Several years ago I was in charge of an exciting new project, and I was tasked with the responsibility of hiring four people to work together with me on a team. Three of the people I hired were great. They did their assigned jobs without complaint, worked hard, and most importantly, they worked well together. The fourth person, not so much. On paper he was ideally suited for the position. He had the necessary academic background and the technical skills required for the job. He was friendly and intelligent, and he interviewed well. The problems emerged quickly, however. It turns out that he was a prima donna, expecting regular praise from others, and he had difficulty fitting into the team. To put it bluntly, the others hated working with him. I did the best I could to accommodate him without giving in to his more ridiculous demands, but before long it was clear that rather than being an asset to the team, he was actually a detriment. To be fair, he also realized that the job wasn't a good fit for him, so he sought and found other employment (with a nice boost in pay). I replaced him on the team with an Aussie with whom I had had occasional email interactions because of a shared interest in textual criticism. I found out that we were scheduled to attend a conference in Cape Town a couple of months later, where we would meet face to face for the first time. In light of my recent subpar hiring performance, I was leery of making a similar mistake. Sure the guy looked good on paper, and he was friendly enough via email, but how would he fit into the team if I was to offer him the job? After meeting him in person that week at the conference, I did offer him the job, and he became a key member of the team, a perfect fit. The team that we built, and the project that we completed, was probably the most fulfilling job experience I've ever had, and certainly the most fun. One thing I learned from the experience is that making a mistake doesn't doom the enterprise, but it can be an opportunity to move on to even greater accomplishments. In today's reading from 1 Samuel 15, the author makes an astounding statement. "The Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel." On paper Saul was the ideal king: tall and powerful, a war hero, a natural-born leader. As it turned out, however, he couldn't get the job done. I think the biblical authors portray Saul much more negatively that was justified, because they wrote from a pro-David perspective, but the bottom line is the Saul was "hired" to lead the Israelites to victory over their greatest rivals, the Philistines, and he didn't do it, in part because--according to the biblical narrative--he spent too much time chasing David around the wilderness rather than fighting the Philistines. David, by contrast, was young and brash, apparently not particularly tall, and had no experience leading men into battle. After becoming king, however, he quickly ended Philistine encroachment into Israelite territory, captured the Canaanite stronghold of Jerusalem in the middle of the Israelites' land, and established a dynasty that would last for four hundred years. Despite his very real flaws, he became the ideal king that later Israelites--and even later Jews and Christians--would look back upon as a model by which to measure others. We all sometimes make bad decisions, and sometimes we have to live with the consequences for some time, but few of our bad decisions leave us without opportunities to correct or at least improve the situation. I've had subsequent employment situations in which a dysfunctional team learned to work together and produce quality results, as well as a tolerable work environment. I've also had to live through the experience of having my job eliminated for what I thought were unjustified reasons, but I was able to move on eventually to a much more stable and rewarding work environment. When we're faced with tough situations, even those of our own making, we can take comfort in the fact that, according to the biblical writer, even God sometimes makes mistakes, but just as importantly, God will almost always provide us with opportunities to learn from, triumph over, and move forward from our mistakes.
Psalm 20 was written as a prayer for the king's victory in battle.
It contains assurances of God's presence with the king and his army in
the coming conflict, petitions for God to remember the king's faithful
sacrifices, and an admonition for the king to put his ultimate trust in
God rather than in implements of war. As a peacemaker rather than a
warmonger, I read a psalm like this with ambivalence. I like the
promise of God's presence with God's people, but I don't like the
underlying assumptions, first, that the people's enemies are God's
enemies, and second, that waging war is an effective, justifiable, or
just solution to international conflicts. I'm not an absolute pacifist,
but I'm more and more convinced that the solution to both international
and intranational disputes is rarely if ever war, and certainly not
aggressive or preemptive war. I believe that the serious conflicts in
the world today, such as the ongoing bloodshed in Syria, the conflicts
between Sudan and South Sudan, the repression of ethnic minorities in
various countries and of gays in places like Uganda, could all be solved
with a radical restructuring of national and world governments and
enforcement mechanisms. Barring that kind of major transformation,
which certainly won't happen in the short term, a combination of
negotiation and international pressure can almost always produce results
with less loss of life and destruction of property than armed conflict.
