Anointing of the Counted Out

The bible text for this sermon is available at https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=502185741

"King David" by Rae

“For every ending there is a beginning and for every beginning there is an ending.” 

This is why our calendar of the church year is shown as a circle. 

This is the mystery of time -  

the time we can count...

and time which weaves within and beyond what we can see or comprehend.

Last week, Samuel was a young boy learning the sound of God’s voice as it called him by name.Since then, he has grown through God’s guidance and is still learning how to be an extension of God’s care for the people. As the people were emerging into their identity, they saw that the people around them making their place in the world through Kings and Empire. The prevailing story surrounding them was that power is made through prestige, polish. And so, despite God’s warnings that all that flash was not the way forward for them, God led Samuel to Saul and Saul to Samuel when Samuel was also just a young boy, out in the fields with his brother as they were looking for his father’s lost donkeys. It was not a journey where he expected to be anointed as a leader of God’s people. 

Saul fit many of the people’s expectations for a triumphant champion that would put them on the map as a respectable and formidable people. Tall and handsome - he looked and played the part well. Perhaps too well as he fell into the inevitable way of Kings - corruption and abuse of power, violence and lack of accountability, becoming utterly disconnected from the way of life God had shown them as good and life-giving.

Even though Saul was flawed as we all are, there had been an investment of care and hope in his leadership and the loss of that caused Samuel to grieve. Even prophets aren’t holier than thou robots.  In times of upheaval, they experience anger, sadness, and stillness too. Those things are part of the story of God’s people too. But God doesn’t leave us to get stuck there forever.

God meets Samuel in that place and time and gives voice to what is ending while pointing toward something new. Even before now, back in 1 Sam 13, God proclaims that there will be a new king, a man after God’s own heart. At that time it isn’t clear who that person is; they aren’t named. God’s anointing is rooted before those who it will affect even know that it exists. 

It travels with Samuel as he navigates a people on edge and a king ready to lash out, as he looks for what will come next. God has pointed Samuel to the horizon of Jesse’s house, but still isn’t clear on which of his many sons will be the right one for the role. God ‘s voice comes again to guide Samuel in this moment. God reminds Samuel to look on things the way God would look at them - considering not just what looks good on paper, but what is at the heart of things.

So then Samuel has a parade of tall handsome grown sons lining up in front of him, the ones that seem to make the most sense, but none of them are the one God is leading him to.  In a very Cinderella move, Samuel asks if all the eligible young contenders are here. Well, everyone except the youngest who was already counted out and so sent him to work with the sheep in the fields. It is this one - the one with the least social pull, doing work which was considered to be among the most lowly. David.

Was it meant to be David all along? Or was it David because others had counted him out and that’s where God seems to pull from most often. David doesn’t follow the pattern of what a king is “supposed” to be, but maybe that’s just what the people need to lead them out of this rut they’re in. Samuel annoints him then and there, according to God’s leading. Samuel takes the oil of blessing and pours it over David - not when they get back to the temple, but right there at home when he’s fresh from the field with dirt under his fingernails and grit in his hair. He is anointed now, before there’s an official crown on his head, but God’s promise doesn’t need those things to get started. 

The thing about oil is that it seeps and absorbs into your skin.  It seeps in and nourishes and becomes a part of you so that you can no longer separate the oil or the blessing from yourself. And so God’s blessing is there forever, and will unfold throughout David’s life.

We’ll see it in the way young David is blessed with the gift of music and uses it to play his harp for Saul which soothes his soul in a way nothing else seems to. It flows as he composes psalm after psalm to give heavenly voice to our hearts for generations. It unfolds as he, while still a young boy, draws up the courage to face Giants like Goliath that threaten his people. Maybe it is evident in the deep soulful love he shares with the prophet Jonathon, leading many to understand this relationship as one of the greatest love stories in the Bible. Perhaps this oil of blessing has seeped into his choices of compassion over vengeance when unlike other conquering kings, he doesn’t try to kill his rival Saul or his family even when Saul has tried to kill him. This is a man of heart and of care. And this, seemingly absurd and perhaps impossible contender for the role of queer sheperd king, becomes the root in Bethlehem that gets us from Jesse to Jesus.

Of course, this does not make him impervious to fault. As much as we’d love to believe that the next king, the next ruler, the next job, the next relationship, the next city, the next church...will fix everything and look good doing it….without addressing the real source of the problems we face, the messiness that got us here....that’s not the way this blessing unfolds.  David will also commit terrible harmful mistakes. David will let people down. And there are serious consequences to those actions.

But the removal of God’s heart and care is not one of them. The bible twice refers to David as “a man after God’s own heart.” Once, when he is officially named King (perhaps to remind him as he goes off into this new thing of who he really is ath heart), and again by the first followers of Christ in the book of Acts. Even after he lost his way and his legacy is tarnished, even after all that….the heart of that oil of anointing is still a part of him and God still claims him as beloved. It seems nothing can remove him even millennia later as one after God’s own heart. 

Beloved, the same is true for you. 

No matter what you are grieving, or who has counted you out, 

or convinced you to count yourself out…

No matter what gifts, talents, or shining moments rise and fade, end and begin anew…

Nothing can separate you from the determination of God’s blessing.

Nothing can dull its luster within God’s own heart.

God’s anointing of David extends before, alongside, and beyond him.

Your anointing is no different. 

Maybe you don’t remember ever being anointed. Anointing with oil is still a tradition we use in the church.  We anoint the sick for the healing of body and soul. We anoint those beginning the work of ministry. We anoint people at their baptism with the words “you are marked with the cross of Christ and sealed with the Holy Spirit forever.” 

It is a ritual of healing and wholeness. A balm to aching and anxious souls and a guiding light to anchor us back to who we really are in God, even when we’re not sure who that is. It’s an external visible marker of an often invisible yet everlasting truth - you are a child of God’s own heart, now and always. All of you. Always. Amen.