Thursday 21 October 2021

Judging by Appearances

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
24 October 2021



Samuel anoints David, 3rd Century artwork from Dura Europos in Syria


1 Samuel 16.1-13
Psalm 51.10-14
James 4.7-10


I was in a meeting this week, with others from London Citizens,
            and we were discussing the fact that it’s only just over six months
            before the next round of UK local elections,
with all London borough councils, and all local authorities
            up for election on 22nd May 2022.
 
The opportunities for electing our leaders only happens periodically,
            and it always represents an opportunity
            to bring about change in the direction of justice.
 
This will be the country’s first chance since the pandemic,
            to choose who our local leaders will be,
            and I wonder what our criteria will be when we come to vote?
 
Will we simply vote for the local representatives of our preferred national party?
            Or will we engage deeply with the people, the policies, and the programmes
            that will shape our society for the next few years?
 
With COP 26 round the corner, you might want to take a look
            at the website of The Commitment UK https://www.thecommitment.uk/
who invite us to make a commitment to voting
            with the health of the planet at the heart of our decision.
 
They then take everyone’s Commitment to local politicians,
            giving them a powerful reason to act on the climate and the natural world.
Because, of course, they really want our votes!
 
The months in the run-up to an election are a key time
            to obtain promises from those seeking office,
as they develop their policies to win confidence and, ultimately, votes.
 
We saw this with the London Mayoral election earlier this year,
            and a number of us from Bloomsbury joined with thousands of others
for an online Citizens Assembly,
            to put to the mayoral candidates a manifesto of requests,
            on the issues that we believe matter most to London.
 
So we got promises on
            Housing and Homelessness,
            Youth safety and knife crime
            The living wage
            Welcome and sanctuary for refugees
            and a Just Transition to becoming a carbon neutral city.
 
This last one continues to resonate, of course,
            with the threat of rising utility prices pushing more people into fuel poverty
            where they have to choose between heating their homes and buying food.
 
The task now is to hold the elected mayor to account on the promises he gave,
            and I’m personally involved in this, along with others from Bloomsbury.
 
At our Deacons’ meeting this week
            Jean mentioned the proud history this church has
            of taking action with others on issues of justice,
 
and if anyone would like to join me on the evening of Monday 15th November,
            I’ll be going to an event organised by our West London Citizens group,
                        which will be highlighting the importance of both the Living Wage
                        and the necessity to create good green jobs.
 
We will be joined by a representative from the Mayor’s office,
            who will be speaking about the progress they’ve made since the election,
and we will get to meet both employers seeking to create good job opportunities,
            and local people who are seeking fair employment.
 
Do let me know if you’d like to join me,
            and Libby will send the information round in the news email this week.
 
All of which is to illustrate my point for this morning:
            who we have as our leaders, really matters.
This is true nationally, internationally, locally, and also in church life.
 
As I said last week, it isn’t true that all politicians are the same,
            any more than it is true that all church leaders are the same.
And all leaders, even those with whom we may disagree on policy,
            are worthy of respect until they prove otherwise!
 
And so we come to the story we read earlier from the book of 1 Samuel
            which speaks powerfully, I think, to our current situation.
 
You may remember the story so far…
 
Israel under the Judges had become lawless and godless,
            a place where ‘Everyone did what was right in their own eyes’(Judges 17.6)
 
God’s answer to this was to call Samuel,
            the young boy who would be God’s prophet to the nation,
            calling them to a better way of being.
 
Those who suggest that religion should stay away from politics
            obviously haven’t spent enough time reading the Hebrew Bible,
because it is clear from stories such as the life of Samuel,
            that God’s people absolutely have a vital role to play
            in the way society is shaped and functions.
 
This week we re-join the story of Samuel a few chapters later,
            and we find him stepping into his vocation
as the person who is called to lead the people
            from a time of degeneracy and corruption
            into a new and better future as a society.
 
He finds himself representing the bright new hope for the nation,
            which is the popular call for the establishment of a monarchy.
 
The people cry that the judges have failed them,
            and that what they need instead is a king,
            like the other nations around them have.
 
In this we hear, I think, an early example of nationalist politics,
            and the parallels with certain contemporary political events
            are too obvious to ignore.
 
The people of Israel felt failed by the political system of the Judges;
            that had become bureaucratic and unwieldly,
            with corruption a constant threat,
            and leaders who were out of touch.
 
So the people cried out for a new national identity,
            a new way of understanding themselves,
they wanted to take their stand on the world stage
            on an equal basis to the other countries around them.
 
