I Chronicles 22:1-13 (Chronicles pp. 37, 38)
“Hand Off”
October 10, 2021 – Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Heidi gave me a little cardboard box. I pulled off the lid and found an old-fashioned wooden gavel inside. She had just handed off to me her role as president of the Covenant Ministerium. For the next three years, I would put that box with the gavel in my suitcase and tote it each June to chair a meeting of all Covenant pastors. There was more to the role than just wielding the gavel, but a little varnished hammer symbolized the hand off.
In our readings from Chronicles for this past week, we found David making ready to hand off his role as king of Israel. In our text, the beginning of I Chronicles 22 in a chapter and verse Bible, David especially prepared to pass on the role of temple builder. In order to lay the groundwork for his son Solomon to construct a temple for God in Jerusalem, verse 5 at the end of the first full paragraph on page 38 says David “collected vast amounts of building materials before his death.”
As you heard, David also prepared for handing off that role more personally, with a direct address to Solomon, explaining why he David was not building the Temple and why Solomon would. Further on, at the top of page 39, the beginning of chapter23, David proclaimed Solomon king even before David’s death. That changeover in II Samuel wasn’t quite as smooth a transfer of power as Chronicles suggests, but David definitely wished to hand off to his son the blessing and authority he had received.
The writer of Chronicles whitewashed his account of David in many respects. Some of you heard about that in our introduction during Sunday School two weeks ago. Chronicles leaves out lots of negative material about David and his family, like his sin with Bathsheba, the revolt led by Absalom his son, and the rape of one of his daughters by her half-brother.
So David’s speech here to Solomon is interesting. Chronicles adds an explanation not found in II Samuel, the reason the Lord gave for not letting David build the Temple. It’s a third of the way down, verse 8. In all his wars on Israel’s behalf, to consolidate and protect the kingdom, David shed too much blood. It was better to have a man of peace be the king who builds the temple. God told David he would have a son named “Solomon,” which in Hebrew sounds very much like the word for peace, which you may know, shalom.
We’re seeing something here in David and God’s plan for his family not all that different from the desire of many of us: we wish our descendants, our children and grandchildren, not only to be better off than we were but to be better people than we were. It’s a strong part of the American dream, but people in all times and places dream much the same thing. We don’t just wish our children to be chips off the old blocks, living the exact same sort of lives. We hope and pray they will have things we never had, experience joys we never experienced, accomplish things we failed to do, and, best of all, avoid some of our mistakes and live more truly good lives.
Of course it doesn’t always happen that way. It didn’t quite happen that way with Solomon. His reign was more peaceful. He built the Temple. He was blessed with wisdom. But Solomon indulged his selfish desires even more than David did, and most tellingly, he failed to do as well as his father did when it came time to hand off to the next generation. The unified kingdom of eighty years divided and never came back together.
To relate David’s hand off to Solomon to one sort of current concern, let’s consider just the passing along of material things. David acquired and prepared all those building materials for the Temple, cut stones, iron for nails, bronze for decoration and utensils, and lumber, “innumerable cedar logs.” We can be sure that David also left Solomon his own cedar palace and plenty of gold, silver, and jewels, which you read about in chapter 29 at the top of page 49 in Chronicles.
One privilege of America has been the ability, like kings and queens and other landed nobility of old, of more ordinary people to pass wealth from generation to generation. Many of our parents and grandparents owned homes and built up savings accounts and then passed them to us. My mother did not own a home for most of her life but in old age she was able to purchase a house and live in it for 15 years. When she had to leave that home she sold it and banked the equity to live on. When she died, what was left went to my sister and me. We were able to use what we received to pay off some debts, do some home repairs, and a little better off because we received that blessing.
