David
David
I Samuel 16:1-13
The old saying is, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It comes from a letter written in the mid-nineteenth century from Lord Acton to an Anglican bishop regarding the pope. The next thought, which almost no one ever quotes is this: “Great men are almost always bad men.”
I re-read the Iliad a week ago. It is the story of great men who are all terribly flawed. Odysseus is so in love with his own intellect. Agamemnon has an eye for the ladies. Achilles is brilliant on the battlefield but a hot mess everywhere else. Again and again, the Greeks tell us about heroes with tragic flaws, heroes who abuse women, heroes who horde wealth, heroes who offend the gods in every where imaginable. Several thousand years before Lord Acton, in their own words and through their powerful stories, they tell us that great men are almost always bad men.
The Bible really tells us pretty much the same tale, over and over again, too. There are people who do amazing things, who rise and act on faith. However, all those heroes of faith are broken human beings, all except Christ, himself. Remember…Moses, after confronting Pharaoh, after leading the people out of slavery and across the parted Red Sea, after shepherding them through the wilderness for forty years, Moses doesn’t get to go into the promised land because…he was corrupt. He kept something for himself after a battle and everything gained in battle was supposed to go to God. He used his power for personal gain.
Generally, in the Bible, the downfall of every hero almost always starts with what your therapist might call an “I statement.” In particular, the statement is, “I want…” And…whatever it is that this particular “hero” wants, what underlies the statement is, “I deserve.” “They owe me…”. “God owes me…”. Power leads people to feel entitled and entitled people are a danger to themselves and others.
Last week, I introduced you to King Saul. Saul became a king because of a collective act of “We want” on the part of the people. What they wanted was a king, someone who would fight their fights. (Of course, kings, or people who act like they are kings always send others into battle.) They wanted a king who would provide for them. (Of course, kings are always about the business of taking from their subjects.) They wanted a king who would care for them. (Of course, what the king will care most about is taking your sons and turning them into his disposable soldiers and taking your daughters and using them for his own pleasure.)
The people wanted a king and they got King Saul. (It’s hard for me to imagine that God and the prophet Samuel didn’t pick Saul with more than a little knowledge of what a nightmare he would be, “We’ll show you people!”) Saul was a haunted person. He was mentally ill long before anyone had any notion of mental illness. He could be ruthless. He had no idea what he was doing. It was just a matter of time until the story of King Saul took a nasty turn. The thing was he took the same nasty turn as Moses—greed led him to take something for himself that should have gone to God.
(Just as an aside, here. It’s always interesting to me that when really poor people are caught in the wake of an earthquake or some other natural disaster and they have no food, we say that they are “looting” when they go into a store to get what they need to survive. On the other hand, when someone is super rich and they figure out some way to break the rules to become exponentially more wealthy, at a cost to society (think of opioids here) or at a cost to the people who work for them (think of big oil here who had their best quarterly profits ever while we paid over $5.00 at the pump) we think they are clever and wise and savvy businessmen and women. I’m just saying…)
Back to Saul…So King Saul who could have anything and anyone he wanted— but just give God what belongs to God—does what an awful lot of greedy people do. He takes the one thing he can’t have. After all, what’s the point of having absolute power if you can’t have absolutely anything and anyone that you want?
If there is a corollary lesson that walks “hand in hand” with the notion that power corrupts, it is this: no one ever gets away with anything, not in the long run. You might get away with something for a while but if someone else knows, the games already over because people really can’t keep secrets. Even if no one else knows, you do and that knowledge will eat away at you. Even if you have no soul and no conscience, God still knows.
I don’t think Saul had much of a soul or a conscience. What he had instead was a prophet who called him out. What he had was a God who knew about his greed. And, as soon as God finds out, the clock is ticking on Saul’s rule. The thing is that what Saul may have lacked in soul or conscience he made up for in paranoia. He knows he’s in trouble. He can feel it coming. This knowledge just makes him crazier than ever.
As our text unfolds, Samuel is moping. We should pause there. Who hasn’t moped and wallowed in the disappointment of running into yet another example of a human being who has been corrupted. It’s the person who just used the little bit of power they’ve been entrusted with to have an affair or to claim someone else’s work as their own or to grab some material possession. It’s the never-ending screaming match back and forth across the aisle that the other side’s leaders are corrupt which is true in both directions, which is the result of a system that puts those leaders in a position where they have to constantly fundraise and so are readily available for purchase. It’s you on a bad day knowing that you failed miserably to be who you might have been on a better day. It’s hard not to just get cynical but our job, it turns out, isn’t to be saints. Rather, our job, with God’s help, is to occasionally, every now and then, do something that is not about ourselves but is about helping someone else. Still, sometimes we just need to mope first.
