The Problem of Two People with the Same Bad Idea
I Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
June 10, 2012

The Problem of Two People with the Same Bad Idea
I Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
June 10, 2012

I need this morning to begin with a disclaimer. The source of this
disclaimer is the reality that very likely in the near future, when my
parents are driving to the beach, they will listen to this sermon in
podcast. So here's the disclaimer: My parents have an absolutely
beautiful house that any one of us would be happy to occupy. The
reason I need to say that is because this particular house is not
without a handful of quirks. They built it when I was in college, and it
was custom-built. Essentially, what they did was to correct
everything that they hated about the house I grew up in.

Here's an example of what I mean. I'm the middle of five children; I
have three brothers and one sister. The house I grew up in had two
bathrooms. We referred to them very imaginatively as the big
bathroom and the little bathroom. The reason I say imaginative is
that they were in fact the tiny bathroom and the teeniny bathroom. I
tell you this because I know from first-hand experience that when my
parents were sitting in the architect's office, going over the must-have
list for this house they wanted to build, my father's words to the
architect were, "You may do whatever she likes, but I never want to
wait for a bathroom again in my life."

A few years later, they were renovating this house, and converting
the fifth bathroom into a mud room. It was at that point that my father
acknowledged they may have overcorrected, just a little bit. There
was another time when my brother, my mother and I showed up on
the construction site, and it was very clear that my father had beaten
us there to have a word with the electrician. We walked into the
roughed-in living room and saw that there were no fewer than 16
electrical outlets throughout the room. When we pressed him on this
fact, he said that the last 17 years in the 1950s-era ranch, there had
never been an electrical outlet where he wanted one. Therefore, he
was going to correct this. Now lest you think I'm hounding my father
mercilessly, I should acknowledge that almost every member of the
family contributed some or the other quirk to the design. I myself
have never lived down the time that I showed up with another of my
brothers and my mother, and they unveiled their newest custom plan.
I think it was for some sort of water feature; my memory fails me now.
They had excitement in their eyes as they described it to me. I
crushed them just a bit when I replied, "What do I think? I think the
only thing worse than one person with a bad idea is two people with
the same bad idea."

Based on your laughter, I gather you have found this to be true in
your own lives. Many of life's absurdities, I think, result from two
people with the same bad idea. If you stay up late and watch the
infomercials that dot late-night TV, you'll quickly see the products of
two people with the same bad idea. Not long ago, I bought a new
vacuum cleaner. It came with an attachment with which I could brush
my dog with a vacuum cleaner running. Again, two people, bad idea.
Credit default swaps now look like a bad idea in retrospect. Just on a
whim, I looked for the worst ever idea in the history of humankind. I
was astonished when I found virtual unanimity that spray-on hair in a
can was most likely the result of two people with the same bad idea.
In this instance, the ancient Israelites represent an almost perfect
case study in overcorrection, and the dangers of bad ideas being
reinforced by group-think.

To be sure, despite the humor, I don't want to engage in a pile-on of
folks who aren't able to defend themselves against what we're saying.
So let me say that the ancient Israelites were certainly less
sophisticated in their knowledge of technology than we are and had
less benefit of scientific knowledge, but they weren't less intelligent
than you and me. They had less knowledge, not less aptitude. But in
the matter of kingship, just about everything points to two people with
the same bad idea.

You see, throughout their history the story of Israel was that of a
covenant relationship enjoyed with their Creator. Yahweh, the God of
Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Leah and Rachel
made covenant with them to be their God and to be faithful to them.
The covenant was that God would be their God, the king over them.
You don't need a king if you have a living God. With the living God at
their sides, they needn't be subject to the same ordering of life of all
of the folks who surrounded them. You see, the Israelites were
hemmed in on virtually every side by folks who weren't themselves
Israelites. They had certain practices and ways of life that God called
the Israelites to abstain from.

Indeed these Israelites whom God called into being, to be a blessing
to the world, were God's people. And as God's people, the way they
lived their lives -- you know, that promise that you made to Preston
today -- the way they lived their lives said something about the God
whom they worshiped. And so it was that certain problematic
behaviors were proscribed from their lives.

