Rapidly Aging
THE THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
1 Samuel 8:4-20 • 2 Cor 4:13-5:1 • Mark 3:20-35
For a good ten years of my youth, summertime meant catching up on soap operas. My summer days were packed: The Young and the Restless at 11, The Bold and the Beautiful at noon, One Life to Live at 1, and Days of our Lives at 2. Soap operas are known for rapidly aging their characters, so there was a lot to catch up on. A character who was conceived in scandal one summer, might be five years old the next summer. After a few years at boarding school, the character might come home as a twenty-year-old, ready to participate in a mature summer love triangle of their own.
Our schedule of Sunday morning Scripture readings also rapidly ages the Bible’s cast of characters. In our reading last week, the prophet Samuel was a young boy. Today, he’s already an old man.
The young Samuel of last week had just started to hear the Lord calling his name—“Samuel, Samuel.” In a wonderful pun, the name “Samuel” sounds very close to the Hebrew word for “listen.” Eli, who was training Samuel to be a priest, taught Samuel to respond to the Lord’s call by saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” In Hebrew, Samuel’s response sounds like, “Speak, Lord for your servant Sams.” Eli’s own sons were pretty lousy at the family priesthood business. They took the best portions of animal sacrifices for themselves. They were implicated in sexual scandal. They refused to “listen” to their father (1 Sam 2:25). Unlike them, Samuel listens. Samuel “Sams.”
Today, Samuel is much older—tangled up in dramas and power struggles. He’s had a good career as a “trustworthy prophet.” He traveled through Israel administering justice. He offered sacrifices to the Lord, and the Lord responded by delivering the Israelites in battle.
But now, the boy once poised to displace Eli’s corrupted sons has fallen into nepotism himself. Samuel has appointed his sons to take over judging the Israelites. But Samuel’s sons take bribes and engage in self-dealing. The elders of Israel tell Samuel they want a change in leadership.
How quickly Samuel the boy, once so open and available to God, has become a man with his own grip on power and schemes to set up a family dynasty. Our reading today is a snapshot of a person whose ego gets in the way of his calling.
It must have hurt Samuel to have people basically say, “You’re an old man and your kids are terrible. We don’t want you in charge anymore.” But the Lord invites Samuel’s wounded ego to step aside. The Lord himself knows what it’s like to be rejected. He encourages Samuel not to take it so personally. The Lord basically explains, “Hey, I get it! I know how it feels when people reject you because they think you’re just an old man.” If Samuel had taken this opportunity to grow closer to the Lord, I imagine the Lord could have said more. Maybe something like, “You know, I used to talk to your mother Hannah about this very thing. She also felt rejected, and worried that her legacy would end with her. Until you, Samuel, were born.”
But instead, Samuel gets down to business, still nursing his hurt feelings. The Lord asks Samuel to “solemnly warn” the people about the dangers of monarchy. When he delivers the Lord’s message, Samuel skips right over the theological reasons for not having a king. Samuel also skips a history lesson about how God faithfully provided a new leader every time his people cried out for one.
Instead, Samuel delivers one heck of a speech about taxes and military conscription. Our translation drains the rhetorical power of this speech by changing the Hebrew word order, but Robert Alter’s translation preserves the speech’s force. In Alter’s version, Samuel warns the people about a king: “Your sons he will take, your daughters he will take, your best fields and your vineyards and your olive trees he will take . . . your best male and female slaves and your cattle and your donkeys he will take . . . and as for you, you will become his slaves.”
With that last bit, Samuel might be going off script. The Lord told Samuel only to warn people about the typical ways of kings. But Samuel catastrophizes that if they appoint a king, the people will end up right back where they started, enslaved like they were in Egypt. In fact, they might be worse off than they were in Egypt, because according to Samuel, the Lord won’t hear their cries. Samuel warns them, “you will cry out because of your king . . . but the Lord will not answer you.”
This is Samuel threatening to rage-quit. Samuel’s job as prophet is to keep channels of communication open between people and the Lord. Now, Samuel seems to say that if he has to share power with a king, he’ll shut down his line of communication. He won’t pass along people’s cries. This threat comes more from Samuel’s wounded ego than from the Lord.
Samuel the boy, once so available to God, open to possibility, and willing to listen, has become someone who berates and threatens people he’s supposed to help. At this moment, the Lord again asks Samuel to do something extremely humbling. Samuel has to do something even harder than listening to God. He has to listen to the people, and give them what they ask for.
Listening to the people is hard. It seems unfair, since they’re such bad listeners themselves. The people seem to have latched onto the “chariot” part of Samuel’s speech and ignored the rest. Samuel mentions chariots three times, warning people that a king will conscript people to operate these chariots, and laborers to equipment for them. But the Israelites at the time didn’t have those fancy war vehicles. The idea that a king could increase the defense budget and manufacture chariots made the prospect of monarchy all the more attractive.
The people may be selective listeners. But they also have real concerns about the corruption of justice. They have real fears about their ongoing vulnerability to the Philistines and other nations. Samuel hears only their rejection of him, instead of listening for why they want a king in the first place. They want to be governed justly, and defended strongly.
The Lord sees the people’s request for a king as a lack of faith. But he tells Samuel to listen to them anyway, and to give them their king (1 Sam 8:22). In the Hebrew, it sounds like “The Lord said to Samuel, ‘Sam to the voice of the people.’ ”
The Lord asks Samuel to set aside his ego, live up to his name, and play his humble part in the drama of God’s relationship with God’s people. And through Samuel’s story, the Lord invites all of us to set aside our ego, so we can live more fully into our childlike openness and our humble callings.
I have a friend who once auditioned for a role in a soap opera. For this audition, he was instructed to overact, with unnatural facial expressions and over-the-top reactions to other characters. This style of acting wasn’t for him. But as a soap opera fan, I can say that style of acting is part of the fun. And for actors who play roles in dramatic, long-running stories, maybe there’s a sanctifying humility in giving people what they ask for.
© 2024 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas