marry outside the group. Don’t marry outside people of other religions, people of other faiths. God is trying to protect the people of Israel from all those other faiths out there, all the mullets, all of those. But what is more, is that God also says, don’t make an alliance unless you talk to me. Don’t go and make an alliance with the people of Moab, unless you pray and talk with me. Because what we forget, when we look at this, because we see kings and rulers, when we look at normal kingdoms, who’s the head, who’s the top dog? Well, not now. Now we have constitutional monarchies, all of that. But the king is second only to nobody in those countries. But in Israel, the king is always second to God.

But, I can wonder if Solomon looks around at all those other kingdoms, and says, he’s not answerable to God. The king of Egypt isn’t answerable to God. Why do I have to be? Again, we could go down these rabbit trails for years. But the reality of this moment is this. Solomon has this ability, this gift, and yet he doesn’t use it. He doesn’t use the one thing he has.

The lesson for us from Solomon is this. When God gives us gifts, just like the parable of the talons, are we supposed to take them and bury them in the backyard, put them under the mattress and wait, wait for the right particular moment, and then pull them out like an emergency parachute? Or does God give us our gifts to use them now, in the moment, however we can? If we loop back to these other parables, think about the treasure in the field, the pearl of great price. What is the response when God’s kingdom is there and available in those parables? The people sell everything they have to get them. When God gives us a gift, it isn’t for use on a rainy day. It is used for every single day. The challenge for us is to use those gifts.

Now for us, the stakes are going to be a little less than Solomon. I don’t think if we don’t use the gifts God has given us, a kingdom is not going to fall. And if you are the ruler of a kingdom, that’s kind of cool. Let’s talk. But if you aren’t a king or a queen, if you’re an average person, when God blesses you with a gift, use it. Find a way to use it. Be willing to use it. Sacrifice to use it. God did not give us a gift to sit on our own and don’t use it and save it. It is meant to be used. You don’t keep your mints in your pocket on Sunday from the collect lint. You keep them in your pocket on Sunday so that when the sermon goes, you pop them in your mouth and it gives you a little something sweet to suck on as you get a little bit of sour from the sermon.

The reality is, when you have a gift given to you by God, it is given for the purpose of use. Now, we can wonder about Solomon all day long, about why he chose not to. But I would rather wonder about why I chose not to and change. I would rather for us to wonder about what our gifts are and how we can best use them. What gifts have we not used? So, brothers and sisters, think about your gifts. Think about how God has blessed you. And then think about how you can use it for God.

Amen.

Brothers and sisters, let us give from our gifts.