The Chosen Ones - Or Not
A Sermon on 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Mark 4:26-34 for Pentecost 4, 2024
To those of us who knew the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball
Do any of you remember that song?
I usually send out my Sunday sermons on Saturday morning for St Paul’s people who won’t be able to get to church, and also for my clergy friends who might have had a particularly hard week and be in need of sermon ideas. Please make use of anything that is useful for you and leave anything that is not.
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I learned the truth at seventeen by Janis Ian came out when I was a kid – just beginning to notice that some people were born with more advantages than others – wealthier, more beautiful, more athletic, more extroverted, more practical. Life felt like a competition for the best seats, and some people were born at the front of the queue, and some were born at the back.
By the time I was a teenager – you heard it here! – I had the sheet music to I learned the truth at seventeen and would play it on my guitar.
I was very aware of those who were ahead of me in the queue, but took longer for me to pay attention to the fact that there were more people behind me – way behind me - most notably my neighbours, many of whom were Aboriginal.
The story of David being selected as king calls us to reflect on who is at the front of the queue, who is at the back, and who is not even in the line-up.
David is the youngest of eight brothers. The assumption was that surely one of the elder ones would be right for the job – one of the bigger, stronger, more capable brothers. David was not even in the line-up. He was out with the sheep.
And you know who else wasn’t in the line-up? Who is not even in the text?
Well, in a family of eight brothers, you could expect that there would also be sisters. And we might wonder where they were when all this was happening. Clearly nobody considered giving them the job.
This story asks hard questions about who, in our community, is in and who is out and who isn’t even in the running. Who is left with the sheep? Who is left in the kitchen? Who is left out on the street?
David was side-lined by his family. But God chose him. This preference of God for the younger one, the weaker one, the rejected one, resonates throughout Scripture and is ultimately applied to Jesus – the stone the builder rejected that became the capstone.
So God, who sees the heart, knew that Eliab and Shammah and the other brothers were not right, though Samuel thought they looked pretty good; and God chose David, from whom nobody expected greatness.
In a story that starts like this, we would expect David to go on to be a great king. Wouldn’t we? Rags to riches. Reject to regent! We love that! But Biblical narratives rarely give us what we expect, because real life is messy and Biblical narratives are complex and compelling.
Readers are so conditioned to expect greatness from someone whose story starts this way that a lot of Christians pretend David was a great king, and gloss over all the evidence to the contrary.
We still see this today, don’t we? How many times do we hear about famous men, of today or of the past, who have abused women and children, who have grown rich through dishonest or exploitative means, yet people defend them: “Yeah there is that, but he did a lot of good things too.”
Jean Vanier, John Howard Yoder, Bill Hybels – just to name a few. What do we do with them?
What do we do with David?
Part of the problem with David is that a lot of Christians think David gave us the book of Psalms, and they reason, “how could a bad person write such beautiful prayers?” How indeed?
I used to think like that, until I studied the Psalter as part of my first theology degree. There was huge controversy in the class when the lecturer told us that, though David was a musician and had supported the arts, there is no evidence that he wrote any – let alone all – of the Psalms in the Bible. Those little headings above some of the Psalms that are translated “Of David” don’t mean “by David”. They could mean a lot of things and all we can say for sure is that they had come to be connected with David’s story in some way. I remember one fellow student saying that we should keep preaching these Psalms “as if” David wrote them.
Can you see what that student was doing? He was putting David’s reputation ahead of the truth. And when that happens in the church – when people’s reputations are held to be more important than the truth - then we are in trouble. That is exactly what led to the cover ups that created the need for the Royal Commission into institutional responses to abuse.
God didn’t choose David because he was a good person. God chose him – just because. It is a mystery. If we look back at the story so far, when God looked at Isaac’s sons and chose Jacob instead of Esau: that is a mystery. Jacob was most definitely not the better person. And if we go all the way back to the beginning, to Genesis 4, when God held Abel’s sacrifice in higher regard than Cain’s, we are not told why. Commentators for millennia have been trying to work out what was better about Abel’s sacrifice, but the point is – it is a mystery. Sometimes we just don’t get to know why God does what God does. The important question is: what will we do about it?
We have no idea why God chose David over his brothers. If God had chosen Eliab, might things have been better or worse? Might there have been less bloodshed, abuse and exploitation? Or more? We don’t know, because that is not the story being told here. This is the story of a king whose origin story leads us to expect greatness, but whose reality is violence, exploitation, abuse, rape and murder. That’s the story. Really confronting. Really disappointing. But life can be confronting and disappointing sometimes.
