“Someday this will all be yours.” I said that as I was showing our son-in-law-to-be several shoe boxes filled with rocks and shells that our eldest daughter collected over the course of her childhood. Those boxes had weighed down and bent the shelf in a closet of our home for years. “It’s your dowry,” I told Andrew. But he seemed undaunted and, unfortunately, they have yet to retrieve and take away those forgotten treasures.
More seriously, there are things many of us very much want to hand off to a next generation, whether it’s a house and its contents, a family business, or a set of cherished recipes. My brother-in-law worked in his father’s printing machine repair business for years and took it over when his father died. Such hand offs are part of human life, although they don’t always happen, nor do they always go smoothly.
Our text this week from I Chronicles 22:1-13 shows us David the king making preparations to hand off to his son Solomon the assignment for building a temple for God in Jerusalem. I’m preaching on this text partly because it is one of the few bits in our Immerse reading for the week which does not duplicate content in I or II Samuel.
To continue a theme that I voiced for the past two Sundays, David’s hand off of temple building to Solomon can suggest the general work of God’s people in handing off faith and faithful kingdom building work to those who will follow us. One challenge to American baby-boomer Christians like myself is the seeming fumbled hand off to younger generations. It’s not just about changes in music style, but about failure to grasp Christian complicity in racism and other social justice issues.
So we may have some work like David’s ahead of us, to have something of faith worth handing on to those who come after. And like Solomon, those who follow will need to head David’s admonition in verse 13, “Be strong and courageous; do not be afraid or lose heart!”
There clearly will be a hand off of Christian faith is some way in our time. Besides the generational change, there is the great global shifting of the Christian majority from the northern to the southern hemisphere. The only question is how well older white Christians will prepare to give over the work and the blessing and how smoothly the transition may go.