Does it sound familiar?
 
But instead of BREXIT, they wanted a king.
 
It’s interesting to note that Samuel
            was far from being an ardent advocate for the monarchy,
and he had profound doubts about whether kingship was a path
            that Israel ought to be following.
 
But Israel wanted its king,
            a bright shining personality of a leader
who could fix all their problems
            and be accountable to those who appointed them.
 
And initially, it looked like Saul was the perfect choice.
            He was every inch a king, but also, it emerged, brutal, faithless, and unpredictable.
 
And by the time we re-join the story in chapter 16,
            we find Samuel embroiled in another attempt to raise up a new leadership,
this time against the backdrop of the failing leadership of Saul,
            rather than the previously failing regime of the Judges.
 
And so Samuel goes to Bethlehem,
            to visit a man called Jesse,
because God has told Samuel that the next king
            will be one of Jesse’s sons.
 
As a leadership-appointment strategy,
            I think it lacks some of the nuances of democracy;
but then sometimes I look at who democracy appoints as our leader,
            and I wonder whether things are all that different!
 
Anyway…
 
Samuel sets up a kind of beauty-pageant parade of potential kings,
            and his first instinct is for a young man called Eliab.
 
However, as Samuel had already discovered with Saul,
            the person who looks most kingly,
            isn’t necessarily the person most suited to ruling.
 
And so we get God’s voice intruding into the narrative,
 
The LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart."
 
The inference, although I may be being harsh on young Eliab here,
            is that he doesn’t have the right character to lead.
 
And it’s not until Jesse’s youngest son, David, is brought in from the fields,
            that Samuel takes the horn of oil, and anoints David for kingship.
 
David’s character, it seems, is just what God is looking for.
 
Except, of course, if you know what comes next,
            David’s character turns out to be, well, questionable.
 
He was, as they say, a complicated character!
 
There’s the cutesy David,
            the shepherd-boy, the talented musician,
            who knows the secret chord that pleases the Lord.
 
Although, at the risk of undermining Leonard Cohen’s great song,
            it’s not such secret…
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift;
            I can play that on the guitar!
 
But I digress.
 
Here we have David the pastoral musical boy-wonder,
            who also turns out to be a capable mixed martial arts fighter
            capable of giant-killing acts of violence.
 
And then we have David the adulterer,
            David the murderer,
who by the time of his death has become a kind of Mafia-boss,
            visiting death and destruction on those who displease him,
            through a complex family-based network of thugs and agents.
 
This, it turns out, is the Lord’s anointed,
            who despite us having just been told that the Lord looks not upon appearance,
            is also handsome, with a ruddy complexion and beautiful eyes!
 
What is going on,
            that this gorgeous poster-boy for the Israelite Monarchy 2.0 reboot
            turns out to be someone who could give Saul a run for his money
                        in the competition for the title of ‘dangerous tyrant of the century’???
 
Why is he the anointed one?
 
And here we need to pause for a moment,
            and locate this story within its wider historical context.
 
As with all these early stories from the Hebrew Bible,
            what we have in our Bibles
                        are texts written much, much later, than the events they describe
                        telling stories set in prehistory.
 
It’s a bit like going to see one of Shakespeare’s Henry plays:
            there’s the historical gap between us and Shakespeare,
            and then there’s another historical gap
                        between Shakespeare and the characters he’s writing about.
 
So it is with this story from 1 Samuel,
            which was written down during the Babylonian exile,
            some 500 years or more after the stories it is recording.
 
This is not contemporary, first-hand, eyewitness history.
            This is oral tradition, dramatized and retold over centuries.
 
And it’s written for the Jewish exiles in Babylon,
            who have just witnessed their capital city of Jerusalem destroyed
            and their king deposed by the invading Babylonians.
 
For these people, a story setting the seal of God’s approval
            on the mythic ancestor of their kingly line,
rooting that person firmly in the geography of Jerusalem and Judea,
            was a compelling narrative of national hope,
            told to sustain them through the experience of exile.
 
David, for the exiled Babylonians,
            functioned similarly to King Arthur’s role in medieval England.
 
The stories of Arthur, set in a mythic prehistory,
            defined what it meant to be English,
setting out in narrative form the values of chivalry
            as nobility, humility, bravery, and obedience.
 
