The Turning Point
The Turning Point
I Samuel 8:10-22
If you were to try to tell your life story, chances are that you would talk about turning point moments: “Here was the first teacher who made school come to life for me;” “Here was the day that I picked up a basketball, or my musical instrument, or sang in a choir for the first time;” “Here was my first crush who crushed me” or “Here was the day I met the person that I would one day marry.” Some of the stories we tell might be embarrassing. Some of our stories might be defining moments. Either way, there are moments that we remember forever, that leave us forever changed. There are moments that define us, even if we had no idea how important they were at the time.
I think that there are moments that define groups of people, too: family moments or community moments or national moments. We may not have any idea ahead of time how important the moment will turn out to be but they do define us. It’s the last conversation with a family member before they leave for their new job or before the next child is born or before that beloved family member unexpectedly dies. It’s some community event that brings people together in a way that reminds us that we actually do need one another. It’s the sign that I’ve heard hangs in the FBI headquarters that reads, “Every day is September 12th.” Again, it would be awesome if we were notified ahead of time: “Pay attention! This moment is really going to matter!” Instead, we walk unknowingly into these moments without a clue.
In our text for this morning, our ancestors in faith are in one of those defining, turning point moments. I think this is a kind of turning point moment that we’ve all been in: a moment when we are sure that we know what we want. We are also sure that we know what will happen if we get what we want. The defining thing about this moment, though, is that our expectations are absolutely, 100 percent wrong. It turns out that we’re a lot better at imagining a future than we are at predicting the future.
What our ancestors in faith want is a king. Up until this point in their history, our ancestors believed that God was their leader. Moses came and liberated them and then lead them through the wilderness but Moses was acting on God’s behalf. Joshua led them into the Promised Land but that was because God called him. The judges led the tribes in their early life as a people but the wisdom of those judges came from God. There were human leaders but those leaders were held accountable by a higher power.
The thing about the human leaders was that everyone knew that they were totally human. Moses broke the rules. Joshua was a lot better on a battlefield than he was in the rest of life. The judges eventually were corrupted by their power. Still, on a lot of days, those human leaders were so much more “hands on” than this notion that God was somehow with them. Somehow, the further removed they were from slavery or from wandering the wilderness or having to fight for the Promised Land, the harder it was to muster up all that extra energy to consider God at all.
The people did have one last great judge with them, Samuel. Everyone thought Samuel was a good man and a great leader. He didn’t always say what you wanted to hear but he looked you in the eye when he said it. And, whatever he said he was going to do…it was as good as done. Samuel was going to tell you the truth and then he was going to follow through. This was a man you could trust.
The problem was that Sameul’s two sons were nothing like their father. They were self-centered thieves who put their own interests over anyone else’s. No one was too bothered by this until it dawned on the people that Samuel was getting a little old and wasn’t going to be there forever. What in the world was going to happen when Samuel was gone? If his son’s were terrible people, then who would be their new leader? The people’s anxiety grew stronger. People got more and more insecure, the kind of insecure feeling that might have been there when you were leaving life as a slave behind, the kind of insecurity that might have been there on your first day in the wilderness, the kind of insecurity that might have led the people, in a different time, to turn to God.
That’s not where they were led this time. Instead, faced with this core insecurity—a real question about their future—they decided…to be like everyone else! (Dear God, haven’t we all been there and done that, right?) Instead of reminding themselves of who they were and who’s they were, they decided that they needed a king. Despite all the evidence that even the best leaders were a total piece of work, they decided that they wanted to give absolute power to a human being.
Samuel challenges them: “You know that a king will tax you to death and take your crops and your livestock. You know that a king will turn your sons into soldiers and your daughters into servants, maybe even concubines. You know that a king will turn the world as you know it on it’s head, just to enrich himself.” “Ya…ya,” the people answer, “but the king will ‘fight our battle for us.” (Of course, kings don’t fight battles at all, right?) The people practically start chanting, “We want a king! We want a king!” Samuel, with God’s encouragement, gives the people exactly what they want.
The people never really saw what was coming, even though they had been told. Saul, their first king, was crazy. Pretty much every other king followed suit. The wisest king they ever had foolishly built a temple where God could be further removed from the people’s life. The most beloved king fell in love with another man’s wife and had the husband killed to cover his tracks. The day the people got a king was an absolute turning point.