So how can someone with an aversion to armed force as a solution to the
world's problems deal with Psalm 20? To me, the key verse is verse 7:
"Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is in
the name of the LORD our God." Rather than relying on military might,
people of faith should put their trust in God to resolve conflicts in a
just way. From a practical standpoint, that means that we should act in
ways that are consistent with our understanding of God as a God who
values justice, peace, and reconciliation and who loves all peoples of
the earth equally.
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13), 14-17 (first published 18 June 2006)
Although I'm not a scientist, I hold science in the highest regard. I
am a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
and I read widely in a variety of scientific disciplines, including
evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, genetics, and subatomic particle
physics, as well as the odd book or article on mathematical topics. This
is not to say that I'm an expert in any of these areas--I'm not--but I am
an interested amateur. In a book I'm currently reading, a critique of the
Intelligent Design movement, the author, a scientist, admits that as
important as science is, it does not answer all of life's questions.
"Science cannot tell us what we ought to do or what should be, only what
we can do and what is. Religion thrives because it addresses our deepest
emotional yearnings and society's foundation moral needs." Paul puts it
like this: "We walk by faith and not by sight." Now sight is a valuable
sense, and no one who has it would willingly give it up in order to be
blind. It is not that sight is an inferior sense, it is that it has
limitations. If we have sight, we should certainly take advantage of it,
and that's why attempts to negate the findings of science on the basis of
religion are foolish and ultimately doomed to fail. However, sight--or
science--is not all there is. People of faith recognize that beauty,
value, and meaning are real but not susceptible to scientific probing.
Sight tells us many important things; faith tells us the most important
things.
Mk+4:26-34 (first published 18 June 2006)
Mark was the first of our canonical gospels to be written, and both Matthew's and Luke's gospels use it as a basic framework. Most of Mark's content is repeated in either one or both of these gospels, but the first parable of the kingdom in today's reading is unique to Mark. Jesus tells of a farmer who sows his seed on the ground, then waits expectantly until the earth yields its harvest. When the harvest comes in, he takes his sickle and reaps the grain. Why was this story omitted from Matthew and Luke? There is nothing obviously troubling about the story, but a closer look reveals that if God is too closely identified with the farmer (after all, God is the one who reaps the harvest), the statement that the farmer doesn't know how the seed sprouts and grows would seem to contradict the concept of an omniscient God. This might be the reason that the later gospels omit this parable, or there might be another reason. Nevertheless, the important point of the parable is that the kingdom of God is mysterious, particularly in its growth patterns. Why does a church planted in one area grow while another does not? The pastors of growing churches often like to imagine that they are doing something better than the churches that are struggling, but is that really true? Does a church planted using one set of strategies grow because of those strategies? If so, then why doesn't the same set of strategies work universally? The answer is that it is not the strategies and it is not the pastor. The kingdom grows in sometimes unusual ways and under rather odd circumstances. Sometimes the kingdom merely holds its own, or even shrinks, in a particular geographical area. If the kingdom could be bottled, someone could make a fortune selling churches a "church growth kit" that really works. But the kingdom can't be bottled, and God can't be predicted. Maybe we'd prefer a God who's a little more like we are. Fortunately, God knows better. Rather than focusing too much on how to get our portion of the kingdom to grow like the big megachurches (which may or may not represent true growth of the kingdom of God), it might be better if we looked around to see where God is already growing the kingdom, and join in. There's a caution, however. Growth of the kingdom doesn't necessarily equate to numerical growth. The biggest church in town might not be the strongest representative of the kingdom. In fact, it might just be that the most profound kingdom growth isn't even in a church. It could be in an educational ministry, a feeding program, or a medical ministry. God works in mysterious ways, and the growth of the kingdom really is like the seed that the farmer put on the ground in the parable. It grows, and we don't know exactly what caused the growth. All we can do is rejoice in it.