Sunday 24 June 2018

Fear, Faith, and Peace (1 Samuel 17:32-49)


(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on June 24, 2018, Proper 7)



In the Deep End:
Trusting the Water

Do you remember the first time you went into the deep end of the swimming pool without any help?  Without a parent to hold you up, without floats around your arms, without a pool noodle to hang onto?

I remember my first time.  My heart was in my throat.  What would it feel like without any ground beneath my feet?  Nearby my parents were cheering me on.  They told me to trust the water.  I could turn over onto my back, they said, and the water would hold me up.

So I splashed my way down into the deep end.  Full of fear, I flapped around at first and it felt like I was sinking.  But then amid my fear, I stopped flapping and trusted the water.  I turned over onto my back.  And I floated in peace.

The Difference between Faith and “Belief”

When Jesus stills the storm, he asks the disciples, “Why are you afraid?  Have you still no faith?”  In our world today, that question—Do you have faith?—is often understood as a matter of the mind.  For many folks, faith has to do with what you believe.  In the same way that we might say, “I believe there’s milk in the fridge,” or “I believe in thunderstorms, that they exist and make lots of noise and bring lots of rain,” many folks today express their faith by saying, “I believe in God.”

But when Jesus asks the disciples if they have faith, he isn’t asking them what’s in their head.  He isn’t asking if they believe in the existence of God.  Back then, everyone believed in at least one god if not more.  That’s why they made so many sacrifices.  Their belief filled them with fear.  They believed in these gods who could cause storms or droughts or other catastrophes in the flick of a finger, and so they were continually trying to get in the gods’ good graces.

Jesus isn’t asking his disciples about what’s in their head but about what’s in their heart.  He isn’t asking them if they believe in God but rather if they trust God.  For Jesus, faith is not a belief in powerful gods that fills us with fear.  Faith is an intimate trust in God that confronts our fear.  Faith is what stops us from flapping in the deep end and enables us to trust the water.

Contrary to popular opinion, I think Jesus was afraid in the storm just like his disciples were.  We know Jesus experienced the frailty of fear.  The gospels tell us that he sweated blood and wept tears.[1]  I think Jesus shared his disciples’ fear, but unlike his disciples he trusted in God.  Faith, I think, was the difference between Jesus’ calm and his disciples’ flapping about.  His faith enabled him to respond to his fear with a defiant—one might even say miraculous—peace.

Faith Fiddling around with the Text

In the story of David and Goliath, the Israelites are the ones flapping about in the deep end.  They are fearful of the Philistine warrior Goliath.  But David is not flapping about.  “Let no one’s heart fail because of [Goliath],” he says to Saul (17:32).  David appears to be floating serenely at the deep end.  When Saul expresses doubt at David’s proposal—“You are just a boy,” he says (17:33)—David recites how he has dealt with lions and bears, and this Philistine will be no different.  The Lord, he says, will deliver him now as before.

We generally read this story as an illustration of David’s great faith.  He has no fear because he has faith.  That is a fine reading, and an inspiring one, and quite possibly what the original storyteller was hoping to tell us.  But today I want to explore another reading of the story, a reading inspired by Jesus in the storm, Jesus who responds to fear with a defiant peace.  Let me be clear, this is no authoritative interpretation.  What follows is my faith fiddling around with the text, wondering how the way of Jesus might have looked in the time of David.  So treat what I am about to tell you as a rumor, as gossip—and see what truth you can work out from it.

David Shows No Fear

Look at David, ready to waltz into battle, so sure of himself, so sure of the Lord.  Does this look at all familiar?  Are not such self-certainty and such a combative religious zeal also marks of the religious fundamentalists who have wrought great violence in our world?  Anyway…I think there’s a reason we love this story so much.  Not only is it the tale of a victorious underdog.  It also gives us the bravado that we love.  David is cool, calm, and fearless.

