1 Kings 3:5-12

At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night, and God said, “Ask what I should give you.” And Solomon said, “You have shown great and steadfast love to your servant my father David because he walked before you in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart toward you, and you have kept for him this great and steadfast love and have given him a son to sit on his throne today. And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in. And your servant is in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted. Give your servant, therefore, an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil, for who can govern this great people of yours?”

It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this. God said to him, “Because you have asked this and have not asked for yourself long life or riches or for the life of your enemies but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, I now do according to your word. Indeed, I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you, and no one like you shall arise after you.

Sermon Text

 Last week we talked about how hard it is to conceptualize Heaven. The difficulty of describing the mundane makes it clear that the supernatural, that which exists beyond the created order we are regularly engaging with, is well beyond our reach. However, I want to make sure that we follow up the general message of last week – that despite the difficulty that comes with describing our experiences with God, there is a point to sharing them. The dreams that we have, of God coming to be with us, shape our understanding of how the world around us should be. If God is moving Heaven to be closer to Earth, surely there is something we can do on Earth to, if not aid that goal, to at least not get in the way of it.

I also described cynicism as what happens when we lack the imagination to hope. Now, that is a piece of language that might hit some people as strange. “Imagination,” is something we often reserve to mean something fanciful. We imagine scenarios that might never happen. We imagine that the noise in the kitchen isn’t actually the cat, but instead is a burglar or monster poised to get us. We see “imagination,” and its related words as a dismissal of the things they precede. To say that hope is built on our ability to be “imaginative,” might seem like another dismissal. Instead, however, I think that imagination is essential to our pursuit of a good life.

I want you to look around this room right now and imagine what you would like to see in it. Close your eyes if that helps. Think of the pews, the chancel, the windows, every piece of this building and imagine your ideal space. Some of the details are gonna be your own biases or preferences. When I close my eyes I imagine this room having moveable chairs instead of pews, something that I know would give everyone here indigestion. However, I think that we all have a few shared parts of our dream. More people sitting in the pews. People from our neighborhood – people like us and quite different from us. Musicians to play and sing and lead us in worship above and beyond our present capacity.

Not every part of our dreams, as I said, comes from anything divinely inspired or even generally prudential. However, the capacity to imagine what could be allows us to plan for what could be. A willingness to imagine a future different than our own allows for God to shape our vision toward something new and different from what was. A willingness to imagine a world different from what currently is, means that we might have a world that does not make the same mistakes that our generation or the ones before it have already made. Imagination, the essence of all dreams, is what allows us to pursue what is right.

When Solomon went up to Gibeon, he did so as part of his coronation ritual. We do not know exactly why sleeping up on a hill would be part of it, but it might call back to other patriarchs like Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph who spoke to God in dreams. The King went on the mountain with the anticipation God would have something to say to the newly crowned monarch, and in Solomon’s case this was what happened. God spoke to Solomon and gave him a simple command. “Tell me what you would want from me.” God tells us at the end that most people would ask to live a long life or to have their enemies wiped out from the earth, but Solomon asked for something simpler. A sharp mind, and the knowledge necessary to lead well.

Solomon, despite that wisdom, was a tyrant of a king. He enslaved many people, he married many women, and kept many more sex-slaves beyond his already numerous wives. His taxes took from the treasuries of the poor to enrich his own, and while his reign was the most prosperous and powerful Israel would ever be – it set up his own sons to split the kingdom in half, to divide the monarchy, to destroy the unity of the people of God.

God gave Solomon wisdom, and that wisdom served him well. However, beyond that wisdom there needed to be goodness, and that goodness depended on the ability to believe something other than what is, was possible. Solomon became a great King, but he became a king like all the other kings of the earth. He chased after land, and money, and women, and eventually that unwillingness to be better led to him abandoning God as well.

At the time there were several streams of religion in Israel, two of which we can highlight. One saw God as standing at the very top of the heavens, commanding all lesser spirits. The other put God alongside other gods, and particularly paired him with a goddess named Asherah. Solomon placed many sacred groves on the hilltops of Israel, devoted to this divine wife of God, and slowly the faith of the people switched from the Lord God of Israel, Adonai, to a competing God also named, “Lord,” namely the god, “Ba’al.”

Elsewhere scripture tells us that God made Israel to be a different sort of people. The tribal confederacy lived as twelve independent bodies that came together when crisis arose. They were led by a clan structure, but would periodically appoint a “Judge,” to oversee specific times of trouble. Meanwhile, prophets would tell people what God’s will was in a given situation, with the main prophet serving as a priest in the Tabernacle placed over the Ark of the Covenant. Only when Israel saw the money and power accrued by other nations did they call for a King to be placed over them, and the prophet at the time, Samuel, read them the riot act for asking for one.

The people lacked imagination to see that they could be different from those around them. They wanted to be like the nations around them, and so sold themselves to a King who would oppress them again and again and again across generations. The Kings did not want to rule differently than the Kings before them, and so sought more money and power and women and prestige. The world was as it ever had been, and so no growth could ever come.

What made Christ’s movement so powerful was that it dared to imagine something different for the world. The movement was led by a homeless man, who did not dress well or speak in flowery language. The movement was nonviolent, even when its leader was killed he commanded his people that it was better to die innocent than kill and become a murderer. The movement was not based on making money, or maintaining its power in society, but in helping others and proclaiming its good news to anyone who would listen. The Church, at its outset, was willing to dream of an Earth that looked a bit more like Heaven, and so they made one.

Unfortunately, we did what Israel had done before us. We got power, and so we looked at what powerful people around us were doing. We cast out the needy, they brought down our property values. We took up weapons, claiming our crucified messiah needed to be defended with violence. We saw money as the primary reason to get people involved in our movement. We were invited into government and sought to replace Caesar’s face on all coins with our own. We did not care to build a community, we wanted a brand, and one that would sell and make us bigger and better and more influential and more like every other movement on earth.

And then… Through the slow rot of two thousand years. We began to die. Recently at a clergy meeting at a coffee shop, me and a few pastors made the comment, “The Church is dying.” Not about any one church, but about Church as it is. A woman who heard us, as she was leaving, told us that she thought we were wrong, that the Church is alive and well and it just needs to get out its doors! And that those young people need to get over themselves and fall in line… When we said, those of us gathered there, that “The Church,” was dying, we did not mean the people of God called together by Christ did not have a future. What we meant is that the Church as it is, must die, so that Christianity may live and flourish.

For hundreds of years, we have lacked the imagination to dream of a world any different from the one we live in. No wonder people stopped believing we had any power the moment that the Government and Society also began to lose some of their appeal. We were no different than Society, we were so tied up in Government, that no one could tell the difference anymore. Most Churches run like businesses without half the business sense, and people can tell when  we’re more worried about the future of a building than of a movement. We have to dream of something different, we have to believe that the world around us doesn’t have to be so bleak and distressing. We have to believe that there is a place for everyone, and ability to change to meet the needs of everyone. We have to understand that whatever we Dream of on Earth, can reflect what Dreams we are given of Heaven, but only if we are willing to say that the world as it is, is not enough.

Can you dare to let God lead you to dream of something else?