Lectionary Readings
O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
If you spend time on TikTok or Reddit, you’ve probably run across the term “main character syndrome.” It describes the tendency for someone to view themselves as the lead character in life. They can only see things from their own perspective, making them self-absorbed and self-centered. Those who have this main character syndrome find collaborating with others difficult. Entitlement, narcissism, superiority, and attention and validation seeking are some of the symptoms that go along with it. You’ve all run into these sorts of people – the people who intentionally take up two parking spaces at the mall; the people who are sitting in the left turn lane but decide they want to go straight, so they make everyone behind them just wait even though there is a green turn arrow; the people who expect everyone else to change their plans to accommodate their schedule. This is, obviously, not a new phenomenon – it just has a new name. What people on social media are now calling “main character syndrome,” the Church has called “sin,” for 2,000 years.
I bring this up because main character syndrome is a good way to understand King David, whom we heard about in the reading from Second Samuel. To be clear, it’s not only politicians, celebrities, and monarchs who struggle with sin and the way it manifests itself as main character syndrome. All of us share in this tendency to have a preferential bias for ourselves and to assume reality is how we see it.
Recall the story of David. The runt of the family – he was the smallest and youngest of the sons of Jesse. When the prophet Samuel was told by God to go to the house of Jesse to anoint the next king of Israel, David was forgotten in the field, watching the sheep. And yet, God chose him. God was with David when he was outmatched against Goliath. When David committed the horrendous sin of taking Bethsheba and murdering her husband, God did not take away the throne from him, as would have been warranted. God was faithful to the promise. God has blessed David with military, political, and personal victories. But David, as all of us sinners do, suffered from main character syndrome. And that’s where today’s reading picks up.
When David was settled in his new mansion, then, and only then, did he think “You know, I ought to do something for God.” In David’s defense, I’ve certainly forgotten things before. We get busy and forget to send a thank you note or we overlook someone on our Christmas shopping list. It happens. But it’s not only that David built himself a house before he thought about building a house for God, it’s that David thinks that there is anything that he can do for God. The whole story of David’s life has been how God has blessed him, supported him, and forgiven him. By now, David should have realized that he is utterly dependent on God, but here he is, thinking God needs him to do something for the Almighty.
It’s not that David is necessarily doing anything evil, it’s just that he’s got the direction of things wrong. He sees himself as the main character, as the one with the power and the resources to do something for God. When, in reality, God is the creator, redeemer, and sustainer of all things. The whole of the universe is God’s house, and if God wanted a house of cedar, well, God doesn’t need David to make that happen. It is as the great preacher Fleming Rutledge puts it, “God always gets the good verbs.” In other words, God is the main character, not David and not us.
Yes, we can participate in what God is already up to in the world, but we don’t have the task or burden of needing to do anything. A lot of this comes down to the idea of enchantment that I mentioned last Sunday. If we do not believe that God is up to anything in this world, then we will think that it’s up to us to bring about peace, or care for those in poverty, or promote justice. The fact of the matter is that God’s will is going to be accomplished because it is God’s will, not because we accomplish it. That’s the primary mistake David was making – he was giving himself the verbs instead of realizing that the verbs all belong to God.
One theologian has put it this way, “It’s not that the Church has a mission, it’s that God’s mission has a Church.” Meaning, we are the tool, not the main character. We don’t have work to do nor do we have a mission to accomplish. Instead, we have been given mercy, peace, grace, and love by God and we have the opportunity to participate in our salvation. But we do not have to create or earn our own salvation. And please hear this as a message of grace, not resignation. The point is not that “nothing we do matters.” The point is that mattering is not up to us. We don’t have make our lives matter. Our lives matter because we are participating in the only thing that is true, the only thing that is eternal, the only thing that is perfect – and that is the love of God made known in Jesus Christ.
So instead of faith being a burden or a task, faith is a gift – the gift of participating in God’s story instead of having to worry about making our own turn out perfectly. And because we are a part of God’s story and not the main character of our own, we can be confident that things will turn out perfectly; that all shall be well.
Turning to this week’s Collect, we see this directionality of grace embedded within it: “Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation.” God is coming to us daily, not us reaching out to make God present. God is with us. That is, perhaps, the central message of the Bible. If you had to write a plot synopsis for the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation it would be that God stops at nothing to make his grace and love known and present. God created all that is and visited with Adam and Eve in the Garden. God came to Abraham to make a covenant. God was with Moses in the burning bush. God was with the people as they fled Egypt and crossed the Red Sea in a pillar of fire. Though even the entire universe cannot begin to contain the fullness of God, God was willing to be confined to a Temple in Jerusalem to make it easier for the people to imagine and interact with God. As we heard in the reading from Luke, God was with Mary and is found not in the grandeur of a temple, but in the womb of a young peasant girl from Palestine. God was willing to go so far as to even be put in a tomb after the creation that he made had murdered him. This is the message of Scripture, it is the prayer of Advent, and in a few hours, it will be the proclamation of Christmas: Emmanuel – God is with us.
In the passage from Second Samuel, there is wordplay going on that works in both Hebrew and English with the word “house.” We can talk about a house as a dwelling place or a house as a lineage or dynasty. I live in a house, and Queen Elizabeth I was in the House of Tudor. The same double-meaning of house exists in the Hebrew that this passage is written in. So, thinking in terms of houses, do we live in a one-story or two-story house?
What I am asking is: do we all live on the ground floor while the landlord, God, lives upstairs? Maybe everyone once in a while, God comes down the stairs to check on things or straighten things up a bit, but God doesn’t live here. And if we want to visit with God, we have to use things like prayer to go upstairs. If that’s the case, it means that we don’t really expect to run into God downstairs, because that’s not where God hangs out. It means that we think the verbs are all up to us – we have to do all of the chores because we’re the main characters downstairs. We’re in charge of things, we are the ones who get to judge what is acceptable behavior in our house, and we get to set the agenda and budget for our household. We don’t have to worry about the landlord because he doesn’t live here. Sure, maybe there are some cameras he’s installed to keep an eye on things, but there’s no real interaction. That two-story world is the one that most people, even Christians, live in.
But our faith and Scripture tell us that we live in a one-story world. God is not “up there” or “beyond space and time.” No, not at all. God is present, accessible, always on the move and up to something – not locked up in heaven, or a Temple. As I quoted last week, one poet has said “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” God can be encountered in prayer, in Sacraments, in music, in nature, in daydreams, in fellowship, in forgiveness, in generosity, in compassion, and in love. God’s visitation is not occasionally, but daily. God is the main character in this world, present and active, getting all of the verbs, and taking up residence in our lives.
Given that, I don’t have a call to action to issue this morning. No admonition to go out and do this, that, or the other. Instead, I simply want to remind you of the truth of that passage that has become so familiar that we overlook the beauty and grandeur of it – that God so loved this world, that he sent his only Son that we might flourish in the abundance of his never-ending and unconditional love. God loves you and has stopped at absolutely nothing to be with us. As St. Paul puts it in Romans, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And we might add, neither your sins, nor your doubts, nor your grudges, nor your fears, nor your mistakes, nor those things you’re working on in therapy, nor the holiday weight gain, nor the uncharitable thoughts that you have, nor your inability to have it all put together, nothing, nothing will separate us from God’s love.
The story of our faith is that God is with us to guide, to comfort, to teach, to bless, to love. Through the strength of the Spirit and by God’s grace, as we are able to receive this love as the plot of our lives and recognize God as the main character, we come and see the love we are destined for.