The Israelites, for example, were flatly prohibited from engaging in
Moloch or child sacrifice, unlike some of their neighbors. The
Israelite men were prohibited from treating their wives as casual
sexual dalliances that could be discarded and left to fend for
themselves. They were not permitted to engage in disproportional
response. In other words, they could only take an eye for an eye,
and a tooth for a tooth. They were prohibited from the barbarian
practice of taking a head for an eye, or a leg for a tooth. God had
ways that God wanted them to live, ways intended to bless them and
to bless others.

Trusting in God's everlasting mercy and faithfulness - that's how God
wanted them to live. You see, God wanted for them a life of freedom
from what all the folks around them inured. God wanted them to be
free to live in trust, in hope. And so Yahweh, the living God was to be
their only source of hope and security.

But they wanted a king.

Why did they want a king? Because their neighbors had kings!
Before I appear to be making light of their struggle as mere peer
pressure to maintain their identity as God's people, I should add that
to the observation of the Israelites, their neighbors, who had kings,
appeared to be safer, more prosperous and more secure.

Worshiping the living God, a distinct privilege then and now, does
carry with it the unique challenge of trust, of trusting that God, who
has ever been as presented will ever be as expected. It carries a
unique challenge of finding the Word of this living God as a way of
life. But this is not necessarily easy.

Look at your own life. Is trusting in God perhaps sometimes a very
difficult thing to do?

The neighboring countries, they concluded, had kings, and they had
prosperity and security. Well who wouldn't want that? Surely the
Israelites needed a king as well. I'm not sure, but I think this may
indeed be the first documented case of people confusing government
with God.

In an election year, that can sound like a partisan statement, but trust
me; it's not. The reason it isn't is because we have as a society
separation of church and state, in varying degrees, allegedly.
But they didn't. There is no separation between the church and the
government. The church and the state in ancient Israel are one in the
same. That's their identity. Their identity is based upon the God who
called them into being. You see, Yahweh, the living God who
rescued them from slavery in Egypt, who led them through the
wilderness with pillars of cloud by day and fire by night, this same
God walked with them into the promised land and made covenant to
be their God. That was their identity. It was who they are and who
they were. But now, in this moment, they wanted to change that
identity. They wanted more. They wanted political cohesiveness, not
just the cohesiveness of shared faith that you and I enjoy.

They went to the priest Samuel to tell him of their wishes. In what
must surely seem like an odd conversation to us, Yahweh says to
Samuel about the rejection of God's promise of leadership and
kingship, "It's not you; it's me."

And so Yahweh does not forbid their request for a king. But first he
warns them: There will be consequences of changing from your
present course of action to a different one. And to be perfectly
honest, God's warnings sound a little bit like some of the modern
screeds against government that we may encounter at the more
extreme fringes. A king, he warned, will tax you. A king will draft
your children. A king, he warns, will seize your assets. Are you sure
you want to do this? And the people unanimously agreed, "We want
a king!"

This is the moment when the die is cast, and history changes course
for them. The warning is set: There will be consequences if you
change course. The people are unanimous. "We want a king."
Saul is anointed king over them. Saul was a disaster. It started off
well enough, as he took wise counsel and listened to it. He started
off well in office, as he continued to follow the ways of the living God,
but it wasn't very long before everything went tragically off course.
Saul's kingdom was undermined by jealousy and rivalry, before finally
coming to its end as he took his own life, falling on his sword. In the
process, his sons were destroyed alongside him, and the country
plunged into civil war. A bad outcome to a bad idea, or so at least it
would seem.

Some would say it was a deserved outcome, the result of deliberate
rejection. And to read First and Second Samuel, all of this would
appear to be true. If that were the whole story it might be a dire
warning, but it would be a story bereft of grace and hope. One Old
Testament scholar has noted that the simple injection of the word -
the name - Yahweh into a story turns it into a story of hope and
grace.

