Seeing With God's Eyes

"Being Born Again, Once Again"

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
June 14, 2009

Then Samuel went to Ramah; and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. Samuel
did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the
LORD was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.
The LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul? I have rejected him
from being king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse
the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.” Samuel said,
“How can I go? If Saul hears of it, he will kill me.” And the LORD said, “Take a heifer
with you, and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’ Invite Jesse to the sacrifice,
and I will show you what you shall do; and you shall anoint for me the one whom I name
to you.” Samuel did what the LORD commanded, and came to Bethlehem. The elders
of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, “Do you come peaceably?” He said,
“Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the LORD; sanctify yourselves and come with
me to the sacrifice.” And he sanctified Jesse and his sons and invited them to the
sacrifice.
When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is now
before the LORD.” But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on
the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as
mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”
Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. He said, “Neither has
the LORD chosen this one.” Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said,
“Neither has the LORD chosen this one.” Jesse made seven of his sons pass before
Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, “The LORD has not chosen any of these.” Samuel
said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest,
but he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and bring him; for we
will not sit down until he comes here.” He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy,
and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The LORD said, “Rise and anoint him; for
this is the one.” Then Samuel 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. Samuel then set out and went to Ramah.

In 1995 Neil White was convicted of check fraud, of kiting a half million dollar check to
cover the employee payroll of his burgeoning magazine empire. His magazines were
doing well, and so he kept buying more and more regional magazines, but because he
wasn’t collecting on his accounts as he should have, and was living a good lifestyle, the
cash wasn’t there as he had hoped, so he simply got more and more brazen about
living on the financial edge with the check kiting scheme. During a regular bank audit,
the federal authorities caught up with his fraud, confronted him, during which he
admitted the practice, without quite realizing how serious the charges really were.
Eventually he was sentenced to one year in a minimum security prison in Carville,
Louisiana. White was a churchgoer, a budding young philanthropist, had a good
reputation, but now he was having to soften the blow of his year long absence from his
wife and kids by telling his small children that their daddy was simply going to camp for
a long year.   (link to interview with author)

When he arrived in Carville, he was greeted in the hallway by a man with no fingers,
which shocked him a bit, but he simply supposed the man had been in some sort of
prison accident. Later, White was stunned to find out that he would be sharing this
prison with the residents of the last remaining leper colony in the United States—
indeed, the prison had been primarily a leper colony before the federal government
had appropriated the place for low risk prisoners like himself, and though the leper
population had shrunk over the years, there still remained some 70 lepers still living on
the grounds in the mid-nineties. For a man as self-admittedly vain as White, this was a
horrifying prospect and when one of the residents, a man who would eventually
become a close friend of his, offered him his hand, White pulled back, not
understanding that leprosy was not contagious, despite the Sunday School stories he
had grown up with that had implied that it was. In fact, most of us have an automatic
immunity to it, and scientists now think it is probably passed to others through the blood
of some animals—in Louisiana and in the deep South, it is thought that armadillos may
be a carrier of leprosy, a disease which has now be renamed Hansen’s disease.

Despite his initial fear, White almost immediately found himself drawn to these people,
these folks who had often spent a lifetime in the place, being forcibly removed from
their homes and almost “sentenced” to this place forever.   They were remarkable
people, often more positive than the prisoners who were had been sentenced to
Carville for actual crimes. Lepers, or people with Hansen’s disease lose their limbs
because they sometimes lose all feelings in their hands and feet, and so when they
injure those parts of their bodies, they don’t immediately seek out treatment because
they can’t feel the pain, and eventually they lose parts of their bodies because the
infection simply isn’t caught in time. As White learned more about the disease, he also
allowed himself to get beyond the appearance of these men and women, and quickly
found himself overwhelmed by their goodness and wisdom, even as they shared with
him the horrors stories of how they got forcibly moved to Carville, as if they themselves
were criminals being sentenced for being one of the “untouchables.” What White
learned was so many things, but the perhaps the greatest and most obvious was that
people are never quite what they appear to be, both good and bad, and that what had
mattered to him so much—his success, his looks, his power—it seem like nothing next
to the wisdom that these people had culled from their experience of being “other” in a
culture that feared them.