Isn’t that the model we’re given growing up?  Don’t show your weakness, your doubts, your fear?  And so we don’t.  We hide them behind boasting resumes, behind sharp and professional attire, behind uncompromising attitudes—“It’s my way or the highway.”  We don’t overcome our fear.  We hide it.  We push it down.  We deny it.  But what is repressed, often rebounds back upon us in terrible fashion.  And so we see bullies who compensate for their hidden fears with shows of domination.  We see bosses who respond to adversity with a brutality of their own.  Again and again, repressed fear returns in a show of strength and force, as though to prove there is no fear in the first place.

Now look at David again.  Is this a man of faith who faces his fear with peace?  Or is this a man who has denied his fear, repressed it behind a mix of holy machismo and misguided nationalistic piety, a man whose response to fear is not peace but bared teeth. 

A Lapse in Faith?

We generally read this story as an illustration of David’s great faith.  But the narrator is strangely silent.  He furnishes David no praise here, nor criticism.  It is left up to us to interpret.  Personally, a part of me can’t help wondering if his meeting Goliath on the battlefield might not be a lapse in faith.  David shows no fear, for sure.  But what has he done with that fear?  Has he confronted it with faith and defiantly declared peace?  Or has he repressed it?  Does he trust in the God who blessed the family of Abraham to be a blessing to all the families of the earth, the God who the prophet Amos says liberated the Philistines from their captivity as the Israelites had been liberated from Egypt (Amos 9:7)?  Or does he put on his best James Dean, his best Marlboro Man, and act out in the way of our world, a way that shows no weakness, no doubts, no fears, a way that prefers strength and force over peace?

This really is unfair of me to put David on the stand.  After all, the Old Testament is full of war and violence.  Maybe David trusted in God but knew no way to extend the peace of that trust to the world around him.  Whatever the case may be, I cannot shake the example of Jesus from my mind.  I can think of two instances in the gospels when the fearful followers of Jesus want to respond to the world with violence, and in both cases Jesus rebukes them.[2]  And so today as I read the story of David, I also hear his words: “Put away your sword.  For all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”  Sadly this would be all too true for much of David’s family and royal court.

What Would Jesus Do in David’s Place?

It’s nearly impossible, of course, to imagine an alternative ending to the story of David and Goliath, just as it’s impossible to imagine peaceful resolutions to many of our world’s conflicts.  But let’s try for just a second.  What would Jesus do in David’s place?  I believe that instead of hiding his fear and putting on a strong front, he would have felt fear, sweating as he did before the cross, perhaps crying over the brokenness of his own nation and of the Philistines’.  But I believe that amid that fear, he would do as he did on the stormy sea: he would defiantly declare peace. I believe that instead of speaking death and curses, he would speak life and blessing, reminding folks that God had liberated both Israel and the Philistines, that God was on both their sides.  That all sounds wildly impractical, and you might be thinking that would get Jesus killed.  That’s not much different than what happened in his own time.

But that wouldn’t be the end of the story.  When Jesus went into the deep end of his world, he went not only with fear but also with a deep faith.  Some called it weakness.  Some called it foolishness.  He went into the deep end with nothing—no floats, no noodles.  It looked crazy, but he trusted in the water.  He trusted in a God of love, a God whose love was even stronger than death, a God whose love would keep him afloat.  Even in death he did not sink.  And so even in the deep end, even amid fear, he could confidently proclaim peace.

It really is gospel—good news.  Our faith is not a belief in a powerful, violent God that fills us with fear.  Our faith is an intimate trust in a loving and life-giving God that enables us to face our fear.  It’s what empowers us to stop flapping around in the deep end, in fright and violence, and instead to echo the defiant declaration of Christ within the storm: peace!

Prayer

Creator God,
Whose creation is cut
From the cloth of love—
There are many things in life
That we do not understand,
That we cannot control,
And so we are fearful.
We thank you
For being in the boat beside us.
Inspire us with the deep trust
In your love
That enabled Jesus to proclaim, “Peace!”
Amid wind and wave;
So that one day we would live
Not by fight or flight,
But by trust in your incomprehensible peace.
In the name of our companion, Jesus Christ.  Amen.