Yet part of the story of America is that Black people have not often had that privilege, the blessing of handing off wealth, whether money or property, from one generation to the next. It’s not just that Black families had no land at all in the days of slavery. For a century after slavery ended, Black people were systematically prevented from using the same, more favorable banking system as whites, from buying property or being able to obtain loans, and from working at better paying jobs which were reserved for white people. As Jemar Tisby tells us in The Color of Compromise, the average wealth of white people in America is far more than the average wealth of Black people, 16 times more in a 2011 study.[1]
If we are going to read the Bible and hear how David passed on wealth to his son and see the hand of God in that, see it as a blessing from the Lord, then I submit that we ought to want that blessing to be a real possibility for all God’s people, regardless of their color. We ought not be content with the continuing fallout of injustice and oppression, but desire that we and the next generations do better, just as David desired for Solomon.
Which all might make us want to notice something I was tempted to skip over here right at the beginning of the text, right at the top of page 38. It’s verse 2. “So David gave orders to call together the foreigners living in Israel, and he assigned them the task of preparing finished stone for building the Temple of God.” That’s conscripted labor, my friends. That’s slavery. That’s taking people from other nations and forcing them to work in support of a building project which later they would not even be able to enter.
I’m sorry. I don’t have simple answers for how we as Christians handle such things in the Old Testament, things like God seeming to endorse genocide for some of Israel’s enemies, or making slaves out of foreigners and even their own citizens, or the looser standards for marriage which all the kings of Israel seemed to enjoy. All I can say is that here is yet another place where Christians must say that we wish to do better than previous generations, to abhor violent slaying of masses of people, to absolutely renounce slavery and racism, to live in righteous family arrangements, and, as David wished for Solomon, to seek peace and freedom from bloodshed in our own time, in our own lives.
I don’t have easy answers, but I do have an observation: the way God handled it all was to put a Temple at the center of it. David said in verse 5 “the Temple to be built for the Lord must be a magnificent structure, famous and glorious throughout the world.” God said in verse 8 that the Temple would honor His name. The best way to help a new generation be better than the previous one, is to put God at the center. A place where God is worshipped is key to it all.
In our Gospel text, Jesus didn’t worry about how that rich young man was going to preserve and hand off his wealth to his heirs. Just the opposite. In order to place God at the center of his life, in order to follow Jesus, that man needed to divest himself of riches, to redistribute them to the poor. But the man walked away from Jesus, walked away from God because he couldn’t bear to make that sort of hand off.
David’s hand off invites you and me to consider how well we will make hand offs which God sets before us. Will we cling to wealth and power, like the rich young man, until the last second of life? Or will we, like David, prepare for future generations and willingly lay down and hand off what we have so that God may be glorified by those yet to come?
David could have taken all those building materials and precious metals (even iron was precious in those times) and built himself a bigger house, or maybe a vacation home by the Sea of Galilee. He simply could have hoarded it all like kings often did. But instead he put together a plan that he himself would not live to complete. He prepared for a permanent place of worship where his children and the people they served would come and meet God and receive forgiveness for their sins.
The New Testament tells us, as in Ephesians 2:21 and 22, that our Temple now is not a building but our own selves, the church of Jesus Christ. By faith in Jesus, God comes and dwells in His people and they are “built together in the Spirit into a dwelling place for God.” Ultimately that Temple built in the Spirit is what we want to hand off to those who follow us. We want to hand off our faith, our relationship with Jesus, and welcome our children, our neighbors, and the whole world into that Temple not made with hands.
Yet we are still physical as well as spiritual people. God made us both. So we need places to worship. Long after David’s Temple is gone, it’s still a spiritual service to God and others to raise up and hand off buildings which bring honor to the name of the Lord. That’s why we’re asking each other this fall to “Stand in the Gap” and repair the walls and windows of this building. It’s not just for ourselves. Many of us are old enough, like David, to at least catch a glimpse of a time when we won’t be around. But we still want to hand off a beautiful and solid place of worship to those who come after, to those who currently attend Confirmation, come forward for children’s messages, and get held in the nursery.
It’s not just a building we have to hand off, though. Our reading in Chronicles makes it clear that David was concerned with far more than just preparing a prefab Temple for his son Solomon, like some giant project from IKEA. No, there are all those lists of people who served in the temple, even a description of how it was all ordered and arranged: priests who would offer sacrifices, Levites who would carry and clean and watch the gates, and musicians to make beautiful sounds as it all happened.