Similarly, for the Israelite exiles in Babylon,
            the story of the mythic king David,
            defined what it meant to be Jewish,
setting out the dream of a land, a king,
            and a national identity rooted in God’s presence in the city of Jerusalem.
 
And just as King Arthur was often portrayed as a complex man,
            a flawed hero, far from ideal,
            whilst still defining the ideal of what it meant to be English;
so also for King David,
            another imperfect, inconsistent character,
            compelling and repellent in equal measure,
far from ideal,
            but defining the ideal of what it meant to be Jewish.
 
It may not matter to God if David is good-looking,
            but it certainly mattered to the scribe of 1 Samuel,
who needed his idealised David who his audience could fall in love with,
            before going on to explore the complexities of the great man’s character
            in the stories that followed.
 
We might say to ourselves that image isn’t important,
            that it’s a person’s heart and character that matter,
            not how competently they can eat a bacon sandwich on camera,
but the reality of our world,
            as for the world the ancient Israelites in exile in Babylon,
is that we like our heroes to look the part,
            and we expect them to play the part,
and as long as they do,
            we will overlook all kind of other moral and personal failings.
 
David is still Israel’s hero,
            despite his tendency towards adultery, murder, and violence.
 
Because he represents and ideal,
            he is more than the sum of his parts.
 
It doesn’t matter whether he even existed, historically speaking,
            he still writes the script of what it means to be Jewish,
every bit as effectively as Arthur writes the script
            of what it means to be English.
 
So what are we to make of this?
 
What are we to do with the fact
            that people continue to acclaim leaders
                        based on appearance rather than character,
            on the ideology they represent,
                        rather than the decency of their personality?
 
What are we to make of the fact
            that we live in a society where appearance is so often decisive
            in how a person will be treated by others?
 
From racism, to gender stereotyping, to transphobia,
            to conspicuous wealth, to a person’s weight…
in so many ways, we judge by appearance,
            and lives are blighted because of it.
 

Our new strategic partnership with Impact Dance,
            the black-led organisation now based on our 4th floor,
together with our strong stance as a church on issues of gender and sexuality,
            speak well of our openness to going deeper,
            to valuing each person as made and loved by God.
 
It was inspirational this week to be at the public launch of Impact Dance,
            and to hear the testimonies of young people whose lives have been turned around
            because of the acceptance and value they have discovered there.
 
And I look forward to finding ways as a congregation
            of us journeying with Impact Dance,
            as our church and our building are used to embody inclusion and justice.
 
Similarly, I am glad that we are church
            where gender and sexuality are no bar to full participation,
            and where we live into being the belief that each of us is created in the image of God.
 
But for all the steps taken,
            there is still a long journey ahead.

We need to hear the voice of the Lord,
            breaking into our narratives,
telling us that the LORD does not see as mortals see;
            they look on the outward appearance,
            but the LORD looks on the heart.
 
If we can truly hear this message,
            and learn to see people as God sees them,
it could be revolutionary for the way we live our lives:
            not just in terms of who we vote for as our leaders,
                        although certainly that;
            but also in the way we are towards others.
 
God’s call is on the people of God
            to radically reject any narrative or ideology
            that values or devalues people based on appearance.
 
Because God looks to the heart,
            to a person’s character,
and it is here that God’s persistence is most obvious,
            as God calls sinful people to repentance,
            to turn from their selfish ambition,
            and to live lives of love and concern for others.
 
This story from 1 Samuel isn’t, in the end,
            a fable about whether or not we should elect leaders like David.
 
Of course we shouldn’t, and of course we do.
 
Rather, it’s an invitation for us to see ourselves reflected in the life of David,
            as we too are flawed human beings,
capable of great sin, and great goodness,
            sometimes both at the same time.
 
And if God continued to call David,
            it was because beneath the flaws of David’s character,
he was a person who was willing to repent of his evil,
            to seek forgiveness, and to keep seeking the heart of God.
 
Like David, we are called to be continually responsive to the word of God,
            embodied for us in the word made flesh that is Jesus.
 
It is through Jesus that we are called to a new, a better way of being human,
            to live lives focussed on love of God, and love of the other.
 
People called Jesus the anointed one, the messiah,
            the son of David, born in David’s town of Bethlehem.
 
But unlike David, Jesus resisted temptations of power,
            Jesus turned away from nationalism, from overthrowing the empire,
            he refused to be King.
 
And in so doing, in Jesus, we see the loving heart of God revealed,
            because the LORD does not see as mortals see;
            they look on the outward appearance,
            but the LORD looks on the heart.

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