[1] Luke 19:41; 22:44; John 11:35.  Cf. Dorothee Sölle, The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity (trans. Robert and Rita Kimber; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), 149.
[2] Matthew 26:52; Luke 9:54-55.


Sunday 17 June 2018

The Extraordinary Sense of God: Beyond Human Binaries (1 Samuel 15:34-16:13)


(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on June 17, 2018, Proper 6)



This or That

I discovered spicy food at a very early age.  I don’t remember the day myself, but my parents tell the story this way.  As my mom, dad, and brother were preparing dinner, someone had left the refrigerator door open.  I was a toddler at the time and toddled on over to explore what was inside.  On the lowest shelf sat a red bottle.  I stuck its top in mouth.  And for the next hour or so, I was wincing and smacking my lips.  I had discovered Tabasco!

As far as I can reconstruct, that’s the day I learned the word “hot”—as opposed to “cold,” which the refrigerator certainly was.   And that’s the way we all learn, according to psychologists and linguists.  You can’t know one thing until you know its opposite.  Hot/cold, up/down, night/day: as children, we begin to make sense of the world by dividing it up into this or that.

As adults, we generally make sense of the world in the same dualistic, divided-up way.  And with good reason: these binaries are the basis of our survival, our self-preservation.  Without distinctions like poisonous/safe, healthy/unhealthy, predator/prey, friend/enemy, hot/cold, we wouldn’t be here today.

Binaries are the basis of survival.  But binaries can also blind us.  They limit the world to this or that categories.  Instead of seeing a fellow American, we see Republican or Democrat.  Instead of seeing a human being created in the image of God, we see man or woman, black or white, straight or gay.  Not only do these binaries blind us to deeper realities, they also make us biased.  Because binaries are about self-preservation, about keeping order, about keeping things the way they are. In any binary, we prefer the term that preserves our sense of self, whatever preserves the world as we know it.

Saul’s Selective Listening

If you were in a traffic jam, and you heard a random honk behind you, would pay much attention?  What if it were a police siren?  If you were on the sidewalk, and a stranger in a business suit was politely requesting help, would you approach him?  What if it were a homeless person whose voice was slurred?

The problem with Israel’s first king, Saul, was his selective listening: hearing this but not hearing that.  Right before today’s scripture, Samuel calls him to account for not precisely following the instructions of God, and Saul replies: “I feared my men and listened to their voice” (15:24).  In other words, King Saul was a people-pleaser.  He had strayed just a little bit from the command of God in order to please the strong men in his army (cf. 14:52). 

If you’ll remember from last week, God had warned Israel that a king spelled trouble.  Power would take without asking.  It would build itself up at the people’s expense.  Power would not ensure the justice of God’s good covenant.  It would not look out for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, as the covenant endlessly called for.[1]  Instead, it would do the opposite.  Power—a king of might, a king who would fight—this would take Israel back to its beginning in Egypt.  Or as God put it, “You will be…slaves” again (8:17).

Life under Saul did not look exactly like slavery, but in Saul’s selective listening, we catch a glimpse of power’s cold disregard.  Saul does not listen to God.  Nor, we might imagine, does he listen to the widow, the orphan, or the stranger.  Saul listens to the strong men carrying swords and spears. He listens to the people with power, the ones on whom his power rests.  What the widow, the orphan, the stranger, or God thinks…well, that can wait.

Samuel’s Selective Looking

In today’s scripture, we discover the outcome of Saul’s selective listening.  God has moved on.  God has already been scouting for a future king, and God’s found one!  Samuel follows God’s prompting and travels to Bethlehem.  