As I look into 2024, although I also cannot forsee the future, I feel a turning point before us. All sorts of issues are challenging us: economic questions; immigration questions; questions about our role in the world; questions about how we will care for a world in which the climate is clearly changing. Challenging as these issues are, and there are urgent questions we need to answer, we are currently paralyzed by our divisions. We seem to have decided that we would rather attack one another than attack the challenges before us. We’re stuck…and the turning point that’s coming, I’m afraid, is going to raise the possibility that our divisions might get worse.
As we move into 2024, I’m focused on two things: the rise of artificial intelligence and the upcoming election. Not unlike our ancestors in faith, the question is, “Who will lead us?” Not unlike our ancestors in faith, our anxiety and insecurity invite us to try to be like everyone else, to forget who we are and who we’ve been, to find someone or something that will fight our battles for us.
We have to be honest and make the connection between a previous turning point and where we now stand. If you showed footage of folks walking around today staring at their phones to people 30 years ago, people would have asked, “What’s with the slabs in their hands?” It would have made absolutely no sense to anyone.
Those “slabs,” like every other tool, have done incredible things for us and terrible things to us. With a smart phone, we never have to lose track of a friend. We can be available to the people we love. We can have unprecented access to knowledge and news and information. If we get lost, they will help us find our way. If we fall, they will call for help. If we’re bored, they will entertain us.
Of course, they will cost us our privacy, as they collect every scrap of data they can gather. They will refine their quest to keep us spending money by finding the next tempting thing we absolutely “need” to buy. They will realize that what keeps people on line is conflict and shock and they will reward people who promote those things, leading us to say and do things in our seemingly anonymous state that will change how we think about our connections to one another. Trust will be destroyed. Because engagement and likes are the priority, our commitment to the truth will erode.
Let me drive the point home this way. It would be one thing if these changes were only an internet experience. Sadly, the discourse of the internet has come to dominate our public life. The concern about being polite and measuring what we say to one another because we’re going to have to live with one another has given way to making the harshest possible pronouncements and attacking one another because that’s what gets attention, that’s what strength looks like, that’s what “truth” is. Whatever is said over and over again in the loudest way wins. Any willingness to compromise or to cultivate mutual respect or to actually learn from each other are seen as being weak or, perhaps most horrifyingly in our age—as “boring.”
So, now we are adding artificial intelligence into this world of “truth decay” and “trust erosion.” There are a host of good things and bad things that this tool will provide: it will write your college paper for you; it will entertain you even better than the internet; it may eliminate your job. That will be up to all of us as a culture to track and decide which, honestly, we don’t have a great track record of doing. Who among our aging legislators will have the savvy to regulate something this powerful and new?
Here’s the immediate challenge, though. If you have five hundred words of someone speaking, artificial intelligence based tools can create a recording of you saying just about anything. These tools can also make a fairly convincing video of you doing things that you’ve never done, too. So, if someone had an axe to grind with me, A. I. could easily write a sermon that reads like me or a recording that sounds like me or a video of me arguing for or doing something awful. Honestly, though, I don’t matter that much and the people who know me would look and say, “That’s not him. We know him.” They would care to find out the truth.
In the world of internet induced “truth and trust decay,” though, that’s not what will happen. We have been taught to find things that tell us what we want to hear. So, in our upcoming election, which will be unbelievably divisive, each side will be anxious to confirm their biases. Need an audio of the other candidate saying something terrible? Need a speech written that is horrifying? Need video of the other person’s supporters falsifying election results? A. I. will produce those for you. Some of those recordings will come from fellow Americans. Some will come from other nations who’s goal for a long time has to create chaos in our nation.
We need to educate ourselves. We need to do more than just look for what we want to see or hear. We need to turn down our volume and turn to those with whom we disagree and reaffirm that the truth matters, that trust matters, that getting things done actually matters more than grandstanding.
We need to remember who we are: the oldest democracy in the world; a nation with a constitution that we uphold and laws to which we submit; a society in which we never allow any one person or group of people to hold power because we understand what power does to human beings. We need to decipher together what it means be be who we are as we move forward.