Jun 11 | King Jesus: Summer 2018 Preaching Series, Part 1

Having been left in charge of St. Margaret’s while the rector was on sabbatical for the summer, I decided to start a preaching series as we journey through the saga of the kings of Israel. My first one was preached June 10th, 2018. The series will continue through August 26th and will be shared in full here.

This week’s citations:

1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14–15

Mark 3:20–35

Being as how this is Heidi’s last Sunday before her sabbatical, you might wonder why she’s not up here, as you’re going to be tired of hearing my voice by the end of the summer.

Well, Heidi wanted to spend her last Sunday with our children, and it’s the perfect way for us to begin a special journey through the summer months while Heidi is away.

See, I noticed that the lectionary readings take us through the story cycle of the monarchy in Israel, starting with the call of Samuel and moving through the coronations of Saul, David, and Solomon. We don’t always have the time to link story cycles together the way we can in the summertime when that whole long green and growing time stretches out before us.

So I thought, starting today and ending August 26^th, where the cycle ends, we could talk about kings – and not just kings, but leaders of any kind, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And if that sounds just awful to you, well, on July 15^th I’ll be away, so you can hear my dear friend Rev. Paula Porter Leggett talk about something else.

We began our story cycle with the birth of Samuel from barren Hannah, and last week we heard about the call of Samuel and that emperor of awkward moments where Eli says to his protégé, “Well, what did God say? Did he say anything about me and my sons?”

“Ummmmmmmm…”

Things aren’t looking good for Eli, but I like to think that Samuel got his first piece of real wisdom from Eli’s reaction to the news, which was quiet acceptance of God’s will. It couldn’t have been a surprise to poor Eli, right?

What the Eli and Samuel story sets up for our journey can redeem the image of kingship for those of us who find it uncomfortable, something we’re going to come back to again and again:

God is not a monarch like any other monarch we’ve seen before. God overturns every assumption on its head, and I think this makes the image of the kingdom something worth reclaiming.

So let’s begin our journey.

Something really fascinating about the First Samuel passage is that it’s been cut up into pieces. We don’t get the first two verses and there’s a giant chunk taken out of the middle – we jump from Chapter 8 to Chapter 11. Those first two verses are a significant subtraction, because we learn that, like Eli, Samuel has two corrupt deadbeat sons. It’s the writer’s signal to us that Israel still has all the same challenges it ever did. I love the Hebrew Bible for this refreshing honesty.

Anyway, seeing that Samuel’s boys are a wash-out as successors, the elders come to Samuel and say, perhaps more plainly than he would like, “You’re old and your sons do not follow in your ways.” In Hebrew they start with “Hine,” which the King James Version translates as “Behold,” but which is more actually translated as “Hey!” or “Look here!” It’s rude, but maybe they felt they didn’t have time for civility. They want to be like other nations, to have a king.

But this is God’s chosen nation. They are not meant to be like other nations. They are meant to absorb them, or graft them onto themselves.

Then they add insult to injury by saying they want someone to lead them in battle! Who’s been leading them in battle this whole time?! God has been fighting for them since the Exodus!

God’s annoyance might make more sense to us now, but what’s amazing is God’s response. People like to talk about how the God of the Hebrew Bible is all fire and brimstone, cruelty and jealousy, but far more often you will find this God, who says, “They can have a king, but it’s going to turn out poorly. Make sure they understand that,” and then follows that up with as much meddling as She can get away with.

And so the huge chunk taken out of the middle of the passage tells us how Saul came to be the first king of Israel. It involved a lot of cheeky maneuvering by God and Samuel – choosing him ahead of time through the machinations of a servant boy, staging an event where it looks like he was chosen by lot, documenting the rules of kingship as a safety net, the possession of Saul by the Holy Spirit to lead an army to liberate a lowly tribe (which of course brings out the isolationists who get angry with Saul for risking their lives for these lowlifes), and finally a formal coronation.

Strangely enough, next week’s passage leaves out another huge chunk of text. We go straight to the selection of David and bypass most of the rest of the Saul story. What we miss is that Saul, after doing so well at the beginning, almost immediately drops the ball and begin to first ignore the will of God and then to abuse his power.

So God tried Her best – don’t give Her all the flack!

This story shows us not only the boundless love of a God who truly is like a parent, letting us make mistakes while trying to mitigate the consequences as best She can, but the shortcomings of earthly authority. When Samuel warns the people of the consequences of monarchy, he lists war and stolen labour. Back then, one’s children working for the king was not something to celebrate. Any work they did for him was work that didn’t benefit their own family – some errant chunks of Marxism in our morning Scripture, hey?

All of Samuel’s and God’s objections to monarchy are rooted in a belief that for its time was truly radical: that equating an earthly king with the divine patron of the nation, a belief nearly universal across the ancient Near East, was idolatry. Only God was worthy of ultimate obedience, and that obedience should never be divided.

And yet, human beings constantly choose division of allegiance, over and over.

So how does this relate to our Gospel story?

Jesus explains that division of allegiance leads to destruction. A kingdom divided cannot stand. The worst thing about that truth is that it’s true for good and for ill. The undivided kingdom of God would be a kingdom where all flourish because we would love God and our neighbour. And the undivided kingdom of fascism and totalitarianism, while cruel, also tends to be a pretty high-functioning one. Dictators know that when you erase all alternatives to power, getting people to sacrifice their lives is a lot easier.

Jesus also shows us that there are social consequences to choosing allegiance to God alone. His family is embarrassed and tries to restrain him, or in the Greek, control him. It should be noted that there is a translation error – although the English suggests that people in the crowd are saying Jesus has gone out of his mind, the Greek suggests that this is actually spoken by his family. They don’t understand what he’s doing. And the scribes, justly frightened of acts that could lead to punishment from Rome, the great Empire, disavow his work as demonic.

But we also learn that life is there for those who choose God. I think of the sound of a hundred voices singing, “Courage, my friends, you do not walk alone” as water protectors on Burnaby Mountain were being arrested. I think of the wormwood branches that my friend Pastor Brian gave me, branches which to me looked quite dead, but planted in new earth are indeed beginning to sprout anew.

The structure of monarchy calls for undivided hearts. Knowing our frailties, God chose to embody this fully in the person of Jesus Christ, a model for a king truly worthy of undying devotion: a brown poor oppressed king, who feeds people not by co-opting the labour of the poor but by offering up his own flesh and blood; who served us not by demanding accolades but by healing without cost; who was exalted not through war but through ultimate surrender at the hands of a hostile state, only to once again lay claim to our allegiance by conquering not Empire but death.

That’s the only kind of king worth kneeling to.

We’ll talk about this more next week.

For now, let’s prepare to receive his gifts, free for the taking.

Let all who hunger come and be filled.