As the father of a
college-age daughter, long ago, oh too long ago (beginning to weep), I remember
the onslaught of princess movies that were fed to my daughter throughout her
childhood by the Disney and Barbie universe.
One of the basic truths of those princess movies was that there were,
yes, people who were mean-spirited and evil who often had false claims to the
throne. But . . . the insidious lie that
was told is that there are also heroic and benevolent dictators who were good
and righteous and fair. That’s all we needed—just the right
authoritarian ruler—not an end to authoritarian rule.[1]
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, does
not follow this ancient cultural tradition.
The Bible begins the description of a king with a sense of dread and
misgiving before anything else happens.[2]
.
To supplant all kings, pharaohs, and sovereigns, God is made king. In establishing a covenant with the people,
God acts as ancient kings acted in establishing some form of treaty or
agreement with their people.[3] 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, sovereigns, and Caesars the
Jewish people would inevitably encounter in the ancient Mediterranean world. The Ten Commandments established a covenant 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, established the land as a relative to human community for their mutual
welfare and well-being. The word
“salvation,” in fact, was closely tied to “liberation,” as in the liberation of
the Hebrew people from their religious, political, economic, and institutional enslavement
to Pharoah and the Egyptian empire. The
HarperCollins Bible Dictionary defines “salvation” as a broadening or enlarging
of space for community life and conduct.[4]
Sewn into Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim faith are democratic concepts of a nation of priests, the priesthood of
all believers, the Body of Christ which values the most vulnerable, social
justice, economic equality, and sovereignty reserved for God alone.
In the 10 Commandments, God does not deliver the
Children of Israel from Egypt only to be just like Egypt. For example, “Do not steal,” or 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.
As Hebrew Scripture scholar, Robert Gnuse has written, “The purpose of
the command [do not steal] was to curb those who steal from society at large by
amassing great wealth, for such theft will ultimately break down that society.”[5]
Communal property, the land, the object of promise,
was not for individual ownership. In
ancient time, the land was effectively, as our New England sisters and brothers,
siblings and cousins, might say, “the common”—the shared place of public use
and thriving.
In the Exodus story, Pharaoh sought to bring all
resources to him, for everything to flow through him. The true Sovereign of Israel, their Liberator
and Deliverer, sought to bring the Children of Israel to a broad space for not
only all of the people to thrive but, in particular, for the most
vulnerable—the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, and the land—to be
protected.
So when the Children of Israel shout to the prophet Samuel, “Give us
a king!” it is a direct insult not only against the one who delivered them from Egypt. But against the values of the Living God. Sovereignty is to be reserved for God alone.
And God knows how this story goes, how these values
will lead to ruin.
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 away your sons.
The king shall take away your daughters.
The king shall take away your slaves.
The king shall take away your animals.
The king shall take away 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.[6] 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 shall reverse the very
values instituted by God to keep the resources for life and people of Israel,
particularly the most vulnerable—the economically poor, the widow, the orphan,
the immigrant, and the land--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 the mammoth amount of money
made by the pharmaceutical industry or how the profits of behemoths like Amazon
have skyrocketed, governed by what Michael Piketty calls patrimonial capitalism
or plutocracy, lobbied and bought by large corporations, industrial
agriculture, or the multinational finance industry, or the vaunted and
reverential status and absolution of any responsibility for the United States
military, we are ruled and all power flows to the king. And it is killing the common.
God . . . God opposes kings and pharaohs and Caesars
who strategically direct the flow of resources to the throne. God opposes kings because their oppressive
power takes and takes and takes to keep the people subjugated and enslaved.
In 2019, according to Inc., Amazon made 11
billion dollars in profits, paid no taxes, and received a $129 million tax
rebate.[7] During pandemic, Jeff Bezos income increased
by 86 billion dollars.[8] Meanwhile, injuries in Amazon warehouses were
80% higher than its competitors.[9] Indeed, “[t]he combined wealth of America's 657 billionaires grew by
44.6% — $1.3 trillion — during the pandemic.”
