Can You See What's Truly Great?
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Then Samuel went to Ramah; and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.
The Lord said to Samuel, ‘How long will you grieve over Saul? I have rejected him from being king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.’ Samuel said, ‘How can I go? If Saul hears of it, he will kill me.’ And the Lord said, ‘Take a heifer with you, and say, “I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.” Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do; and you shall anoint for me the one whom I name to you.’ Samuel did what the Lord commanded, and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, ‘Do you come peaceably?’ He said, ‘Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the Lord; sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.’ And he sanctified Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.
When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, ‘Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.’ But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’ Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. He said, ‘Neither has the Lord chosen this one.’ Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, ‘Neither has the Lord chosen this one.’ Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, ‘The Lord has not chosen any of these.’ Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Are all your sons here?’ And he said, ‘There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.’ And Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Send and bring him; for we will not sit down until he comes here.’ He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The Lord said, ‘Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.’ Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward. Samuel then set out and went to Ramah.
As I read our passage for this week, I kept thinking about an experience Erin and Shea, my daughters, and I had about a year ago. We had been visiting my parents in Sewickley, where I grew up, and after visiting I realized that I hadn’t thawed anything for dinner. Many of you who have families where both parents work go through this a lot. You forget to pull something out of the freezer to thaw in the morning, and so five o’clock rolls around and you don’t know what to do for dinner. That happens to us frequently.
On this particular evening we decided to drop into a small fish and poultry store in Sewickley on the way home to get some salmon. As I was chatting with the shop owner, a man walked in behind us and stood waiting in line. He was a bit taller than me, perhaps 6’4”, and he waited patiently. He even smiled at the antics of my 9 year-old twins as they shoved each other back and forth, and generally ignored my commands to settle down. The girls were oblivious to him as they made enough ruckus that I had to eventually separate them and make each one stand in a different part of the store.
The owner of the shop gave me my salmon, said good-bye, and out we walked. I then looked at the girls and said, “Man, you guys were so busy playing that you didn’t even see who was behind you.” “What?” they said. “Who was it? Was it someone famous?” I said, “Yeah, pretty famous. That guy behind you was Mario Lemieux.” “No!” they said. “Can we go back in and look at him?” I said to them, “No, but you can go back in and buy some chips for a snack, but you aren’t allowed to stare or bother him.” So back in we went to buy some chips and to let nine year-old twins snatch furtive glances at Mario Lemieux.
You know, the funny thing is that Erin and Shea probably should have recognized him. I’ve shown him to them on television a number of times. I’ve had them watch bits of specials about him, so they know what he looks like. And for our family, recognizing hockey players is part of our DNA. You wouldn’t know this, but my father was one of the original owners of the Penguins back in 1967. He also was a part owner in the early 1970s. We grew up with hockey, and I played it all through junior and senior high school. For Standishes in general, hockey is part of our collective DNA.
So, why couldn’t the girls recognize him face-to-face? Simply put, they weren’t looking for greatness. They were looking to play. Sometimes greatness is in our midst, and we miss it because we just aren’t paying attention.
About thirteen years ago I had different experience with greatness. I was visiting my cousins in Concord, Massachusetts, and my cousin, Peter, asked if I wanted to ride a bike around Concord to see the sights. So we tooled around the town, seeing the interesting buildings, graveyards, and the river. And then he asked if I wanted to ride down to Walden Pond. “Really?” I said. “We can ride there? Is far?” “No, only about two miles outside of town.”
I don’t know if Walden Pond holds much significance for you, but it does for me. Henry David Thoreau wrote about it in his masterpiece book, Walden. His book was heavily influential to Americans back in the mid-nineteenth Century. He wrote in the book about how, in 1845, he had decided that civilization was corrupting his soul. He wanted to get back to living a simple life in nature so that he could “suck the marrow” out of life. He saw a life in nature as a vital life. And so he decided to spend a year living on the shores of Walden Pond, a mystical place surrounded by nature. In his book, he wrote about his experiences there and how they transformed him.