What comes next is a celebrated Bible story, a timeless classic that features in every children’s Sunday School curriculum.  Samuel invites Jesse to bring his sons before him.  First comes Eliab, and he must have had an impressive physique, because Samuel thinks, “Surely this is the one.”  But the Lord says to him, essentially, “Don’t look the way humans look, selectively, dividing up and judging by your categories, old/young, tall/short, strong/weak.  For God does not see that way.  God looks on the heart.”  In other words, Samuel was looking for the future king in the same way that Saul trying to stay king.  He was dividing the world up into this or that, and he was giving priority to whatever he thought would preserve power.  Saul listened first to the mighty men with swords and spears.  Samuel looked first for a son who was strong, commanding, and experienced.

Next comes Abinadab, and then Shammah, and then four more sons.  Each time, Samuel listens to God and shakes his head.  He must be perplexed at this point, because he’s seen all there is to see.  Maybe he confused God’s directions.  Maybe this is the wrong father and these are the wrong sons.  Just to make sure, though, he asks Jesse, “Are all your sons here?”  Jesse responds that the youngest isn’t here, but is tending the sheep.  So he calls for his son David—who is the least of his sons, the last of his sons, the left-out son.  And he, of course, is the one.  God chooses him to be king.

More than Survival and Self-Preservation

The book of I Samuel contains within it a tension, a friction between the people of Israel and God.  We see it in today’s story, where Samuel anoints the next king, and in the story right before it, where Saul listens first to the voice of his army. 

On the one hand, there are the people of Israel grasping for power, power that will sort out their problems inside, power that will secure their borders outside.  This power builds quite naturally on divisions, which are a mechanism of survival and self-preservation.  This power splits the world up into simple categories, this-or-that, and prefers whatever will preserve things the way they are, whatever will preserve the present order.  

On the other hand, there is God whose covenant looks out for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, whose dream is change, the lowly lifted up and the powerful laid low.  The change of God continually bursts beyond the binaries of Israel.  It sees the potential for abundant life not in imposing kings but in a little boy like Samuel and later in Jesse’s left-out son, David.

The power of Israel builds on divisions, but the change of God bursts beyond these binaries.  Because God wants more than survival, God wants life!  God wants more than the self-preservation of the powerful, God wants beloved community, life for everyone.

The Unity of God’s Love:
From the Most Minor of Minorities

Which is the same thing that Jesus wants, the same thing we see in the Jesus story.  Jesus is consistently bursting beyond our binaries, our this-or-that thinking, drawing us beyond these divisions into the unity of God’s love.  It is Jesus who sees greatness in the smallest of seeds.  It is Jesus who proclaims enemies to be beloved.  It is Jesus who lifts high the little children as model citizens of the kingdom.  It is Jesus who calls the last first.

In the story of Samuel and Israel, as in the story of Jesus, God does not limit our world according to the divisions that we make, this-or-that.  Rather God sees infinite possibility in all things.  And thank God for that.

Binaries keep us alive.  But they also keep us from life.  When we divide the world up into this or that, and we make choices based on survival and self-preservation, the world hardens and closes in on itself.  When the powerful act to preserve the present order, to keep things the way they are, the world comes to a standstill.  No significant change in history happened because at first a majority voted for it.  The change of God that pushes past mere survival and self-preservation, that liberates slaves in Egypt, that looks out for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, that transforms enemies into friends, that draws us all beyond this-or-that into the unity of God’s love—this life-giving change of God grows from the most minor of minorities, from the smallest of things.  Like a mustard seed.  Like a little, left-out boy.  Like a convicted criminal on a cross. 

Prayer

Mysterious and merciful God,
Who transgresses
Our codes of what is correct,
Our understanding of this-or-that;
Draw us into your holy quest
For more than survival and self-preservation;
Grow within us and our community
The tiny seeds of your kingdom,
In which everything belongs
And is filled with infinite possibility.
In the name of him
Whose love obeys no laws, Jesus Christ.  Amen.



[1] According to Baba Metzia 59b, some rabbis counted in the Torah 36 warnings against wronging the sojourner; others counted 46.  Cf. Jonathan Sacks, “Mishpatim (5768)—Loving the Stranger,” http://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation-5768-mishpatim-loving-the-stranger/, accessed June 13, 2018.