The one good thing that David is remembered for, throughout Biblical history, is that he worshipped Yahweh and did not worship other Gods. That seems a low bar, given that at that time, the MOST important responsibility every king of every nation was to lead their nation in worship of their nation’s God. But as the story goes on, most of the kings of Israel and Judah will stumble under even that extremely low bar.
But this resonates through the years and into the church. How do we respond today to people who lead liturgy beautifully and teach the Scriptures faithfully, yet in their dealings with individuals are abusive and exploitative? Do we hush up the bad stuff in order to keep benefiting from the good stuff? Or if we don’t do that, what do we do? We have a new Professional Standards team in our diocese, and I encourage you to pray for them, because they are still working this stuff out, and trying to do better than we have done in the past.
The other thing David had going for him is that he started out as a shepherd. All the nations around him expected kings to act like shepherds – guiding, protecting and providing for their people. So, the fact that David started out as a shepherd was a big plus.
This is the theme of a much earlier, Sumerian epic about one of their earliest kings called Gilgamesh. The more I hold those stories together, the more convinced I am that the authors of the David stories had at least heard the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are so many points of contact. I could bore you by talking about this all day, but I will try to restrain myself.
Gilgamesh is a story of progress, the original hero journey, about a truly awful prince, bullying and raping his way through his kingdom, eventually learning wisdom and becoming a good king – a shepherd king. The first thing Gilgamesh needs for his transformation is a deep friendship with – you guessed it - a shepherd. Enkidu is a wild man, made from the earth, who lived among animals instead of people. He is, therefore, a far better leader than Gilgamesh. In the story, Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh grieves, then continues his adventures and becomes wise.
The David stories are not about growth into wisdom, but decline into foolishness. David started well. He was a shepherd. And while he was still young he defeated a giant who had been menacing his people. We will look at that next week. Even in his youth he has exactly what it takes to be to be a good king. He is like Enkidu - the shepherd who befriends a prince. The intensity of David and Jonathan’s relationship echoes the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but here it is the prince, Jonathan, who dies, and instead of learning wisdom, when David becomes king he looks a lot like the young Gilgamesh – bullying and raping his way through his kingdom.
As the authors of 1 & 2 Samuel, in exile in Babylon, reflected on how they got there, they noticed their story was the opposite of Gilgamesh. Their nation had been formed in a great act of liberation as their God miraculously brought them out of slavery in Egypt and settled them in their own land. The path of their people had not been one of growth towards wisdom, but of decline into foolishness.
So they wrote stories of their kings as stories of decline. David and Solomon, in particular, started well: started strong, started wise, started faithful. But once they had their hands on success and power it changed them. And they became increasingly paranoid, selfish and foolish.
We know from our own experience that life trajectories can go either way. Sometimes raging youths learn wisdom, respect and compassion, as Gilgamesh did. But sometimes good people get twisted by their own success, as David did. There is a cliché: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. It is a cliché for a reason. We have seen it happen far too often.
This resonated with the storytellers as they lamented in exile. Though God had chosen them to be God’s special people, they had not grown into the glorious, just, light-shining nation they seemed destined to become.
Those are hard reflections, aren’t they? I suspect all of us, at some point in our lives, have had reason to ask those questions of ourselves. We came into the world with so much potential. What happened?
That can be a particularly hard question for the chosen ones: for those born at the front of the queue – those from whom everyone expects greatness. It can be really hard to feel like you have disappointed the world.
But for those whose names were never called? Those from whom no-one expects greatness? The ones who don’t get to be the subject of a great story of growth or decline? Jesus told a little story about them:
26 “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” [1]
Just teeny tiny seeds. Thrown away. Nothing special. Yet in the Kingdom of God every one of them will transform into a beautiful plant that brings food and shade to the world. No one chosen or rejected. No one special or ordinary. All given space and opportunity to grow into exactly who they were created to be.
So as we look at the twisted ways in which power is used in our world, let’s stop looking for heroes to rescue us. Instead, let’s keep praying, “Your Kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as in heaven.” Amen.
Let’s pray:
With Love from Rev Margaret
[1] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Mk 4:26–29). (1989). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Thank you!
Yes, Margaret. Very helpful reflections - "At Seventeen" was a splendid anthem/piercing lament. It touched the angst of my youth - and now of my greyth! And I particularly was struck by your insight of those behind me in the queue. (And those not even in the frame.) Blessings to you!