I read the book in my twenties and resonated with it. So, you can imagine that the idea of riding out to that great, mystical place stirred my soul. My imagination was firing on all cylinders. I was expecting to find some pristine mountain lake, much like what we might find in Alaska. What I found instead was a medium-sized pond where hundreds of people were swimming, walking, and milling about. I was really surprised. I was disappointed because I expected to find something else, but I was also disappointed because I realized that even in Thoreau’s time it was never as pristine as he let on. The pond is barely outside of the town of Concord, taking maybe twenty to thirty minutes to walk. His hut was right next to a walking path that went between Concord and the next town. In other words, he wasn’t living away from civilization. Civilization walked right by his door many times a day. When I told my cousin how disappointed I was, he said, “And I’ve also heard that his mother used to walk by all the time and bring him lunch and dinner. She lived only a little ways away.”
I had expected Walden Pond to be such a great spiritual place. It turned out to be only okay.
How do you tell if something or someone is really great? So often greatness is in our midst, but we miss it. Perhaps we miss it because we are too busy doing other things. Perhaps we miss it because what we think of as truly great really isn’t. Or perhaps we miss it because we think greatness is captured by worldly abilities, and miss the spiritual nature of true greatness.
As great as he was, the prophet Samuel struggled with finding greatness in the story from scripture this morning. He was sent by God to find a new king for Israel. Saul, the first king, had disappointed God. God had called Saul to be a king for all the people. Instead, Saul was becoming more and more a king for himself. He was amassing and abusing power. So God went looking for another to be king.
Samuel was sent to Bethlehem to find a man named Jesse, for one of his sons was ordained to be the next king of Israel. Samuel invited Jesse and his sons to a sacrifice and a meal, and there he began to test Jesse’s sons to see which one of them was the new king. He started with the one who was the most obvious candidate: Eliab. This young man was strong, brave, and clearly a man ready to be king. Standing before Eliab, God said, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” So, Samuel went onto the next candidate, Abinadab. He was a fine candidate, but he wasn’t the king, either. Eight more times Samuel surveyed Jesse’s sons, but none had the greatness God was looking for. You can imagine Samuel’s frustration. He had been sent to find the new king, and all the candidates were rejected by God. Why would God send him here to fail? In frustration, Samuel asks Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” Jesse says that he has another, but surely this young boy of perhaps 12 couldn’t be the new king. He was the runt of the litter. He was so small and insignificant that Jesse didn’t even bother to include him in the meal with Samuel. This runt was David. David was brought before Samuel, and God said, “this is my king, anoint him with oil.”
Even after David was anointed king, he didn’t seem great. Sure, he killed Goliath, which truly was great since all the supposedly great Jewish warriors were too afraid to fight Goliath. But after that act of greatness, Saul became jealous and wanted to kill David. So David was forced to live for twelve years as an outlaw in the desert, living in caves along with a band of followers. Yet David remained spiritually great throughout it all, which one particular incident reminds us.
There was a point at which Saul went with an army to track down and kill David in the desert. One night, Saul was asleep in his encampment in a cave. David snuck in, and standing over Saul with a spear, plunged the spear into the dirt beside Saul’s body. It was a message: “I could have killed you, but I followed God’s will instead, and I remain God’s and your servant.” David’s greatness was measured through his heart and soul, which led him to acts of faith and mercy. When he became king, he became revered because he ruled based on God’s will, not his own. And even when he strayed, he saw the error of his ways, confessed, repented, and went back to serving God. Psalm 51, a psalm of confession, is evidence of that, since it was written in response to his sin regarding Bathsheba and Uriah. Even in his sin, David maintained a sense of true greatness.
