The King
1 Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20, 11:14-15
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In a letter written to the early church in a part of the world we now know as Turkey, the apostle Paul made use of a now familiar phrase, “Do not be deceived,” he wrote to these first Christians, “God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.” In the gospels Jesus uses the image of sowing seed in a variety of parables. In one, he likens the kingdom of God to the smallest of seeds that grows into a wild and unruly bush that eventually becomes a home for the birds of the air. You don’t need to be a master gardener to understand this principle. No one who plants corn expects to get wheat instead. You don’t plant tomatoes if what you want is turnips. Ultimately, this stories we’re listening to this summer from 1 and 2 Samuel are about what we sow as individuals and as a people and what we reap as a consequence. They are a way of making sense of the most traumatic events in the history of this people; something so devastating that its implications reverberate throughout the Law and the Prophets of Hebrew scripture. That event is the Babylonian exile, when the armies of Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, destroyed God’s holy temple there and carried anyone of any wealth or value hundreds of miles away to a strange new land. Like most people who go through something awful and traumatic like that, the people in exile wanted to know why this had happened to them, where they had gone wrong. They waned to understand why God would hand them over to their enemies and allow the wholesale destruction of their city and temple. So they began to trace back. They followed events backward trying to connect the dots to their downfall. And the picture that emerged was on in which, over time, the people lost track of their priorities, and more importantly lost track of the priority of their identity as God’s people. How God had heard their cries when they were enslaved under the oppressive rule of the Pharaoh in Egypt. How God had rescued them from slavery and lead them to freedom. Only it turned out that freedom isn’t as easy as it sounds. They learned that hard lesson when they landed in the wilderness that stretched out on the other side of the Red Sea. So, God made a promise to them, to be their God, to lead and sustain them through that wilderness, if they would be God’s people. It’s cannot be overstated that the covenant that God made with them on the wilderness mountain of Sinai, when Moses was sent down with the commandments on those tablets, was with a people. For forty years they wandered that desert landscape and the only way they survived was by the hand of God that fed them every morning with the bread thy would need for that day. Eventually, God led God’s people into the land that was promised to them, a fruitful land where they could stop wandering, settle down and prosper. But they weren’t the only ones living in that land. As they made their way into it, God went ahead of them, helping them to defeat their enemies as they went. But it wasn’t as though everything was suddenly sunshine and roses once they entered the land. There were repeated set-backs. The people had trouble remembering and obeying the covenant God had made with them. They would start doing their own thing and it wouldn’t go well. Some enemy would rise up. They’d cry out to God, and God would raise up a leader to pull things back together. One of the biggest problems that the people had was that they would get sidetracked, chasing after the latest religious fad- some fertility god or goddess that their neighbors in the land worshipped. The more things change, the more they stay the same; three thousand years of history and civilization and human nature is relatively unchanged. God’s people just wanted to be like everyone else. They wanted to fit in; to do the things that their neighbors were doing. They wanted to go along to get along. Back when the Hunger Games movies came out, a friend shared with me how desperate his 9-year-old was to see them. My friend was reticent about taking his young son to a story about children being forced to fight to the death in some post-apocalyptic dystopia. What became clear was that the boy wasn’t so very interested in the story. He just wanted to do what he thought all his friends and classmates at school were doing. He was having what we call FOMO; fear of missing out. He wanted to fit in, to be in the know of what everyone knew and had seen. Even though Israel had arrived in the land God had promised to them, it was a struggle. You know, when you’re going through a difficult time, when you’re just trying to make it through the wilderness of your life in one piece, the promise of something better, someplace better, starts to sound like the answer to all your problems. If I can just get through school, or find a job, or meet my soul mate, or get well. If I can just get past this depression, or divorce, or grief, we think, then things will be alright. Until we make it. Until we get to where wanted to be, have the things we wanted to have, achieve the thing we hoped to achieve, and find that our troubles have only followed us, or a whole new set of struggles are waiting for us. That’s how it was for Israel. They made it to the land, through a hostile landscape where they would have starved to death if it hadn’t been for the intervention of God, only to find the hostility of hunger and thirst replaced by the hostility of neighbors who don’t recognize your claim on the land where they’re living. So what do they do? How do they solve this problem? God had been raising up Judges for them, leaders who would rally the people together against a common enemy. Ehud, Deborah, and Gideon, to name just a few. And Samuel? Samuel was the prophet God called to remind the people who they were, who they were called to be as God’s own people. But when the people look around at the surrounding nations, they see something they think they’re missing out on- a king. You might remember that when Samuel was first called by God, it was to name the corruption of Eli’s sons. Fast forward, as Samuel gets older, his sons become corrupt. Maybe, the people thought, what we need is a king, like the nations. Their solution wasn’t to move closer to God. Their solution was to move closer to the surrounding culture. They’d already begun to throw a little love to the Canaanite goddess Ashera along with their sacrifices to the God who had led them out of slavery in Egypt and preserved them through their desert wanderings. But that wasn’t enough. They wanted to be like everyone else, like the nations. They wanted a king to govern them, and lead them into battle, even though God had already been fulfilling both those roles- giving them the law, and protecting them against their enemies. But no, they wanted someone that they could put up against the kings of other nations. They wanted someone in armor who could lead the charge. They wanted someone who could lead them as a nation in their own right. You know, the worst kind of sin hardly looks like a sin at all. We all know that taking a human life is a bad thing, it’s not like we really needed a commandment to tell us that. But sin is as insidious as a serpent. It slithers in while we’re not paying attention and gives us the rationalization we need to justify just about anything- even taking another’s life. Sin is also able to plant the smallest seed that can also grow into something invasive and unruly. The seed that gets planted here, in this moment, the sin that will grown from it and eventually lead the people into exile is the sin of nationalism.
Once the people ask for a king, once they go looking for the kind of glory they see on display from their neighbors, once they hear the chants from the crowd and watch the banners blowing in the wind, they are hooked. They want that. Why, they’re God’s chosen people aren’t they? The nations should know that. The nations should know Israel’s might. That’s why they need a king. This is the thing about nationalism. It may boast about exceptionalism and even masquerade under the guise of patriotism, but it is the desperate charade of the insecure. It is the reaction of a people who are overcompensating for their fear. And while forms of nationalism may traffic in religious cliches and invoke the name of God to serve their own purpose, it is always a violation of the first commandment- you shall have no other gods before me.
The covenant made on Sinai is between God and God’s people, NOT between God and God’s nation. God has no nation. God has a people. And when we put our trust, our time, or our energy in the politics of earthly power, we risk the gravest of sins by rejection God’s role as the ultimate and unrivaled authority in our lives. The people are warned. We are warned about what happens when we trust too much in the promises of earthly power. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more power we give anyone- any politician, any party, any movement, any army, any industry- the more they will take. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, says Samuel. The people hear it all and still their answer is, “No! We are determined to have a king over us, so that we may also be like other nations.” When will we learn that God isn’t calling us to be like everybody else? When will we finally get it that as people are claimed as God’s own, we are called to be different- not exceptional- to belong to the household of God and not some exalted nation, to be a sign of the kind of life that is possible when we stop investing our efforts in demonstrating our own so-called greatness and glory, but glory instead in the eternal love that God has for all people, and every nation on this earth.