The Story Chapter 10 - Samuel

So here we are – the first Sunday in Advent. “This’ll be your busy time of year minister”, people say to me. And they’re not wrong, although my usual response is that I’ve yet to find a time of year that’s NOT busy.

 

The longer I’m here, the more parallels I see between ministry and farming – you’re always at your work because you live above the shop; there’s always more you could be doing; a lot of your work goes unseen; ultimately you’re placing your trust and hope in powers and forces over which you have little or no control. Soil, sun and rainfall. The providence of a loving God. And  there’s a seasonal element to what you do – cycles and routines to follow over the course of a year.

 

And folk are right, this is getting into a busy season for me, both in family life and church life – there are many plates to spin and the best you can do is try not to drop too many of them.

 

But when life gets like that, I have to tell you – sermon preparation gets hard.

 

REC Browne once wrote that “All speech that moves people was minted when someone’s mind was poised and still”

 

Poise and stillness are hard to come by at this time of year, for all of us.

 

And in part, I guess that’s why I found myself labouring with this week’s chapter of the story. Searching for patterns and insights to preach on, but finding myself feeling more and more like I was looking at one of those fuzzy pictures that used to be in vogue ten years ago. The ones that look like a mess of colour and patterns, but if you stare at them for long enough they resolve into something recognisable, like a pod of dolphins.

 

Well I stared at Chapter 10 for a long time early this week– but I just couldn’t see the dolphins.

 

I’d planned to take Wednesday as my Sabbath, but there was so much else going on, and I was making so little progress for Sunday I just couldn’t see it happening.

 

But by the time I got to Tuesday evening I was so spent I decided I’d have to at least take some time in the morning to slow down, gather my thoughts and pray. So that’s what I did.

 

Wednesday morning dawned sunny and unseasonably warm, and came as a real blessing. Once the kids were gone I brewed a strong coffee, and stood for a while at the kitchen window looking out over the fields and watching the sky shedding its hues of red and yellow. I listened to a few pieces of music that always do my heart good, and then did my body some good by going out for a run in that glorious winter sunshine.

 

And I don’t know whether it was the coffee, the endorphins, or the grace of God, or maybe the grace of God through the medium of coffee and endorphins, but when I came to pray, that stress and tiredness had melted away and I was just able to be for a spell; be grateful, be still, be aware. Just be, rather than do.

 

And from that still place, lo and behold, I saw the dolphins without really even trying. And some speech was minted.

 

Maybe, in that few hours, God was giving me a little taste of what Advent is meant to be like. Not the frantic rush that we make it, but a time when we deliberately slow down – the better to meet with him.

 

 If that sounds impossible, is that a sign that we’re getting carried along by a whole load of assumptions about what we need to be doing at this time of year? And are we willing to question those assumptions? Our culture’s tended to plagiarise Christmas but miss the heart of it. Is this the very time when we most need to be counter-cultural in the choices that we make about how we spend our time, money and energy? More of that later when we talk about Right Christmas.

 

But for now, what about chapter 10? There’s a lot going on in the story this week. We’re still in the time of the Judges, where Israel is settling in to the promised land but still harassed by her restless neighbours.

 

And we meet three significant people in the story this week – Hannah, her son Samuel, and Israel’s first King, Saul. All three of them, in different ways, experiencing some kind of anxiety. And how they deal with that anxiety is what we have most to learn from this morning, I think.

 

Poor Hannah was in a bad way. She was childless and in her culture, a married woman who was childless was ripe for scorn. In a time when bearing and raising children was thought to be a woman’s main role in life, not having children was seen as failing your husband, and worse still, a sign that God was against you.

 

Elkanah, her husband, tried to cheer her up and reassure her that it was ok, but his other wife, Peninnah was a nasty piece of work. She already had children and took great delight in rubbing salt into Hannah’s wounds.

 

We find Hannah in prayer at Shiloh; and she’s so distressed by her situation, so passionate in her prayer, that Eli, the priest thinks she’s had a skinful of wine and tells her off for turning up to worship in that kind of a state.

 

As a wee aside - some of you might remember a similar thing happening at the first Pentecost. The crowds thought the disciples were behaving strangely because they were tanked up and Peter had to assure them that the only Spirit they’d been partaking of was the Holy Spirit!

 

So Hannah explains her situation, and Eli sends her off with his blessing – asking that God might give her the desires of her heart. And indeed he does. She has a son, and calls him Samuel – which means ‘God hears’ and when the time comes she fulfils the vow she made to God and gives Samuel over into God’s service.

 

The pain of giving Samuel away is tempered by the arrival of other children, five of them in total, and Hannah prays again saying  – “My heart rejoices in the Lord; in the Lord my horn is lifted high. My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance.”

 

All Peninnah’s cruel taunts have come to nothing. Hannah hasn’t been rejected by God, or punished by him – on the contrary – she’s been blessed with more children than she could have hoped or dreamed of.

