Legacy Lost, Legacy Found

1 Kings 12:1-17, 25-29
All Saints' Day
November 1, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Well, now, this text poses a problem or two. It's supposed to be a text for All Saint's Day. It's supposed to be a stewardship text, too. I think it is both, but you may take some convincing. We'll see how that goes.

Rehoboam was a spoiled rich kid. He was the grandson of David, the great-great-great-grandson of Boaz and Ruth (the Moabite). Like many spoiled rich kids, he had no clue about just how privileged he was.

Rehoboam’s grandfather David had become the king of the united tribes of Israel. But before that he had waged a long guerrilla war against Saul his father-in-law and the first king of Israel. David lived with real hardship and his life was often in danger.

On Saul’s death David became king over Israel. But he was denied the right to build a Temple for Yahweh's chest, the ark of the covenant, because he was a man whose life had been given to making war.

So Solomon built the Temple instead of David. It was an architectural wonder, a thing of beauty, a compelling statement, propaganda in stone to Yahweh's intention to uphold, protect, and give glory to the royal house of David. The Temple by its mere existence proclaimed to one and all that God was in Jerusalem to stay and would stay there forever. No foreign enemy could threaten Israel's future. No internal threat could topple the descendants of David.

Solomon was lucky enough to be king when things were quiet in the region. Neither Egypt nor the Babylon was anxious for foreign adventure and so the little buffering kingdoms between them enjoyed a brief and uncharacteristic freedom from domination by the regional super-powers. Israel's location across the trade routes from the Egypt to Babylon meant that all that wealth passed through Israel and Solomon exacted high tolls. He used the money to become militarily powerful. His neighbors considered him wise. At least they found it prudent to say as much. They came to listen to his wisdom. They brought gifts.

The whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his mind. Every one of them brought a present, objects of silver and gold, garments, weaponry, spices, horses, and mules, so much year by year.

Solomon gathered together chariots and horses; he had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horses, which he stationed in the chariot cities and with the king in Jerusalem. The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and he made cedars as numerous as the sycamores of the Shephelah.

See, I told you this would be a stewardship sermon!

Famously, Solomon also gathered wives. "Among his wives," the text says, "were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines." Some of them, I'm sure, were acquired in order to make alliances with neighboring kingdoms. But I wonder if the gathering of wives didn't go beyond the needs of diplomacy. Solomon certainly did not lack for entertainment.

Old Samuel had warned the tribes about all this when they had come to him asking for a king. "These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots...He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers... He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day."

And under Solomon, only their third king, it was as Samuel had said it would be.

When Solomon died, the people had grievances. They still wanted to have a king, but they were tired. They had built Jerusalem. The defense budget was huge, and this in spite of the absence of any foreign threat. They needed some relief from the burden that Solomon had laid on them. So they met Rehoboam at Shechem, the ancient center of the federation of tribes. Their spokesman Jeroboam presented their grievances to the new king. Rehoboam listened and asked for three days to consider their requests.

Now Rehoboam had grown up in Solomon's court. He was a spoiled rich kid who was accustomed to life in the palace. Like a lot of spoiled rich kids, he had no clue either about what struggles David had faced, nor about what ordinary people's lives were like. He was that worst of all possible characters: someone who was clueless and entitled. He had no idea about the lives led by his subjects, but he was sure what he himself deserved: silver, gold, luxurious furniture, sumptuous food, fine horses. And women, of course. Many, many women.

He consulted his fathers' counselors. They agreed with the people. There needed to be some royal belt-tightening so that the people could have some relief.

But when Rehoboam met again with the representatives of the tribes, he told them: "My father made your workload heavy, but I’ll make it even heavier! My father disciplined you with whips, but I’ll do it with scorpions!"

The people had made their complaint. Rehoboam had refused to listen to them. Instead he had insulted them. They had had enough. They answer to the king was open rebellion:

What share do we have in David? 

We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse.

To your tents, O Israel!

Look now to your own house, O David.

The northern tribes chose Jeroboam as their king and were then known as Israel. The tribes of Judah, Benjamin and part of the tribe of Levi remained with Rehoboam in the kingdom known from then on as Judah. The covenant people of Yahweh never reunited.

This is supposed to be a stewardship sermon. It's also, perhaps more importantly, supposed to be a sermon for All Saints' Day.

So far, it's a story about a legacy lost, a story about how one spoiled rich kid squandered away all that his grandfather had accomplished, all that his father had tried (however foolishly) to build on. The root question that Rehoboam had to answer was this: What was his legacy and what was he going to do with it?

Was his legacy a tradition of protecting and caring for the people of God? Or was it an chance to amass an even greater fortune? He picked the second choice. His father had counted chariots in the thousands and horses in the tens of thousands. He would count them in the tens and hundreds of thousands. He would weigh gold in tons. He would gather wives in the thousands.

He was not going to use his legacy to protect God's people. Especially he was not going to use it to protect the widow, the orphan and the foreigner. The covenant that had protected and sheltered his ancestor Ruth and given rise to his own grandfather would have no role in his rule. He would reign as a deserter of the covenant.

It's a cautionary tale, to be sure. And it asks us the same sorts of questions. We're not kings, of course. We haven't inherited seven hundred of our father's wives and three hundred live-in girlfriends. Thank God for that! But we are heirs, each of us, and responsible for a legacy.

There is the legacy that we share together with all of God's people. Sometimes I think it comes as a surprise, but we are not the first people to follow Jesus or to belong to the God of Jesus. We are only the latest of a long line. Today we have read the names and remembered the contributions of seven of God's saints. They are those who joined that long parade during the last year, just from our own congregation. They lived their lives by God's grace. Some of them did it deliberately, devoting all of their energy to being faithful followers of Jesus. Others were not so deliberate, not so dedicated. But all of them were God's saints.

From these names we can imagine the long, long line of saints from every time and place. They refracted God's love into their world like prisms dangling in the sunlight throwing brilliant colors around a room. We know some very few of their names: Brigit, the sixth-century Irish nun who led a community of both monks and nuns in Kildare, Ireland; Absalom Jones who, denied ordination in the Methodist Episcopal Church, became the first African American to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church; Frederick Douglass, that firebrand of a prophet who railed against America's great sin of slavery; and Polycarp, the second-century pastor of the church if Smyrna in modern-day Turkey, who paid for his faith with his life. And there are countless others.

Of these saints—both famous and anonymous—we are heirs. They are our legacy. We can treat them as if they were of no importance to us. We can poke fun at their oddities; God knows some of them were odd! Or we can take heart from them. In the midst of their struggles, they reflected God's love and grace in their own peculiar ways. They are a treasury of pray-able lives.

We have our own legacies of wealth and privilege. Okay, so it's not much wealth on Solomon's or Rehoboam's scale. And as to privilege, well, again, it may not be much, but surely simply to be born in the United States and to live in a part of the country that is prospering is to enjoy privilege. I can add to my own list of privilege: I'm white, middle class, well-educated, straight, and in a respected profession. You may not have the same list, but your list of privilege is not empty. What will you and I do with that privilege?

I have wealth, too. Maybe I don't have as much as I'd like, and certainly not as much as others, but it's still appreciable. What will I do with it? What causes will I favor? What processes will I encourage? What work will I support? These are all questions of legacy.

On All Saints' Day we consider our legacy of holiness and we decide how to use it and whether to add our own contribution to it. On Consecration Sunday we consider our legacy of privilege and wealth and decide how to use it. My hope for myself and for all of you is that we'll do better than Rehoboam. Knowing you as I do, I'm pretty sure you'll do fine.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.