B
Proper 5 BFC 2015
I
Samuel 8:1,3-20
June
7, 2015
Jewish
scholar, Everett Fox, notes that most every culture has a tradition that builds
the idea of kingship on a “firm popular foundation.” The stories share the king’s savoir faire and charisma, his many military
exploits—killings, conquerings, all aligned with his cultural
identification. The Bible, however,
begins the description of a king with a sense of dread and misgiving before
anything else happens.[1]
The dread and misgiving stem from the history God has had
with the people in the Exodus event. The
Living God, Yahweh, the one who said, “I- Will-Be-There” directly opposed the
King of the Egyptians, Pharaoh. In the
Living One saying that “I will go before you”, God is taking on the role of
king and sovereign. In establishing a
covenant with the people, God acts as ancient kings acted in establishing some
form of treaty or agreement with their people.[2] This idea of God as King was such a basic
understanding in Judaism that far out into the future, Jesus juxtaposes the
Kingdom or Empire of God over and against the Kingdom or Empire of Caesar.
But Yahweh, the Living God, was to be of a different
character than the kings, pharaohs, and Caesars the Jewish people would
inevitably encounter in the ancient Mediterranean world. That was the primary purpose of the Ten
Commandments and the Law, a covenant established to reflect a loyalty to not
only God but one’s neighbor. While
earthly kings and sovereigns drew the land and its resources to themselves, the
Living God, as true creator and owner of the land, gave it to for the life and
well-being of the entire community.
Commandments against theft did not serve to protect private property. Rather, important possessions belonged to the
entire community. Communal possessions
were not to be taken for one’s own private use.
Communal property, the land, the object of promise, was not for
individual ownership. As Hebrew
Scripture scholar, Robert Gnuse has written, “The purpose of the command was to
curb those who steal from society at large by amassing great wealth, for such
theft will ultimately break down that society.”[3] In ancient time, the land was effectively, as
our New England sisters and brothers might say, “the common”—the shared place
of public use and thriving.
The Biblical passage before us today is a great
foreshadowing of what is to come for the people of Israel; how kings shall rob
the people of the very resources that God has given them in liberation and
salvation. Over and over again, we hear
the words, “The king shall take your sons.
The king shall take your daughters.
The king shall take your slaves.
The king shall take your animals.
The king shall take your land.”
The king shall take. The king
shall take. The king shall take. Heck, after the king finishes “taking”, there
is hardly anything left for Israelite freedom and enjoyment. They return to being slaves under their own Israelite
king. Later, in I Samuel, in Chapter 12,
Yahweh, the Living God, makes it clear that as Sovereign of Israel, the Living
God never took a darn thing from you.[4] Storming against the people, Yahweh asks, “Whose
ox have I taken? Whose donkey have I
taken? And whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed? And from whose hand have I taken a bribe so
that justice might not be done?”
The king reverses the very values instituted by God to keep
the resources for life and people of Israel, particularly the most vulnerable
people—the economically poor, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant--free,
delivered, redeemed, and saved. Once
instituted, priests and prophets attempted to offer a corrective to the king’s
office by making him the one particularly responsible for protecting these
vulnerable populations. The coronation
psalm, Psalm 72, states:
12Let it be so, because the king
delivers the needy who cry out,
the poor, and those who have
no helper.13 The king has compassion on the weak and the needy;
the king saves the lives of those who are in need.
14 The king redeems their lives from oppression and violence;
their blood is precious in his eyes.
But this psalm was more “hoped for” than it was reality. As even the heyday of great kings in Israel’s
history showed, most often the king takes and takes and takes.
I feel like I now need to use a “Law and Order”
sequitur to say, “ripped from the headlines.”
Whether it be mammoth trade deals like the North American Free Trade
Agreement or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, governed by what Michael Piketty
calls patrimonial capitalism or plutocracy, lobbied and bought by large
corporations, industrial agriculture, or the multinational finance industry, we
are ruled and all power flows to the king.
And it is killing the common.
Implicit
in the passage before us today and in I Samuel, Chapter 12, is the need the
Israelite people feel to ratchet up for war, centralize leadership, and take on
peoples like the Philistines who are known to have advanced further in military
industrial technology than any other people in the land. As a confederation of tribes, Israel does not
believe it has the power to impress sons into the army that a king might. The elders of these tribes also may have
believed that a king might make them military powerful like other nations. The giant, Goliath, who ridicules David and
his slingshot, is an iconic figure of how the people of Israel felt dwarfed by
Philistine military industrial technology.[5] Though the shepherd boy slays Goliath, the
arms race is underway with the need for the Israelite people to abandon faith
in the Living God in exchange for shiny new spears to counter the
Philistines.
This
is what war does. It disrupts and
drains the common, centralizes leadership and unseats shared thriving and
freedom, gives power over to kings and sovereigns who then take and take and
take, and, inevitably, moves God off the throne in favor of other idols, lies,
and priorities. God opposes Pharaoh and
Caesar because their oppressive power takes and takes and takes to keep the
people subjugated and enslaved.
