Sometimes I begin a sermon with a humorous story or joke as a way to ease into a biblical passage and its timeless spiritual truth.  Humor is a tool that should only be used in a sermon if it serves to communicate something about the topic at hand.  Otherwise it is a gratuitous distraction that serves no purpose.  With that in mind I begin this message with a knock, knock joke that requires your participation.  You start by saying, "knock, knock."  Everybody say it together:  "Knock, Knock."  Who’s there?

Ha!  I can’t believe you fell for it.  I really got you there.  Don’t you feel silly?  How does it feel to be the butt of a joke?  "What," you may be asking, is the point of that joke in light of today’s message?  The point is that there is always a butt to every joke.  Jokes are only funny if they are at the expense of someone.  The title of our message is: "Advancing Self at the Expense of Others."  For a moment everyone here looked a bit foolish except me.  Fortunately for me, you happen to be good sports and able to laugh at yourselves as the butt of my little joke this morning.

Sometimes jokes strike a little too close for comfort, and we do not find them so funny.  As one song puts it, "Don’t laugh at me.  Don’t call me names.  Don’t get your pleasure from my pain."  There are many ways that people get pleasure from other people’s pain.  In most athletic endeavors somebody wins because somebody else loses.  Watch carefully after the last play of any World Series.  First the cameras will pan in on the winning team members jumping and yelling and hugging each other.  But then they will focus on the dejected losing team members silently bowing their heads in shame and maybe shedding a tear or two.

Advancing at the expense of others does not just happen during the playoffs, or on the field of athletic endeavor.  It happens in our professional pursuits.  One company gets the big contract because a competitor did not.  One employee gets the promotion because a colleague did not.  It also happens in our social posturing.  One person makes it on the "A-list," another gets relegated to the "D-List" with Kathy Griffin.  Humor is one way we deal with the universally experienced pain inherent in one advancing at the expense of another.  The only alternative to laughing about the experience is crying about it because it is a dog-eat-dog world out there.

I suppose a further response to the pain is to avoid it at all costs.  Be a winner at all costs.  Avoid losing at all costs.  Make sure that somebody else is the loser.  If a little dishonesty gives us a competitive edge, why not?  Some sports figures bend the rules by taking forbidden performance enhancing drugs.  Why shouldn’t we bend the rules if that’s what it takes to hit the homerun, to be a winner, to get elected, to win the promotion, to avoid the pain of losing to others who have no compunction about bending the rules and gaining the competitive advantage over us?

Why shouldn’t we?  Because the Bible says we shouldn’t.  The Bible does not teach us to lie, steal and cheat.  The Bible does not teach us to advance at the expense of others.  Quite the contrary, as St. Paul is recorded in the Bible as saying: Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.  Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.  Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus…. (Philippians 2:3-5).

Well, look where that got Jesus.  In one sense it got him crucified.  But in another sense it got him glorified.  What are we to make of that?  How do we resolve the conflict between what the Bible counsels us to do and what the dog-eat-dog world counsels us to do?  Maybe the Bible is a bunch of bunk.  I think we have to consider the possibility if we are intellectually honest.  But I also think we have to listen to the case the Bible makes for itself if we are going to be intellectually honest.  That is what I would like for us to do today as we turn our attention to a text where one is trying to advance at the expense of another.

Our text, Psalm 52, is prefaced with these words: "For the director of music.  A maskil of David.  When Doeg the Edomite had gone to Saul and told him: "David has gone to the house of Ahimelech."  The book of Psalms is a book of songs composed by King David, among others.  We read them, but they are more properly sung.  A maskil is a technical musical term, but basically a way of giving instruction or spoken wisdom through song.  A total of thirteen maskils appear in the Bible, all of which are found in the book of Psalms.

Psalm 52 is one of them, and it refers to a particular episode in David’s life that is recorded for us in the book of I Samuel.  David has not yet been anointed Israel’s king.  A fellow named Saul is the King and David is the commanding general of his army—a very successful general as it turns out.  In fact, there was a chant among the people of Israel that was popular at the time.  It went: "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands."  As a result, we read, Saul was very angry; this refrain galled him.  "They have credited David with tens of thousands," he thought, "but me with only thousands.  What more can he get but the kingdom?"  And from that time on Saul kept a jealous eye on David (I Samuel 18:7-9).

Indeed, Saul unsuccessfully tried to kill David several times before the later sought escape from the former.  Everyone knew Saul had some serious jealously issues, including his son Jonathan who helped David to escape.  But one fellow in Saul’s administration named Doeg saw an opportunity for professional advancement when he found out that David was being hidden by a group of priests, headed by Ahimelech, in a town called Nob.

Doeg was Saul’s head shepherd at the time.  You will recall that David was a shepherd when he killed the Philistine giant Goliath and began the string of military successes that moved him up in the ranks of Israel’s army.  Doeg sees an opportunity for political intrigue to eliminate David and perhaps open the way for Doeg himself to step into the open position on the cheap.  Doeg rats out David by giving his location and identifying the priests who are hiding him.  Saul pounces, but David escapes after being forewarned by the priests.  In anger Saul commands his soldiers to kill the offending priests, but the soldiers refuse the order because the whole affair stinks.

