A King's Tale

Many thanks to Debie Thomas for allowing me
to share her powerful words on Solomon with my congregation.

August 16, 2015

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14

¹⁰Then David slept with his ancestors, and was buried in the city of David. ¹¹The time that David reigned over Israel was forty years; he reigned seven years in Hebron, and thirty-three years in Jerusalem. ¹²So Solomon sat on the throne of his father David; and his kingdom was firmly established.

3:3Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of his father David; only, he sacrificed and offered incense at the high places.

⁴The king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the principal high place; Solomon used to offer a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. ⁵At Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, "Ask what I should give you." ⁶And 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. ⁷And 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. ⁸And your servant is in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people, so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted.

⁹Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?" ¹⁰It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this. ¹¹God 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, ¹²I 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.

¹³I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor all your life; no other king shall compare with you. ¹⁴If you will walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your life."

Sermon: “A King’s Tale”

I enjoy writing sermons each week.  (I might be in the wrong line of work if I didn’t!)  I usually pick a text in advance, let is sort of marinate for a few days, and then Thursday is The Day to Write.  I sit in a coffee shop and begin the fun task of looking closely at the language, and of jotting down my first impressions and ideas.  Then I put those ideas about a text in conversation with all sorts of people: writers, theologians, poets who all have something to say about that same passage.  Often, you’ll notice, when something really connects with where I feel led to go, I’ll include someone else’s words (with credit) in my own. 

Today is a little different.  When I sat down with coffee in hand to go through my little Thursday process, one link caught my eye – it was called “A King’s Tale.”  I read it, expecting some of it to be helpful to my sermon on Solomon.  Instead, the whole thing was, in my book, better than anything I could ever hope to write.  The writer was Debie (with one ‘b’) Thomas and she brought to life the whole story of Solomon, in ways I hadn’t connected with before.  I was so moved and shaken by her words that I told the poor coffee shop owner all about it!  And then, like some sort of fawning fan, I sent Debie Thomas an email.  After some definite gushing over her refreshing and challenging take on the story of Solomon, I asked a question: “Could I share it?  With y’all specifically?” 

She eagerly agreed, honored that the words of a Christian, Californian creative writer might make their way to a little North Carolina church.  So, today, I’m not really preaching to you.  Debie is.  I promise to get back to usual next week, but for now, let’s listen to what she has to say to us about the real King Solomon.

“A King’s Tale”

by: Debie Thomas

Once upon a time, there was a wise prince.   Following his father's death, the prince assumed his divinely appointed throne, married a beautiful princess from a neighboring kingdom, and settled down to govern his people to the glory of God.  Soon afterwards, God appeared to him in a dream, and promised to grant the young royal whatever his heart desired. 

Being a humble man, the king refused to ask for wealth, power, or long life, and instead replied thus: "I am only a child.  Therefore give your servant an understanding mind to govern your people, and to discern between good and evil."

God was so pleased with the king's request, he promised not only to grant it — to make this king the wisest human being in history — but to grant him every other measure of greatness as well.  Untold wealth, matchless honor, and long life.

In time, the king's reputation for brilliance spread across the land.  Nobles traveled from distant shores to hear his pithy sayings and witness his wise judgments.  In accordance with his wisdom and God's blessing, the king's wealth and power grew beyond measure.  He made strategic political and economic alliances; maintained fleets of ships; built gorgeous temples and palaces; traded in luxuries such as gold, silver, and ivory; penned the greatest wisdom literature of his time; presided over the Golden Age of his kingdom; and finally handed over the throne to his son after a peaceable reign of forty years.

By any measure, a "happily ever after" story…

Once upon a time, there was a shrewd prince.  Following the death of the king, the prince ordered the murder of his older brother — the rightful heir — and assumed his father's throne with blood on his hands.  He spent the earliest days of his reign carrying out the vengeance killings his father had requested before his death.  Then, believing himself to have divine wisdom and a divine mandate, he set out to build the kingdom of his dreams — a kingdom of wealth, prestige, and power.

The king's appetites were beyond excessive.  To support his extravagant lifestyle, he levied taxes his subjects could not bear.  To control knowledge, he gathered the surrounding world's wisdom traditions to himself.  To complete his lavish building projects, he conscripted thousands of people into forced labor.  To satisfy his desires, he assembled a harem of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.  To quell his spiritual restlessness, he constructed pagan shrines and offered worship to gods who demanded child sacrifice.

The results of his choices were dire.  By the end of his reign, his people could no longer bear the crushing burdens of taxation and slavery he had placed upon them. In the wake of his paganism, they could no longer differentiate between idolatry and worship.  Because he had monopolized God to justify his personal brand of wisdom, his subjects had nowhere to turn for divine discernment or reparation.

Soon the king found himself confronted by enemies.  Though he attempted to fight back, God's hand was against him, and he enjoyed little success.  He died shortly thereafter, denied the long life he had dreamed of.  His son then tried to force the disgruntled masses back into servitude, but they resisted, and a civil war that would last for decades broke out across the land.  The kingdom split in two, and the famed king's once-golden dream dissolved into chaos.

By any measure, NOT "a happily ever after" story.

So.  Which story is true?  Who was King Solomon?  A sage or a fool?  A noble or a glutton?  A leader or a tyrant?

That's the first question posed by this week's lectionary reading from 1st Kings.  But here's the second:  What happens if the answer is yes?  What if King Solomon was all of the above?  What then?

I grew up in a church that espoused strict Biblical literalism and inerrancy.  Though I no longer read Scripture through those lenses, I respect the challenge King Solomon poses for those who do.  I have precise memories of sitting in church as a child, watching preachers twist themselves into interpretative pretzels to make sure the famed king emerged from their sermons with his reputation intact. "The wisest man who ever lived."

Those preachers had no choice.  If the Bible literally claims that God made Solomon wiser than all the billions of human beings who ever have (or ever will) inhabit planet Earth, then the rest of Solomon's story — however sordid — must be packaged to substantiate the claim.

One way to manage the problem is to leave out huge chunks of the story, as I did at the beginning of this essay.  Growing up, I didn't hear about the slaves who toiled in the king's copper mines and stone yards.  Or about the excesses of Solomon's daily menu — a thousand measures of flour and meal, ten oxen, twenty cattle, one hundred sheep, and ample sides of deer, gazelle, roebuck, and fatted fowl.  Or about the forbidden gods — Chemosh, Molech, Astarte, Milcom — he honored with dubious and possibly sinister sacrifices at shrines on the outskirts of the city.

Another way to revise Solomon's story is to make the time-honored, "Let's blame Eve" move.  This allows Solomon to remain a wise and good king, a witty and enterprising man whose only fatal mistake is that he falls into the arms of the wrong women — foreign, idolatrous women who lead his otherwise pure heart astray.

Needless to say, this misogynistic reading depends on a pretty narrow definition of sin.  Sin as sexual mishap.  Not sin as greed, ostentation, fratricide, gluttony, idolatry, exploitation, or cruel indifference.

I started this essay dividing Solomon's story into two parts.  The good and the bad, the noble and the shameful.  But the wonderful thing about the Bible — if we're willing to liberate it from the bondage of literalism — is that it refuses to distort reality in such an unhelpful way.

The Solomon of the Bible is a human being.  Which is to say, he is a paradox.  Blessed with wisdom and cursed with foolishness.  Devoted to God and attracted to idols.   Committed to his intellect and shackled to his appetites.    

We can neither whitewash nor dismiss this king — his story is too familiar.  Too much like our own.

But we can learn from it.  If we refuse to redeem Solomon by revision, if we're willing to look at his life in its full complexity, we can hear warnings worth heeding.  They're painful and pointed warnings, but they might save us:

1. It's possible to lose God's dream in ours.  Solomon may very well have received a vision from God; in the end, it doesn't matter.  What matters is that Solomon's own dreams very quickly left God's in the dust.  Walter Brueggemann puts it this way: "The wisdom that Solomon does not learn is attentiveness to those for whom God has special attentiveness.  There are all kinds of dreams — of power and money and prestige and control.  But the dream of justice for widows, orphans, and immigrants is the deep wisdom of Torah obedience."  And that's the dream — God's dream for the least and most vulnerable of his children — that Solomon never fulfills.

2. It's possible to hog God.  A mandate is a tricky thing.  Solomon believed that his wisdom and his legitimacy as Israel's ruler came from God himself.  But how often, in the years that followed, did he return to that original mandate, and ask himself if his reign was still worthy of God's stamp of approval?  Using God to legitimize one's own decisions and satisfy one's own lusts is dangerous, especially if it denies other people the right to appeal to God, too.  I wonder, for example, how the parents of those young girls Solomon kidnapped for his harem felt about their king's "holy" mandate.  Solomon monopolized God for the sake of his ambitions and appetites.  He did this long after his personal devotion to God had run cold.

3. Wealth is not blessing.  I feel like I need to repeat that.  Wealth is not blessing.  If it is, then Jesus (just to cite the obvious example) must be regarded as one of the most un-blessed people ever to walk the earth; he lived and died dirt poor.  But if there's one false teaching that haunts the American church most, this is it.  That money is an unambiguous sign of God's approval.  Hence, prosperity theology.  Hence, our willingness to turn a blind eye to sin in our politicians, our economic policy makers, our religious leaders, and our cultural icons when their sins come packaged in enormous wealth.  Too often, money creates a moral vaccuum.  Solomon remained wealthy while he sacrificed babies to Molech.  Wealth is not blessing.

Let's try this again:  Once upon a time there was a king.  He had big dreams, as most of us do.  He had great faults, as most of us do.  He lived a life marked by success and failure, nobility and disgrace.  He loved God and he didn't.  He pleased God and he didn't.  He left a legacy that was neither perfect nor wretched, as most of us will.  But he was loved by God throughout, even when his foolish wisdom shattered God's heart.  As we are. 

Amen.