In the Eyes of God

As you may remember, for these 5 Sundays of Lent, we’re going to, at least in a broad-brush stroke kind of way, re-tell the overarching story of the first Testament—Hebrew Scripture.

         Where last we left, the people were re-living exodus after exodus
—like some family system that re-plays intergenerational trauma, reacting to things without even knowing the thing is a thing
—the grandfather eats sour grapes, the granddaughter’s teeth are set on edge… 

(I imagine, when this is all over, and even when we’re a couple of generations removed…
 we’ll still have children washing their hands to the theme song of the Golden Girls,
people will be shamed for buying too much Toilet Paper even then,
and hand shaking will be seen as socially unacceptable
—these things stick with a people, we need to be careful about the habits we develop in this time of distress, it’ll hang with us and our children and children’s children)…
In the case of the Hebrews, they would:
forget God,
be defeated,
cry out to God,
and God would send a Judge who would unite the tribes
—a mini-Moses to deliver them… over and over again and again, this pattern.

         And this goes on until the Judge/Prophet Samuel
—he goes through the same Judge cycle with the people,
and then his sons, unjust men that they were, seek to claim his mantle, to become the new Judges over the people… and the people respond by crying out for a king…

         “Make us like every other nation, give us a stable leader who will cut through the uncertainty…”

         Samuel is wroth, he harangues the people:
“You want a king? I’ll show you a king!
They’ll take your young men and conscript them as soldiers, they’ll take a second tithe from you—you’ll give 10% to God and an additional 10% to the King, so that they’ll have fancy courts and all the trappings of the monarchy…”

         And then, strangely, God steps in and says, “Chill… it might feel like they’re rejecting you Samuel, but in fact they’re rejecting me… and yes, they’ll eventually cry out against their king in the same way they used to cry out against their enemies… but that’s how it’ll be.”

         And so began the Israelite experiment in Monarchy. They choose, the first time out, with their eyes, chose in the way humans tend to choose, they chose the biggest tallest man around—Saul!

Let us pray…

         So Samuel anoints Saul
—that is, sets him aside for a particular task
—and then Saul defeats the threats at hand… and things go well, until Saul keeps back some spoils of war and refuses to execute a fellow king—a professional courtesy I suppose…

         And that is where we find Samuel in today’s reading
—as we read of his search for a new King, reluctantly looking at brother after brother, “Ohh, this one is tall too, he’ll do… but no…”
Until the little shepherd David comes along…
God sees something different in him, God sees with eyes unlike those of mortals,
So Samuel secretly anoints him King… even as there is still a king in Israel, Saul.

         Saul, whose house David joins,
Saul who stays back as David defeats Goliath,
Saul whose son and daughter both fall in love with David…
Saul’s story fast becomes one of decline, as David’s story becomes one of flourishing.

         And eventually David is cast out of Saul’s court and exiled from his country
—but continues to rise, even as he joins the ranks of Israel’s enemies
—and then turns on them and becomes King of Israel, anointed a second time, this time in public…
anointed even as he laments the death of Saul’s house
—laments the one whom his heart loved, Saul’s son Jonathan.

         And the northern and southern tribes question if he should be king of the north or the south—and David responds, “Why not both.” And is anointed a third time!

         And David proceeds to centralize power, both religious and political, in Jerusalem, a strange capital in neutral tribal territory
(not unlike our District of Colombia, which isn’t attached to any state).
And God returns the favor, centralizing the throne in the family of David, promising it to them forever…
no more moving the monarchy from family to family… 

         After this, David declines just as Saul did,
there is the infamous rape of Bathsheba and the plague that followed,
the brutal infighting between his 19 sons,
Amnon’s rape of Tamar
and the death of David’s favorite son Absalom
—all this ending with David again lamenting…
David, a king anointed and filled with sorrow…
Anointing and lamenting…

         He is followed by Bathsheba’s son Solomon… his mother gained him the crown by “reminding” an Elderly and confused David of an oath he’d never made
—this unuttered oath was to establish Solomon as King instead of his older brothers… and so it was,
Solomon, the wise—famed for his judgments that touched on the essence of every case at hand
—Solomon the builder, of public works and temples
—building using slave labor, just as the Pharaoh of Moses’ era had… its what Kings do, as Samuel rightly warned…

         Solomon known for his 1,000 wives, and by his end, his many gods….

         And after this, the Kingdom splits
—for Solomon’s son embraced all the worst aspects of Samuel’s prophecy about the hardships of Kingship.
—10 tribes go north, the Kingdom of Israel…
2 tribes—go south, sticking with David’s heirs, the Kingdom of Judah… 

and Judah and Israel parallel one another
—sometimes allies sometimes at odds, even at war,
paralleling one another for two centuries until Israel is overthrown, the 10 tribes dispersed by the Assyrians… followed 135 years later by the overthrow of Judah by the Babylonians.

         Thus ended the history of the monarchy….

         And so what, we might ask, shuttered away in our homes.

- As I mentioned at the start
—generational trauma is a thing. We as a nation, in this moment that is truly frightening, we need to be careful what we make normal
—it might stick with us for a long time,
let us meet every challenge with a kindness that later generations will long remember and emulate.

-There is also just the grand length of history, because we’re in the middle of it, we won’t see our place in it rightly,
but there will be a time when people look back and write of this and make sense of the scope of it all.
If you ever feel especially anxious, try writing a letter to yourself from the future, when this is all over…

-Also, there is an adaptability to human life and our life with God
—Judges/Kings,
worshipping at the Shrines of Abraham and Isaac, or only in Jerusalem…
There are consequences to all of it—trade offs, just as we experience today displaced from physical worship, but never an abandonment by God.

-Finally, as all the scriptures today make plain, things looking different to God, 
the little shepherd boy, a better king…
in our gospel reading
—(John 9, read it when you get a chance), the blind man is the only one who can really see…
This is always God’s story
—God in the last place we’d think to look
—fishermen not philosophers, on a donkey not a war horse, cross not throne…
in this time, let us look with eyes from below, so that we might see like God above.
Amen.