Here
we are as nation, plunged into a continuous war that began with what all the
White House hopefuls now believe to be a mistake. That war led to the National Security Agency
spying on peace activists like the well-known terrorist cell, the American
Friends Service Committee. You know,
those agents of anarchy, the Quakers.[6] Every hour the United States taxpayers are
paying over $117,000 for the cost of war in Iraq. Every hour the United States taxpayers are
paying $4 million for the cost of war in Afghanistan. Every hour the United States taxpayers are
paying over $615,000 for the cost of war against ISIS.[7] This cannot help but put a drain on and cause destruction of the common: public lands,
public schools, and all forms of public services that recognize we are a people
of shared fortune. The king takes. Our sons and daughters are sent off to war
with an estimated 6800 dying in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.[8] The king takes. That does not even begin to address the
conservatively estimated 139,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.[9] With that carnage now an admitted mistake, we
turn to those angry in the Middle East, shrug our shoulders, and say, “Oooops.”
Our
liberation, salvation, and redemption depend on how life goes for not just our
private interests but for our whole neighborhood and community, for neighbors
and communities half the world over.
This
is what Jesus tried to recognize when he told the lost and forlorn that God was
indeed looking for them, when he tended to the grieving and the sick, and shared
bread and grape with the hungry and the homeless. Jesus was trying to restore community to a
people caught in the endless Roman War against the Jews in the 1st
Century. Rome killed millions of Jews,
Judea and Galilee were laid waste, and Jewish communities throughout the
Mediterranean were attacked.[10] Those meals shared are what we do here today
in communion. We say that, in a time of
war, we will seek to restore and rebuild our communities, our shared enterprise
as a people.
In
this day and age, I think we too often forget that we are at war. The only time we are reminded we are at war is to put us
in mortal fear that if we do not allow the king to take, our world may come
crashing down.
This
congregation knows the character of God though.
We thrive on ways that celebrate the common: remembering our homeless families as
neighbors in Family Promise, providing low income housing through Prairie
Towers and Habitat for Humanity, oatmeal and supplies for Tumbleweed, advocacy
through the Montana Association of Christians and the Montana Organizing
Project. We also have a number of people in our
church who have connection with the Northern Plains Resource Council and the
Western Organization of Resource Councils to protect our public, common spaces,
these gifts from God for our liberation, thriving, and salvation.
It
is also why I get psyched to identify ourselves with a wider community through
the work of the VISTA volunteers and the Downtown Billings Alliance—the Downtown
Billings Alliance with our own Virginia Bryan; and Lisa Harmon who identifies
what it means to be a citizen of our community and radically challenges our
privatization and disconnect. We
share. We become something bigger than
what we are. We become . . .
Divine. Would that we continue to build
the things that make for peace in our communities and in our world not only
through activity and interest but also through protesting and standing our ground in
peace to say no more of the violence, no more of the death, no more of the war. War is disrupting and draining our common—not only
half a world away but here as the citizens of our own communities. French economist, Michael Piketty, author of the
iconic book, Capital, says that it
may be a pipe dream right now but we need to have the will to have an
international, progressive income tax so nobody can drain the common and hide,
and then we need to invest in universal education so that all who want to learn
and advance can. We need people to stop
being spectators and see themselves part of grand movement away from kings and
toward democracy. Piketty writes, “We
must bet everything on democracy.”[11] We need people to organize and force the
kings of the earth to get serious about this beautiful land and sea and
resources that God has given us. Whatever our answers, it is time for people of
faith to seek those answers out so that God’s loving and just will be done on
earth.
The
king takes. But God . . . God
shares. The question is, what will the
people of God now do? What will we
do? Amen.
[1] Everett
Fox, Give Us a King! Samuel, Saul, and David (New York: Schocken Books, 1999), p. 34. I use Fox’s beautifully poetic translation of
this passage which show the author repeating the word “take” as a header to
every phrase. Fox also interprets God’s
name YHWH as “I-Will-Be-There.”
[2] Robert L. Deffinbaugh, “Give Us a King!” Bible.org
May 25, 2004 https://bible.org/seriespage/give-us-king-1-samuel-81-22.
[3] Robert Gnuse, You
Shall Not Steal: Community and Property
in the Biblical Tradition (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1985), pp. 6-7.
[4] Fox, Give Us,
p. 33.
[5] See I Samuel 13:19-22 for an explicit reference to
the superior technology of the Philistines.
[6] “Pentagon Caught Spying on U.S. Anti-War and
Anti-Nuclear Activists,” Democracy
Now! December 15, 2005 http://www.democracynow.org/2005/12/15/pentagon_caught_spying_on_u_s. From
an NBC News Report. “The list
included: counter-military recruiting meetings held at a Quaker Meeting House
in Lake Forth, Florida. Anti-nuclear protests staged in Nebraska on the 50th
anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. An anti-war protest
organized by military families outside Fort Bragg in North Carolina. And a
rally in San Diego to support war resister Pablo Parades. The Pentagon database
described all of these events as threats.”
[8] http://costsofwar.org/article/us-killed-0.
The
number of American troops who have died fighting the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan totaled 6,802 as of April 2014.
[9] https://www.iraqbodycount.org/.
Iraqi body count documents anywhere from
139,484 to 158,104 deaths.
[10] James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age (New York: Viking, 2014), pp. 46-54
[11]Thomas Piketty, CAPITAL: in the Twenty-First Century (The Bellknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 573
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