Sermon preached at Good Shepherd Church, Berkeley, June 17, 2018
Proper 6B: 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 (11-13)14-17; Mark 4:26-34

We’ll be reading from the books of Samuel and Kings all summer this year. And they’re full of great stories. Admittedly, we’ll be getting a carefully pruned selection of them, made suitable for delicate ears on Sunday mornings. If you want the whole raw (and occasionally appalling) narrative, I’m afraid you’ll just have to read it in the Bible.
Now, today’s story didn’t need any cleaning up, but you need to know a bit about the political realities of the tenth century B.C. in order to understand exactly what’s going on here. The Middle East of the prophet Samuel’s day was a bit like the chaotic state of Syria and northern Iraq right now Every group in the population was engaged in an ongoing struggle with its neighbors—a struggle for power and sometimes a struggle for survival.
The Israelites were a loose coalition of tribes in the hill country of Palestine, under pressure from their richer and better organized neighbors, the Philistines, who had a group of city states on the coast. (The most important of their cities was Gaza—still a place of contention to this day.)
The Israelites were having a hard time defending themselves and finally admitted that they needed stronger leadership. They went to the prophet Samuel, their most widely respected leader, and demanded a king. Samuel thought it was a bad idea, but he finally gave way. And the lot for kingship fell on a warrior named Saul, who also happened to be the tallest and strongest man among the Israelites. But it wasn’t long before Saul did something that made Samuel so furious that he disowned him. (We won’t go into the details. It’s one of those stories that’s been edited out of Sunday readings—probably for good reason.)
But if Saul had lost divine approval, who was going to replace him? And how was that going to play out? God told Samuel that a replacement was already chosen and directed him to go anoint him as the next king. Samuel, of course, understood the risk. “Saul will kill me,” he says. He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. This was a bloody era.
So off Samuel goes to Bethlehem. And you will have noticed what kind of reception he got there: “The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, ‘Do you come peaceably?'” Everybody had to be suspicious of everybody else. There were foes without and enemies within. And Samuel was powerful enough to make people very nervous.

But Samuel announces that he’s only come to make a sacrifice—which normally meant that there would be a feast. (Only certain parts of the animal, you see, would be burnt on the altar. The rest would be roasted to provide a sacred banquet.) And he invites the elders of the city to the feast, making a special point to include Jesse and his sons. And everything is proceeding as expected until Samuel starts making his way through the list of sons, starting with the eldest, Eliab, who made a very good impression. But, no, God wasn’t interested. And so on and so on, until he’s run out of sons. What sort of trick is God playing on him?
So he turns to Jesse and says, “Is this really all your sons?” And, no, it’s not! Even though the terrifying Samuel had specifically invited “Jesse and his sons” to the feast, Jesse hadn’t seen any reason to send for David, his youngest—just a boy, not old enough for important public gatherings. So who gets anointed as the next king of Israel? Some little shrimp who isn’t big enough to wield a sword, much less wage war on two fronts, one with the current king, the other with the Philistines! Really?
In the rest of the 1st Book of Samuel we got lots of stories about David’s adventures and misadventures between the time when Samuel anointed him as king and the time, years later, when he actually began to rule. There was danger. There was bloodshed. There was flight and periods in hiding. Would the shepherd boy have agreed to it all if Samuel had given him a choice? Maybe not. Jon and I were pondering the story this week, and he wondered how the older brothers felt about being passed over. Maybe relieved, actually.

Now, I’ve spent quite bit of time on this story—partly just because I think it’s very interesting. But also because there’s a connection with our other readings this morning—more of a connection than we have any reason to expect given that we’re actually just reading our way through each of these books—1 Samuel, 2 Corinthians, Mark’s Gospel—at this time of year. The people who created the lectionary made no effort to coordinate the readings with each other.
But just look what crops up in Mark’s Gospel! Jesus tells us that the reign of God is like a mustard seed. It was the smallest of all garden seeds, but it produces the biggest plant in the garden—big enough for birds to nest under it. And you think of that pipsqueak shepherd boy named David and how he changed the whole political climate of the area and even achieved a degree of peace and quiet that hadn’t been seen there for centuries—a shelter where the people could make themselves at home.
Or the other parable Jesus told: the reign of God is like someone who sows a field and then goes about the business of every day life until, lo! it’s ready for harvest. And you think of Samuel, probably shaking his head over the choice of David, but doing his job and leaving the rest to God.
We have a built-in human prejudice, I suppose, in favor of people who project strength and ability, even if, like Saul, they may not have all that much of either. And we want to see things changing visibly—dramatically even—and immediately. We live in an age where people have fallen in love with a picture of the reign of God as arriving with a thunderclap, a catastrophe, a sudden rapturing of the good and punishment of the evil. How odd to hear Jesus saying here, “You sow the seeds yourself—and then maybe you should take a nap and get on with your other chores.” I love the name that’s been bestowed in this parable: The Seed Growing Secretly. It’s not the less powerful just because it doesn’t make the front page. God’s methods are more subtle—and I dare say more lasting—than those of Mr. Trump.

And St. Paul offered us a key reminder into what all of this means for our own lives: “We walk by faith, not by sight.” Actually, of course, the truth is more like “We walk primarily by faith, not by sight.” Sight is important, too, and Paul was never one to ignore the realities around him. But the direction of our walk, the steadiness with which we take our steps, the central values that guide us in understanding and dealing with the world around us—these come from faith, from our basic sense of what life in this world is really about.
Some people don’t like this talk about “faith.” They would like to think that everything can be based on knowledge. But they actually have a faith, too—the faith that they can in fact see and know everything of importance. The older I get, the more improbable that seems. It stretches credulity. It would be truer, I think, simply to admit that everybody walks by faith—by a kind of broad sense of what the world is like, a big picture into which we fit what we can actually see at the moment. Sometimes, of course, what we see refuses to fit and then we may have to rethink our faith. But, for the most part it’s our faith that guides us and helps us interpret what we are seeing.
And faith makes an enormous difference, as the story of David shows. David eventually did become king and reigned for many years. He did it by becoming a hard-edged politician and guerrilla fighter—a master of what could be seen—but he also hung onto a larger sense of vocation that was connected to God. His faith helped him, unlike most hard-edged politicians and guerrilla fighters, to turn the corner when the right time came. He graduated from being a leader of insurrection to being, for the most part, a generous, just, peaceful monarch. Not many people since him have been able to make that transition.

We, too, can follow on the same path. Not the path of civil war, I mean. God spare us all that! But the faith that God’s love is the true shaping force in our world, the shaping form of true human lives, of lives worth living. And we all have parts to play as we walk in that faith—parts large or small, it makes no difference. After all, the smallest seed can produce the biggest plant. And we don’t even have to make it all happen. But we do need to plant the seed and tend it and rejoice in its growth.