Neil White learned what our friend Samuel learned thousands of years ago, that things
are not necessarily as they appear, that you really can’t judge a book by its cover, and
that what White eventually came to see in these people with leprosy was actually pretty
close to the way that God saw them—as fully fleshed-out people, as humans, as good
people whose wisdom had been tempered by a deep experience of otherness. The
irony is that the prophet Samuel in our story today would simply do as he had been
taught, in a way, he would do the thing that we are often taught to do, which is to trust
that the outside matches the inside. Sure, it’s not something we are taught explicitly,
and sometimes we are explicitly told the opposite, that looks don’t matter, that it’s the
heart that matters, but in reality, if you think about it, we rarely see ugly people on TV,
diseased people on primetime, or even simply overweight people in our culture—
everyone is perfect, or at least perfect as our culture understands it. Still, in Samuel’s
day, the religious laws also deigned people who were diseased with something like
Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, as people who were unfit to enter into the temple, or
serve at the altar, because only perfection, physical perfection was worthy enough to
lead the worship of the living God. The Old Testament is crawling with laws dealing with
those kinds of skin diseases, laws usually born out of the kind of ignorance and
misunderstanding that had brought those folks at Carville to their new home. Samuel
has a bias that is understandable, that is human, sadly, and that is even reflected in
the religious laws he extols—that physical beauty, that physical perfection, equals
spiritual perfection, spiritual beauty.

So, Samuel shows up at Jesse’s home, at God’s command, to seek out a replacement
for Saul, God’s first pick to be king of Israel. Needless to say, the pick of Saul had
been a slow-moving disaster, and God has finally had it up to here with Saul, and it’s
time for a new king. God tells Samuel to go to see this guy Jesse, whose family has no
real important pedigree, no real standing amongst the tribes of Israel, and yet amongst
Jesse’s sons, there will be found the next king of Israel. The people in Jesse’s town
fear Samuel, either because he is known to be in conflict with Saul, or because of the
spiritual power he carries with him, but Samuel assures them, with the Lord’s coaching,
that he is not there to hurt anyone. Jesse’s sons are invited to be a part of worship that
Samuel, and so when Samuel meets Jesse’s oldest son at that worship, he assumes
that the good looking Eliab must be the new anointed one, but, in the verse that seems
to be the crux of the text, God says to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on
the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as
mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”
With this pearl of divine wisdom, Samuel goes through the other brothers, until there
are no more present, and he inquires whether or not there might be others left—
eventually, David shows up and is anointed king of Israel, even though, technically
speaking, Israel already had a king. The drama that ensues engulfs the final chapters
of 1 Samuel, but the details, many of which are familiar to many of you, are something
you can catch up with in your free time.

What we are left with here is this wisdom that mirrors the wisdom that Neil White
stumbled upon while he was at Carville, which is that there is more to people than the
way they look. It’s obvious, I know, but its obviousness doesn’t mean it’s something we
quite get, not in our hearts, despite the truth of it. We all judge people by how they
look, and the reason why everyone on TV is good looking is because people like to
look at handsome and beautiful people, me included, to be honest. You even have an
admission by the writer of our text from 1 Samuel that, despite the fact that God might
look at the heart, the composer of this text is simply delighted that the one who is
anointed is “was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.” Even the person
telling the story, the one who said that God told Samuel not to judge someone by their
looks, even he is taken by the good looks of the man God chooses to be the next king
of Israel—he has a sort of ancient man-crush on David. There is an obvious tension
here between what God sees and what we see—and, if we are to believe the text, it is
simply a coincidence that David is both beautiful inside and out. Obviously, the writer is
happy that is the case, and I think, if were honest, it is what we hope for when we
become enamored by someone’s good looks, hoping that somehow their outside
matches their inside.

And yet, that is not an automatic, is it? What God sees easily is something that often
takes while for us to get, and more importantly, is something we often are in denial
about. Douglas bought one of those roll-out seed beds, the thing that has seeds
imbedded in the material that you lay out in the flower beds, and that simply needs
watering. Well, according to the outside packaging, all I had to do was to water every
day, and it should sprout up in 2-3 weeks. I did as I was told, I really did, despite the
fact that I really hate yard work, but nothing ever came up, nothing sprouted up—the
package, with all of its pretty flowers and its promises of a beautiful garden, the outside
packaging didn’t match what was actually inside of it. We’ve all experienced that, one
way or another, but God never does, God never has to make a gamble like we did in
buying that product, because God never falls for the marketing, the packaging, we
present ourselves in. God knows the whole of us, and God sees us for who we really
are—and for some people, that is a terrifying thing. For Neil White, who judged people
by their outward appearance, like most of us do, it was a moment of revelation to see
the world as God sees it—as full of people whose importance was measured by the
inside of them rather than the outside of them. For White, for Samuel, for the rest of
us, we are challenged to try to see the world the way God sees it, as a world full of
souls, of hearts, whose beauty is really measured by the depth of their care for others,
their openness, their goodness

