Poolesville Presbyterian Church
06.10.12; Rev. David Williams
If you spend more than a short while interacting with other Americans, you’ll encounter one of them. They are the conspiracy theorists, the folks who are utterly convinced that things are not as they seem, and that somewhere, someone is secretly manipulating everything to some unspeakable and nefarious purpose. Nothing is as it seems.
These are folks who might well seem bright and capable, like the perfectly normal seeming person in the cubicle next to you. He seems so busy and so capable, right up until you realize that he spends most of his work day researching his 1,500 page unpublished manuscript, which reveals that the United States is actually run by the disembodied brain of Walt Disney, which controls both political parties and the military industrial complex from its jar in a deep vault under the Masonic Temple in Alexandria.
This might perhaps explain why he spends his every lunch hour watching iCarly online at one-tenth normal speed while taking furious notes. Although now that you’ve figured out why, you just don’t have the heart to tell him it’s not actually a Disney show.
About a week ago, things were conspiracy-theory central in the D.C. suburbs. In Chantilly, Virginia, the annual meeting of something called the Bilderberg Group was held. It’s a private, informal conference, one that’s been run since the 1950’s for high level political leaders and operatives, captains of industry, and other assorted muckity mucks. It’s invite only, and the goings on within are confidential, so of course conspiracy theorists swarm around it like moths to a porchlight.
According to the Bilderberger conspiracists, this gathering of some of the world’s most powerful and influential people is actually a cabal that is secretly controlling the entire global economy, manipulating everything from behind the scenes.
Here, I confess to being a little bit baffled. This conspiracy theory...if I’m getting this right...hopes to reveal that the world’s most powerful, connected, and influential people are controlling the world. Huh.
Alrighty then.
That, I think, is one of the things I’ve never quite gotten about the whole secret-cabal-conspiracy thing. Powerful people don’t hide their power. They don’t need to. Billionaires and old landed money and political powerhouses tend not to live on secret bases just under the surface of private islands. They do their thing right out there where everyone can see them. Why? Because they’re powerful, and power can do whatever power wants. You want to pour four hundred million dollars into an election to sway the country in a direction that favors your business? You just do it, right out there where everyone can see you.
That’s certainly true now, but it has always been true. Whenever human beings have created societies, there have always been those with power and those without. And those with power? You just can’t miss them.
As we hear the reading from 1 Samuel 8 this morning, that was clearly the case a little over 3,000 years ago. This was a period of considerable change for the Hebrew people, a time during which they found themselves transitioning from one way of being community together to another.
This story comes to us from somewhere between one thousand and eleven-hundred years BCE, a time when the loose tribal federation that had comprised the people of Israel was under considerable pressure. The world around them was changing, both technologically and sociologically. Technologically, the ancient near east was moving from the bronze age to the iron age. Israel was on the bronze side of that exchange, and it was costing them dearly whenever they encountered more advanced iron on the field of battle. The Philistines, for example, had mastered that metal, and that made them scary no matter how many giants they might have with them.
But of equal significance was the shift among the peoples of that region to more and more centralized systems of government. The people of Israel were not yet in that category. Instead of having a central state, they lived without a significant locus of power. The tribes operated more or less on their own, and when an external threat arose, they relied on whatever charismatic or talented leader might arise to help them resist that threat. Those leaders, called “judges,” weren’t of any particular lineage, and their power tended not to convey beyond their own personal authority. They were an odd blend of leader and prophet, and their leadership was part and parcel with the idea that only God was ultimately sovereign.
When all Israel faced were surrounding peoples who were increasingly organized around consolidated, central authority. Individual tribes or city-states were merging into kingdoms, which could leverage that consolidated power into more and more organized military systems. Their armies were better equipped.
And so the pressure was on, and the struggled to come to terms with their seeming lack of power. The solution was simple. In order to provide the unifying and concentrated power that would permit the Israelites to compete with other nations, the elders of all of the tribes approached Samuel. “Give us a king like the other nations.”
This was, for Samuel, frustrating, but as he sought the counsel of God, he receives an odd response.
Faced with what appears to be a rejection of the balance that has maintained the integrity of the covenant people, God tells Samuel in verse 7: “Listen to the voice of the people,” and again in verse 9, “Listen to their voice.” For all of Samuel’s frustration, he is told, listen...and then told to just tell them precisely what will happen if he does what they ask.
What the leaders of Israel hope is that the king will serve them. Samuel predicts is what always happens when human power concentrates in the hands of a few. The powerful will take what they need to maintain power. The king will take sons as soldiers and daughters for his courts. He will take taxes and take land, which will be distributed to those who hover around the riches of power. The king will serve the people, alright, but not quite in the way they’d hoped.
It’s not quite like that old classic Twilight Zone, but it’s pretty close.
But the yearning for national power was too strong, and Samuel acceded to the demands of the people. He listened, as he had been told to listen. That’s not necessarily what was most striking. What is more striking is the way God responds to the request of his people. Despite the seeming move away from covenant, there is no smiting. There are no pillars of fire or plagues or sudden arrivals of the YHWH Death Star in low earth orbit.
What appears to matter most significantly is the free embrace of covenant. If the people choose not to focus on the justice of covenant with God, and instead seek the justice that comes with the balance of human power, then they are free to do so. They’ll receive the truth about the nature of their choice, as Samuel conveyed it. That truth played out across the history of the kingdom, as within two generations, Solomon’s son Rehoboam would so oppress the people of the North that the kingdom would split clean in half.
The misuse of power always produces the same result. When power concentrates, the result is always the same. It is hardly a secret, and hardly a mystery. Throughout the three thousand or so years of human history, power is always it’s own downfall. Wherever human beings have drawn power to a few, be it political or economic, that culture has always and without fail collapsed.
In that, though, we miss the power that quietly but inescapably underlies all things. That power is a subtle part of the structure of all being, as present as the air we breathe or the gravity that keeps us from drifting off the surface of this world. That power is the grace and justice of our Creator, and it’s easy to miss. It’s a form of power that does not demand, that does not coerce or oppress, but instead permits us the freedom to either stand in covenant or not.
Whenever we find ourselves in positions of authority, we need to recall this. Whether at work on in family life, there will be times when we find others in our charge. There is always a temptation to use power like a king, or like a tycoon. It can maintain order, sure. But it too often becomes the means by which we force our wills upon others, to no other purpose than to affirm ourselves. When we do that, our power turns into a feedback loop, feeding only itself. God’s power is not like that. It is infinitely generous, not controlling. It is truly giving, not grasping and self-oriented.
And though it’s as subtle as a sunset, and as quiet as the breath of a newborn child, it’s not really a secret. Not really. It just gets drowned out in the din of our shouting.
Live, in whatever power has been given you, so that truth might be more clearly heard. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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