 

Samuel, meanwhile, grows up under the tutelage of Eli and many of us will know the story of how God called to him three times in the night, and how he thought it was Eli until the old man cottoned on that it was God speaking to him.

 

But it’s not that part of Samuel’s story I want us to look at this morning. Instead, we’re fast forwarding all the way to his old age and to an incident that I’d guess few of us are familiar with

 

Although Samuel has led Israel well, we’re told that his sons Joel and Abijah weren’t up to scratch.  “They turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice”.

 

So the elders of Israel meet with Samuel and say “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have”.

 

“But when they said ‘give us a King to lead us,’ this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.”

 

So some interesting dynamics going on there. Firstly, the Israelites are looking anxiously at the nations around them. They’ve had some heavy defeats to the Philistines in fairly recent history. All the surrounding nations are led by warrior kings. Who have they got in charge?  An ageing priest. They’re right to think they could be doing better, militarily, but they’re wrong in thinking that a king is the answer. Their God is their King. It’s their lack of obedience to him that’s the problem.

 

And Samuel knows this – that’s a big part of his displeasure. We’ve said before that Israel was to be different  - a nation gathered around God. And here they are saying “we want a king so we can be like all the other nations” . They sound like sulky teenagers moaning because they haven’t got the same kind of trainers as everyone else.

 

But I think there’s a hint of something personal about this for Samuel too. He’s worked so hard over the years to lead Israel. Is this all the thanks that he gets? He’s already disappointed that his sons have turned out to be rogues. Have the people learned nothing during his time in charge either? Have they thought so little of him and his leadership that they want to dispense with Judges altogether and choose a king?

 

It sounds to me that even as strong a man as Samuel could become anxious about the decisions his people were about to make. God had some reassuring to do.

 

And then lastly there’s Saul. And Saul had a bit of the Samson’s about him, I think. Lots going on outside – tall and strong – but not so much going on inside. He looked the part, but he didn’t really play the part.

 

Where is he when the lots are drawn to see who’s to become king? He’s hiding among the supplies – hoping they won’t find him!

 

And later on, after some military success which seemed to bode well, he goes and messes things up in the next campaign. Samuel was supposed to offer the sacrifices prior to Israel going into battle, but when he doesn’t show up soon enough, Saul grows anxious and oversteps the mark by offering the sacrifice himself. And then, to cap it all, he doesn’t follow orders and ends up keeping back the choice sheep and cattle even though he’d been told to slaughter them all. And that set the tone for the rest of Saul’s reign.

 

So each of the main characters in this part of the story has their anxieties, their worries, to deal with. And in that sense, they are exactly like you and me – for all the distance between us in time and culture.

 

And the key thing to note this morning is that two of the characters – Hannah and Samuel – know what to do with their anxiety. And the other two – Israel and Saul – don’t.

 

What does Hannah do with her anxiety about her barrenness? She prays. She pours her heart out to God.

 

What does Samuel do when the elders approach him with this demand for a king? He prays into his disappointment and worry.

 

What does Israel do when they see the kings of the surrounding nations winning battles? Do they pray? No – they go to Samuel and ask him for a King so they can be like their pagan neighbours.

 

What does Saul do when he’s up against it and anxious? Does he pray? No – he goes against God’s instruction and improvises with disastrous consequences.

 

When we’re slow to pray, we find ourselves stuck in the Lower Story narrative of our childlessness, or our disappointment, or our worries. But when we pray, we’re  lifted up into the possibilities of the Upper Story where God is at work in ways we couldn’t have anticipated.

 

When Hannah prayed from her heart, bringing her worries to God in that way, we’re told that he heard and answered her. We might also reflect on the truth that finding the strength, in God, to cope with the taunts and her childlessness would also have been an answer to her prayer.

 

And when Samuel prayed, he found affirmation – this isn’t a rejection of you, said God. It’s a rejection of me.

 

But more than that, he also found God responding in a way he hadn’t expected to. “Give them a King if that’s what they want” he said. “Warn them what a king will mean; remind them that a king will only be as good as he is faithful to me, but give them what they are asking for.” Samuel’s surprised to discover a God who’s big enough to let us make our own choices, even if they may not be the best choices.

 

Prayer gives us a new perspective from which to see our problems. It reminds us not just who we are, but whose we are – that we’re not in this alone, but in the company of a God who sees the whole picture and will help us see more of it if we come to him in prayer.

 

I don’t know what’s working on you just now, but it would be a pretty cool customer who could say that they don’t have any worries to deal with.

 

It might be health; it might be family; it might be work or money; it might be choices you’ve made, or have to make. It might be things that have happened in the past, or are going to happen in the future. It might be all the stresses you have to cope with at Christmastime.

 

Whatever it is, I can do no better than quote the apostle Paul to you in his letter to the Philippians. He says:

 

Don’t fret or worry. Shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down.

 

I love the reality of that. He doesn’t say we won’t have worries. What he says is, when you have worries, shape them into prayers. That’s what made the difference to Hannah and to Samuel’s stories. And that’s what can make the difference to yours and mine as well.