Calling Upon the Name of the Lord

Calling Upon the Name of the Lord
4 Pentecost; June 16, 2024 (Father’s Day)
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20; 2 Cor 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34


The key verse for my sermon this morning comes from our Psalm: “Some put their trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will call upon the Name of the Lord our God.” But it’s going to take a few minutes to get there.

One month from today, our younger son Nicholas will hit the quarter-century mark; he’s turning twenty-five. That is a little shocking for me. And it makes me think back to when I turned twenty-five. Even more shocking, that was thirty-four years ago.

When I turned twenty-five, back in 1990, the world seemed to be getting better and better. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. In 1990 Nelson Mandela was released from prison and apartheid in South Africa began to crumble. The Soviet Union broke up in 1991, and its subject nations became free.

Closer to home, our economy was doing well. Even government spending was responsible. In 1992, the federal deficit began to come down, leading to a budget surplus in 1998, the nation’s first surplus since 1969.

All was not right with the world in those years, of course. But the world seemed to be moving in the right direction, the direction of peace, and justice, and freedom. In 1990, I was optimistic about the future.

Today, as my son prepares to turn twenty-five, things don’t look as bright.

To a degree I would not have thought possible back in 1990, many Americans, on the left and the right, seem to have lost confidence in our democratic institutions and to fear that we might lose them. Young people in particular are experiencing high and rising levels of emotional distress, at least partly because of concerns about the future of our nation and our world.

What should we do in this apparently bleak moment in human history?

As people of faith, we begin by looking to Scripture for guidance. And we get guidance in our Old Testament reading, although, as always when we are
dealing with the Old Testament, we need to know something about the context.

In the years immediately preceding our reading from First Samuel, ancient Israel was going through a time of crisis and transition.

From the east, the Ammonites—a foreign people—were pushing into Israelite territory and brutalizing the Israelite people. From the southwest, the Philistines posed an even greater long-term threat to the Israelites.

As we heard in our reading from last week, plagued by their enemies, the demoralized Israelites asked the prophet Samuel to give them a king. Samuel wasn’t happy, but he anointed Saul as Israel’s first-ever king.

At first, King Saul seemed like the man for the job. Saul successfully neutralized the threat from the Ammonites, and Saul made progress against the Philistines. But then Saul became increasingly erratic and unfaithful, eventually losing the support of the prophet Samuel.

That’s where our reading picks up. The Israelites were dividing between those loyal to King Saul and those loyal to the prophet Samuel. Suspicion and fear were everywhere. Samuel worried that Saul would kill him. The elders of Bethlehem were afraid of Samuel, and came trembling to meet him. The elders must also have been worried about getting caught in the crossfire between Samuel and Saul.

Unfortunately, subsequent events justified everyone’s fears. King Saul continued to descend into paranoid insanity, and spent all his time fighting supposed internal enemies while ignoring the real threat from the Philistines.

Eventually the Philistines forced battle and crushed Saul’s army, killing him and establishing themselves as the dominant power in the region. Even then, Israel remained internally divided, now into two petty kingdoms at war with each other and both under the effective control of the Philistines. To the Israelites, all must have seemed hopeless.

But, as we see in our reading for this morning, God was at work in the midst of the chaos, behind the scenes and in unexpected ways. In this unfolding crisis, God sent Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint one of Jesse’s sons as the next king of Israel.

That was already unexpected.

But God’s choice was more surprising still. Samuel invited Jesse and his sons to a feast. And Jesse’s sons looked surprisingly impressive. Jesse’s eldest son Eliab was positively kingly. But Eliab was not God’s choice. Neither were any of Jesse’s other sons.

Finally, Samuel asked Jesse if he had any more sons. The answer was, yes. But the remaining son was really just a boy. Jesse had left him in charge of the sheep because he was too young to come to a feast of adults.

That boy turned out to be God’s choice. We know him as David, Israel’s greatest king and the ancestor of Jesus himself.

But if, on the day Samuel anointed David in a private ceremony, you had asked anybody in Israel what the future had in store for them, they surely would have been pessimistic indeed, and rightly so. Few were aware of what Samuel had done. Even if they were aware, David was a teenager and totally untested, the unstable Saul remained king of Israel, and the Philistines remained a powerful enemy. The situation seemed hopeless.

At last, I come back to the verse from our Psalm: “Some put their trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will call upon the Name of the Lord our God.”

Anyone who trusted in chariots and horses at the time of our reading would have bet on the Philistines as the victor in their long war with a divided and weakened Israel. But Israelites who called upon the name of the Lord knew that, with God, there was always hope. And the people who called upon the name of the Lord were the ones who turned out to be right.

Back to our own time. When, in my twenties, I thought the world was getting better and better, the fact is, I was trusting in horses and chariots. That is to say, I was trusting in political events to bring about a world of peace and justice and freedom.

But now that political events seem to be heading in the wrong direction, trust in “chariots and horses” is mostly gone, for me and for a lot of people.

That’s why our Old Testament reading speaks directly to this moment, when they, too, had little hope in chariots and horses. Our reading reminds us that God is always at work, and that God’s help often comes from very unexpected directions. It encourages us to put our trust in the name of the Lord, with whom there is always hope.

The tiny mustard seed that God is planting in this time may not look like much. We may not see that seed at all yet. But God is at work. And God’s mustard seed can take over the whole garden.

In all circumstances, says the Apostle Paul, the love of Christ urges us on. And for those with eyes to see, for those in Christ, for those who walk by faith, not by sight, for those who put their trust in the Name of the Lord, everything is in fact becoming new, we ourselves are becoming new.

This week, I invite you to take the message of our readings to heart. Look for seeds of hope, including in unlikely places. And name those seeds for what they are, little beacons of hope in a discouraging world.

And so, we carry on, letting go of our trust in chariots and horses, calling on the name of our Lord, and looking forward in hope to the time when we, too, will shout for joy at God’s victory.

In Christ’s name. Amen