Sunday 10 June 2018

Back to Egypt (1 Samuel 8:4-20)


(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on June 10, 2018, Proper 5)



The Way of God:
The Lowly Lifted Up

When Samuel was born into the world, his mother was dreaming of another world.  She sings a beautiful song about this dream, a song about the lowly lifted up and the powerful laid low, about empty tummies filled with food and barren wombs bearing children.  It was a song that challenged reality, for at the time the powerful in Israel ruled with greed and dishonesty, threat and intimidation.  Abusing their privilege, they swindled and stole and took advantage of the weak (cf. 2:12-17, 22).  It was a world perhaps not that different from ours, where profit-hungry businesses prey on the vulnerable and power-hungry leaders rule by threat and force.

But one night in the midst of this reign of terror, the word of God came to Israel.  Well, it came to an unsuspecting boy, Samuel.  And the word of God was change.  It was the same word that Samuel’s mother had sung, a word about the lowly lifted up and the powerful laid low.  It was a word that, as God said, would “make both ears of anyone who hears it tingle” (3:11).  Because it was at once both a promise and a threat, terrific or terrifying, depending on where you stood.  To those injured by the injustice, it was the terrific promise that the powerful would not prevail forever.  To those complicit in the injustice, to the powerful and the privileged, it was a threat.  A warning that sin—injustice—has its own terrifying consequences.

And sure enough, change happened.  The leaders of Israel died at the hands of the Philistines, and Israel itself fell into political disorder for twenty years (cf. 7:2).  By that time, Samuel had grown up and developed quite a reputation.  His words had become reality.  The powerful leaders in Israel had indeed been laid low. 

So when he spoke in the present disorder, everyone listened.  He gathered all Israel together, and what he did next, the Bible repeats three times, so that you can’t miss it—he practiced justice among the people (7:6, 15, 17).  In other words, he guided them in the way of the special covenant that God had made with them.  A covenant which might seem sort of strange to us today, because unlike our laws its priority was not to protect private pursuits and individual gains but rather to protect the needful, “the widows, orphans, and sojourners.”[1]  You might say, in fact, that its priority was to lift the lowly.  When Samuel practiced justice among the people, when he guided them in the way of God’s covenant, he fulfilled in the flesh his mother’s song and dream.  Yes, now the lowly—the widows, the orphans, the strangers, the ones who would have been most vulnerable under the unjust rule of the powerful and privileged—now they were lifted up.

From the Lowly to a King:
Fighting Power with More Power

This would be a perfect spot for the story to wrap up, to conclude with those reassuring words, “And they lived happily ever after.”

But they didn’t.  As Samuel grew older and less capable of guiding the people in the way of God’s covenant, he delegated this responsibility to his sons.  But his sons, the Bible says, “turned aside after gain; they took bribes and perverted justice” (8:3).  In other words, they fell into the trap of the previous leaders.  Their influence went to their head, and rather than looking out for the lowly, they looked out first and foremost for themselves.  It is a pattern we see over and over again in the Bible, leaders who afflict others in their lust for power, prestige, and possessions. 

You would think that the people of Israel would resist this growing power, that they would challenge the ways of Samuel’s sons, speaking the truth to this power, confronting this corruption with God’s good covenant.  But they do just the opposite!  When they see power growing in the hands of Samuel’s sons, they decide that the answer is even more power in the hands of a king.  They want to fight the fire with a bigger fire.

Forgotten in all of this, of course, is the matter of God’s covenant and justice for the lowly.  No one seems to remember how the last time Israel had rulers with such power and influence, the lowly were afflicted and left helpless.

No one remembers, that is, but God.  And in today’s scripture, as the people cry out for a king, God responds and reminds them just what they’re asking for.

[Read 1 Samuel 8:4-20.]

“Like Other Nations”:
The Way of the World

When my Old Testament professor in seminary read this scripture in class, he told us a joke.  “What do you get,” he asked, “when you play a country song backwards?”  “You get your truck back, your dog back, your wife back….”