Music and a love of music is something you and I as followers of Jesus may hand off to the next generations. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but churches are pretty much the only place in America where people come and sing together anymore. We sang together as a family on car trips when I was a child, but it doesn’t seem to happen so much anymore. Everyone is plugged into his or her own music. A church is a unique place where people actually make music together rather than just listening to it from a recording.
So I thank God for the wealth of musicians God has given Valley Covenant, like He gave to David and Israel long ago. They lead us in making beautiful music and teach us old and new songs which we may hand off to those coming after. Music is a precious gift from our Lord which honors His name in this world. Let’s support and encourage that ministry of music so we may faithfully hand it off and keep the praise of God rising up to Him.
All those Levite Temple service occupations were important roles handed off generation to generation. At the outset, in Numbers 8 verse 10, the Levites were set apart for their service in worship, whether priest or gatekeeper, by the people of Israel laying their hands upon them. That laying on of hands was a way to say that those servants in the Tabernacle, and then the Temple, would represent the people before God. Their work and service of sacrifice would be on behalf of the whole congregation.
In Christian life, that laying on of hands quickly became the ritual by which men and women were set apart to represent Christian congregations before the Lord. Believers in Jesus were chosen and set apart to be deacons or pastors by having hands laid upon their heads and prayers offered over them.
I still remember a very hot day in June of 1986 when I knelt on the hardwood floor of a stage in the old gymnasium at North Park University. A Covenant pastor placed his hand on my head while another prayed over twenty or so of us kneeling there. That was my ordination to be a pastor. Our theology says it is primarily a recognition of the call and presence of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. But there is also a very literal way in which it was a hand off. I’ll save the history for another time, but a case can be made that Covenant churches stand in a Christian tradition known as the “Apostolic Succession,” an unbroken chain of service to God passed from hand to head down through the ages, starting with the very first followers of Jesus.
Later I was blessed to participate in that hand off myself. As president of the Ministerium, I used that gavel Heidi gave me when Covenant pastors gathered. We voted to recommend new women and men for ordination. I’d say a name, we’d vote, and I’d bring the gavel down saying, “Kaneesha Johnson is recommended for ordination to word and sacrament,” or “Jung Lee Kim is recommended for ordination to word and sacrament.”
Then a day or two later I and others on the Board of Ministry would stand behind a row of kneeling candidates and place each of our hands on a head as prayer was offered. One of those times, I was privileged to offer that prayer. It was a joy and a blessing to be part of that great hand off of pastoral service and ministry.
But that hand off privilege is not just for a chosen few, not just for pastors. When people of this congregation installed me as your pastor, I knelt again and almost everyone’s hands were laid on me right here in the front of this sanctuary. Again, it’s not just about pastors. As I’ve tried to say all along, we all, together, have a great work behind and before us of both receiving what’s been handed off to us and making a good hand off to those who are coming after.
Those of you who are sports fans know that lots of cheering and praise go to the player who crosses the goal line with the ball or who shoots the winning basket or kicks the decisive point past the opposing goalie. You’ve likely cheered such people yourself. But real fans know that great credit goes to the players who handed off that touchdown ball, or passed to that player who took the winning shot, or who set up that final goal. Success depended on the hand off. That’s how it was for Solomon in building the Temple. We call it Solomon’s Temple, but a great deal of the credit goes to Solomon’s father, to David.
Let’s be people like David, not caring so much who gets credit for scoring a winning point here and there, but people ready to hand off well, so that worship and praise can be beautifully offered to God. Let’s be ready to hand off especially a ministry and mission of peace, like that for which Solomon was named, confessing like David and letting go of the conflicts which may have marred our own lives and service. May we prepare now to hand off that worship and that peace of our Lord Jesus Christ to those who follow us.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] The Color of Compromise (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), p. 198.