You know, the funny thing about true greatness is that it isn’t necessarily measured in great feats, as wonderful as they can be. True greatness is always measured in heart and soul. For example, I really admire the athletic greatness of Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Marc-Andre Fluery, Ben Rothlesberger, Hines Ward, Troy Palomalu, Hines Ward, and so many others. But I also recognize that their greatness is in the material world. I have no idea how well their greatness translates into the spiritual world, nor do I know if their spiritual ability matches their athletic accomplishments, yet I do know that it is in the spiritual realm that true greatness is measured.
I’ve love reading great inspiring books like Walden, but I also know that many of the books that we consider great may not be considered great from a spiritual perspective. It’s from that perspective that real greatness is measured. Real greatness is based on entirely different criteria. Real greatness is measured by God’s criteria
Karen Cramer, one of our members who was on the nominating committee that brought me to Calvin Church, once said to me that no one famous ever came from Zelienople. I got her point, which is that Zelienople is a great place to live, but it’s not the kind of place that produces great athletes, actors, musicians, politicians, or celebrities. Unfortunately, I beg to differ with her, and I think she’d agree with my differing. What I disagree with is that since I’ve been here at Calvin Church I’ve met many famous people from Zelienople. It’s just that they were famous in God’s realm, not ours.
I can name a number of people whom I truly believe were well-known and great in God’s realm while they were alive, but who may not have been well-known or considered great in the earthly realm. I’m thinking about people like Jo Jones, who was one of our members when I first came to Calvin Church. Jo was a bright, shining star. She was a woman who helped get the Zelienople Nursery School started, and eventually brought it here to Calvin Church. She was a woman of deep prayer and love, and nothing demonstrates that more than one of my last experiences with her.
About a month before she died, I visited her at home. She had suffered from cancerous tumors in her neck and brain for a number of years, always managing, thought a combination of conventional medicine, alternative medicine, and prayer, to become free of cancer. Eventually a tumor grew along the side of her brain. Radiation killed the tumor, but the pressure of the tumor eventually compromised the ability of her brain to function normally. In my last visit with her, Jo really couldn’t speak, and I’m not sure she even knew who I was, although she sensed that she knew me. I was sitting with her, and she motioned me to give my hands to her. She took my hands, picked up some hand lotion beside her, squirted a big glob into my hand, and then started rubbing lotion into both of my hands. I knew immediately what she was doing. She could barely think or communicate, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t love. If the only way to show love was to rub lotion into my hands, well that was what she was going to do. Her greatness was her love of God and others, and nothing was going to stop her ability to love. That’s true greatness.
I’ve met other spiritually famous people since I’ve been here—people such as Bill Uhl, John McMillen, Corrine Henderson, Dick Anderson (my predecessor as pastor here), LaRue Craig, Betty Alexander, and so many, many more. I still see great and famous people here in this church every Sunday, and it’s a privilege to be in their midst.
So how is true fame and greatness measured? Our passage gives a great example in David. Let me just share three qualities that I think are part of true greatness. First there is humility, which doesn’t mean being weak-kneed and easily pushed around. Humility is a spiritual virtue, which literally means having a willingness to be unimportant and to do what’s necessary for God. Humility means having the strength to say yes to God no matter what, and no to anything else that gets in the way of God’s will.
Second, there is commitment to God no matter what. David had this kind of commitment. It allowed him to patiently wait for God’s will to work throughout his life. It’s what caused him to stay his hand in killing Saul, even though doing so would have made his life and his rule easier. David knew who and what mattered, and he stayed committed to it, even in the face of pressures to take shortcuts.
Finally, David had courage. Courage is different from bravery. Courage is spiritual. It literally means to act out of the heart, which is the seat of the soul. To have courage means to be willing to do what God wants, even in the face of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. For instance, it means that if you are in school, having the courage to stand up for someone who is being picked on and bullied, even if it might make you picked on and bullied. In the workplace it means doing what’s ethical, even if it might get you fired. In the world it means being loving and caring and generous, even in the face of pressures to be selfish, self-focused, and self-protective.
Each and every one of us is called to greatness, and to a different kind of greatness from each other. The question is, will we strive to live in this kind of greatness?
Amen.
