Uncle Sam

Midweek Worship

The Third Week After the Pentecost

Semicontinuous Reading: 1 Samuel 15:34—16:13

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.

Ah. Now is when things start to get messy.

Last week we spoke of Samuel, last of the Judges, and of the people’s insistence that he anoint for them a king. Samuel was a prophet raised by a priest, who spent his childhood tending to the Ark of the Covenant. So he’s a bit intense. As a Judge he proved a great ruler, just and fair, a man of both faith and action. He had delivered Israel from the yoke of the Philistines, another warlike and nomadic people, likely related to the Greeks, who were vying to settle the same land.

Samuel was a hero: culturally, militarily, religiously. But like so many other great men, he seems not to have been so great of a father. His sons were—well, let’s just say that the apple had fallen some distance from the tree. When the people demanded a king, they were effectively demanding stability. Whenever a Judge died, a period of backsliding had become the norm. And they didn’t want that. They wanted a smooth transition of power. They wanted a new dynasty.

And Samuel took that kind of personally. “They aren’t rejecting you,” God tells him, in this book that bears his name. “Rather, they are rejecting Me as King over them.” Nevertheless, if there’s going to be a new ruler, Samuel’s going to have a say in who it is. If he cannot be king, he will be kingmaker. And so he chooses Saul, a tall, strong, good-looking man, head and shoulders above everyone else, and a renowned war leader to boot. Samuel anoints him; Samuel enthrones him; thus Saul is Samuel’s man.

That is, until he isn’t.

It starts off with Saul usurping Samuel’s duties. When the prophet is late to a pre-battle sacrifice, and they really must hurry for the army to be on its way, Saul steps in to serve as priest as well as king. And when Samuel shows up, he’s none too happy about this. Junior, it seems, has been sitting in daddy’s chair. In public, no less. And Samuel’s reaction to this, his righteous indignation, might seem to us excessive—denouncing Saul’s dynasty for an understandable breach of ritual etiquette—until we see that it’s really about power, about who is and who isn’t in charge. Saul is king, but Samuel made him king. And Samuel can unmake him as well.

Now, it should be pointed out of course that Samuel understands that God is on his side. When Samuel gives an instruction to Saul, it is God, we are told, who’s really calling the shots. But significantly, there is ambiguity in the text. Rarely does God speak directly. We don’t hear God make these demands of Saul. What we hear is Samuel’s insistence that God through him should wish it so. The author of the text, or at least its compiler, appears to doubt just what exactly is of God and what is instead of Samuel. And that’s important for this next bit.

Because the final straw for Samuel comes when Saul is leading the army out against Amalekites, an ancient enemy of Israel, now vassals of the Philistines. And Samuel commands Saul to wipe them out entirely: every man, woman, and child, every ox and ass and camel, everything that breathes, put to the sword. Now, Semitic hyperbole is infamous, with numbers wildly inflated, and boasts that entire peoples have been utterly annihilated; only to have those same peoples show up, as allies or enemies, in the very next chapter. This is simply the literary style of the day. One must take tales of Near Eastern war with more than a grain of salt.

In this instance, however, Samuel’s pronunciation of the ban is quite insistent and quite literal. He understands it so, even if Saul does not. Everything with breath must die, so sayeth the Lord! Or rather—so sayeth Samuel, sayeth the Lord. See, Saul doesn’t kill everybody. He spares the quality: the king and the best of the beasts. It isn’t mercy that stays Saul’s sword, but greed, it would seem. For his part, Saul is quite confident that he has obeyed both Samuel and Sam’s God.

But Sam himself doesn’t see it that way. He’s furious that Saul has disobeyed him, especially when dealing with such ancient and hated foes. Samuel commands that the king of the Amalekites be brought before him, and with his own two hands Samuel butchers the king in front of the army, cuts him into pieces. And then he leaves. And despite Saul’s pleas for forgiveness, Saul never sees Samuel alive again. All of which brings us to our Scriptures for the evening.

