When it comes to life with God, are you more of a pioneer or a settler?

Think of the old west. Think of that restless pioneer spirit, always seeking the new adventure, heading out where no one has been before. Wildness, fear, no comforts of home, beauty, and adventure are all part of the life of the pioneer. The world isn’t all that safe, but it is huge and beautiful, waiting to be explored.

The settlers are the ones who come after the pioneers, and they see the world differently. They are the ones who plot out the town, bring order and law and stability, build buildings, and begin to add the comforts of home. Order, security, structure, and community are the values of the settler’s world. The world out there is dangerous, but here in the town, in our little place, things are ok.

A man named Wes Seeliger wrote a book called “Western Theology”, using this word picture of settlers and pioneers to explore some of the different approaches we all take to understanding and living with God. Some of those differences are summed up well in the differences between “pioneers” and “settlers”.

I may be a little more likely than Seeliger to say that each group has its good points and bad points, its own strengths and weaknesses.

Pioneers aren’t the kind of people who produce powerful works of art, or who live out the beauty that’s found in a lifetime of relationships. They are too much on the move, too focused on survival to have time for that.

Settlers, on the other hand, are much more likely to be bored, to make God too small, to miss out on the adventure of life and the bigness of God and creation.

In a few weeks, we’ll begin looking at the book of Micah.

Micah is a prophet, a person in the bible through whom God speaks truth and correction to the people of Israel. To understand Micah and the prophets better, last week we began a quick race through the Old Testament, trying to help us have some background of history.

We talked last week about some of the major themes in the history of Israel. God created everything, and it was good! People were made in God’s image. God chose Abraham, and promised him land and descendants. God sent him out on a wild pioneering adventure, to go and find a land which God would show him.

400 years after Abraham, the Israelites are slaves in Egypt. Their numbers have grown; God’s promise of descendants for Abraham has come true, but they are without freedom and without the promised land. So God rescued them out of Egypt, met Moses on Mt. Sinai, and made a bond with them: “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

In one way, the people of Israel are beginning to become settlers. God gives Moses the 10 commandments and the law, bringing some order and stability to them. But mostly, they are the pioneer adventurers, with all the good and bad that brings.

God is present with them each day as a cloud and as fire.

He dwells with them in their tents, their tents that move each day as God leads. Each morning, God’s presence and care are seen as they gather manna bread to eat, each evening as God provides Quail. For 40 years, they are led by God and loved by God; they are completely aware of his presence leading them.

But they miss the comforts of home in Egypt. They get tired of tents and sand and wandering. They long for the promised land, to be settled, to have a home instead of being people on the move.

After Moses comes Joshua and the judges, the time when Abraham’s descendants finally enter the promised land and make it their own.

They get a home…but life isn’t perfect here, either. No more daily provision of manna and quail from God. No more clear signs of God’s leading. A bad cycle of turning their backs on God and following after their neighbor’s beliefs begins.

Last week, we saw the people asking Samuel, the last of the judges, to give them a king. They didn’t feel safe. They wanted a king like all the nations around them, to protect them.

God saw that as a rejection. God realized the people were rejecting him as their present God, the one leading them and living among them. When God no longer had the cloud and the fire and the manna and the quail, it was too hard for the people to see what God was doing for them.

They traded the God who was hard to see and understand, and turned to human kings, kings with ambiguity, kings with failings.

God’s people make the move toward being settlers.

Saul is the first king, and things don’t go very well. David takes his place, a man after God’s own heart, a king to whom God makes a great promise: one of your descendants will always rule.

David rules for 40 years, 40 years of fighting and conquering and internal strife and dissension. But for the first time, Israel is unified and living in the land God promised Abraham.

When Solomon, David’s son, becomes king, he too rules for 40 years. But Solomon’s reign is one of peace and prosperity. It’s the pinnacle of Israel’s kingdom, never experienced before, and never experienced since.

Solomon does all kinds of things that settlers do.

He makes alliances so that the nation will be safe. He builds roads, and palaces, he organizes government and collects taxes and builds up a strong centralized presence.

But the bible records Solomon’s greatest achievement as the building of a temple for worship of God. He spares no expense to build a lavish temple that takes 7 years to complete.

Solomon’s temple will remain the center of worship for God’s people for hundreds of years, until it is destroyed when the Israelites are captured and taken into exile. It proves to be not only spiritually significant, but political, too; it’s a way for Solomon to unify the kingdom by bringing about a place for all to worship.

It also brings tension, tension that leads to his kingdom dividing in two after Solomon’s death, a division that we still see present almost a thousand years later when Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman in John 4, and she wants to argue about how the Jews say the Samaritans must worship in Jerusalem.

Ben read for us part of Solomon’s prayer as he dedicated the temple to God.