Sooner or later, God or someone who seems suspiciously like they might be acting on God’s behalf, looks us in the eye and says, “Are you done moping now?” After all…what was Samuel expecting? He knew the whole king thing was going to be a problem. He knew that Saul was a hot mess. Likewise, we know what power does to people. We know how self-centered not only the people we don’t like but we, ourselves can be. So, God says, in essence, “Stop acting like you’re all surprised and stop moping. It’s time to pick a new king.”
The only thing worse than having a bad king is having a bad king who knows the clock is ticking. Samuel’s no dummy! When God tells him to fill up his flask with anointing oil and get ready to travel, Samuel says to God, “You know, you’re going to get me killed. If Saul finds out that I’m out picking his successor, he will hunt me down.” God basically says the one thing that none of us want to hear: “Trust me here…” (Who doesn’t have problems with the whole “trust me/follow me” thing, right?)
Where would you go to find a new king? There are a number of tribes to pick from. Ask yourself, who do you think God would pick? Is God going to pick the rich and powerful tribe? No! God never picks the rich and powerful folks. God’s preference is for the poor and the powerless. Why do I say this? Well…I’ve read the book. Over and over again, God picks the “losers” who come from “podunk” places. And sooner or later, those “losers” fall prey to thinking they got picked because they deserved it and the hometown folks from “podunk” places think they’ve got an “in.”
In this case, God and Samuel go to visit Jesse who is kind of a nobody who happens to be from Bethlehem which is a small village in the middle of nowhere. In fact, when Samuel arrives, the village leaders’ first question is, “What’s wrong?” (This is a really funny moment we’ve probably all had when someone important shows up out of nowhere and we think to ourselves, “What did I do?”) In order to cover their tracks, God tells Samuel to bring a cow with him so they can make it look like they’re on some sort of worship tour and Bethlehem is the next stop: “Nothing’s wrong! We’re just here to sing, ‘Kumbaya.” A cow would have been a pretty lavish sacrifice and a real taste treat afterwords, especially for a guy like Jesse who had a lot of sons to feed.
Jesse and all those sons show up for worship. What unfolds is a kind of odd “beauty pageant,” with Jesse and his sons parading past Samuel. Jesse introduces each of his many sons. As each one passes, Samuel whispers to God, “Wow! How about this one? This one seems amazing!” Yet, God just keeps muttering, “Nope…not that one. Keep moving. Next!”
What we can trust is that the sons were being presented in their birth order. Everything in that world turned on being the oldest son. A person’s power in a family diminished with each rung down that ladder where you stood. (Of course, if you were a daughter, you couldn’t even step onto that “ladder” at all.) So, the thing that we might not pick up on in this story is that the original audience, hearing the story, would have been thinking with each passing son’s rejection that this whole trip to Bethlehem was a giant waste of time.This is why it makes sense when Jesse is asked if he has any more sons and he kind of chuckles and says, “Sure…my runt…but he’s out in the fields tending sheep.” Again, we have to pause and realize the power of what’s being said here. Anyone hearing the story would have known that David was, in fact, going to be the most beloved king that Israel would ever have—a warrior, a musician, a judge, a writer and poet, and one darn fine looking man! However, who he was, form the start, was “the runt,” a total afterthought. Again, this is the story of how God works. God chooses the slaves, the runts, the overlooked and ignored. You would think that when we look to pick a leader, we might keep this in mind…
Immediately, God sees David and says to Samuel, “Get out your flask and anoint this kid. Samuel, say, ‘Hello,’ to the next king!” Later, people would think David was picked because of the whole Goliath thing. Later, people would think that David was picked because of his other skills or good looks. That’s not the story here. As the parade of sons is unfolding, God says this to Samuel: “Looks aren’t everything. Don’t be impressed with his looks and stature…God judges persons differently than humans do. Men and women look at the face; God looks into the heart.” A lot of people will eventually love David for what’s on the outside. God loves David first and foremost for what’s in his heart.
Imagine a world where we chose leaders that way, where the question isn’t “What’s in it for me,” but “What’s in this person’s heart?” Do they have integrity? Are they able to make hard choices? Is there any sense of humility in that heart of theirs? Are they holding power in order to care for others or is that power just a means to enrich themselves. Eventually, power will corrupt even David. However, the man started with his heart in the right place.