There are
great cycles of stories in the Hebrew Bible, which we call the Old Testament .
. . Genesis, of course, has the patriarch stories: the Abraham, Jacob and
Joseph cycles, which follow the Hebrew people—not yet a nation, not yet
Israelites—into their captivity by the Egyptians. Exodus tells about that captivity, way down
in Egypt-land, and their release by Moses,
the first of the great prophets. It also
tells of the coming of the Law, which binds the tribes into a new nation, and
Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy tell of its elaboration and the Israelites'
wandering in the wilderness until, at the end of Deuteronomy, they are poised
to enter the promised land, and although he can look into it from a high
mountain top, Moses cannot enter because he did not trust God at the waters of
Meribah.
The next
three books have the same names as a Lyle Lovett song—or maybe the song got its
name from the Bible, I’m not sure—“Joshua Judges Ruth,” and the books—but not
the song—describe the taking of the promised land from the people who were
already there, and that brings us up to today’s passage. From their formation as a peoples, then a
nation, the Israelites had not had a king . . . instead, they had a series of
adjudicators, a series of mediators, known as Judges, who judged the cause of the people, and occasionally led
them into battle, but did not rule over them.
The book of the same name, of course, describes the rise and activities
of these unique individuals, but things begin to change as First Samuel opens .
. . after his iconic call by the Lord—here I am, Lord—it gradually becomes
clear that he will be the last of the judges.
And now, in
our passage, the people confront Samuel at Ramah, just North and a tad West of
what is today Jerusalem, and they ask him for a King. “You’re getting old,” they say, “And your
sons aren’t very good judges” and in fact, they were venal, stealing the
sacrifices for themselves, which may have had something to do with the desire
for a change. “Give us a king to govern
us, like other nations.” And Samuel
doesn’t like this, and so he prays to God and lo and behold—and conveniently
for Samuel—God doesn’t like it
either. “Listen to the voice of the people in all
that they say to you;” God says “for they have not rejected you, but they have
rejected me from being king over them.”
Seems like Samuel might have been taking it a little . . . personal, but
God sets him straight: it’s not Samuel they’re rejecting, it’s God.
Not bad advice, even for us today.
We often forget that this ministry business is not our own, but God’s .
. . and we agonize over its rejection by folks, the increasing secularization
of society, and all that jazz, when all we’ve ever been asked to do is proclaim
the gospel, to tell folks about it, in—as St. Francis was supposed to have
said—words if necessary. If people reject living in a relationship
with God, if they reject living and working in a Christian community, then they
have rejected God, not us.
Of course, that doesn’t let us off the hook regarding how we proclaim the gospel, in what mode . . . if we sit in our air conditioned boxes and sing Amazing Grace and do not take the word to the people, where they are, if we
talk about the gospel but do not perform it, well we are not being faithful to
our calling. If we insist in proclaiming
it outmoded forms, if we tell the old, old story in ways that are not new and
relevant to people today, we are not proclaiming the gospel in a way Christ would
have us do.
In Samuel’s case, maybe God knew that his motives were not exactly . . .
pure. After all, him being a judge was a
pretty big deal, and doing away with them would cost him a lot of power,
prestige and money. Again, we have
analogous situations in our own, modern churches, don’t we? The pastor who gets a little too big for his
britches, who stays a little longer than he should at a church . . . who can
forget the spectacular examples, the Jim Bakkers and the Creflo Dollars,
corrupted by the money and power, and loath to give them up. But it also affects those who work in the
congregations, who can build up power bases around program areas. It’s not always money that drives people, it
can also be ego and self esteem.
Well. Whatever God means, and
whatever motives Samuel has, God tells him
to tell the people just what will
happen to them if they have a king. In
essence, God tells Samuel to lay out the facts and let ‘em make up their own
minds, and so he does. And the result is
one of the iconic speeches in the Old Testament. To see why this is so, we need to note a
couple of things. First, there are two
great streams of political thought in the books of Samuel and Kings: one that
is pro-monarchy and one that is anti-monarchy, one that is pro-having a king
and one that is against the idea. One of
the remarkable things about the Hebrew Bible is that they coexist side-by-side
in the same books—especially first and second Samuel. We know that these books are compilations,
written by more than one author, and edited together at a later date, and what
is so remarkable is that passages remain in them that are pro-monarchy and
anti-monarchy, and some later editor hasn’t “smoothed them all out.” Here, in this speech, Samuel articulates the
anti-monarchy position, the one held also, presumably, by God.
The second thing to notice is a verb . . . my old Hebrew prof Walter
Breuggemann says that Hebrew is a language of verbs, and there is no better
passage demonstrating that than this one.