Today’s scripture reads a lot like a country song (played forwards).  It is a litany of all that the Israelites will lose.  God warns the people about all that the king will take: their sons for the king’s army, their daughters for the king’s kitchen, the best of their fields and their vineyards and their produce for the king’s officials, their servants cattle and donkeys for the king’s workforce. 

And then comes the punch line, except this one is all punch and no funny.  “You shall be his slaves.”  Which is a horrible enough proposition, but it’s even worse considering his audience.  Remember who this is to whom God is speaking.  This is the people who were slaves in Egypt.  Their story is freedom from oppression, justice for the downtrodden, the God who listens to the least.  They were a sign, a witness to the way of God, which lifts the lowly and lays low the powerful.  By blessing Israel, God had intended to bless all the families of earth, to bring all the world into beloved community, where oppression and slavery have no place.

By asking for a king, the Israelites were playing their entire song backwards, disowning their story.  God, deliverance, justice.  They were reversing their history and returning to slavery.  They were effectively going back to Egypt.

Why?  We hear the real reason at the end of today’s scripture: “So that we…may be like other nations, and that our king may…fight our battles” (8:20).  In a word, the reason is power.  Power—someone with might, someone who will fight—power, they think, will solve their problems at home and abroad.  Power will put Samuel’s corrupt sons in their place.  Power will keep the Philistines and other enemies at bay. 

Twice when the people ask for a king, they rationalize their request with the reason that they might be “like other nations” (8:5, 20).  Power, in other words, is the way of the world around them.  But power is not the way of their God.  The covenant that God made with them is about looking out for the lowly—the widow, the orphan, the stranger.  The way of their God is beloved community.

Setting the Covenant—or Kingdom—Aside

I can’t help but wonder if our world today is but an echo of Israel’s world long ago.  I’m sure that the Israelites in Samuel’s day thought highly of the way of God, the covenant of community and justice to which they had agreed.  I’m sure they talked about it on Sabbath and recited its words and ideas at the dinner table.  I’m sure they memorized parts of the covenant and quoted it in small matters.  But I also imagine that when it came to larger matters—like national security or the economy or land management—they set the covenant aside as a rather idealistic and impractical guide, instead trusting in the more efficient means of power.  Looking out for the stranger is all well and good when it’s a harmless neighbor whom you’ve already gotten to know, but when it comes to securing the borders and ensuring that the harvest goes to law-abiding Israelites first, maybe the covenant isn’t so relevant.  Maybe what’s more relevant is a king who can protect us, who can make difficult decisions in our favor.

In the end, Israel would get their kings.  God did not stand in the way of their desire.  (The way of God, remember, is not the way of coercive power.)  But as they got their kings, there also echoed the words of God for any who would remember: “You shall be his slaves.”  Back to Egypt. 

For us, it is not the ancient covenant of the Israelites that we are tempted to set aside as idealistic or impractical.  It is the kingdom of God, where the poor are a priority, the homeless are sheltered, the stranger is welcomed, the world is God’s beloved creation, the enemy is loved, the excluded are embraced and welcomed to the table of fellowship.  These things are all great, but when it comes to questions of economic inequality, healthcare, immigration, climate change, military budget, it’s easy to set the kingdom aside for the sake of self-interested power.[2]  But if today’s story is any indication, this trust in power brings not freedom but oppression, not justice but slavery.  It leads us not to God’s promised land but back to Egypt.

Prayer

God who lifts the lowly
And sets free the enslaved—
When fear and anxiety
Narrow our vision
And tempt us
Toward the way of power,
Remind us anew
Of your kingdom dream
Of beloved community
And a world made whole,
And enlarge our hearts to act
Not in the service of self-interested power
But in the service of others. 
In Christ, who proclaims your kingdom.  Amen.



