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Sunday January 13, 2008 "What Do You Want?" 1 Kings 3:1-15, 4:29-34 |
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Location: Blogs Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons |
 | | Posted by: Brad Miller | 1/14/2008 5:22 AM | Overall, Solomon’s heart seems to have been in the right place. We are told early on in this scripture lesson that “Solomon loved the Lord.” That sounds pretty good. If people were to talk about you or I and one of the first things they said was “they love Lord”, we’d be pretty pleased, wouldn’t we? After all, it says something important about who we are, about what we think is important, about what we strive to do in our lives.
Well, at least that is what I think it says.
When I think about people I have known that fall into the category of folks who “love the Lord” it is usually because of their actions, their deeds, the way they conduct themselves. They are selfless people. They seem to be always on the lookout for people who might need assistance. They are people of integrity. They do what is right.
Those people who are comfortable in their faith seem more likely to me to be “good people.” Maybe it’s because they know all good things have come to them through God’s grace and so hope to use that example to serve others. Maybe it’s because they know that doing the right thing honors God. But here’s the rub: people who love the Lord are not perfect. No one is perfect. They may strive for all those good things, but they do not always achieve them. They sometimes make good choices; they sometimes make bad choices. But just because they sometimes make bad choices does not necessarily mean they do not love the Lord.
Take Solomon, for instance.
Ask most people about Solomon and they will tell you a couple of things very quickly: he was amazingly wise and he built the Temple in Jerusalem as God’s one and true temple. These are both facts that the Biblical record puts forward, but it is not the whole story by any stretch of the imagination. Solomon was a much more complex person than a cursory reading of his story might tell us.
Solomon loved the Lord, BUT…listen to what follows this pronouncement: “Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of David; only he sacrificed and offered incense at the high places.” This little line carries much importance in this story. It would be very easy for us to rush through this scripture and say, “Yep, Solomon loved God and he brought sacrifices and burned incense in the high places.” Through our Christian lens there is nothing terribly alarming about this assertion. We know that the ancient Hebrew people had an elaborate sacrificial system to honor God, to expunge sin, to bless families. But because we believe that in Christ Jesus the sacrificial system was put away once and for all, we don’t have a good handle on just what that ancient sacrificial system entailed.
Hear the same part of scripture in a more contemporary voice, Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation of the Bible:
“Solomon loved God and continued to live in the God honoring ways of David, EXCEPT that he also worshipped in the local shrines, offering sacrifices and burning incense.”
There is no doubt that Solomon sought to honor God. There is little doubt that his heart was in the right place. But there is some doubt as to whether his actions would have been seen by his faithful Hebrew brothers and sisters as “god honoring.”
According to Hebrew law, there was only one place to offer sacrifices: in God’s holy temple. But early in Solomon’s reign as king, there was no temple. Until the temple was complete, the only place that sacrifices could be made was the holy Tabernacle that had been built at Moses direction. Solomon had been charged with building the temple, but it was not yet complete. So, we are told, the people worshipped wherever they were able. And many of these sites were pagan worship sites. Many of them were shrines to gods other than the one God that the Jewish people worshipped. And Solomon did as the people did.
Does this make him a bad person? He wanted to honor God. So, he took it upon himself to honor God in a less than holy place. He circumvented the rules, but he did it for the right reasons. We can let him off the hook for one slip up, can’t we?
Well, what are we supposed to do with several other pieces of information we are presented here? First, we are told that Solomon “made a marriage alliance with Egypt’s Pharaoh.” This does not mean that he simply took a non-Hebrew wife – which Moses warned against – but that he took this Egyptian wife – pharaoh’s daughter - as a political maneuver; a chance to build a mutual protection agreement with Egypt. But this was Israel’s enemy! The holy scriptures specifically prohibit forming close alliances with Egypt.
Second, we are told that his Egyptian bride came and lived with him in the city of David until he had finished building his own house, and THEN the Temple of God.
Wait a second! Did I hear that right? This son of David, who loved God and sought to honor God waited to build the temple until after his own house was completed? Huh? Does this sound like someone whose priorities are in the right place? Does this sound like someone dedicated to having his life shine as a beacon of the love he felt for God?
Whatever conclusion we reach, this morning’s scripture tells us that because there was no temple for the sacrificial ceremonies of the Hebrew people, the Hebrew people corrupted the sacrificial system by transferring their practices to other places, even though it violated Hebrew law. The unmistakable conclusion is that they began to do this because there was no temple. There was no temple because Solomon decided he needed to finish his own house before he built God’s house. And there is some hint that he needed to finish his own house first to please Pharaoh’s daughter, thus securing the political bond between pharaoh and Solomon!
Is there a way to reconcile these two Solomon’s: the one who loves the Lord and the one that breaks the law of Torah with great regularity? The Solomon who sought to protect Israel, but did so by rejecting scripture and taking a foreign wife? The Solomon who built the temple, but only after his own was finished? The Solomon who sought to honor God, but did so at idolatrous shrines?
The next scene in this scripture helps us to sort out some of this whole mess.
Solomon traveled to Gibeon, one of the most high of the “other” places of worship. And here, he offered a thousand sacrifices, each sacrifice in that place a contradiction of the teaching of Torah. And he slept.
