Grace for Pain Makers
1 Samuel 24:1 – 13
On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck filled with explosives in front of Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. At 9:02 AM the resulting explosion killed 168 people, wounded 850, destroyed the building, terrified a community, shook a nation and made him one of the notorious Pain Makers recent memory.
Pain Makers still rock our world from time to time and unfortunately, recently we have become far too accustomed to their premeditated actions that seem only to be inspired by evil and malice to others. These people inexcusably and inexplicably intend to maim people and scar our psyche.
We have all come across them in our lives. There are those people that seemed intent on doing harm to us without any particular reason, for fun, for spite or for evil’s sake. I have had people in my life that seemed to relish the opportunity to negatively change the course of my life simply because they could and could benefit the Pain Makers by doing it.
Through their actions these Pain Makers are trying to change our lives by creating a new sense of reality in our world. It affects our state of mind and our sense of comfort and safety. We can fall into a spiritual slump.
Spiritual slumps bring sadness and take happiness. They bring confusion and take our faith. You can’t find your rhythm; you can’t seem to get out of bed because you fear the Pain Makers. Every step forward gets lost in two steps backward. Relationships sour. Skies darken and billow. Your nights defy the sunrise. You are in a spiritual slump. What can we do to disarm the Pain Makers in our lives? What wisdom can we find that will get us out of our slump?
Those questions bring us back to our friend David. As we saw last week, when David’s Pain Maker, King Saul transforms David’s world, David dashes into the desert to hide from his Pain Maker because he didn’t know how to avoid his mental and spiritual control over him. Saul has been getting the best of David, leaving him sleeping in caves, lurking behind trees. He was running from a crazed king by hiding in hills.
As we know David sought refuge among the caves near the Dead Sea. Eventually David realizes that because of Saul’s inexplicable malice toward him, the focus on Saul had replaced David’s focus on God. It had been that God-focus rather than problem-focus which allowed him to overcome Goliath.
In our scripture lesson for today we find the answers as to how we can disarm the Pain Makers from having control over our lives because David models how to give grace to a person who gives nothing but grief.
Today we see that Saul and his army are out, not searching for enemy armies but rather searching for the fugitive David. This is a personal quest for Saul, the Pain Maker. As they are marching through the desert, Saul signals for his men to stop and they do. Three thousand soldiers come to a stop as their king dismounts and walks up the mountainside.
In order “to relieve himself” Saul enters the cave that David and his men are hiding in the back of. Because his eyes don’t fully adjust to the dark cave after having been in the bright desert sun, Saul doesn’t notice the silent figures who line the walls – but they definitely see him.
Max Lucado describes it:
As Saul heeds nature’s call, dozens of eyes widen. Their minds race, and hands reach for daggers. One thrust of the blade will bring Saul’s tyranny and their running to an end. But David signals for his men to hold back. David will do the deed.
He edges along the wall, unsheathes his knife, and cuts not the flesh but the robe of Saul. David then creeps back into the recesses of the cave. David’s men can’t believe what their leader has done. Neither can David. His men think he has done too little; surprisingly David thinks he has done too much.
David feels guilty because he had dared to cut off a corner of Saul’s robe. He says “May the Lord keep me from doing such a thing to my master!” David remembers that Saul is the Lord’s appointed king and David knows that he must respect those that are God’s elect.
After Saul leaves the cave, David soon follows. He lifts the piece of the robe and tells Saul of the grace that he has shown to Saul. He yells out “I could have killed you, but I didn’t.” Stunned by the unknown close call Saul looks up and wonders aloud why would David allow him to live?
David spares Saul’s life because he displayed a God focused mind. God put your life into my hands and you are God’s anointed. The Bible makes it perfectly clear, David thoughts are not on his tormenter, the Pain Maker but rather on the Lord himself. We think about the purveyors of pain in our own lives. It’s one thing to give grace to friends and family, but can you give grace to those who give you grief?
Job 5:2 tells us that not doing so leads us into those spiritual Slumps. “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple”. Vengeance fixes our attention on life’s ugliest moments. It did to David and it will to us as well. Will rehearsing and reliving your hurts and those that have hurt you make you a better person? No, it will destroy your soul.
Those that want to destroy their Pain Makers ultimately need two graves, one for pain giver and one for themselves. “It is foolish to harbor a grudge” (Eccles. 7:9 TEV). An eye for an eye becomes a neck for a neck and a job for a job and a reputation for a reputation. When does it stop?