Meanwhile, “[f]rom
March 2020 to February 2021, 80 million people in the US lost their jobs. Between June and November 2020, nearly
8 million Americans fell into poverty.”[10] At a time when we should be
bearing one another’s burdens and speaking to the needs of the most vulnerable,
the king takes.
It was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who was
quoted as saying, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have wealth
concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”[11]
If there ever were a time when we would be reminded
that we are all sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins to one another, this
time of pandemic should have revealed that to us. For we know that as long as the pandemic
rages in another nation, the greater possibility there is for a variant to
occur--which may make vaccinations many of us have received less effective.
Cases are rising in at least 14 African nations.
Hospitals are overwhelmed in some nations.
Others are reporting a third wave. The World Health Organization is warning that
vaccine deployment in Africa has come to an almost complete halt. The People’s Vaccine Alliance estimates it
could take 57 years to fully vaccinate everyone in low-income nations.[12]
Anne Marriott, Oxfam's health policy manager, stated,
"These vaccines were funded by public money and should be first and
foremost a global public good, not a private profit opportunity.” Yet vaccines makers refuse to waive patent
rights so that vaccines might be made more locally in poorer countries. Nine new billionaires were created in the
pharmaceutical industry as a result of the vaccine.[13] Rich countries continue to hoard vaccines
when, as Dr.
Monica Gandhi, infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco has said,
the only way out of pandemic is application of the vaccine. Nobody is safe unless we all are safe.[14]
But . . . the king takes.
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, before a king, Israel may not have believed it had 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 militarily 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.[15] 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 fear and war do. Fear and war disrupt and drain the common,
centralize leadership and unseat shared thriving and freedom, give power over
to kings and sovereigns who then take and take and take, and, inevitably, kings
move God off the throne in favor of other idols, lies, and priorities. The king
openly states that our prosperity is wrapped in him rather than each
other. So we fear one another instead of
the king who drains the common. The king
demonizes the vulnerable to say they are the ones who will drain your
livelihood. In turn, we make the
economically poor and the immigrant our enemy pretending that they are the ones
who rob of us of our profit margin. The
king amasses a war chest and calls the people to war on his behalf, promoting
his own divinity to deliver the people from their insecurity and fears. The king hoards and privatizes every last
thing, including the land and the water, the very thing God gives to live in
mutual relationship to the people as their relative.
To protect our hoarded wealth, requires an ever-greater
investment in our military at a time of the longest running war in United
States history. Even if the Pentagon
budget were cut in half, the United States would still outspend China, Russia,
Iran, and North Korea combined. We spend
more on the military than the next 10 nations combined.[16] The National Priorities Project shares that “[t]he United States military is the world’s
largest institutional consumer of oil and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world. In any given year, the U.S.
military pumps more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than some
industrialized countries. In 2017, the Pentagon’s total greenhouse gas
emissions were greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal.[17] Rather than a relative to be protected, God’s
good earth has become a resource to be exploited.
This is not about Republican or Democrat. The increase in the Pentagon
budget proposed by President Biden is the size of the entire CDC budget.[18]
We have no shortage of resources. Abundantly, God has given us the
resources. But they are hoarded by the
ruling class. The king takes.
I Samuel, Chapter 8, is a critique of a nation that
believes in a benevolent dictator rather than a God who desires their shared
thriving. To paraphrase former Zambian
president, Kenneth Kaunda, I Samuel 8, reminds us that what a faithful nation
needs is not a person of faith in the palace but a prophet within earshot. Prophets were those truth-tellers . . . those
people who reminded the powerful of their responsibility for the poor and
oppressed.
Our liberation, salvation, and redemption depends 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. That we are bound to one another, sisters and
brothers, siblings and cousins of one another . . . this is the cruel teaching
of the pandemic.