This was a common practice among ancient people. When they needed to hear from whatever diety they worshipped, they would go to a holy place, and hope that God would come to them in their dreams. Anthropologists call this practice “incubation” and this is what Solomon was hoping for that night. It is a form of prayer: listening for God’s voice.
But this was not a place where God resided! This was not the house of God!
It didn’t matter. God came to Solomon in a dream and said, “Solomon, what do you want? What can I do for you?”
Is this a test? Will God judge Solomon’s answer? Or is it God saying, “Okay. Solomon, you have one wish: what will it be?”
Can you imagine? What we wouldn’t give to have one wish! Just one wish that would magically come true! It’s the stuff of folklore and legend and bad jokes! One wish! Boy oh boy, Solomon, it had better be a good one.
It was.
In Solomon’s response to God we get a glimpse of the heart of Solomon, the Solomon that loves the Lord. The Solomon that recognizes that he is a flawed human. The Solomon who understands that he is NOT his father, King David. The Solomon who worries he is not up to the task of being the King of God’s chosen people.
Speaking from his heart, Solomon responds to God.
He asks for wisdom.
And God is pleased.
How many of us would have been tempted to ask for riches, power, glory, fame, long life? How many of us would have thought of ourselves our immediate family first? How many of us would ask to win the lottery? C’mon admit it: it would have at least crossed your mind!
Solomon asked for none of those. He asked to be a better person. He asked to be a good King. He asked for wisdom that would allow him to rule God’s people well.
God granted his wish, and the name Solomon became synonymous with the concept of “wisdom.” In a passage we skipped over this morning, we are given an example of just how wise Solomon was.
I t is, of course, the story of the two women, each with a child. One child dies and the grieving mother takes the other child and claims it his her own. They bring the dispute to Solomon and he rules that they should cut the baby in half, knowing full well that the true mother would rather give up her claim to the child than see him die. Of course, Solomon was right.
The end of our reading today is a litany of the scope and breadth of Solomon’s wisdom. Our passage tells us that others paled in comparison. We read about the incredible number of proverbs Solomon wrote, the topics on which he was expert and the crowds who came to sit at his feet to bask in Solomon’s wisdom.
The story does not end here. God granted Solomon wisdom, but also the power and wealth that he did not ask for. With this wealth and power, Solomon completed the magnificent house of God, the Temple of Jerusalem. Because of his wealth and power, Solomon’s reign is ultimately doomed to failure. Hee ultimately fell sway to the power of self-aggrandizement over wisdom.
You know, this was a pretty good story right up until that last part. Shouldn’t God have known that Solomon would ultimately misuse his wealth and power? Why would such a flawed human being be granted such great wisdom? How could Solomon not see that he had been given an incredible gift from God, and so work to honor the giver through the use of the gift? The short answer to all of these questions is “I don’t know.”
The longer answer is that this is a story of humanity. This is a story of God’s love. This is a story of choices.
In a state of prayer, Solomon makes the choice to lay bare his soul before God. He recognizes his own flaws all too well. In prayer, he makes the choice to seek God’s guidance and the chance to serve God well. And when God asks, “What do you want?” Solomon chooses to answer with an already apparent wisdom: the wisdom to know that he needs help.
But like us, Solomon is human and his choices are not static. His life, like ours, is based on continual choices about whether to seek God’s path. New problems, new opportunities, new circumstances lead to the need to make new choices. Every day of our lives.
At Gibeon, when God asked Simeon “What do you want?” the dreaming Solomon chose wisely. Having been granted his wish, having chosen correctly once, Solomon seems to think that his choosing is done.
This is where Solomon got it wrong.
It does seem like and amazing thing that God would ask a human, “what do you want?” Solomon certainly thought it was miraculous. But even though we don’t hear the words, God asks us this question every day and every day we are given an opportunity to respond. This concept is called “grace” and it is offered to us not because of who we are, or how we respond, but because of who God is.
God created us with the ability to choose. God gave us free will, the power to choose to follow God’s path or to go our own way. The wonder of God’s grace is not that we are asked just once what we want, but we are asked every day, and every day we choose how to respond. Solomon chose once and stopped listening. We must not.
But where, you may ask, have we heard God asking what we want, asking what God can do for us?
When we grasp the presence of God in our lives for the first time, God asks “what do you want?”
When we wake up every morning as part of God’s wondrous creation, God asks, “what do you want?”
When we struggle with the temptations of life, God asks, “what do you want?”
When we recognize that our lives and all the good gifts we have been given are completely undeserved, God asks, “what do you want?”
When Jesus rose from the dead, humanity was asked “what do you want?”
Over and over again, as individuals and as a community of faith, we have the chance to answer God when we are asked, “what do you want?”
May we answer wisely, today, tomorrow and always.
Let us pray: Lord, we give you thanks for loving us so much that you allow us to choose how we will live our lives. We will make mistakes and missteps but we are filled with wonder that at every turn you are there asking, “What do you want? What can I do for you?” Help us to answer from our heart: in everything we do, Lord, we want to honor you, to glorify you, to show our love for you and to reflect your love for us, so that all might come to know you. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
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