Reading: I Samuel 3
The First Book of Samuel is a story of Israel in a time of radical transition. Ever since the people arrived in the land of Canaan, they have lived as twelve separate tribes, governed and held together by a network of judges and a house of priests to keep them honest and faithful to God.
But life is now more complex. Inequalities have begun to grow among the people. The judges do not have the power to keep good order. The priests have grown complacent and corrupt. The people know something – maybe everything, has to change. In this situation, God raises up Samuel to lead the people through the transition they long for.
But how does Samuel become the kind of leader the people need to help them through the ups and downs, the mistakes and partial successes they will suffer on their way to a radically new way of being God’s people in the world?
Chapters 1 and 2 tell the story of Samuel born as a miracle baby to a woman in the hill country named Hannah, and how she brings him to the temple to be taught by Eli, the priest who lives there, to be a servant of God.
Eli, for his part, knows he is probably the last of the line of priests. He is old, nearly blind and no longer hears God’s voice. His sons are among the most corrupt of the priests. There is no future for him or the house of priests in the leadership of Israel.
In
chapter 3 we read the story of how old Eli teaches young Samuel what he needs
to be the new leader the people need.
In those days, when the boy Samuel was serving the Lord under the direction of Eli, there were very few messages from the Lord, and visions from him were rare. One night, Eli – almost blind, was sleeping in his room. Samuel was sleeping in the sanctuary where the Ark of the Covenant was. Before dawn, while the lamp was still burning, the Lord called Samuel. He answered, “Yes, sir!” and ran to Eli and said, “You called me; here I am.”
But Eli answered, “I didn’t call you; go back to bed.” So Samuel went back to bed.
The Lord called Samuel again. The boy did not know it was the Lord, so he got up, went to Eli, and said, “You called me; here I am.”
Eli answered, “My son, I didn’t call you; go back to bed.”
The Lord called Samuel a third time; he got up, went to Eli, and said, “You called me; here I am.”
The Lord came and stood there, and called as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” Samuel answered, “Speak, Lord; your servant is listening.”
And the Lord said, “Soon I am going to do something to the people of Israel that many will see as terrible. I will bring to an end the line of Eli, and their leadership of the people. I have already told him this, and why, and that nothing will stop the end what is to happen.”
Samuel stayed in bed until morning. Then he got up and opened the doors of the house of the Lord. He was afraid to tell Eli what the Lord had said to him.
But Eli called him, and asked him what the Lord had told him. “Don’t keep anything from me,” he said. “God will punish you if you do.”
So, Samuel told him everything, holding nothing back. Eli said, “He is the Lord; he will do what he knows is best.”
As
Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and made come true everything he told
Samuel. So, all the people of Israel,
from one end of the country to the other, knew Samuel was indeed a prophet of
the Lord. The Lord continued to reveal
himself to Samuel, and when Samuel spoke, all Israel listened.
Reflection
1207 is kind of a mythical place for the three of us. For my sisters and I, 1207 Ashburn Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba is the only home we ever knew with our parents.
One of my sisters has a picture of it in her own home – a coloured-pencil and pastel sketch made by a friend of hers, framed and given to my parents when they moved after more than 40 years at 1207, into a seniors’ condo. The three of us also have a lasting picture of it in our minds, with a perfectly kept, weed-free lawn front and back; a row of evenly spaced shrubs along one side of the back yard; vegetable garden at the back; around the yard an unceasingly maintained white picket fence; and at the heart of it a house equally unceasingly maintained, repaired, cleaned and kept in order.
A few years ago, I was back in Winnipeg to visit my sister. It was the twentieth anniversary of our dad’s death, and the first time I was back since his funeral.
One day we drove over to 1207, and were astonished by what it is now. Under the current owners – who bought it from my parents and have lived there since, the front yard still has some lawn, but is mostly a number of stone-wall-enclosed gardens of grasses, flowers, shrubs and trees offering shade for a few little walkways and a couple of little benches to sit on – a kind of 50-foot frontage private park in the middle of that block of Ashburn Street, with a house kind of tucked in behind it.
In the back yard, the side shrubs and most of the lawn are gone. Almost all the back yard is a big organic garden, with walkways through near-jungles of more vegetable growth than I can name – a lot of it of gigantic dimensions. It felt like a mini-Mediterranean country estate.
And the house was just as open and opened up inside as a mini-Mediterranean villa. Light and fresh air and freedom all over the place.
At least one of my sisters doesn’t like it; it hurts to see our dad’s and our mom’s vision of the place they worked so hard to maintain, not kept alive and honoured. And I understand that; I feel the same way about lots of things.
But I also really like what’s been done to 1207. I love that the new owners in their time have worked as hard and long at loving that home and making it theirs, as mom and dad did in their time.
That difference of opinion between my sister and I, makes me think of the current debate in church circles and in the news about St. Giles United Church – an historic goliath of a church in east Hamilton. Like many old United churches in formerly white Protestant neighbourhoods, St Giles fell on hard times decades ago. Numbers of both members and dollars dropped, and the cost of maintaining and repairing the building kept rising.
The small congregation that was left amalgamated with Centenary United, a few kilometres down Main Street at the heart of downtown Hamilton – equally historic, equally small, and equally struggling. Under the new name of New Vision United, the amalgamated congregation soon found both the vision and the energy to become a vital part of downtown Hamilton, using the slightly fixed-up Centenary building to host everything from top-name concerts and well-supported benefits for all kinds of causes, to drop-in centres, bathroom facilities and health care for street people during the pandemic, as well as worship, prayer, pastoral care and faith development programs.
The fate of the St. Giles building remains undecided. On one side, some say fix it up and keep it as much as possible it has been, to honour what it was and may still be with proper care. On the other, is a plan to take it down and serve current neighbourhood needs by building new residential space, some full-market value and some subsidized for lower income groups – as well as help fund the new mission going on in the downtown core.
How to know what’s the best way forward and the faithful way of serving God and neighbour? Keep building on the past – tinkering and tweaking, maintaining and repairing as we go, which has worked and served us well enough? Or really let go of what is no longer working as it used to, and radically restructure towards a new future that beckons and begs for our help to be born, even if we can’t see it all that clearly yet?
That’s the question in so many areas of our life today. And it’s exactly the backdrop to our reading this morning from The First Book of Samuel, and the chapter of it we’ve read.
Old Eli is the last of a line of priests who, along with a network of judges, have governed and led the people of Israel ever since they arrived in the land of Canaan. The system worked well for a long time. But the time has changed, and for a whole host of reasons, big change has gotta come. And old Eli knows it.
He knows he is a servant of a failing and fading structure. His sons will not be the ones to lead Israel into the future. It is time for the people of Israel to learn to be the people of God in a new way, and the hard task of leading them into whatever their future will be will belong to an outsider miracle child named Samuel, who is brought by his mother to Eli to be taught how to serve God.
And how lovely it is that Eli, rather than training Samuel to be a copy of himself, teaches him instead to listen to God for himself. Samuel doesn’t know yet what that means, but Eli teaches him, knowing full well that what Samuel hears from God will be the end of what Eli and his sons have known and have been part of.
In the middle of the night, when nothing can be seen for sure, Eli says to young Samuel, “No, I did not call you. It is not me you need to hear. Go back to bed, and if he calls you again, just say, ‘Speak, Lord, for I am listening.’ ”
It sounds so simple. If only it always were.
But this time at least – at this critical moment in Israel’s history, old Eli and young Samuel together get it right.