[1] E.g., Deut 14:29, 16:11, 14; 24:19–21; 26:12–15.  Cf. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 423.
[2] Rev. Granberg-Michaelson, who has served as chief legislative assistant to Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Director of Church and Society for the World Council of Churches, and General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America raises these issues as especially relevant to the practice of faith in the political field.  Cf. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, “From Mysticism to Politics,” Onening: An Alternative Orthodoxy 5:2 (2017): 15-21.


Sunday 3 June 2018

The Change of God (1 Samuel 3:1-20)



(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on June 3, 2018, Proper 4)



A Beloved Bible Story

Today’s scripture begins with a beloved Bible story: Samuel and the call of God.

[Read 1 Samuel 3:1-10.]

Today’s story reads a little bit like a children’s fable or fairytale.  We imagine little Samuel lying in sleep when he hears a voice call his name.  Three times Samuel hears the voice, three times he runs in his innocence to the priest Eli.  Finally Eli figures out that the little boy is having more than a dream.  He’s hearing a call from God.

And so we end up with a simple, soft-hearted lesson about personal piety: about the significance of our evening prayers or about showing God full attention the way that Samuel finally did, when he said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

Both are important lessons.  But they are also ways we domesticate this story.  This sentimentalized, soft-hearted reading of the story turns faith into a private matter, something we reflect on at night, at our bedside, in the quiet of our hearts.

When really this story portrays faith as the seed of sweeping and subversive social change.

Where God’s Change often Starts:
on the Margins

To put this story in perspective, it helps to remember that when Samuel was born, his mother sang a song: a song about the lowly lifted up and the powerful laid low, about empty wombs bearing children and empty tummies filled with food.  In other words, when Samuel entered this world, his mother was dreaming of another world.  Samuel embodies the dream of change.  Change will be his story.

So instead of imagining the boy Samuel in his pajamas and night slippers, kneeling piously by his bedside and praying to God in the safety of his heart, picture him instead as you might picture the hobbit Frodo at the start of The Lord of the Rings, dozing off in the hillside peace of the Shire about to be taken by a wizard and adventure; or the farmer boy Luke Skywalker at the start of Star Wars, going about his business on the remote dusty planet of Tatooine about to be engulfed in the fate of the universe.

These timeless stories echo a timeless truth, one that we find repeatedly in the Bible.  The change that saves our world often begins on the margins in the unlikeliest of characters.  The change that Samuel’s mom hopes and dreams for, is not a change that God enforces with a flick of the wrist or a momentary visit to earth.  It is a change that starts in the smallest and strangest of ways.  In a whisper.  In the dead of night.  To a boy.  It goes without saying that the boy is not an ordained priest.  (A reminder, if nothing else, that God does not follow our rules.)

What God’s Change often Becomes:
Public and Political and Precarious

If our story today begins on the margins with a rather personal and innocent touch, focusing on the boy Samuel as he hears from God for the first time, it quickly becomes public and political and precarious. 

But again, we need some of the background to understand this.  Right after Samuel is born and his mother sings her song of the lowly lifted up and the powerful laid low, the storyteller tells us about the leaders in Israel: the judge and priest Eli (cf. 4:18) and his two sons who were also priests.  Eli’s sons, the Bible says, were scoundrels with no regard for others or for God.  They stole from the people’s offerings.  And if someone confronted them, they would threaten them in return (2:13-17).  They took advantage of their power.  This included, the storyteller says, the way they treated women who came to the holy tent of meeting (2:22). 

Having domesticated the Bible, we often miss out on its all-too-human overtones of privilege and power struggle and political intrigue.  But it’s all here.  Today’s #MeToo movement, our world’s increasing distrust of the establishment, its jaded eye toward anyone who might have a vested interest—it’s not that different from the world we find in 1 Samuel.  Abuse of power, threats and intimidation, corruption and sex scandals—it’s all here, three thousand years ago, in these priests, these sons of Eli.  Behind the brief and suggestive sentences of our storyteller lies a familiar story: the privilege of a few, the ruin of many, and the hopeless inertia of the status quo.

