Covenant  United Methodist Church                                     Sunday School 9:45 Worship 8:30 & 10:45 am

Pentecost 5 Honey Out of the Lion Judges 14-5-14

The pearl is one of the most highly prized jewels, yet these gleaming spheres are the result of an irritation. Pearls are formed when an irritant lodges in the flesh of an oyster - say a piece of shell. The oyster fights back by excreting layers of a hard substance from its mantle tissue. This neutralizes the intruder, but it also forms the pearl.

In the same way difficulties can provide irritants in our life, but if we "fight back" in the right ways the end result can be something very positive. This is not to say the irritants are in themselves something good, but that even from an irritant God can salvage good. That brings us to good old Samson. There have been movies written about this guy. A man with legendary strength, but also with a fatal weakness. His weakness was women. He didn’t make good choices about the women he picked, and then he trusted these untrustworthy women with information he should have kept to himself. At the same time one of the great judges for his ability to win wars single handed. Give him the jaw bone of an ass and he could defeat huge numbers of people in battle.

 In our story today we see him in one of his legendary struggles. He meets a lion on the road and the lion attacks him. The spirit of the Lord comes upon him and he kills the lion. Then he goes and meets a Philistine woman and marries her. Later he is walking by the body of this lion that he struggled with and he notices honey bees have made a honey comb in the belly of the dead lion. He scrapes honey out of the lion and eats it. At the wedding feast he has 30 Philistine men who become wedding chaperones for him, and for profit he poses a riddle to them, “Out of the eater came something to eat, out of the strong came something sweet.”  Now the rest of the story is typical Samson. These wedding guests that are hanging around Samson threaten his bride to be, and she tricks Samson into telling him the secret of the riddle.  Samson gets a little ticked off when he finds out they know and realizes his wife has betrayed him. I love what he says in response to the 30 wedding guests. “If you hadn’t plowed with my cow, you wouldn’t know the answer to the riddle now!” So he goes and wipes out an army and from the spoils of his victory he pays off his betting debt…  What a way to end a story. What I want to do though is go back and look at the struggle and the riddle itself. I wonder if the struggle Samson encounters with the lion isn’t a kind of parable for our lives. You know I think in life we all struggle with our own lions. They may be illness, or poverty, or loss of job, or personal failure… I have found that when I have struggled with lions more times than not something sweet comes out of the struggle.

 I remember a number of years back when I was just starting ministry, I had a myriad of problems that I was never expecting to deal with. I had a man commit suicide in my church the first week I was there. I went to visit the family and the wife was still cleaning blood and guts off the walls of their trailer home. I didn’t know what to say, so I just started helping her clean up. Six months later a young girl reveals to me that her step dad was sexually abusing her. So I called child protective services. The little girl was removed from the home for a while, but was sent back home later because of lack of evidence… I lost a family in my church in the process of doing the right thing. Some time later a young woman shows up at the parsonage of the church. When I open the door she has blood dripping down her face from where a pierced ear had once been. She had a bloody nose and one eye was closing shut. She looked at me and said “Brother Mike I think I need marital counseling.”  I put the woman in a home for abused women, and had my congregation angry at me, because I had to keep the information about what happened from them. All these things happened to a kid fresh out of seminary, and I realized I didn’t know how to deal with such things. I also struggled at that church. There were some people who just didn’t like me…

Now the truth is that seminary just didn’t train me for these areas of ministry…so I went back to school and got another degree. I decided I wanted to learn enough so that I felt I was giving my best effort in every situation in church work. A degree in counseling sounded like the best thing to do… not only did a get a degree and learn how to deal with the pain others feel, but I also became a licensed professional counselor… but that wasn’t the sweetest thing that came out of my struggle.

While sitting in my first class for my master’s degree in counseling… this beautiful young woman walks into class about 10 minutes late. She has big banana blonde curls in her hair, a giant smile on her face, a coke in one hand and a Hershey bar in the other… she sits down at her desk and starts taking impeccable notes (I found out later when I borrowed them) and I said to myself… “ I want to go out with her!” 22 years later we are still together. Out of struggle, out of pain came something sweet…

From Pastor Mike