Our Life Story

The young shepherd boy David had quite a life story. We look back on it from the future, and we know that his anointing by Samuel, recounted in this morning’s first reading, is just the beginning. He has yet to meet Goliath or Bathsheba. His story will include remarkable power as a soldier and leader, and as a poet and musician. He will return the Holy City Jerusalem and the ark of the covenant to the Hebrew people and rule with far-reaching influence over all Israel. Quite a life story.

What is it that makes David’s story so notable? Is it simply the magnitude of his accomplishments? Does David’s life have meaning purely for its historical significance? What make the events of David’s life a story worth telling, retelling, and remembering?

The author Norman Maclean writes about the idea of story. He ponders what it is that makes personal, historical events into a story. Maclean wrote two remarkable books: A River Runs Through It, which lots of people know because Robert Redford made a movie out of it, and Young Men and Fire, which not many people beyond Montana (and maybe the University of Chicago) know at all. Young Men and Fire is about twelve young men, U. S. Forest Service smokejumpers, who jumped out of an airplane on August 5, 1949, to fight a small routine forest fire in a remote and rugged part of Montana known as Gates of the Mountains. They were strong, an elite corps, full of life and bravado. Within an hour all were dead or dying, caught as they sought to outrun a quirk of nature—a blowup—a capricious, explosive, deadly fire like none they had ever encountered before. A rare manifestation of nature’s power that killed twelve young men who did not expect to die that day.

Maclean writes about his purpose, his quest, in researching and writing this book:

In this cockeyed world there are shapes and designs, connections and meanings, that transform random events into a story. It takes curiosity, training and compassion to seek and see the shapes and designs. It takes honesty, perseverance and courage to discern the truth and meaning. The gift of that effort is the discovery of a story.

A cockeyed world filled with random and capricious events, with no beginning or ending, or a story constructed from shapes and designs that unfolds from beginning to end with meaning and purpose.

How do you see the world? How do you see your life? As a random series of events, or a story with shape and meaning? It depends upon our point of view, on what we choose to see. It depends upon whether we choose to apply our curiosity, training and compassion to seek out and discern the shapes and designs that are a part of our own lives. Whether, as Maclean says, we bring honesty and courage to the interpretation of our experiences, looking for their meaning. Or, on the other hand, we may simply accept our lives as a collection of random events, an assortment of statistics, rather than the shapes and design of a story.

At first glance, the events in the life of the youngest son of Jesse the Bethlehemite might seem random and capricious in the extreme. David’s life certainly did not unfold along any "normal" social or professional trajectory of the time. Nor are there any obvious reasons why he should have received the status that was bestowed upon him, nor any clear indication that he deserved or earned the glory he achieved. In fact Scripture tells us as much about his frailties and flaws as it does about his positive traits. His "good" fortune would seem to be an inexplicable and capricious quirk of fate or nature or luck… 

Except for one thing. God.

The events of David’s life began, obviously, at his birth. The story of David’s life begins in today’s reading. Samuel, the Bible tells us, "took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward." The spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward. And it was in those many times and places when the spirit of the Lord wrapped itself around David that the shapes and patterns of his life became a story. David’s life has a story… David’s life story is meaningful (rather than meaningless) and memorable and worth telling and retelling… because David’s life is a part of God’s story, because David’s story and God’s story are connected over and over again. And the story that those shapes and patterns tell is the story of God’s love for his people. God’s love. And God’s ever unfolding efforts to enfold us into that love.

Do you see the shape of this story in your own lives? It begins at baptism. "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever." God’s touch of love, of renewal, of promise. A point of profound connection with God, when each of us is invited into and made a part of God’s story, God’s offering of love to us.

You have to look, Norman Maclean reminds us, you have to look, and sometimes in odd places, to find the pieces of the story. There may have been no odder place to look for God's story than in the greedy, ambitious, lustful life of David. Yet the pattern of God’s love was woven powerfully into the events of David’s life.

For example, many years after today’s reading the young king David had against all odds recaptured Jerusalem, the sacred city of his people, and had brought into the city the ark, the most sacred symbol of his people. For the people of God in that time, there could hardly be a clearer manifestation of God’s love for them. And they gather to celebrate. Hear how Frederick Buechner describes David’s role in the celebration:

A poetic and imaginative description of a single event in David’s life, but the shape of that event tells the story of God’s presence and love...  and the story of God’s efforts to share that love, to bring all the people into fuller awareness of God’s love and presence with them.

Other events in David’s life, not so magnificent, still tell the same story, the story of God’s reaching out in love. In the midst of David’s adulterous union with Bathsheba, the wife of another man, Scripture tells us that Nathan the prophet brought David to a profound sense of remorse. In a rush of awareness, David saw the deathly darkness of what he had done and that it could not be undone and before God, the mighty King David trembled. Yet Scripture also tells us that the spirit of God was with him still and brought David to see God’s mercy offered into his darkness. God’s presence and love, and God’s desire that David (and we) might know that love, live into its promise. This is the shape and pattern of the events in David’s life story.

It is the same story told in this morning’s Gospel reading, where Jesus gives sight to the man born blind. In and of itself that is a remarkable sign of God’s love, but perhaps even more important is that the man recognized this act as a manifestation of God’s love. He knew that he had been touched by God. The others chose not to see God’s story in this event. The man who was given his sight saw, in this event, the shape, the pattern, the design, of God’s presence and love with him. He saw that his story was a part of God’s story.

And that is the challenge to us, to see in the events of our lives, the shape and pattern of God’s love and presence. To look in the odd places of our lives… To bring our curiosity, training and compassion, our courage and our honesty to search for the shapes and designs in our own lives that tell the story of God’s love and presence with us.

As a possible forepiece to Young Men and Fire, a story about a wildfire in Montana, Norman Maclean wrote these rather odd words:

Love. The story of God’s love for us is our life story. If only we have the eyes to see it.

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