The Spiritual Reading

Midweek Worship

The Second Week After Pentecost

Semicontinuous Reading: Samuel 8:4-20; 11:14-15

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Some 400 years before Jesus, the Greek philosopher Plato argued that anyone who truly honored the gods could not take Greek mythology literally. And he was hardly the first to do so. The gods of Greek mythology are infamously jealous, violent, fickle, cruel, lustful, lascivious, and larcenous. Their primarily trait is power, power beyond morality, power solely in the service of their honor. That’s what made them gods.

And Plato knew that this was just awful. The gods—who were really One God, he believed—had to be morally perfect, not petty; eternally beneficent, not belligerent. Plato was no fan of poets, as he himself had been one. For the myths to be taken seriously by philosophers, and not just rejected outright, they had to be interpreted spiritually, allegorically. Else heaven must be full of monsters.

Early Christians learned a lot from Plato. In fact, one modern professor has quipped that educated theology is always Platonic but popular theology never is. We as Christians inherited the Hebrew Scriptures, and like our Jewish kinsmen we had to confront the problems of the Old Testament: the violence, the contradictions. Just as educated pagans interpreted their myths spiritually, it was the practice of the early Church, following the lead of the rabbis, to interpret the Hebrew Bible spiritually. For us particularly the Hebrew Scriptures always point to Christ. We always look for Jesus in the text, else why bother with the Bible at all?

The Old Testament is a collection of many books, many authors, chronicling Israel’s ever evolving understanding of God: who He is, what He’s like, what He wants. The early stuff can sound a lot like polytheism, a lot like paganism. There are clearly parts of the Scriptures in which people think of Yahweh as just some tribal desert god: Israel’s god, but not necessarily anyone else’s. And they portray Him like other ancient Mediterranean gods: jealous, violent, powerful in defense of honor; the polar opposite, in fact, of how we’ve come to understand Jesus.

So what were the Christians to do? One group, the Marcionites, rejected the Hebrew Scriptures completely. The beneficent God and Father of Jesus Christ, they claimed, could not possibly be the petty tyrant of Moses, Joshua, and Judges. Another group, the fundamentalists, try to take both Testaments at face value, so that the god who commands genocide of innocent women and children is the same God who so loves the world that He gives His only Son in order to save us all in Him.

This results in a sort of bipolar picture of God, in which one can never be sure whether one will suffer the justice of His wrath or the mercies of His love. Thus One God comes across more like two. Flip a coin; take your chances. Suffice to say that neither approach has ever been the mainstream of Christian orthodoxy; or Jewish for that matter. Even without Christ, Judaism knows to look for the perfect Lord of Love in the all-too-human stories of the late Bronze Age.

Christianity would not reject the Hebrew Bible, the First Testament of our Scriptures. Jesus, after all, is a Jew, incarnate not only in flesh and blood but in culture and belief, in morals and mores. You have to have the Hebrew Bible to make heads or tails of the Hebrew Christ. Yet when it says that God does evil, or burns with anger, or jealously repays children for their parents’ sins, dare we take that literally, literalistically? Of course not. Such would be blasphemy. Such would portray God as worse than the devil.

Which is not to say that God cannot punish. Yet if He does, He does so only for our good, as a doctor prescribes medicine, as a surgeon cuts out cancer. Justice and mercy in God are both one: both are His truth; both are His love. In the words of George MacDonald, God is always for us; even when He must be against us, He is for us. And so we approach the Old Testament. So we seek for God, incarnate, as it were, in pages of parchment from a time and a place so very far removed from our own. Yet in it people are still people, and God is still God.

Every Sunday this congregation follows the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year cycle of readings which we share more-or-less with Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and various other liturgical Protestants. And every summer, this Lectionary gives us opportunity to follow a “semicontinuous reading.” That is, an alternate Old Testament text not paired with the Gospel for the day but designed to offer an ongoing narrative throughout the season, following major themes and stories of the Hebrew Bible.

Well, this year I want to follow those texts, that semicontinous reading, in our Wednesday evening services each week throughout the summer. This will give me opportunity to practice what I preach, in that it will allow us to follow the arc of the Hebrew Scriptures—the arc of Jesus’ Bible—while interpreting these stories of our faith in both a rabbinical and Christian light.

Jesus and Paul were first-century Jews, and they interpreted Scripture as first-century Jews. We too stand in this tradition, treading the Way of Jesus Christ betwixt the extremes of rejectionism and fundamentalism, of atheism and superstition. And I think it’s fair to say that most people in our context today have embraced one of those extremes: have either rejected the God of the Bible outright, or imagine that He’s as nasty and petty as we are.

As Lutherans, we can’t do that. As Christians, we must not do that. The Scriptures give us Jesus, and Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Now I know that’s rather a lot in the way of introduction, so let us now ground ourselves in the text, finding our orientation in the narrative. We start in the Book of Samuel, set some 3000 years ago; long after the mythic beginnings of Genesis; long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; long after Moses and the Exodus. We’re at the end of the age of the Judges, with Samuel as the last of their line. The Hebrew children of Israel have come out of slavery in Egypt, finished their wanderings in the wilderness, and settled in the Promised Land of their ancestors.

They’ve fallen out by tribes—12 Tribes claiming descent from 12 brothers—in a loose federation, united by language, religion, and a common story of their origins. But they are ever vulnerable to the more organized and despotic societies around them. Other nations have armies, kings, temples. The Israelites have none of these. What they do have are Judges: great heroes, called and empowered by the Spirit of God, whenever Israel strays from the Law of her Lord and finds herself oppressed by the neighboring kingdoms. Judges all share one thing in common: they are the least likely people you would expect.

The Judges include women and left-handers, bandits and bastards, skeptics and zealots. One of them is even a sort of wicked warrior monk, who breaks every religious rule and flies into rages of supernatural strength. His greatest victory comes only after he is imprisoned by his enemies and blinded for his pride. The Judges for all their failings have never truly failed, for God has been their guarantor, working through the least likely vessels in order to liberate his people once again.

But in our reading this evening the people of Israel have grown tired of this game. They drift away from God, fall into oppression, a Judge sets them free, and sooner or later the Judge dies, to start the cycle over again, generation upon generation. The Israelites no longer want Judges. They no longer wish solely to trust in their God. And so they demand a king, and an army, and a temple, so that they might have nice things, violent things, like everybody else does.

So Samuel, the last of the Judges, whose children are no great shakes to replace him, warns us all that kings are more trouble than they’re worth. They’ll tax us, enslave us, set us to labor, send us to war. And in putting our trust in princes, in militaries and their might, the Israelites are implicitly rejecting God as their King, trading liberty for security. “In those days there was no king,” the Book of Judges cryptically repeats, “and each man did as he saw fit,” both for the good and the ill.

The time of Judges was no picnic, but the era of Kings will be far worse. And we will see prophets and rulers alike do terrible things in the name of the Lord. Doesn’t that sound familiar? But God will be faithful, and God will be just, in spite of all our crimes; until that day comes when we are ready to have God as our King once again—crowned with a circlet of thorns, nailed to the wood of His throne.

Welcome to the Books of the Kings. May God have mercy on us all, as indeed He does.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.