I was once told a story about a city slicker who bought a farm, and a cow. Shortly after this cow was providing milk, it went dry. The farmer caught word of this and was surprised. This city man was surprised too. He said, "I can't understand it. For if a person was ever was considerate of an animal I was of that cow. If I didn't need milk - I didn't milk her. If I only needed a quart - I only took a quart."

Then the farmer tried to explain to this fellow that the only way to keep that milk flowing is to NOT take as little as possible from the cow. Take as much as possible.

In this letter today we heard from Paul. He is writing to this church in Rome to take as much as possible of this hope we have in Jesus Christ. "May the God of all hope fill you with all joy and peace and believing, so that the power of the Holy Spirit may overflow that hope through and in you." [Romans 15:13]

We don't always, however, overflow with hope, right? We don't, right? Ask anybody who's ever been around me very long there are times when I have not been overflowing with hope. It's our nature. I think it's part of our inclination and our fallen reality. We may be more ready to be disappointed, agitated, or perplexed. In fact I know some people that I swear take delight in being that way, but...

Friends we only take some of what God has had for us - we don't take it all. We need that hope to overflow through us and outflow to the world. Paul says that abundant hope comes from believing. Often the world gives us other sources of hope, right? We hope in and for other things. Our hope lies in our OUR strength. OUR ability to conquer and do things. Maybe our hope is in a good economy...that hopefully it would stay there. Our hopes have us running from here to there in this world not even staying put at times. A new job - hoping for a better job. A better location, finding a better doctor, a better church, a better anything. Our hope lies in all of these things. I was even reading an article that sometimes when we talk about divorce and marriage. People say 'on it's about money,' ' it's about lack of communication.' This article proposed that maybe it's about our hope of something better, instead of existing where we are. And, I wonder if...

It occurred to me that this is probably the last time I get to lead worship with you all outside. So, I decided what we would do is read a bunch of texts...scriptures from the Bible that celebrated God and the world around us. And, we're going to do that a little bit, but when I made my list, it would have had us here all day - there's just so much. Today we're going to focus on thinking about why we think of God differently in new ways, when we think of God out in the natural world. Out in the midst of creation. We will start with Psalm 24 printed in your bulletin.

Why is it that when we look up on the creation itself we get a different image of God? A man came to me long ago. A polite and capable man, and he could not bring himself to acknowledge God. And, in his words, the reason he could not is because apparently in his growing up years (his developmental years) (and this man was probably just a smidge older than I am)...the church community he grew up in strongly used the phrase 'God fearing'. Many of us of a certain age remember hearing, 'You need to grow up to be a God fearing person. He could not deal with the idea of a God that required us to fear Him. We talked about that a bit. I'm not sure that anything we talked about changed his mind, but as I reflected on that over the years it's pushed my mind back into the natural world. Because, out in the natural world, out in the backcountry, nature doesn't suffer fools easily. Nature can be very harsh. Nature can be very violent. It can be happily harsh and violent. We can laugh about how violent it can be at times, but it can also be so overpowering it boggles our minds...

To understand the story I just read to you, you first have to understand that until the time of Saul and David, the people of Israel viewed themselves as more a collection of loosely connected independent tribes; they didn't see themselves as a nation. Very similar to the rather fluid boundaries that existed between many North American Native Tribes. The people of Israel saw themselves as independent tribes, who, yeah were related to the other tribes, but they really didn't want to have a lot to deal with each other. If we go back in our Bibles all the way back to Genesis, Jacob, who goes on to be renamed 'Israel'; Jacob had two wives who were sisters to one another. Those two wives were Leah and Rachel. They were sisters. Upon their marriages to Jacob Leah and Rachel each received from their father as a gift a handmaid, a servant girl. Leah's maid was Zilpha and Rachel's maid was Bilhah. It's most likely that Zilpha and Bilhah were also sisters to Leah and Rachel. It was very common back then. For younger sisters to be given as handmaids to their older sisters. Makes you really want to be a younger sister, doesn't it? Think of the stories we know of the Mormon people in the past - where they have sister wives. Where do you think they got that idea? They didn't just make it up this is where it came from. Long and complicated story short: Jacob had children with each of those four women. Father's Day at Jacob's house was pretty straightforward, but Mother's Day got confusing. With Leah, Jacob had Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Jacob's only daughter, Dinah. Who, for our purposes today doesn't matter because she didn't have a region of Israel. She wasn't the head of one of the tribes of Israel. Only the boys founded tribes. With Zilpha, Jacob had Gad and Asher. With Bilhah, he had Dan and Naphtali. And, with Rachel Jacob had Joseph and Benjamin. On the map in the bulletin you can see the name of the region which each tribe occupied. Just like if you had a map of the United States with Native American tribes here, you might Shoshone written across our area because...