Once again Doeg sees an opportunity for professional advancement at the expense of others.  So Doeg the Edomite turned and struck them down.  That day he killed eighty-five men who wore the linen ephod (the liturgical garb for priests).  He also put to the sword Nob, the town of the priests, with its men and women, its children and infants, and its cattle, donkeys and sheep (II Samuel 22:18-19).  What a ruthless, self-serving apparatchik.

This is the episode that inspired David to write Psalm 52.  Why do you boast of evil, you mighty man?  Why do you boast all day long, you who are a disgrace in the eyes of God? (Verse 1).  Note that some who are considered mighty in the eyes of the world are considered a disgrace in the eyes of God.  Doeg seems to be getting away with murder.  Indeed, he boasts about it with the same tongue that plotted the destruction of David and the priests of the Lord.  Your tongue plots destruction; it is like a sharpened razor, you who practice deceit.  You love evil rather than good, falsehood rather than speaking the truth.  You love every harmful word, O you deceitful tongue! (Verses 2-4).

But does Doeg get away with murder?  Since this is the last we hear of him in the Scriptures, we really don’t know.  What we do know is that David escapes Doeg’s evil plots and that he eventually supersedes Saul as King of Israel.  I don’t think it is too great of a stretch to assume that God used David to deal with evil Doeg in his own time and way.  As David testifies in his psalm: Surely God will bring you down to everlasting ruin: He will snatch you up and tear you from your tent; he will uproot you from the land of the living (Verse 5).

From the perspective of the passing years, David was able to see what became of evil people who advanced themselves at the expense of others.  Despite their most careful plotting and seeming success, God found a way to bring them down to ruin as an example for those who would follow in their evil ways.  The righteous will see and fear, they will laugh at him, saying, "Here now is the man who did not make God his stronghold but trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others"—who advanced himself at the expense of others (Verse 7).

In contrast to Doeg we find David prospering by the power of Almighty God.  But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God; I trust in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever.  I will praise you forever for what you have done; in your name I will hope, for your name is good.  I will praise you in the presence of your saints (Verse 9).  David’s praise continues to this present day through the psalms he wrote, and we are the beneficiaries of the timeless spiritual truths that he has witnessed from the perspective of the passing years.  We do not have to wait until the end of life to perceive these great truths.  We can learn from the mistakes of Doeg as well as from the positive example of King David, who set the standard of righteousness for all of Israel’s succeeding kings.

So there we have the biblical case for not seeking to advance ourselves at the expense of others, and of course we are familiar with the contrary case made by the dog-eat-dog mentality that abides by the law of the jungle, also known as survival of the fittest.  That last phrase is actually borrowed from Darwin’s theory of evolution.  I suppose that is why a lot of Christians do not subscribe to Darwin’s theory, opting instead for what has been called creationism.  I am not one of them.

I personally think Darwin’s theory of evolution is bulletproof as I understand it from my reading of the subject.  You may not agree, which is your right, just as it is my right to hold my own opinions.  However I think a legitimate question is: how does one resolve the notion of survival of the fittest with the biblical case for not seeking to advance oneself at the expense of others.  Either we are in hopeless competition with each other where one wins because another loses, or there is a win-win possibility that God offers us.

I do not believe that we are created fundamentally competitive creatures.  Quite the contrary, I believe we are created fundamentally cooperative creatures.  Why, because from the moment we are born we require complete nurturing to survive.  If our parents were completely out for themselves they would not make the enormous self-sacrificing effort required of human parents.  Somewhere along the evolutionary way cooperation among human beings emerged as the best bet for our individual and collective survival.

The fittest among us were not the lone rangers fighting it out among themselves, but the cooperative ones willing to make personal sacrifices for the common good.  From that cooperative spirit came communities and nations, roads and libraries and all the other things we share, including laws (rules) that govern our use of such things.  The Bible is a rulebook designed to bring the best out of God’s cooperative creation.  The Bible is the key for the survival of the fittest of God’s creation.  That is one way I reconcile belief in the Bible with Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The fittest in God’s eyes is not the mighty of the world who grow strong by destroying others.  The fittest are those who, like Jesus, deny themselves and take up their crosses—the image of self-sacrifice for the common good.  In God’s creation they are the ones who are ultimately raised up, exalted and glorified by the power of God; while those who exalt themselves are brought low and humbled just like Doeg in our text.

Do you want to be a Doeg who is ultimately destroyed, or do you want to be a David who is ultimately delivered?  To be honest, there is probably a little of both in each of us.  Which one prevails depends upon the choices we make.  How are we seeking to advance ourselves at the expense of others?  I think we need to ask ourselves that question as individuals and as the preeminent nation among the nations of the world.  Just as important, what opportunity is God giving us to serve the common good?