It will stop when one person imitates David’s God-dominated mind. Eventually he faced Saul the way he faced Goliath, by facing toward God instead of facing toward the problem. When the soldiers in the cave urged David to kill Saul, what dominated David’s thoughts? He saw, not Saul the enemy, but Saul the anointed of God. He refused to see his Pain Maker as anything less than a child of God.
Your enemies figure into God’s plan for you and your life. God hasn’t given up on you or them. They may be out of God’s will, but not out of his reach. You honor God when you see them, not as his failures, but as his projects. Besides, no one assigns us the task of vengeance and David understood this.
Revenge removes God from the equation. Vigilantes displace and replace God. Only God assesses accurate judgments. We impose punishments too slight or severe. God dispenses perfect justice. Vengeance is his job. Leave your enemies in God’s hands.
Our world has been rocked recently by people that have become Pain Makers in the lives of ourselves and others. Whether their actions were intentional or not they resulted in pain for tens, hundreds, thousands even millions of people.
On August 23 Jacob Blake was shot and injured by a policeman in Kenosha, Wisconsin after an altercation. We can reasonably question the actions and reactions of the people involved in the situation. Litigating the incident is not my intent, my intent is to show you how one person found Grace for Pain Makers.
Two days after the incident lawyers for Jacob Blake held a news conference with the family speaking their thoughts. The lawyers came out placing blame on the police, looking for justice for Mr. Blake and punishment for the officers involved. They did not seem to be interested in any Davidic Grace for Pain Makers. But when his mother Julia Jackson steps up to the microphone and she offers a different point of view.
She says in part, “We need healing. As I pray for my son’s healing — physically, emotionally, and spiritually — I also have been praying even before this for the healing of our country. God has placed each and every one of us in this country because he wanted us to be here. Clearly you can see by now that I have beautiful brown skin. But take a look at your hand. Whatever shade it is, it is beautiful as well. How dare we hate what we are. We are humans. How dare you ask God to make one type of human that looks just like you? No one is superior to the other. The only supreme being is God himself.
To all of the police officers: I’m praying for you and your families. To all of the citizens, my black and brown sisters and brothers: I’m praying for you. I believe that you are intelligent beings just like the rest of us. Everybody: Let’s use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together, to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other. America is great when we behave greatly.
Going back to where we started today with our first Pain Maker, I have had the blessing of being able to visit the Oklahoma City Memorial. It is a reverent and contemplative place. There are 168 lighted empty chairs with plaques of the names of each missing and lost soul of that family and friends can go and sit with their loved one.
There is also a large reflecting pool which is essentially in the foot print of the Murrah building. It is bounded on each end with large gateways with digital clocks that show the before and after time of the event. One reads 9:01, the minute before the explosion, the other reads 9:03, the minute after. In between is the reflecting pool which allows the visitors to recollect the moment that pain delivered by the Pain Maker.
These two gateways represent how we can deal with the Pain Makers in our lives. Prior to the grief we live within the bliss and blessings of our Father. During the event we feel the pain and contemplate how this could have happened to us and why someone would do such a thing. We question why God would allow this to happen to us.
Then we come to the other gateway and know that it is time to move on and let God be in control of the situation. Are you willing to cross through the 9:03 gateway of the pain you feel? Are you like Jacob Blake’s Mother willing to give Grace for Pain Makers and let God handle it?
Hear the Good News my friends…….
When David got to the point where a Pain Maker had him mired in a spiritual slump, he changed his focus toward God as the only one that has authority and control over all things. When David was in that slump, scriptures tell us that he went to God to find the focus that allowed him to find peace in the grace of God. We give grace to others, even haters because we’ve first been given grace. We, like Saul, have been given grace. We, like David, can freely give it.
Forgiving others is an action of healing ourselves rather than healing others. Forgiveness allows us to get past the pain created in us by someone else and to move forward toward growing from the pain and not hiding from the pain.
Our ability to find the courage to see others that harm us as God’s children that are under the justice of God transforms us into the empowered, God-focused people that we are called to be. Spreading grace and forgiveness to those that have caused us pain, because we have first received that grace and forgiveness from our Father in Heaven when we were the Pain Makers intentionally to him or to others. Grace for Pain Makers; we must give it because we have already received it. Amen.