It’s perhaps Solomon’s finest moment, perhaps the finest moment in the history of the kingdom of Israel. God is the center of who they are as a people.

I love this prayer, for several reasons. One of the reasons is that Solomon seems to really be wrestling with the dangers of being a settler. He’s trying to do it right, trying to name the dangers, asking God to help them not fall into the traps that settlers often do.

It doesn’t work. Israel falls apart, in so many ways, even in Solomon’s reign. The prophets, including Micah, will remind and challenge Israel with some of the same themes that Solomon has in this prayer of dedication.

What are some of those themes, some of the important things for spiritual “settler types” to watch out for?

God cannot be contained in a human building.

God cannot be contained, period! Solomon recognizes that for all of the amazing work he has done to build this beautiful temple, creating perhaps the most exquisite temple ever built until that time period, it is nothing compared to the magnitude of God. [READ 1 Kings 8: 27]

The biggest danger to spiritual settlers is to think we can figure out God, keep him safe, keep him contained and outlined in our way of doing things. Solomon in his prayer reminds us of the wildness of God, the power of God. Solomon reminds us what spiritual pioneers see each day: God is always moving, always leading, always bigger than we can possibly imagine.

Settlers must never fall for the temptation that they have God all figured out!

Another danger for settlers is to think that God only cares for us and our little community.

When Israel was in the desert, when Israel was still a bunch of pioneers, they had a balance. They knew they were God’s chosen people, but they knew God was in charge of everything. God had exerted his power over Egypt, the great world power of the time. God loved Israel, but God was in charge of the whole world.

Solomon’s prayer reminds Israel that even though they are special in God’s eyes, God is still God over the entire world. The temple is NOT just there for Israel’s enjoyment. It is there as a marker for the whole world, a sign to everyone everywhere that Yahweh is God of the universe! [READ v. 41-43]

Even at the ultimate moment for Israel, even here, dedicating the center of Israel worship for centuries to come, Solomon won’t forget the whole world. Solomon won’t let them become provincial or inward or only concerned with themselves. God is God in ALL the world, and the reason God chose Israel to be his people is so that the WHOLE EARTH will see God’s glory.

Finally, Solomon recognizes the danger of making religion about rituals instead of about justice.

[READ v. 57-61]

God, be with us and bless us…but WE must be with God, too. We must live for God, walk in his ways, “so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God, and there is no other.”

So what about us, thousands of years later, here in Newberg, Oregon?

I’m sure that we have both pioneer types and settler types in the room. When you think of our church as a whole, though, when you think of us as the first church in Newberg, the first church in our Yearly Meeting, as a group, we tend more toward the settlers than the pioneers.

For us, I think we need to listen to Solomon–and later to the prophets–and be reminded of the dangers settlers face.

God can’t be contained in this building or in our way of doing things.

God is not tame or domesticated or “settled” in any sense. God is a restless fire! God is constantly active, constantly loving, “slow to anger and abounding in mercy”, always drawing the whole world to himself.

My prayer, and a prayer I’ve heard others speak recently as well, is that in our worship and in our lives we will have freedom. Freedom to worship God, to follow God wherever he leads. It is a radical thing we say when we say God is present.

Mauri likes to quote Annie Dillard, who said that if we really did believe that God was going to show up in worship, we’d where crash helmets and buckle up! God is not safe or predictable, and we must never think or act like he is. But we KNOW that he is good.

God doesn’t just care for us at Newberg Friends.

God is at work, powerfully, in other churches in Newberg. God is drawing us to new relationships with other churches, to be one body of Christ together that meets in different buildings.

God is at work, powerfully, all around the world. To be true followers of God, we ought to be concerned and active in the whole world. It’s important for us to support those called to be missionaries around the world. It’s important for us to work against injustice, whether that’s Andy Sears and Josh Reid reminding us of the slave trade in Thailand, or the peace ministry team reminding us of the genocide in Darfur.

God is bigger than Newberg Friends!

God is more than our worship of him, more than our gatherings. For us to follow God means more than just showing up on a Sunday, more than reading the bible or spiritual books regularly, more than having a disciplined prayer life.

No, all of those practices are not ends in themselves, but they are ways that we allow God to help us become people like God…people who do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

This is part of who I see us needing to be as the people of God known as Newberg Friends.

It’s part of the dedication prayer, or maybe the RE-dedication prayer I would make for us.

What would you say in a re-dedication prayer for NFC? As you heard Solomon’s prayer, as you listen to God’s prompting right now, what would you ask God to do in us at NFC?

We want to take some time together at the close of our service to pray…to ask God to re-dedicate us at Newberg Friends to the things God is calling us to be and to do.

Would you speak out prayer of re-dedication for us, as God leads? What does God want to do in us? What does God want us to be about?