Because King Hiram of Tyre was loyal to David throughout his rule, Hiram sent his servants to Solomon when he heard that Solomon had become king after his father. 2 Solomon sent the following message to Hiram: 3 “You know that my father David wasn’t able to build a temple for the name of the Lord my God. This was because of the enemies that fought him on all sides until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet. 4 Now the Lord my God has given me peace on every side, without enemies or misfortune. 5 So I’m planning to build a temple for the name of the Lord my God, just as the Lord indicated to my father David, ‘I will give you a son to follow you on your throne. He will build the temple for my name.’ 6 Now give the order and have the cedars of Lebanon cut down for me. My servants will work with your servants. I’ll pay your servants whatever price you set, because you know we have no one here who is skilled in cutting wood like the Sidonians.”
7 Hiram was thrilled when he heard Solomon’s message. He said, “Today the Lord is blessed because he has given David a wise son who is in charge of this great people.” 8 Hiram sent word back to Solomon: “I have heard your message to me. I will do as you wish with the cedar and pinewood. 9 My servants will bring the wood down the Lebanon Mountains to the sea. I’ll make rafts out of them and float them on the sea to the place you specify. There I’ll dismantle them, and you can carry them away. Now, as for what you must do for me in return, I ask you to provide for my royal house.”
10 So Hiram gave Solomon all the cedar and pinewood that he wanted. 11 In return, Solomon gave an annual gift to Hiram of twenty thousand kors of wheat to eat, and twenty thousand kors of pure oil for his palace use. 12 Now the Lord made Solomon wise, just as he had promised. Solomon and Hiram made a covenant and had peace. (Common English Bible)
“The Dreaming Architect:
Solomon, Son of David & Bathsheba, King of Israel” Week Three
It
might be the most lopsided trade I’ve ever seen, and yet, it cost neither party
in the grand scheme of things a great deal. And that’s saying something.
Diana
Hussein, a Dearborn, Michigan communications worker about my age, had, many
years ago, named her Twitter account @DietDrDepper, after the pop she happened
to be drinking the day she logged onto Twitter for the first time. This was
years ago, before Twitter had gotten the audience it has now, but still, it’s
surprising that the suits over at Dr. Pepper didn’t snap that screenname up.
Diana
kept her carbonation-infused screen name until this past year, when she reachedout to Dr. Pepper because, as a beverage company that sells bottled water under
the brand name Deja Blue (get it? Yuk yuk yuk), she thought that they might be
in a position to help her beloved neighbor to the north: Flint, Michigan.
So
she struck a deal with the Texas-based beverage company: she’d hand over the
keys to her Twitter screenname if they’d send Flint some water to help them
through the horrific leaded water crisis that was imposed upon them by the
leaders of their town and state.
It
was a trade in which neither side had to give up much, but that ended up making
a big difference for hundreds of people. Diana gave up a Twitter account and
just as easily started another. For a conglomerate the size of Dr. Pepper,
40,000 bottles of water was a good deed they could easily afford to do. But for
hundreds of people in Flint, those bottles of water meant another day of life.
Rarely,
though, are compromises and trades so easily admired. For one to be of any real
consequence, both of the sides involved have to give up something of real
value, which means that there are those who will miss that which is traded or
given away in exchange for something else.
So
we instead hype up our end of the deal, to say that the other party is getting
more than what they may in fact be getting. You see this phenomenon all the
time in sports, where, as Jonathan Rand, a former Kansas City columnist put it,
“(There is) the kind of deal you hear fans suggest on call-in shows. They suggest
taking three guys who have become expendable and putting them in a sack to
obtain a premier player. You chuckle because the suggestion assumes the other
team’s front office just fell off a potato truck.”
Put
a different way, it’d be if my Kansas City Royals called up your Mariners and
offered to trade y’all Drew Butera, Brian Flynn, and Scott Alexander for King
Felix. And if you’re hearing that and asking, “Who?” then that demonstrates my
point.
Trade—real
trade—is sacrificial by definition. And it is a lesson that Solomon has to
execute most harshly when it comes to, at long last, building his temple in
Jerusalem for God.
This
is a new sermon series for a new season in the church—spring is moving into
summer, and just like a couple of years ago in 2014, when, if you’ll remember,
we spent most of the summer reading verse-by-verse through the beginning of
Acts, we’ll once again take on one big narrative in Scripture.
Only
this time, that narrative will be the life and reign of King Solomon, a
fascinating figure in Israelite history who has probably been somewhat
mythologized and made into a King Arthur-esque national legend over the years,
but who nonetheless represents an epoch centered around a singular truth that
was not achieved again for hundreds of years, and then again for thousands:
ruling over Israel as a unified and independent kingdom.
Believe
it or not, a unified and independent Israel is a rarity in history. After
Solomon, an independent and unified Israel would only really exist twice:
during the short reign of the Maccabees (of whom you have probably heard via
the Hanukkah story), and during present history since 1946.
