Third Sunday after Pentecost                   

1 Samuel 8:4-20

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, “You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.”

But, it displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to govern us.”

Samuel prayed to God, who said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from ruling over them. Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”

So, Samuel reported all the words of God to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots, and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And, in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but God will not answer you in that day.”

But, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

Quote of the Day

Before I went to seminary, I worked for a company that sold CPAP machines for people who have sleep apnea. One day, one of the owners asked if I would be willing to put up a “Quote of the Day” on the board in front of the office. It sounded like it would be a fun, so I agreed, and that same day, I put up the very first quote. I don’t remember what it was, because it was so long ago, but it was probably something like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s: “If you would create something, you must be something.” You know, like a quote that you would find on a motivational poster.

This went on for a few weeks, and I had to find a new quote every day. I started tracking them on a spreadsheet so that I wouldn’t reuse the same quote twice. I was collecting them from everywhere: books, magazines, the Internet, and I kept adding them to the spreadsheet, with future dates on them so that each day, all I would have to do was pull up my spreadsheet, and write the quote on the board. After doing this for a while, it started to get kind of hard to find new quotes, so I started wondering if there were sources that I hadn’t considered, yet. And, I started to wonder if I might be able to maybe use some quotes from the Bible.

Now, for the most part, the people that I worked with were not particularly religious, so I knew that I couldn’t just throw Bible verses up on the board. I had to pave the way, make sure everyone was prepared for it, so it wouldn’t be a complete shock. So, I started looking at the texts from other religious traditions: Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism. For some reason I thought that religions other than Christianity would be less threatening. So, I’d sneak a religious text onto the board about once a week, and then after about a month of that, I put up a verse from the Bible. I chose something from the Hebrew Bible, what we often refer to as the Old Testament, because two of the three owners were Jewish. So, I put up the Bible verse, and I held my breath. And at the end of the day, no one had said anything bad about it. So I thought, okay! I guess there was nothing to be worried about.

I got a little more brazen after that. I only waited about a week and a half before I put another Bible verse on the board. Again, nothing happened, and I thought everything was fine. But the next day, when I got to work, the office manager called me into her office, and asked me to close the door. She said they had gotten some complaints about the ‘Quote of the day.

I said, “Really? What are people saying?”

“They’re complaining about the Bible verses being put up on the board.”

At first, I thought she was kidding, because we did joke around with each other, sometimes. But then, I realized she was serious. So, I started to defend myself.

I said, “I’m not just putting Bible verses on the board. I put up quotes from Buddha and Mohammed, too, and the religious quotes that I put up aren’t pushing any kind of religious beliefs, they just happen to come from religious texts. And, I purposely used the Old Testament because those are the same texts that Jewish people use. And, the vast majority of the quotes are from secular sources, anyway.”

“Well, people don’t like it. They don’t want to have religion shoved in their faces when they come to work.”

“But, I’m not shoving religion in anyone’s face. That’s the whole reason I’ve been using lots of different religions. I’m not favoring one over the other.”

“It would be fine if you were just putting this up on your desk,” she said, “but those kinds of things can’t be put up in front of the whole office.”

“So, does that mean we’re not having a quote of the day anymore?”

“No, the quote of the day is fine, you just can’t put up the religious stuff, anymore.”

I didn’t feel like there was anything left for me to say at that point, so I just said, “Fine, I won’t put up religious quotes anymore.”

She smiled and nodded, and I got up and went back to my desk. For a few months, I had been given the opportunity to be a source of enlightenment and inspiration for a small group of people. But, a lot of people like to keep some distance between themselves and enlightenment. A lot of people don’t like it when God gets too close.

Our scripture readings today from Genesis and First Samuel are stories about people putting distance between themselves and God. They’re stories about trust: do we trust God, or not? Who are we trusting more than we trust God?

Eve trusted a serpent. The serpent told her she should eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, even though God told her not to. And, after she and Adam ate the fruit, they ran away from God, because they were ashamed of their nakedness. They wanted to keep their distance from God. They didn’t want God getting too close.

In our story about Samuel, the elders come to him asking for a king. They didn’t have a king; God didn’t want them to have a king. But, there were a couple of things going on that made them want a king. First of all, they didn’t like Samuel’s sons. Samuel was an important man; he was a judge and he had a lot of power, and the elders assumed that his sons would lead after him. But, his sons were not virtuous; they didn’t behave like Samuel, and the elders didn’t want them to be in charge after Samuel was gone. Also, all of their neighbors had kings. All of the countries around them had kings, and they wanted to be like everyone else. They wanted a human being, someone they could see and touch, to rule them and fight their battles. They didn’t trust God to make sure they would be okay after Samuel was gone. They didn’t trust God to govern them and to fight their battles for them.

Now, God gives them a warning, delivered by Samuel. If they get a king, he will use the people for his own benefit. He’s not going to fight their battles, he’s going to turn them into horsemen, and chariot riders, warriors to fight his own enemies. He will take their daughters and make them work for him. He will take their land, their livestock, and he will make the people his slaves. And, by the time they finally realize what they’ve done, when they finally realize the mistake that they made, it will be too late.

As human beings, our brains aren’t very good at perceiving danger that is far away, or in some intangible future. We focus on what’s in front of us, what we need to do right now. It’s hard for us to put our trust in an unseen God. And, we don’t want someone nagging us about mistakes that we might be making. We don’t like being wrong, and we don’t like to admit when we’re wrong.

After that conversation with the office manager about the “Quote of the day,” I got really sad. I was just trying to make everyone’s day a little more interesting, bring different aspects of our world into the office and give people something to think about. I wasn’t trying to convert anyone. Was the idea of faith really so distasteful that they could even exist within the vicinity of it? I think the reason I had gotten so upset about it was because the “Quote of the Day” had become an expression of me, and I was being told that I was wasn’t palatable.

The next day, I went back to the office manager and I told her that I wasn’t going to do the “Quote of the Day” anymore. And, it was unfortunate, because people had started looking forward to seeing what the new quote would be every day. It could’ve been something good, you know? A way for people to expand their horizons and maybe think about their own beliefs and the assumptions that they’ve made.

I like to think that I made some kind of difference while I was working there. I didn’t always feel comfortable talking about what I believed with my co-workers, because I knew what a lot of them thought about it. But, they all knew that I went to church every Sunday and that I was the leader of the youth group. They also knew that I was in school so that I could eventually go to seminary. There are so many different ways that people express their belief in God, and some of those ways are the reason that people don’t want faith or religion getting too close to them. So, we have to speak up and let people know who we think God is. Do you believe in kind and loving and generous God? Do you believe in a God who only wants good for us and who wants to take care of us, no matter what we do or say. I know that God is in the world, all around us and inside every person. And maybe, if we can be loving enough, if we can be caring enough, and if we can be loud enough, then other people will know that, too. Amen.

~ Rev. Charles Wei