Espionage, spies, intrigue, battles, kings, witches, prophets, rape, and promises made and broken ….it’s all there in this week’s readings. The stories told that sound more like the headlines of today’s papers than something you would expect to read in the Bible. 1 & 2 Samuel have shown us the best and the worst of King Saul and King David. We’ve witnessed acts of extravagant kindness, faith and bravery and acts of extreme cruelty, faithlessness and cowardliness.
Often when we hear the stories of the great characters of the Bible, we see them in the light of hero with a character that seems to have no blemish or fault; yet when we are willing to look a little deeper into their lives we see that they too make poor decisions, behave badly and seem to exhibit anything but Godly behavior. Perhaps that is why it is difficult to accept that our Sunday School heroes often stumbled and failed – we want to only see them in that light of goodness and greatness.
So what is there for us to see and learn from these stories, this quagmire of daily living that can easily disillusion us from these ones that, perhaps until these readings, we admired? Maybe it is this: that even in the midst of our "stuff" God is ever present….ever waiting to be called upon for guidance and help. In every venture, when God was called upon, God was present and ready to love and forgive. That forgiveness did not take away the consequences of some very poor and destructive choices, yet it allowed them to move forward with hope and renewed identify of children of God…with a fresh start from that moment forward.
Maybe our inability to conceive the depth of that kind of forgiveness from God is why we struggle to believe that God can truly forgive us. When we fail to live up to our expectations of what it means to be a Christian, how can God possibly forgive us? We live with idealized, often romantic, ideas of what it means to be a Christian in this world; ideas that are often not based on the reality of the messiness of life. We are hurt and we lash out causing more hurt, we compromise our values in small ways and later find ourselves in places or situations we never expected to be, we are disappointed in others and choose to never trust again. If there is one thing we can learn from this week’s readings, or from the Bible in its entirety, is that God never gives up on us and there is no limit to his forgiveness.
When I was a kid, we’d often have "do-overs" if things were going really badly or someone just needed a chance to try again. We’d stop the game and call "do-over" and it was if the previous pitch or hit never happened…..it was a fresh start. Maybe that’s what we need in all our lives – especially when it seems all our efforts are just taking us farther and farther from who and what God has called us to be. "Lord, I am so sorry, and I need your forgiveness." And God replies with a smile on his face, "Do-over!" - Kathy Lamon, pastor of Congregational Care and Older Adults
Often when we hear the stories of the great characters of the Bible, we see them in the light of hero with a character that seems to have no blemish or fault; yet when we are willing to look a little deeper into their lives we see that they too make poor decisions, behave badly and seem to exhibit anything but Godly behavior. Perhaps that is why it is difficult to accept that our Sunday School heroes often stumbled and failed – we want to only see them in that light of goodness and greatness.
So what is there for us to see and learn from these stories, this quagmire of daily living that can easily disillusion us from these ones that, perhaps until these readings, we admired? Maybe it is this: that even in the midst of our "stuff" God is ever present….ever waiting to be called upon for guidance and help. In every venture, when God was called upon, God was present and ready to love and forgive. That forgiveness did not take away the consequences of some very poor and destructive choices, yet it allowed them to move forward with hope and renewed identify of children of God…with a fresh start from that moment forward.
Maybe our inability to conceive the depth of that kind of forgiveness from God is why we struggle to believe that God can truly forgive us. When we fail to live up to our expectations of what it means to be a Christian, how can God possibly forgive us? We live with idealized, often romantic, ideas of what it means to be a Christian in this world; ideas that are often not based on the reality of the messiness of life. We are hurt and we lash out causing more hurt, we compromise our values in small ways and later find ourselves in places or situations we never expected to be, we are disappointed in others and choose to never trust again. If there is one thing we can learn from this week’s readings, or from the Bible in its entirety, is that God never gives up on us and there is no limit to his forgiveness.
When I was a kid, we’d often have "do-overs" if things were going really badly or someone just needed a chance to try again. We’d stop the game and call "do-over" and it was if the previous pitch or hit never happened…..it was a fresh start. Maybe that’s what we need in all our lives – especially when it seems all our efforts are just taking us farther and farther from who and what God has called us to be. "Lord, I am so sorry, and I need your forgiveness." And God replies with a smile on his face, "Do-over!" - Kathy Lamon, pastor of Congregational Care and Older Adults
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