Picking up Pebbles

1 Samuel 17.19-54

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 25 June 2006

Over recent weeks we have been speaking of spiritual gifts, and our church goals and even about calling – words used easily in the Christian community, but words worn smooth and slippery. They are words debased by their use in a variety of settings with many different associations.

Gift.  We know a lot about ‘gifts’ in our culture – products packaged at a price appropriate to the love or loyalty we owe the receiver. The economy of giving, of social relations enacted and accounted for in flowers and bottles and appropriately wrapped little parcels is well known to functioning members of  society.

Goals. We know about ‘goals’, that staple of corporate planning. We now the business-speak slogans that adorn office walls or twinkle on the back of embossed business cards. So much speech about goals is the bland and meaningless patter of consultants and managers used to manipulate the office drones and give some purpose to their desk work.

Calling. These days the word ‘calling’ is a bland alternative to ‘job’. It describes the aptitudes (or the accidents) that have landed us in our present occupation. Occupation refers to that which occupies our days as the filler of forty hours each week.

What are these words? We might even think them clichés of the church – were they not so central to our mission.

We have recently revised our church goals. Perhaps because the challenge before the church is great we find it difficult to respond.  Sometimes too we can ‘over-manage’ the spirit of God, trying to channel the wind of the Spirit into valleys and places of our own making. Perhaps that is why so few people have actually placed their names against the goals on the graffiti Board provided last week and this.

The somewhat colourless blandness of these words came home to me in the World Cup. When Australia was 2-1 down against Croatia with a quarter of an hour to go, when years of planning and preparation were fifteen minutes from oblivion, when millions were anxious and engaged, watching and hoping and chewing their fingernails, then we started to understand what a goal might be: when Harry Kewell drove home the final equalizer we saw a goal that makes a difference, that changed, the way that world was, at least in the little, circumscribed world of football.

And here we are, using the same language as the managers and massagers. We even asked people to put their names against the goals, where they feel there may be some affinity, some connection, perhaps some little nudge of the divine in that direction. It sounds so much like signing up to a product, opting for a package with all the overtones of neat parcels, sensible socks, and polite appreciation. Perhaps we should not be surprised that there are only a couple of names on the Board.

But those associations are misleading, and the process is very different to that! What we are exploring as a community, and as individuals, is where the divine breath blows the soul spark-hot until it smoulders into flame. Has God, creator of all that is, the mystery at the heart of this booming, expanding universe, given you some peculiar, distinctive, special ability that is as much a part of the order of things as the speeding galaxies hurtling away to God knows where? Has the divine voice actually whispered somewhere deep inside our being and said, I have work for you to do?  If this is so we had best attend to what the spirit is igniting, what the voice is saying.

Attending to this, and responding to this is not easy. Last week Jeanette preached on the anointing of David, the youngest son of Jesse, the one ‘least likely to succeed’. Like that young shepherd, overlooked at home yet anointed for leadership, we ask what does all this kind of talk mean. It is as if we were stacking grocery shelves and some wide-eyed loon whispers that we to be the next Secretary General of the United Nations. How does a shepherd grow into a king? How does a housewife become a saint? How does a school student help save the world?

There can be large gulf between the grandeur of the language of gift, goal and calling and the gritty detail of our own little lives. It can intimidate and overwhelm us. Yet this gulf can be crossed. The shepherd anointed as a future king found his way to the battlefield, bearing cheese and bread for his brothers. He heard the giant’s threat and boasting and he was indignant for God.

Like any well ordered church community the troops of Israel knew the battle order, their place in it, who belonged where and who was in charge. The shepherd boy didn’t fit in at all. David’s brother even accused him of leaving his ‘few sheep’ and coming along just to watch the action. ‘I know your presumption and the evil of your heart’. You aren’t part of this, you belong back with those few sheep you were set to manage. How often do people come into church only to find their daily work discounted, mocked?

Yet ‘these few sheep’ had brought David up against ‘the paw of the lion the paw of the bear’. It had taken him into great danger and given him the skills that were vital for the battle. How many people do you know who have been made to feel as if they have just been ‘watching a few sheep’, where as in truth they have battled the lions and bears of this life.

The second thing that confronted David, once he had argues for the right to participate, was that he was offered the armour of the king, the best tools that the army of Israel had at their disposal. But David found he couldn’t even walk in this equipment. How many have been burdened with the armour of the warrior, when what they needed was the weapons of their own calling, their own experience. The tools offered to him were not right!  

The third element of this story I want to point to is the action of David before the battle (vs. 40).  He went down into the wadi and chose five smooth stones.  Picture the scene: armies drawn up on the two mountains with a valley between them, and in the wadi at the bottom of the valley a young boy picking amongst the pebbles while the armies looked on.

Eugene Peterson, the pastor and spiritual writer engages this precise moment of the story:

 “It is a turning point in the story of God’s ways with his people, although no-one knew it at the time.  A new leadership ministry was taking shape. David was not yet king – it would be years before he would be recognised as such. He was a marginal figure…, and slipped back into the obscurity of shepherding in the hill country. The world at that moment seemed divided between the arrogant and bully people of Philistia and the demoralized and anxious people of God, between the powerful but rather stupid giant and the anointed but deeply flawed king. No one could have guessed that the man picking stones out of the brook was doing the most significant work of the day”.  (Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, p. 241)

Within periods of discontinuity and change, the Spirit calls out unlikely people, and sometimes they do unlikely things. Picking up pebbles might be the most important work of the day!  It might mean preparing for some future engagement, thinking through some significant issues or placing oneself in the way of particular experiences.

The readings today are stories of battle and of storm – two basic metaphors of human struggle and danger. The church might seem full and financially sound – things are good – but war and tempest are never far away. I have just been invited to a meeting of Christian leaders around the country that will explore the issues and events that might impact public ministry of the churches over coming years – everything from terrorism to major pandemics. I’ve just finished reading the latest Quarterly Essay: Voting for Jesus. There are significance pressures we face and the possibility of change in the environment around us. Communities of David like ourselves, the small players in world affairs, need to be picking our pebbles carefully.

The process we are engaging is not asking you to do jobs or save the world or make a commitment. It’s asking what are the areas that feel smooth and well weighted in your hand, where some of the church’s goals and dreams resonate with you, where there is a sense of empathy and connection.  If there’s nothing there that fits, what does fit for you? Where is the spirit blowing for you?

And what if you’re just overwhelmed, if the boast of life is rocking so much that you can’t think about pebbles or gifts or what God might be calling you to do?  That’s alright too. The gospel reminds us that Jesus is Lord even of the storm.

When giants are striding the land with their threats, when the sea is heaving with the fury of the storm, the battle can turn in an astonishing and unexpected way, the storm can be stilled with just a word from the Lord, and all our fears and doubts turmoil give way to wonder and praise.