The first reading was not recorded. Sorry. The recording begins with the special music.
Psalm 20; 1 Samuel 9:1-10, 15-21, 10:1a
June 20, 2021
- The beginning of Israel’s Kings
I do not remember the day that I realized my parents were only human, that they did not have everything worked out and that they did not know everything, that they made mistakes, but we all have that day that we realize those who are caring for us are (as I like to say) “making all of this up as we go along.” We would like to think we have the answers and the direction and wisdom, but if we are honest with ourselves, we are basically doing the best we can and trying to stay afloat. I have been open with my own children, telling them that we as parents are just doing our best but are basically trying to figure things out each day as we go along. It is a little humbling to admit that, but it is also freeing. Who wants to live under the pressure of always having to make the right decisions and never making mistakes?
This idea plays beautifully into this passage from 1 Samuel 9 when the prophet Samuel is tasked with having to find and groom the first Jewish King, the person who will be charged with the impossible task of ruling directly for God. Last week we considered the passage that made this passage necessary: the people of Israel demanded a king to be like the other nations, someone to rule them and provide for them in the flesh. Even though this was a rejection of God and Samuel, God agreed to their demands, and we are about to get that very human king. The storytelling in this is intriguing. You have the young man Saul searching for his father’s missing donkeys in this divinely guided quest that brings him to Samuel.
Right off the bat, you have some very interesting context for Saul – he is rich, very handsome, very tall, and a Benjaminite. The writer wants us to really be aware of these details. This is how Saul is presented to us, but how much of that matters in his qualifications to be king? None of it! The fact that he is from the tribe of Benjamin might be the most interesting, since it is the smallest of the tribes as Saul points out. God likes to pull people we would not expect to answer the call to serve, but the other qualities overshadow this. He is rich and tall and gorgeous. This is movie star material. It seems like he is being chosen based on his acceptability or public appeal. For thousands of years, we have preferred leaders who are charismatic and good looking and strong and who say the right things. Anyone with a pretty face can get up there and probably get us interested since we are drawn to leaders who make a good appearance. Even though wealth can come from many sources (honest or dishonest), appearance is an accident of birth or cosmetic surgery these days, and the show of strength can easily be a show, these things stand out as what we choose in a leader. The same back then.
What is more telling is that once Saul goes looking for his donkeys, he has little self-direction. Notice who moves the action of the story, Saul’s servant. He is the one with the answer, who becomes the authority for Saul. Saul defers to him and HE follows the SERVANT! The servant also is the one with the gift for Samuel. Wealthy Saul has to depend on his servant. This is actually a routine for Saul. If you read the stories about him through 1 Samuel, you will notice that his underlings are regularly the ones with the ideas and answers for Saul. Often he just does what others tell him to do. Saul is underwhelming as an “ideas” man or as a leader. He is NOT strong king material, more like mediocre material, at best. He would have been a better Secretary of Transportation or of the Interior.
Yet Saul is chosen as the one to save the Israelites from the Philistines and other neighboring peoples who are causing problems for them. He is going to be their first-ever king and will have some success, especially in the beginning of his reign, but that will be greatly overshadowed by his inevitable failure. In the end, he commits suicide rather than be taken captive by the Philistines. Even then, he asks help of his servant to end his life.
What I am taking from this passage today, however, goes back to my initial point that in life we are basically making this up as we go along. Saul does not know what he is doing. Even Samuel does not really know what he is doing. None of us do. This goes for all fathers and mothers. I know today is a day when we are supposed to honor the gift of fathers, and hopefully, you have good examples to honor, but there are plenty of people who do not have that gift. We are human and make mistakes. Even the ones that God calls for very special purposes fail, and we have to live with those consequences.
If you remember last week, God prophesied that the road to having a king was going to be very bumpy and a problem for the people. They would regret the day they asked for a king. Despite the fact that God was giving them a king, this was not going to be a “happy-ever-after” story. Although they were getting a king and God was providing, even the best was going to fall far short. Why would God put the people through all of that? Why couldn’t God just provide the perfect king who would give them the kind of consistent and constant godly leadership they would need? I expect that just asking the question gave you the answer.
There is no right person, truly godly answer, or perfect choice. God is doing God’s best with what there is to work with – which is us. Some of this is reflected in Psalm 20. May God help; may God provide; may God answer; may God send help; may God remember; may God help the leadership, God’s anointed, the King. That is our prayer because it needs to be our prayer. In God’s perfect wisdom, we have a world that makes us turn back to God because it shows us our need for God. There are no other saviors, no other redeemers, no other gods. We will never find the kind of help we really want or need in human hands, but we can still find the help we need when God works with us and through us.
I am going to guess that at some point in your life you have been a help to someone else in a way that you did not expect or you received that kind of help from someone else. This can work the other way also, of course, when we hurt others without realizing it or intending to, but the good grace of our Lord enables us to share in real, meaningful, life-changing love in ways that go far beyond what we think possible.
In the 1970s, a holocaust survivor named Hilde Back was living in Sweden and working as a preschool teacher. She decided to sponsor a child from Africa and ended up finding a young Kenyan boy named Chris Mburu. School for him in those days was only for those who could pay. Her few dollars every month gave him that gift. He finished school and was so impressed by her support that he wanted to honor it by furthering his education. He made it to Harvard Law School and ended up working for the United Nations as a human rights advocate. Still, Chris wanted to do more and created a fund named for his benefactor whom he had never met called the Hilde Back Education Fund which would support young people who wanted to be educated in his home country. He was eventually able to find Hilde and bring her to Kenya to show her the fruit of what she had started. This gets even better. An American woman, who was in Kenya attending university because her parents were there working in the Peace Corps, met Chris’s cousin in college and found out about what had happened. She made a documentary about the story which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Once others saw this movie, A Small Act, the Education Fund received more than a quarter of a million dollars from people who witnessed what the grace of God could do through human hands.
We should be careful not to lose the good work of God in a world that swallows up expressions of kindness and love and compassion. It is even easy for us to reject genuine Christian hospitality for our desires of what is not Christ. When we chase what looks good or is appealing or is glamorous, we might easily skip over what is right. Even though Saul began as God’s choice, that choice soon changed as he followed his own heart over God’s will. That is actually the backdrop for next week’s sermon. Saul went from being God’s good man to being a great regret.
For now, I’m still grateful that a life full of mistakes still gives us opportunities to make the world a better place. Saul lost sight of this, but we do not have to. He failed to see his failure as anything but failure with no room for redemption. He lost sight of the humility of faith that should have carried him through his time as king. Saul did not know how to work in a world that was too big for him. My guess is that he had always been able to get by on his family, his face, and his appeal. On the other hand, while we do not have all the answers, if we invest ourselves in the work of God right here around us, the Spirit of God will do more and even greater things than we think possible. God will bring good when we seek to be that good in the world.
No one here is worthy of the place we have as God’s beloved, nor are we even good enough to be a church in the body of Christ, but God has brought us here exactly for this and given us this place in the world. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We will undoubtedly have failures, but as we give ourselves to better and better expressions of faithful love, God will do greater things than we could ever do alone. We will walk by faith and not by sight, appealing to God’s gracious love, especially in our failings, and as we continue serving our Lord in Spirit and in Truth, God will bless us more and more to be the church Jesus is calling us to be. To God be the glory. Amen.