What does God think about all of this?  That’s what some people might be asking today.  Where is God in the plight of the disadvantaged?  How does God feel about power that preys on the poor?  Well, today’s scripture gives us an idea.  [Let’s look now at the remainder of our passage.  Read 1 Samuel 3:11-20.]

Where is God when power goes awry, when the mighty mistreat the lowly?  The answer of today’s story is unsettling.  No longer is this an innocent tale of a private, bedside faith.  No, God delivers to the boy Samuel an ominous message: “I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears it tingle” (3:11).  In other words, change is on the way.  Not just for Samuel.  Not just for the sons of Eli.  But for everyone.  This is not a pious, religious change, but a sweeping, social change.  That will make ears “tingle” and hearts tremble.  This truly is the God of whom Samuel’s mother sang, who lifts the lowly and lays low the powerful, who cares for the hungry and barren.

How We Receive God’s Change:
A Promise or a Threat

What troubles me the most in today’s passage is the moment where God promises punishment forever on the house of Eli.  Is that the same God whom I follow?  Is that the same God revealed in Jesus Christ?  Is that the God who Jesus promises is kind and compassionate even to the ungrateful and the wicked (cf. Luke 6:35)? 

To read the Bible literally is to encounter all sorts of contradictions like this one.  In my understanding, the Bible is God-breathed and inspired even as it is a document of human experience and interpretation.  That means that each time we read, we must interpret it ourselves.  We must hold our stethoscopes near to the text and listen for the heartbeat of God under the layers of human story.

Personally, I doubt that the God of love—and love, remember, bears and endures all things—I doubt that this God promised eternal punishment on Eli and his home.  But even so, I do hear a divine heartbeat in this part of the story.  What I hear here, is a promise.  Which is also a threat.  Which is what troubles me still.

The promise, or threat, is this: Things must change.  And they will.  Not because God will come with holster and handcuffs, but because sin—injustice—has its own consequences. 

So the promise is good for those who are on the injured side of injustice: for those who are poor and needy, hungry and empty.  God is on their side.  Change is coming.  But the same promise becomes a threat, if you are among the privileged and powerful, complicit in injustice.  A “new beginning” for some means a “terrible ending” for others.[1]  Eli, who did no wrong himself but who did not restrain his wicked sons, would soon die along with his sons.  And the nation itself would fall into military defeat and political disorder.  Only when injustice had run its course and the nation had fallen into a heap could the change of God begin to take shape.

Does It Make Our Hearts Tremble?

The story of the boy Samuel is soft-hearted and personal and promising.  But it is also subversive and political and threatening.  And it shows a God who is deeply concerned and involved in a world full of political intrigue and abused power and collective injustice.

It is a lesson from the history of our faith, a matter ever to be interpreted anew.  The change of God that whispers on the margins, that cuts to the quick of a nation, that is both a promise and a threat—where is it today?

I wonder if the world might sometimes be dismissing the change of God when it dismisses the cries and complaints of others.  A few weeks ago at Common Table, we were reminded how easily the homeless are dismissed—“Oh, they could get help if they really wanted it.”  I am reminded also of how sometimes racial tensions are dismissed—“That’s all in the past,” say folks who are doing alright for themselves in the present.  I am reminded also of how other minority communities, like the disability community or the LGBTQ community, are dismissed—“How many special privileges do they want?” ask folks who can freely walk into churches and hospitals and schools without fear of suspicious or discriminatory response.

I wonder if these dismissals are not sometimes dismissals of the change of God.  A change that whispers on the margins, that cuts to the quick of a nation, that is both a promise and a threat.

Where do we hear it today—the change of God?  Does it make our ears tingle and our hearts tremble?

Prayer

God of barren mothers
And hungry tummies,
God who lifts the lowly
And lays low the powerful—
Where are you in our world?
Draw us to your side
At the margins,
In the public square,
In your terrifying and terrific change.
Open our ears
To hear your as Samuel did,
And our hearts,
To follow you
Into your holy promise and threat. 
In the name of Christ,
From whose love emerges your new creation.  Amen.



[1] Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 28.