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.[19] Those meals shared are what we do in
communion. We say that, in a time of
war, this blessed church will seek to restore and rebuild our communities, our
shared enterprise as a people.
This congregation knows the character of God
though. We thrive on ways that celebrate
the common: through the ways we share
food, Tracy and I were blessed to participate with Perry and Armela in the CROP
Walk in May to speak to world hunger, and the work done in efforts for the
blanket drive, the food bank, and the community garden.
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 protesting and
standing our ground in peace to say no more of the violence, no more of the
death, no more of the war. It 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 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.”[20] 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 the people of this blessed church do?
How will we communicate God’s salvation to the rest of the world? You.
You are the blessed Body of Christ, the priesthood of all believers, and
it is part of the Congregational heritage of this church to believe and act out
the reality of a God who has sewn democracy into us. May we be those people. Amen.
[1]
Watching the TV miniseries, “The Crown” should disabuse anyone of that notion.
[2]
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.”
[3]
Robert L. Deffinbaugh, “Give Us a King!” Bible.org May 25, 2004 https://bible.org/seriespage/give-us-king-1-samuel-81-22.
[4] “salvation,”
Powell, Mark Allan, ed. HarperCollins Bible Dictionary. Abridged
Edition. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009.
[5] Robert
Gnuse, You Shall Not Steal: Community and Property in the Biblical
Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1985), pp. 6-7.
[6]
Fox, Give Us, p. 33.
[7]
Minda Zetlin, “Amazon Owes $1 Billion in Federal Income Tax. With Deferments,
It May Not Need to Pay Up for a While,” Inc., https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/amazon-1-billion-federal-income-tax-payments-deferred.html
[8]
Chase Peterhorn-Withorn, How Much Money America’s Billionaires Have Made During
The Covid-19 Pandemic,” Forbes, April 30, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2021/04/30/american-billionaires-have-gotten-12-trillion-richer-during-the-pandemic/.
[9] “Amazon
warehouse injuries '80% higher' than competitors, report claims,” BBC,
June 2, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57332390.
[10]
Lina Batarags, “America's billionaires got 44% richer during the pandemic while
more than 80 million people in the US lost their jobs,” Insider, March
24, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-in-america-got-so-much-richer-during-pandemic-2021-3.
[12] “Headlines,”
Democracy Now!, June 4, 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/4/headlines/who_warns_of_surging_covid_19_cases_in_africa_as_vaccine_shipments_come_to_near_halt.
[13]
Hanna Ziady, “Covid vaccine profits mint 9 new pharma billionaires,” CNN,
May 21, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billionaires/index.html.
[14] “Dr. Monica Gandhi on the Origins of COVID-19, Vaccine Equity, the Debate over Masks & More,” Democracy Now!, May 27, 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/27/covid_19_origins_wuhan_lab_leak.
[15]
See I Samuel 13:19-22 for an explicit reference to the superior technology of
the Philistines.
[16]
Robert Reich quoting from National Priorities Project, Tweet, @RBReich, https://twitter.com/i/status/1399416383033667587,
May 31, 2021.
[17]
Lorah Steichen, “The U.S. Military is a Major Polluter, but "Greening the
Military" is a False Solution,” National Priorities Project, May 4,
2020, https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/05/04/if-us-military-major-polluter-why-not-green-military/,
quoting Brown University Watson Institute International & Public Affairs,
“Costs of War.” https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/ClimateChangeandCostofWar;
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and.
[18]
Lindsay Koshgarian, “The Pentagon Increase Is the Size of the Entire CDC Budget,”
National Priorities Project, May 14, 2021, https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2021/05/14/pentagon-increase-size-entire-cdc-budget/.
[19] James Carroll, Christ
Actually: The Son of God for the Secular
Age (New York: Viking, 2014), pp. 46-54
[20]Thomas Piketty, CAPITAL: in the Twenty-First Century (The Bellknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 573
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