But, you know, as I said a second ago, I think that is a scary thing, really, for many of
us, to know that God sees the whole of us. Sure, I’d love to think that God would
consider me a David on the inside, but I wonder if I am more of a Eliab, David’s oldest
brother. That is the fear, isn’t it? To be judged from the inside out…well, it could
expose some parts of our hearts we are not quite proud of—maybe God sees the real
us, and sometimes maybe the real us is not all that pleasant. On the cover of your
bulletin, there is a copy of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s great masterpiece, of
this enigmatic woman whose likeness has been such source of wonder, mystery, and
even parody. In describing the painting, someone has given it this description:
Leonardo used a pyramid design to place the woman simply and calmly in the space of
the painting. Her folded hands form the front corner of the pyramid. Her breast, neck
and face glow in the same light that models her hands. The light gives the variety of
living surfaces an underlying geometry of spheres and circles. Leonardo referred to a
seemingly simple formula for seated female figure: the images of seated Madonna,
which were widespread at the time. He effectively modified this formula in order to
create the visual impression of distance between the sitter and the observer. The
armrest of the chair functions as a dividing element between Mona Lisa and the viewer.
The woman sits markedly upright with her arms folded, which is also a sign of her
reserved posture. Only her gaze is fixed on the observer and seems to welcome them
to this silent communication. Since the brightly lit face is practically framed with various
much darker elements (hair, veil, shadows), the observer's attraction to Mona Lisa's
face is brought to even greater extent. Thus, the composition of the figure evokes an
ambiguous effect: we are attracted to this mysterious woman but have to stay at a
distance as if she were a divine creature. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa)

For me, it is the eyes, the gaze that fixates me, as much as the enigmatic smile. It is
almost as if she knows us, is intimate with us, can see into our bare souls, and that is
why I think people are simply drawn to this portrait of “ Lisa del Giocondo,[8][9] a
member of the Gherardini family of Florence and Tuscany and the wife of wealthy
Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo.[7] The painting was commissioned
for their new home and to celebrate the birth of their second son, Andrea.” And what I
think is most beautiful is that what she sees—us, in a way—what she sees amuses her,
almost delights her. I keep thinking that is probably how God sees us, even as we
sometimes worry that what God sees inside of us is not all that delightful. We are seen
by God, deeply and thoroughly, with all of our shadow and light, and even then,
somehow, we bring a smile to God’s face, God remains fascinated with us, we who are
always God’s own beautiful creation, flaws and all. What looking at the Mona Lisa
looking at us does, is to maybe remind us of the amusement that God probably looks
upon us, we with our shallowness and beauty, with our capacities for such love, and
such hate, with our propensity to be such good people and yet to be such horrible
people as well, sometimes at the same time—the “all of us,” inside and out, I think, just
fascinates the One who has made us, and whose enigmatic image we are made.

And that is what I think this text is asking us to do, which is to look this way at people, to
know that when we look inside, what we will probably see in the other is not a saint, but
not a sinner, not a Mother Teresa nor an Adolph Hitler. What we are is a beguiling mix
of shadow and light, and the more willing we are to see that mix inside of us, the more
obvious it becomes in others, that when we peak underneath the appearance of things,
what we see are people who look a whole like us. And if we see as God sees, if we
sees that beautifully ambiguous mix, then I think we can love others a bit more easily,
because we’ve stopped lying to ourselves about our sainthood and the sainthood of
others, and we also have stopped fooling ourselves into believing in the monstrosity of
others, of thinking that people are one way or another. We have egos, and yet we can
be so selfless. We can be so kind, so unexpectedly kind, and yet in another moment,
our cruelty to each other can seem limitless. And surely God knew what kind of man
David was—his flawed and yet beautiful character would show up in so many ways
throughout the coming years, and even then, God was delighted with this one, with this
David from the house of Jesse. The smile that creeps up on the divine face, the
amusement that sees deep below the surface, that can see the whole of us, those eyes
that seem to burrow deep within us, they are ultimately the eyes of someone who sees
us for who we really are—and yet still deeply and wondrously loves us, as we are.
Amen.