So
Solomon’s reign—and his father David’s before him—is unique. How Solomon is
remembered matters because of it. And we’ll get a chance to read this dreaming
architect’s story from his building of the original temple in Jerusalem to his
eventual downfall. We began by spending two weeks with the story of how Solomon
comes by his divinely-bestowed wisdom for which he is eternally famous and then
with Solomon applying that wisdom in this well-known story of two mothers, and
today, we move forward to begin the story of how Solomon went about building
the Jerusalem Temple.
And
really, that building of the temple begins with a truly awful trade to imagine
once you really begin contemplating the nuts-and-bolts of it: eventually, in 1
Kings 9, Solomon will hand twenty cities over to King Hiram’s rule, except that
those cities are so dilapidated that Hiram objects to being given them saying
to Solomon, “Are these towns you’ve given me good for anything?”
The
fact that Solomon is giving land for goods puts to lie some of the hyperbolic
descriptions of his wealth in the first place, and the apparently shabby state
of those lands further puts said hyperbole to the test, but it is the larger
issue of exchanging land for goods—as opposed to, say, for peace, which Israel
has successfully done in the present day with both Egypt and Jordan—that is
troubling.
After
all, we’ve done the whole exchange-land-for-goods rigamarole here in the States
with the Louisiana Purchase, and it was a precursor to all sorts of violence
against the American Indians who inhabited those lands. Who knows what Hiram’s
plans were for these twenty cities?
I
would like to think that those plans would not be quite so bloodsoaked, because
Hiram is described first and foremost as a righteous man, but that is no
vaccination against bloodshed—just look at the staggering amounts of violence
that Joshua committed to achieve his goals, or Samson.
Here,
though, four chapters earlier in 1 Kings 5, Hiram’s price is not quite so
steep, though still epic to behold: he asks Solomon to provide for his (Hiram’s)
royal court in exchange for the prized cedar and pine wood that will constitute
the temple. This ends up being the equivalent of one million gallons of wheat
and one million gallons of pure (not watered down, as was sometimes the case)
olive oil.
The
price of Hiram’s resources and aid is high, but it is a price that Solomon is
prepared to pay, and setting aside the more disturbing price of the cities and
their inhabitants for a moment, as that is another passage altogether, it begs the
question for us: just how much are we willing to trade, to exchange, to give up
in our own spiritual life to demonstrate, as Solomon will in the building of
the temple, our own devotion and fidelity to God? How much is too much for us
to giving up? Or, how little is what we are comfortable with giving up?
Because
before you say “Someone as rich as Solomon could have easily paid Hiram’s
price,” remember what I just said about the 1 Kings 9 story—that it in all
likelihood actually demonstrates that there were very real limits on Solomon’s
wealth and splendor. So it really is quite probable that this massive
expenditure of wheat and oil is in fact a very real strain on Solomon’s
billfold.
Yet
he spends it anyways. And not as a fool who spends their bonus responding to an
email from a Nigerian prince, for it has been established by now that Solomon’s
gray matter was hardly lacking to say the least, but as someone who, at least
now (though certainly not later in life) is genuinely concerned for following
in God’s footsteps.
We
can be as concerned as Solomon is, but often our own sacrifices do not measure
up. We are not willing to turn over to God everything in our lives, but rather,
only that which we can do without. God demands our whole selves, not scraps
from the table, but it is those gamey, unattractive scraps that we may be wont
to offer because, well, we won’t miss them.
Think
about it: how often do you rush through your prayers, or neglect them altogether?
How often have you tried to start a devotional or prayer practice, only to give
it up a few weeks in? I’m just as guilty of this behavior as you might well be,
and it’s because even giving up that little bit of time to God when we could be
doing something else, that takes a surrender of self that can be extremely difficult
for our selfish souls.
A
compassionate woman gives up something entirely nominal—a Twitter account—and for
recompense, asks that a stricken city be given water. Would you have taken
payment instead? And would you have used that payment towards something you
wanted or needed? That’s the sort of difference we are talking about here.
God
wants true surrender of us, not a halfhearted giving up of the fewer, smaller
things just so we might hope to retain control over the bigger things, no, if
anything, that needs to be reversed. We, in our frail, finite, and sinful
shells, probably only should be trusted with the fewer and smaller things, and
trust God with those far bigger things.
We
are so stingy sometimes with how we give of ourselves. And that simply is not
what God’s intent for us to be really is.
So
give more of yourselves. And give that extra portion not simply freely, but
reluctantly if you must. Resentfully, even, if you need to. At least that way,
your sacrifice will be real and authentic.
Because
God asks us to give of our whole selves. After all, God did not make us only
partially. No, God made us in our totality.
Let
us surrender back to God in equal measure.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
June
12, 2016
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