When I was sixteen years old my dad helped me get a job at the foundry where he worked. There was a man that also worked at the foundry at the time named Nick. Nick was probably 70 years old, he was illiterate, and he probably weighed about 240 pounds. Nick only had one eye. He had lost an eye earlier in life. So he always had kinda a google eye way of looking at ya that was kind of intimidating. Carl didn't think Nick was moving fast enough one day, so he came over to me and grabbed me by the shirt; which was my Uncle Carl's way of doing things. He drug me over to his machine and he said I want that sand moved before I come back tomorrow morning. Now, move it. And it was a lot of sand the hole was maybe 8 feet deep and about 6 feet wide and 25-30 feet long. That's a lot of sand. But, I was young and I was strong and I was mad at the world, and I grew up on the working end of a shovel. On top of it...I just knew I could do that. So, I dove in and I started digging and I had it emptied by the next morning. That went on all of the work week. Nick used to have that job, and when Carl drug me over and put me on that job, I didn't realize it at the time, but it kind made Nick look bad. I didn't understand that. So one day as Nick kept getting meaner and meaner and more and more honery, and I couldn't figure it out. I went to my dad and said, "What's going on with Nick? I don't get this."


Finally dad said, "Well, you are young and able to do that easily and it's an impossible job for Nick."

And he pointed out to me during the recession years of the 70s if you're an ignorant old, one-eyed, fat man ther weren't a lot of jobs to be had.

Even though I thought I was just doing my job...

Two weeks ago we heard the story of God coming to a little boy named Samuel as he slept, and how God was calling him to be a prophet, and then last week we had the story of how Samuel grew up and did indeed become the leading prophet in Israel, and how God instructed Samuel to anoint Saul as king of Israel. The kind in that story I just read. But, you and I are going to focus on another story that leads up to that. And, it forces us to consider some hard questions. Would God ever command people to commit genocide? If God is our Lord, do we still feel free to do whatever we want whenever we want to do it? If God is our Lord; if God is full of grace and mercy how important is out obedience? And if God supposedly ordered something awful, something reprehensible, in the Old Testament; does the nature of Christ in the New Testament, God's Word made flesh, supercede or overrule something that we find to be reprehensible in the Old Testament? Our story for today actually takes place, again, before the story I read about David. This is a story of Saul's downfall as king. The story of why God felt it necessary to tell Samuel to anoint a new king over Israel. I call it the king who won the war and lost the thrown, because that's really what it is. Once upon a time there was a man named Saul who God had chosen to be king over all of Israel. Saul was 30 years old when he was chosen to be the king.

In the summertime I like to spend a little time on stories and today's story starts where we left off last Sunday. Last Sunday we talked about a little boy named Samuel who was left at the temple to become a priest under Eli. Today we're picking up fifty, maybe even sixty, years later. Samuel isn't a little boy anymore, instead he is a leading figure in all of the gathering of tribes known as Israel. This is because during the time of Samuel Israel didn't have any sort of formal government at all. They had no mayors or governors or presidents. They paid no taxes. They had no police or firemen. They had no sewer systems or garbage pickup. Or infrastructure to pay for. They had no CDC, they had no welfare programs, they had no road systems to maintain. They definitely had no formal military to support. If another group or nation attacks them all the neighbors got together and they brought whatever farm tools they had (pitchforks and all manner of things), and that's what they went out to fight with. One of the things people often fail to remember is that when the stories about Samuel took place (and the stories about Saul and David) when all of those things took place it was in the period of history known as the Late Bronze Age. Where people were transitioning from bronze age technology to iron age technology. The Philistines moved into the neighborhood about the 13th century B.C. When they moved in, their iron age technology in metal working was far superior to anything that the people of Israel had. The Philistines, who were a sea-faring people...