And so with the name of the living God, grace and hope return to the
lives of the Israelites. You see, God is the God of redemption, and so
this is not the whole story. This can never be the whole story. The
story doesn't end up with the death of Saul. His disastrous reign is
followed by that of King David. And yes, to be sure, all of what
Yahweh predicted becomes true. The people are taxed; their children
are drafted; their lands are seized. But David is nonetheless
described as a good king. Under his rule, Israel reached its highwater
marks of prosperity, safety, security and geographic size.
David was described as a man after God's own heart. And so
Yahweh, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, became also the
God of David, making with him an everlasting covenant that his heirs
would always sit on the throne of Israel.

The following kings though, were not as good. Solomon, you may
remember, was reputed for his wisdom, but he didn't always do what
was pleasing in God's sight. The kingdom looked great! He was rich,
and he had a thousand wives and concubines, also the markers of
prosperity and security. But soon the kingdom once more plunged
into disarray.

The story of the kings of Israel, as it unfolds through the remainder of
the Old Testament, is a story of feckless leadership, broken promises
and duplicitous alliances, resulting in defeat and slavery. There's no
doubt about it - to read the Old Testament one will quickly draw the
conclusion that people make mistakes. People sometimes make very
big mistakes.

But the Old Testament is not bereft of grace. I never want it said that
the New Testament is the gospel of grace, and the Old Testament the
gospel of the law. There is law and justice in the New Testament,
and there is grace abounding in the Old. The God who made
covenant with the Israelites remained always their God. You see, the
hope of the gospel is not that you and I always remain faithful to God.
The hope of the gospel lies in the reality that God always remains
faithful to us.

People make mistakes, but God redeems. That's why the injection of
the name of God into any story makes of it a story of grace and hope.
That's the gospel; people make mistakes, and yet God redeems. It is
what God does.

Will Campbell, a noted preacher and the inspiration of the character
Will B. Dunn in the comic strip Kudzu, was once asked to summarize
the gospel. He managed to do it in eight words, and I'll paraphrase,
but you can find the original in the text. "We’re all jerks, but God
loves us anyway."1 You would think he was Presbyterian with a
response like that.

You see, we take sin very seriously. We know that God wants us to
live lives that are fulfilled and integrated. And whenever we fall short,
that brokenness is what we identify as sin. We take it seriously that
God wants for us goodness and grace, and that wanting that
goodness and grace for us is not simply to treat us as privileged
people, but so that we in turn may be a blessing to all we encounter -
just like you promised Preston this morning.

There's no mistake about it; people make mistakes. But God
redeems. That is the wonder of the gospel that God loves us
anyway. I'm sure that is why the great stories of literature are so
often redemption stories. We need to know that great hardship, and
great sin, and great evil can be overcome in the power of God's love.
When we hear those stories of redemption, they move us. They
remind us of who we are, and who we can be.

If you saw the movie Schindler's List a while back, you know what
redemption looks like. If you ever read Les Miserables, that
wonderful novel, you know what redemption looks like. If you have
heard the story of Corrie Ten Boom and her sister and their constant
faithfulness throughout their incarceration in the concentration camps,
you know what redemption looks like. If you have ever sung the
hymn Amazing Grace and known that it was the testimony of faith of
a former slave trader who wrote it in response to his conversion to
Christ, you know what redemption looks like. You see, it is those
redemption stories that tell the truth to counter all the stories of sin
and brokenness, all the stories where bad ideas, bad attitudes and
bad motives appear to carry the day. Bringing God into any story is
the beginning of redemption.

But we do have to be careful that if we declare we are bringing God
into the story, that it is actually God whom we bring into the story, and
not simply our own bad ideas about God. If it seems that this is an
unnecessarily dour, decidedly Presbyterian take on our own impure
motives, it probably is. But, if the God whom we seek to mediate into
the story, so that we may see redemption, is anyone other than the
living God, then we have not moved for grace. We've moved in its
opposite direction.

What I should probably do right now is tell you one last really good
redemption story, and wrap it up there, so you can have it echoing in
your ears throughout the week. But I won't. I won't because I don't
want to suggest that something is finished, when God isn't finished
with it yet.

People make mistakes, and God redeems. That is the gospel in
short. The question, rather, that I'd like to leave with you is this:
Where, where do you need redemption in your life?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.

1 Campbell’s actual quote is “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.”