Transcript
That is how you want the atmosphere to sound like when you’re getting ready to speak. My goodness, thank you all so much and peace to you all. I hope you all are well.
It is so wonderful to be here with you all today. I’m grateful to Pastor Somerville for the invitation and to you all for the hospitality. You know, everything pointing out where the restrooms are.
Oh, you know, just it’s the details, you know. This morning I want to talk with you a how our choices reveal us. Our text today provides an insight into this challenge of the human condition.
This is something everyday, something simple, something you observe on an everyday basis. Someone is doing something that is beyond your comfort zone. It’s beyond the menu of options that you would normally select from, especially if you were given the same circumstances.
Perhaps it’s the sort of observation that has made you say to yourself or maybe even to other witnesses, well, that was a choice. You make this observation as you see folks who put together something with their clothes and you say to yourself, you would have never put that color combination together. You go to the store and you say, man, I would never put those toppings on a sandwich.
You’re all stuck in traffic and you’re like, who puts those bumper stickers on their car? All of these choices and these choices, in spite of the degree of our outside judgment, are relatively innocuous. People are within their right to do what they choose to do as long as they’re not hurting no one else, right? After all, let us be reminded of the Apostle Paul’s words to the Church of Philippi to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Yet I offer to you this morning that our choices not only reveal our identities, they also demonstrate an understanding of who our source is.
Our choices tell on us in that way. Let us know what we really care about, what we really rely on. Now, I’m not talking about the sort of dramatic for others’ attentions choices.
I’m not talking about virtue signaling where you say, essentially, come look at how good I look. No, I’m not talking about those kinds of choices. I’m talking about the choices that seem insignificant, the choices that we make every day that really hold our lives together, those sorts of details in our lives.
So much attention is given to the choices that look grand and are sort of like broad brush choices. But I’ve come to believe that the important decisions are those everyday decisions. Those decisions that are tantamount to an artist using a fine brush and paying attention to every single detail.
So yes, we may find success in our occupations. We may be well respected in our communities. But it’s those details, like how do we treat people when no one’s watching? How do the decisions that we make reveal who we love? In our text today, we get a sense of the tension of people wanting to do their own thing and what it looks like when God shows us who we truly love.
I’m fascinated by the way this chapter starts. This chapter begins with the people, the elders in the community criticizing Samuel’s sons. And before I go any further, I just want to publicly thank my sons today for not providing an illustration for how Samuel’s sons were behaving.
I appreciate those fellows. But I’m intrigued by the beginning of this chapter because it parallels the behavior we see with Samuel’s sons with, if you’re looking back at 1 Samuel chapter 2, the behavior of Eli’s sons. In chapter 2, Eli the priest had two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, who were also priests, but they were, as the text describes, scoundrels.
Not the sort of adjective you want to ascribe to your priest. They took advantage of the people making sacrifices. These were irreverent men.
They defiled the offerings of the Lord. They looked at every single person who came to make a sacrifice as an opportunity to get over on someone. It was just like playing three-card money to them.
It made no difference. They were going to take advantage of someone that day. Samuel’s sons are also described as dishonest.
Samuel’s sons take bribes. Samuel’s sons perverted justice. So when you look at Eli’s sons, you look at Samuel’s sons, we see this horrible tradition of the sons of priests who become priests making terrible decisions, leading people into their own selfish games, leading people into whatever scam they could think of.
Clearly terrible qualities for leadership. And the elders say just as much to Samuel, but they use the fallibility of Samuel’s sons as an opportunity to really get what they want. They say, this is why we’re demanding a king.
This obviously isn’t working anymore. Your sons can’t do what you do, Samuel. We need a new model.
Now, I think this is a great time to park the bus and really talk about the importance of decision-making when you’re a leader. See, leaders are not thermometers. Leaders don’t just reflect the temperature in the room.
I believe that leaders are thermostats. Leaders set the temperature. So if a leader is promoting righteousness, people are going to follow because righteousness is now the trend.
Righteousness is now the expectation. And conversely, when leaders choose to live like God does not exist, or leaders fashion themselves as malevolent gods within the sphere of their own influence, they have now set the temperature for all sorts of moral decay. It now becomes fashionable, under such leadership, to hate your neighbor if your leaders are hateful.
It becomes acceptable under such leadership to mock the poor if your leader’s imaginations regarding the poor stops and is stifled only at draconian policies. Leaders’ imaginations can’t mature past charity into an imagination of justice. We’re so interested in feeding the poor, we’re not interested in asking, why are the poor hungry? This becomes a real issue.
And it’s not just something we can lay at the feet of our leaders, because we do indeed have personal responsibility. But we also have a personal responsibility to remind our leaders, and if we are leaders, to remind ourselves that we must live like God is watching, because God sees, God knows, and God cares about how we treat each other, particularly how we treat those whom Howard Thurman described as living with their backs against the wall. This text gives us a lens, provides us a mirror to look at what life looks like when we try to lead ourselves.
In this text, God’s people are experiencing geopolitical FOMO. They do not want to be left out of the cool trend, the hip thing to do called kingdoms. Samuel is upset about this.
He’s furious, heartbroken, devastated by this. But interestingly, the Lord tells him, do what the people have asked you to do. God assures Samuel, you’re not the one being rejected in this situation.
It’s easy to understand why Samuel would take this personally. They just criticized his parenting and his leadership. I can understand why he’d be so hurt.