And the verb is lachach, to
take. He will take your sons, he says, and appoint them to his chariots, to be
his horsemen, to run before his chariots, to be cannon fodder in the king’s
endless wars . . . and he’ll use them to plow his ground, reap his harvest, and
make his weapons, thereby increasing his own riches at your expense . . . and it is indeed at their parents’ expense,
for in a subsistence agriculture economy, sons are vital to work the family’s
land . . .
But
wait! There’s more! He’ll take your
daughters to be performers and cooks and bakers, he’ll take the best of your
fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his toadies . . . he’s
working up a head of steam now, a rhythm . . . he’ll take a tenth of your grain
and grapes . . . he’ll take your male and female slaves and your livestock . .
. he’ll take a tenth of your flocks and you shall be his slaves . . . take,
take, take . . .lachach, lachach,
lachach. The word is dark and
gutteral, and its repetition and rhythm drive the point effectively home.
Finally,
Samuel breaks out of the pattern and delivers the final blow: “in that day
you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but
the LORD will not answer you.” Don’t
come crying to God when that happens, he’s saying, and this may be where Samuel
goes off the reservation a little, because after all, the Bible is full of times when the people cry out to
the Lord and are rescued.
Be that as it may, the people refuse to listen and demand a king, and I
imagine them screwing up their faces in a big pout and stamping their feet like
a little child and saying No! We’re determined to have a king like other
nations to govern us and to go out before us and fight our battles. And like a lot of Hebrew passage, this one is
structured this story so that the same words begin and end the passage—it’s
called an inclusio, if you’re
counting. And they started out saying
they wanted a king to govern them like the other nations, but here at the end
there’s one crucial difference: they’ve added the “go out before us and do
battle” bit. And although the entire
speech foreshadows the reign of David, this addition specifically looks forward
to a key episode, which we’ll get to later this Summer.
But for now, I draw your attention to another characteristic of the verb lachach, the verb “to take.” In the Old Testament, the word is generally
reserved for two entities: God and kings.
God—creator of the universe, absolute arbiter of all life and death—and
human kings—creator of a kingdom, and within its bounds, absolute arbiter of
life and death. And so, what Samuel is
cautioning against is substituting a human king for God, subjecting themselves
to the absolute rule of someone other than the Lord.
Actually, in practice in the ancient world, it is a two-layered deal . . .
once God gives in and lets them have a king, the king is under God and the
people are under the king. It’s a
hierarchy, and the King rules the people, and God—supposedly—rules the
king. But Samuel apparently isn’t
impressed, and thus the take, take, take
speech . . . and apparently, he is leery with good reason: the first king God
chooses, Saul, is so bad God changes God’s mind and sends an evil spirit to
drive him nuts, while at the same time secretly plotting to replace him with
David. And David . . . well, we’ll see how that
turns out later this summer when the Lectionary turns to 2nd Samuel.
Another point to keep in mind when reading the Old Testament, and
especially the prophets, is that this hierarchy works both ways: if the King
represents God to the people, he also represents the people to God. So when God—through Jeremiah—rails against
the sons of good king Josiah, he is complaining against the entire nation.
This hierarchy may seem primitive—God rules over the leader, who represents
the nation—but it’s not so different, at least in theory, from how many of us
conceive our own country. In fact, the
pledge of allegiance says what? One
nation under God. And we say that pledge in the expectation
that the nation is under God, that it
is ruled by God, that nothing it does is against the will of God. That didn’t
work out so well for the Israelites, did it?
And that’s where God’s son comes
in. When Jesus Christ was sent to earth
to free us from bondage to sin, a funny thing happened on the way to the
cathedral. The early Christians declared
him Lord—you see it throughout their testimony in the gospels and letters. The Christ—which means Messiah, anointed one in Greek—is substituted for the earthly
powers that be, namely the emperor and the local governors, the Herods. And this morning, I’d like us to consider
what we mean when we declare Jesus Christ as Lord. Is it a part-time deal? Is he Lord after our government, after our
secular leaders? Or does our commitment
to Christ come first?
Or maybe our commitment to money or our cars or our music or—gasp!—our children comes first (I know, I know—now I’m meddling). What do we mean when we say—or sing or
preach—that Jesus Christ is Lord?
Samuel said earthly kings, earthly Lords will take and take and take . . .
they’ll take our time, they’ll take our money, they’ll take our lives . . . but is that the way of the
Lord Jesus Christ? Just the
opposite: he gives rather than
takes. He gives us peace . . . he gives
us hope . . . he gives us forgiveness—all things that secular governments
cannot, will not provide—and most of
all, he gives us life. Amen.
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