Samuel
Samuel
I Samuel 8:1-22
Here’s one of the secrets of life. In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.” It’s true!Think about it.
You were a baby once, without a care in the world, other than trying hard to trust that the grown ups would clean you and feed you and hold you and move you as needed. You didn’t know how good you had it so you messed up. You started to crawl and walk and move yourself. You picked up a fork or a spoon and began the lifelong project of feeding yourself. You had it made, but you moved on. Maybe you had an older brother or sister and you just wanted to be like them…
Later you were a child. Still your worries were few and far between. You played with your friends out in the yard until your mother called you in for dinner. You had to go to school and, boy, that seemed like such a burden, but, in fact, your mind was coming alive and you learned to read and add and subtract. Still, the people who really defined your world were your family and if you were lucky…and I know some people weren’t—that family loved you
Again, though, you moved on. Your parents began to annoy you and they actually expected you to do things they asked you to do and maybe even expected you to just see things that needed to be done and do them all on your own. (“Geesh…such expectations!”). You paid more attention to your friends and you realized that your parents were kind of embarrassing. Maybe you had an older friend who was well on their way to having their own life. Maybe you decided that you just wanted to be like them.
Most of us can tell the story of our lives in chapters. As we look back, we tell the story of those previous years fondly because now we realize how good we had it back then. At the time, though, we thought things were overwhelming and hard. We looked until we found someone who showed us where to go next, someone who we wanted to be like.
Do you remember when you were in college and you got your course assignments at the beginning of the term and you realized, ‘Oh, my God! I have to write three papers in the next four months!’ You thought that was just such a burden! Maybe you had a job and had to work like 8 hours a week! Maybe you had one bill to pay, too—every month! The real drag, though was that if you wanted to eat, you had to go to the cafeteria and pick from the myriad of choices that someone else had prepared for you that were just waiting for you to arrive. Then, one day, you saw someone who had a real job and you knew, right away, that you wanted to be like them.
Again… “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.” (You tell ‘em, Joni!) Do you remember the day when you realized how little vacation time you were going to have now that you had a job? Do you remember how huge your rent payment seemed to be? Do you laugh now when you realize how cheap that apartment was? Do you sigh to yourself when you remember how simple life still was then? You didn’t have children or a spouse or a lawn or a garden or really much of a care in the world. But you looked until you found someone who did and you decided to be like them.
My point is not that you messed up and chose to grow up. Good for all of us grown ups! We all hope, I’m sure, that we’ve also gotten better at appreciating what we have while we have it: time with family and friends; a roof over our heads; reasonably good health (which we appreciate because, by now, most of us have spent some time in something other than great health.) Even something like the pandemic can make us better at appreciating things—like doing things we haven’t done for a while and having those things be “wonderfully normal.”
My point is this: being a human being is an insecure thing. We rarely have a great grasp on where we are in our lives or all the things that are good or all the things that aren’t worth our time and energy. Instead, we have this ability to feel “nostalgic” about where we’ve been in life and an imagination that is wild enough that we can conjure a thousand different scenarios for the future. It’s so tempting to skip the present and jump ahead. Someone crosses are path who seems like they have things figured out. We think to ourselves, “I’ll just follow them! It sure looks like it’s working for them!” Generally, though, we pay a price every time we try to skip over the hard work of learning what we need to learn.
Our ancestors in faith went through a very similar struggle. At God’s behest, one day, Moses announces to Pharaoh that it’s time for the slaves to go free. So, let’s get this straight…these people, who had a truly terrible existence, whom no one cared about, found out one day that God cared about them. That’s an amazing day, right? It’s just like the day when we were at the end of our rope and someone cared about us. It’s just like the day when we felt so worthless and then some “special someone” walked into your life and said, “I care about you.”
Moses does what it takes with God’s help to get those people out of Egypt and almost immediately, they want to go back. Why? Because being in the wilderness was so much less secure than being a slave: “At least we knew where we were going to sleep and what we were going to eat!” God and Moses and their “daily bread” provided for them were hardly enough. They could only think about what they missed and what they feared was ahead. Can you imagine that? Of course we can! We’re human, too!
When they get to the “Promised Land,” which happened to be someone else’s home (but that’s a sermon for another day!), they had arrived. It was the “land of milk and honey.” For a while, they set up life in tribes, with judges to help them make good choices, and God at the center of everything. They settled in and built a life for themselves and at first they felt so blessed…until they didn’t. People relied on the guidance of the wisest people among them. Then, they got tired of that and kind of decided to do whatever they felt like doing. People relied on God’s presence until they got comfortable enough that they sort of forgot about God because…their “daily bread?”…now it was going to come from their own gardens.
Eventually, things got corrupt enough, and the sons of the wise judges turned out to be not nearly as wise, and things just didn’t feel right. So…the answer they came up with? It wasn’t to renew their faith or their commitment to live a just life in community or to live gratefully. No…those answers would just be so… “yesterday.” What they decided was that they needed to be like everyone else. All the other nations had kings. They wanted a king of their own. The king would take care of them and make things right for them. The king would “jazz things up” and make life interesting again. The king would protect them from whatever the future might hold. The king would make all their decisions for them (which seemed like such a good idea at the time!)
Samuel was the greatest of the judges in the time before there was a king. He was the person that the people went to with their request: “Give us a king to govern us!” From the moment that he heard that request, Samuel hated the idea. He knew that the people just wanted to be like everyone else and that in achieving that dream they would be diminished and then actually become like everyone else. He felt like they were rejecting him. When he complained to God, God pointed at that they were actually rejecting God. Why worry about God when you can have a king? In essence, they would make the king, God. And like a loving parent who knows sometimes your kids need to make mistakes, God gave the people the freedom to make a bad choice: “Give them what they want.”
Then, Samuel tried to reason with the people…
“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves and the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And on that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.”
Again…our ancestors were so human. They were so us. It’s not hard for me to remember all the things that I’ve tried to turn into God: my father; at least a half a dozen girlfriends; a full compliment of athletes and musicians; an occasional politician; several mentors, a few beloved places. For a while, it was so nice to be so clear about what it was that I worshiped! Then, the costs of treating things that were less than God as if they were God became clear, over and over again. It’s just so much power to give away. It gives someone else so much control over you. After the initial relief that someone or something else was going to carry the weight of the world, it never took long for things to start getting crushed: hopes, dreams, me, the other person, and on and on.
What did the people get? They got a king—Saul—who, it turned out was nobody’s notion of a god. The man was likely bipolar in today’s diagnostic categories. He could be drunk on power and wildly paranoid. He could be paralyzed with depression. He did all the things that Samuel had warned a king would do to the people and then he came up with a few wrinkles of his own. When it came to actually letting go of power, well, the man just could not let it go.
Our ancestors never knew how great they had it when God was their king until one day they woke up with Saul on the throne. Again, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.” And it was gone… They had once been God’s chosen people—a ragtag bunch of former slaves wandering in the wilderness. Now, they were just like every other nation, led by leaders who lived to exploit their power.