Imagine you’re reading the Bible for the first time. You decide to read it straight through like any other book. Genesis goes pretty well. It’s filled with great epic stories like Creation, the Flood, Abraham, Joseph and so on. Exodus starts out pretty well too. Baby Moses put in a basket and floated up the river to the palace of the very pharaoh who would have had him killed with all the other male Hebrew infants. Then he grows up among the Egyptians only to turn on them and set his people free from slavery. God parts the Red Sea and leads his people through the wilderness to the promised land. The story moving along just fine and then we get stuck. Our exciting pageturner almost instantly becomes a boring and sometimes incomprehensible file box of ancient legal documents. We might skim through to a couple of other highlights…. stories like David and Goliath or Daniel in the Lion’s Den, but for the most part we have a tendency to get lost in this ancient text.

Then some well-meaning Christian friend tells us we should start in the Gospels. “That’s the good part,” they say. “It’s the story of Jesus.”

Great, back to the story…. and so we turn to Matthew Chapter 1, the first page of the New Testament. If Moses’ story was exciting, surely this story about Jesus will be even better.

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham: Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah and his brothers…

17 verses and 14 generations later, we finally get to Jesus. That is, of course, assuming we make it that far without giving up. What kind of a story is this. No “Once upon a time,” or even “It was a dark and stormy night.” All we get is an ancestory.com report for a family we know nothing about…

For centuries Israel had been praying for a fulfillment of God’s promise, a king to sit on David’s throne for all eternity. For generations they had been a marginalized people under the oppressive rule of one empire after another, and they had gone through a number of “would-be messiahs” who promised to save them only to be killed in the end. Would God ever send a Savior?

Now the savior stands before the Roman authorities accused of treason. His own people declare that he is a threat to Ceasar. “We have no king,” they say, “but the emperor.”

How did we fall so far? We went from a people who would do anything to be set free from Roman rule to a people who would ultimately reject God’s own Son in favor of the Roman Emperor who the world calls the son of God.

We shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Perhaps we are more alike than we care to admit…

… In our culture we would say that David should be glad, or at least relieved, by Saul’s death. It was business, not personal. Or perhaps we might say it’s just politics, not personal. In any case, the path to the throne was now clear for David and more than that, he no longer had to fear for his life with Saul hunting him down around every turn. Saul died in battle and David was spared the guilt of having to kill his enemy himself. From a business or political perspective, all’s well that ends well.

But for David, all is not well. David understood that it’s never just about business or politics. It’s always personal. No matter how evil, hateful, and even murderous Saul had been, David knew that Saul was still God’s anointed. God loved Saul. God had chosen Saul. Saul’s sin, in David’s eyes, did not make him any less God’s anointed King…

On All Saints Day we remember and celebrate the lives of the Great Cloud of Witnesses who have passed through the veil of death to feast at Christ’s heavenly banquet. Despite this celebration, however, it is easy for us to be uncomfortable with our own mortality. We don’t like to think about death.

In some ways, David’s example prepares us for this final stage of our journey into God’s eternal kingdom. King Saul gave his armor to David to protect him in battle against Goliath, but the armor clearly didn’t fit. It was too big and far too heavy for this small, agile shepherd boy.

In the same way, the things we hold onto in this life to protect us at some point become too big and too heavy for us to bear. All our “stuff” becomes too hard to manage and most of what we have collected doesn’t seem nearly as valuable at the end of our lives. Dying is, in part, a process of shedding the “armor” that we have put on throughout our lives to protect us…