We read that Samuel grieves over Saul, and that “the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.” See the ambiguity there? Who made Saul king over Israel? Well, this time things will be done properly—which is to say, done by God. “I have rejected him from being king,” sayeth the Lord, meaning Saul, Samuel’s choice. “Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.” It’s the Lord’s turn now.

The author of the Book of Samuel is simply not willing to blame God for the failures of Samuel and Saul. And one can see why, what with captured kings cut apart, men and women put to the sword. But this time will be different. Samuel shall not choose this king. God sends him out to anoint His chosen sight unseen. And we quickly see why. People are fearful when Samuel shows up, fearful of Saul’s wrath now that Samuel stands against him, and likely fearful of Samuel himself, who has a zealot’s knack for sudden violence.

Note that the prophet instantly starts making the same mistake he’s made before. He’s convinced that he knows whom God must have chosen: the biggest, the tallest, the handsomest, surely this is the Lord’s anointed. But he’s wrong. God has not chosen the elder, stronger sons of Jesse. He has chosen the littlest: the one so young and so preoccupied with his chores that Jesse has not bothered to present him. Jesse’s youngest boy is busy herding his sheep—which is significant, given how many Ancient Near Eastern kings likened themselves to shepherds.

This of course is David, who for all his flaws remains the greatest and most beloved king of the entire Hebrew Bible. More ink has been spilled in the Old Testament over Moses and David than over almost everyone else combined. For now he is a boy—a shepherd, for heaven’s sake—but God has seen his heart. And God has chosen him not for his might or his wealth but for his faith, for his love.

Samuel chose Saul for all the wrong reasons, and likely rejected him for wrong reasons as well. But now he shall not judge by appearance or status or stature. Now shall this brutal Bronze Age warrior swallow his pride and anoint a small boy as his king. This is done through Samuel, in spite of Samuel. This here is done, at last, by the Lord.

So what should we as Christians take from this sordid, savage tale of 3000 years ago? Well, first up, I think we should be discerning when we read the will of God into ancient texts. If the scribe of Samuel’s book was uncomfortable attributing to God the bloody motivations of both the religious and secular leaders of his own day—for Prof. Joel Baden of Yale has argued that the core of Samuel holds all the hallmarks of a true eyewitness account—then surely we, in the 21st century, ought to reject any authority in Church or State who uses religion to justify cruelty. In Abraham’s own words, shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?

The Rabbis and the Church Fathers were generally so shocked by the treatment of the Amalekites in Scripture that they interpreted the whole thing allegorically: that the Amalekites must represent not external enemies but internal sins. For the service of God no half-hearted warfare will do, no reservation of our best and favorite sins for ourselves, as did Saul. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! The thing we hate in the text is the thing we hate in us.

Indeed, the entire Book of Samuel, not to mention the whole of the Hebrew Bible, undermines assumptions of power persistent to this day. We still want the strong man, the tall man, the handsome man. We still want kings and armies and swords. We would much rather see the innocent suffer and die than ever we would allow for our enemies to escape from our vengeance. Behind all the euphemisms—drone strike, collateral damage, capital punishment—are we really so different from Samuel?

God, rather, cares for the heart. He chooses the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved; the younger brother, the shepherd, the immigrant, for don’t forget that David is of Moabite blood as well. Might means nothing to God; it simply does not impress. But righteousness—real righteousness, not just swinging the sword like a maniac—that’s in short supply, whether we’re talking about 1021 BC, or 2021 AD. Not that David’s perfect, mind you. He too one day will fail, spectacularly so.

Yet from his line, by grace of God, shall come the Prince of Peace: true Shepherd, true King, and true Lord. So that even from this game of thrones, so grisly and so cruel, God’s Word extracts true grace for us, no matter what we do. The violence of the Bible is not a bug but a feature: it allows us to be honest about the violence of our world, in our own age. And it assures us that no matter how bad things get or how we may sin, God is ever faithful, and powerful to save.

Next week: David meets Goliath. Best buckle up.

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