Sermon: The Apple of God's Eye

Proper 26 A                                                                                                     October 30, 2011

 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 51:1-10                                                                    St. Alban’s, Austin

David was the apple of God’s eye. Other than Jesus, no one is more pivotal in the gospel narrative than David, but the fact is, he doesn’t show up all that much in the Revised Common Lectionary, which is the one we typically read and which is pretty much standard in all mainline churches these days. David’s story is long and convoluted. I’m going to try to encapsulate it or maybe just hit the high points – and low points – for our focus today. We’re hitting the ground running here.

David was a complicated person, but his reign is considered to be the Camelot of Jewish history, the golden age to which Jews always hoped to return regardless of the fact that it was undoubtedly not as golden as it appears from the distance of three millennia.

David is the first main character in our biblical ancestry whose existence can be historically corroborated. That does not mean that Abraham and Moses and Noah weren’t real people. Just that we don’t have any proof outside the Bible itself. But David did live, and conveniently we can locate him right around the year 1000 BCE. The name David means beloved. More about that later.

After the dark and bloody era of the Judges God relented to the appeals of his people for a king, and the prophet Samuel anointed Saul. But Saul proved not to be up to the task, so God sent Samuel to find another king. He sent him to the home of Jesse, who had eight sons. One by one the strapping big brothers are presented but none of them is God’s chosen. No, God’s chosen is the little boy so irrelevant to any honor that he is out in the field with the sheep while the search for the new king is being held.

If you want to read a summary of David’s story I commend to you the account on Wikipedia. No kidding. David’s life is full of ups and downs, but all in all he is known as a good king, the one whose claim to fame is that he united all the twelve tribes of Israel into one nation, and declared that all worship of God is to take place in Jerusalem. No more high places and pesky idols. He was a warrior – if you know one story about David it is undoubtedly the one about Goliath – and he was a gifted musician and poet, the author of many of the psalms. He was a devoted friend to Jonathan and a faithful worshiper of God. His worst misstep was when he seduced Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, whom he then had killed. The psalm we read this morning is his lament over the great evil he had done. He begs God, “Create in me a clean heart.” That is a good prayer, one we could well pray every day. Create in me a clean heart, God, and I’ll just bet that everything else will fall into place.

I read a tongue-in-cheek blog this week by a clergyperson to his flock in which he spelled out twelve ways to get out of pledging. Don’t go to church in October. November isn’t all that safe either. Move and don’t give the church your address. Tell the rector that you are morally opposed to pledging. That you give to the plate but don’t want anybody to know what you give. (Guess what – people who want to keep their giving secret are not embarrassed that they might be giving too much.) When you put a dollar in the plate

you can fold it creatively to look like more. Tell them you gave electronically and the computer ate your contribution. I’m guessing you could be very creative and come up with more than twelve. But is that really where you want to put your energy? I’m guessing not so much.

Last spring about ten or so of us had the great privilege of going over to Menchaca Elementary School on the day when the first graders got to come to the library to pick out their books. For those of you who are new, we raised money so that every first grader, all 115 of them, got to go to a special Scholastic book fair just for first graders to pick out 12 new books of their very own to read over the summer so that they would not lose their reading skills before second grade. That was a lot of books!

Well, the children were adorable, all excited as they saw the books on the tables. They had excellent manners as they chose books about vampires, (very cuddly looking vampires), sharks, Strawberry Shortcake, Amelia Bedelia, and Clifford the Big Red Dog. All the things that six and seven year olds like. We were glad that they were excited about the books, and they told us who they would be reading to over the summer, their baby brother, their grandfather, the family dog.

But something happened that we hadn’t anticipated. Something that had nothing to do with them getting books. These wise, observant, sensitive children saw something in us. They saw the joy we were experiencing by giving these books away. They saw that we big people were probably having the best time of everyone there, and they wanted in on it. Quite a few of them wrote about this in their thank you letters. You must feel very proud of yourself. I don’t know how you could afford to do this. When I grow up I want to give lots of stuff away like you do.

They caught onto the fact that the real joy is for the giver, not the receiver, and that here were a bunch of old people who didn’t know them and they were having fun giving books to little children whose names they didn’t know. That wasn’t the lesson we set out to teach them. We wanted them to have books and to feel beloved, and I think they did, but they also caught onto the fact that the belover  is every bit as blessed as the beloved.

David was the apple of God’s eye. He danced before the Ark of the Covenant, can’t you just see him? Lifting the scrolls of the Torah overhead and carried away. So filled with the belovedness of God that it overflowed and there was nothing to do but dance it? And belovedness overflows into belovingness as he loves his friend Jonathan and his wife Bathsheba and his sons Absolom and Solomon and so many people whose names we do not know. He loves God so much he wants to build him a permanent home, a temple, but God says, slow down, David, take your time, tend to the business at hand, and David does.

Create in me a clean heart, David prays. What would it feel like to have a clean heart? I imagine it would feel like all the cheapness, pettiness, meanness, stubbornness, laziness, and greediness

were scrubbed out of me. If I could lay out on the table every adjective that could truthfully be said about me it would be a very mixed bag. What if they were all there, words like those old refrigerator poetry magnets, and I could take away all the ones I don’t like and get rid of them forever and keep all the ones I do? I think that’s what it would feel like to have a clean heart. To be the person that God knows I can be because that is the person I am in God’s eyes.

I learned this week what it means to be the apple of someone’s eye. I had to go back to when I was very small to retrieve the memory. I was the apple of my Nonnie’s eye. She was my dad’s mother, the Margaret for whom I was named. She loved me like nobody’s business. I spent the night with her a lot, and whenever I came over she always had fresh-squeezed orange juice and 7-Up and amazing cole slaw. Isn’t it funny what you remember? And she read me Alice in Wonderland. And she had a room full of crafts. We’d spend the whole weekend gluing sequins and rhinestones and pearls onto every random piece of plastic that wasn’t already covered with sequins and rhinestones and pearls.

Nonnie loved me like nobody’s business and she looked at me like nobody else did. She would hold me close and look into my face as if it were the most beautiful face she had ever seen and when she did, and I looked back into her eyes, there I was, reflected as clear as day in the dark pupil of her eye. In the apple of her eye.

God loved David like that. And the thing is that God loves you like that. God knows each and every one of those adjectives that you’d like to sweep off the table. God knows when you’ve let people down and let God down and let yourself down, but God always, every hour of every day holds you close, looks at you so closely and so intently that you can’t help seeing yourself reflected in God’s eye.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and open that heart to do your will, to share with the world from the blessings you have given me because that is the best way I can love you back.

Amen.