But God is telling him, this is not an assessment on your leadership as much as it is a rejection of God’s leadership. The people of Israel asking for a king in this story is not too dissimilar to when you asked your parents to go to a party because you thought everyone was going to be there. If you really want to stretch the analogy, you can imagine the people of Israel like teenagers doing everything but slamming their bedroom door and pouting.
In truth, we can relate to this sort of sentiment. We can relate to this sort of desire to do whatever we feel like. I believe we have a temper tantrum going on in our culture too.
But living in this country means that instead of waiting for the party invitation, we are the ones that send out the party invitations. And the question remains, because of all the resource, all the power, all the influence that we hold in the world, what kind of party are we going to have? Will we have a party where children can thrive regardless of which zip code they live in? Will we have a party where elders do not have to choose between taking their medicine or taking food from the store? Will we have the kind of party where all people can thrive? The question remains, the choice is there for us to make. What kind of party will we have? And we’re in this temper tantrum where we know the kind of party God is calling us to have.
But empire says to us, no, that kind of party is too expensive. No, that kind of party is going to cost us what we have. God is calling us, inviting us, searching for us to have this kind of party where we can proclaim good news to the poor.
Have the kind of party where we bind up the broken hearted. Have the kind of party where we proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind. We have been invited to host the sort of party where we set the captive free.
The kind of party that proclaims the year of the Lord’s favor. But time and time again, we reject this party and we choose to party with the empire. We choose to party with oppression.
We party in this myth of scarcity when God has clearly invited us to party in abundance. And Samuel lets the people know exactly what they’re asking for. He does not allow them to live in the mythology and the myth-making, the lies that we often tell ourselves when we know we’re making the best decision.
So Samuel tells them exactly what kings are like. Samuel lays out a series of exploitations. Samuel tells them that kings take your sons to become horsemen.
Kings take your daughters as perfumers. Kings will take the best of their fields. And the people will cry out to the Lord.
The Lord will let them live in their decision. So while the party of empire may be live, the party of empire may be happening, it’s jumping, Samuel makes it plain that the empire cannot love you back. And the people hear this scenario, this worst case scenario, and still they choose a king.
They still reject Samuel’s words. They still reject God. And we can relate because we still choose empire.
We know better, but we don’t do better because we think what we want is better. Scripture’s full of moments like this. Full of moments where humanity rejects God.
Moments where humanity chooses instruments of self-sufficiency outside of God, trying to prove that they can do it on their own, that we’ve got it, we don’t need help. So we make many gods of our own. We say wealth will take care of us, even if it’s excess, even if it means a myth of scarcity that takes from other people and says, we can’t share this.
We choose power, even if power means that we have to oppress our neighbors. We choose ourselves, even if it means separation from God. But the wonderful news today is that in spite of these choices, in spite of these active decisions, God’s not through with us.
God is not done with us. God wasn’t done with Israel after they demanded a king. In fact, there were kings, just as Samuel prophesied, who exploited people, but there were also kings through whom the people were blessed.
Kings who led the people to glorify God. And thanks be to God, there is a king that reigns forever. Friends, when I consider God’s tenderness towards us, when I consider the depth of God’s love for us, my mind cannot help but imagine God as this wonderful, cautious parent.
This cautious parent who baby proofs our lives. This loving parent who shields us from things we didn’t even know we were in danger from. Yet with all that care, all that attention to detail, God refuses to helicopter parent us.
God is not one who seeks to entirely insulate us from our decisions. Instead, I found God to be a loving parent that walks with us through all seasons of life. God walks with us through the hills and through the valleys.
God walks with us through our obedience and in our shortcomings. It’s this faithfulness. I love that we sang great is thy faithfulness earlier.
This faithfulness that God has for us. That’s unparalleled. This commitment to us.
This never-letting-go-ness of God. That just stops you in your tracks when you really think about it. Because the truth is that long after empire and in everything we could use to distract ourselves from this calling on our lives, this way that God has made us and called us and fashioned us to be, long after all those things are gone, long after all the sorts of ways we’ve given ourselves importance based on the world’s metric, long after those things are gone, long after the world has turned its back and walks away from us, God remains deeply committed to us.
And would that this commitment, this level of commitment, would kindle in us a commitment to God. Would that this commitment to God would be evidenced by how we love one another. It’s impossible to separate.
Love God, love people. We love because God first loved us. That love that God has given us isn’t just something we get to hold on to as a souvenir.
It’s not some savings that we get to visit and dip into in times of emergency. It’s a love that’s meant to be shared. It’s a love that’s meant to be spilled.
It’s a love that’s messy, doesn’t just keep itself contained. It’s not in short supply. How we live, how we treat one another is important.
God is calling us to be thermostats, uninterested in dominating the temperature, but thermostats that are committed to making the temperature habitable for everyone. So friends, may God be present in our desires. May God be present in our habits.
May God be present in the way we love each other, without exception. Let the presence of the Holy Spirit be evident in our decisions, how we treat each other. Let love be our signature in this world.
Be blessed, my friends. Be encouraged and remember the words of our Savior right before he ascended. Words that demonstrate this commitment we’ve been talking about.
Jesus told his disciples that he would never leave them, nor forsake them, that he’d be with them, even until the end of the age, even now. God bless you. God keep you.
Amen.
