Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:1-13
As
I read through the call of David this past week I was struck by the kind of
people that God elects compared with the kind of people we elect. According to polls[1] from
this past week 10% of Americans approve of the job that Congress is doing, 8.5%
don’t know or care (which is probably misleading because I’m pretty sure at this
point 100% of us don’t care, in addition to our other feelings), and 82.5%
disapprove. Given the nature of things in Washington these days I can’t really say I’m
stunned, but taken on its own those numbers are staggering. Isn’t it at least a
little insane that only 1 out of 10 of us approve of the people that we
elected to represent us? We live in a representative democracy wherein the
people decide who gets to serve, and yet we pretty much all dislike the very people
we have elected into that service. And though there is a side of us that really
would never be completely content with any representative, the fact remains
that a majority of us decided that each and every one of these people is the
best person to serve our country.
So, we can be
comforted in knowing that God chooses people very differently from us!
We like
to go the sexy route in our elections. We like to pick the people who are
really smart and attractive, who have a fancy degree from a prestigious university,
and who have done a good job of running a business or making speeches. We
assume that those are the kinds of people that we need running the country
because they have experience doing important stuff, which suggests they can
faithfully represent the issues that are important to us.
Notice,
on the other hand, that God calls a boy shepherd to be king. David isn’t
especially smart; he’s not really attractive in the authoritative way we expect
of our leaders; he has no experience with anything resembling politics; he has
no business acumen; and God doesn’t even ask where he stands on the issues.
What a mockery of the political process! David doesn’t know a thing about
leadership, he has no political convictions whatsoever, and he never went to Yale
or was made captain of the football team. No human being would have ever
elected David to be king.
Isn’t it strange
that God always seems to choose the least, the last, and the littlest whenever
he’s in need of changing the world when those are the precisely the people we reject without consideration? It’s easy for us to justify our choices in leaders. We say
that politician A or politician B has “a good heart.” They’re the kind of
person who stands up strongly for the issues that are important to us. That’s
the kind of person we like to see in leadership, and isn’t that exactly in line
with what God is doing here? Human beings look on the outside but God looks on
the heart, after all! It’s right there in the scripture!
Well, yes… and no
Verse 7 is the one
of the most famous verses in all of the Old Testament, but like many
metaphors it is not so easily translated. It reads like this:
‘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.” It sounds pretty straightforward in English, but in Hebrew it means something different. The word for “heart”
in Hebrew is “lev,” which is your physical muscle that pumps blood—that thing
right there in your chest. But the associations that we have with the heart as the
origin of our feelings and emotions—the kind of thing we mean when we say we
have a “broken heart”—those do not exist with the word “lev.” “Lev” is much
closer to what we think of when we use the English word, “mind.” So, when God
looks on the heart he is not looking for a person who feels or believes well, nor even a person who does good things. Instead, God is looking for
a person who reasons well; a person who is
thoughtful and, most importantly, humble. Such a person has the “lev” necessary
to lead, because he knows what it means to be oppressed by the power that he
will someday yield. Like the law enforcement officer who needs to be tased
before using the taser himself, the kind of person God can use is the person found
wanting in the qualities we typically associate with leadership, because that
person has experience being on the other side of the powerful.
By the way, there
is a Hebrew word for the place where feelings live and it is the intestines.
So, next time you’re on a date feel free to tell your special somebody that you
love him or her with all of your intestines. It does tend to work better if
you’re speaking Hebrew, though.
Anyway, when God
chooses from the least and the littlest it is because they have a mind that is malleable
to God’s will. The biggest and baddest and most powerful rulers tend to have a
mind that is set its ways; they already have power and influence, so their
overriding concern is to protect and keep that power. But the least and the littlest
have a mind that is capable of being molded for God's purposes.
Some of you may
remember Jesse Ventura’s famous interview with Playboy magazine while he was
governor of Minnesota
when he said that “religion… [is] a crutch for weak-minded people.”[2] This
is something fairly typical of atheists. Nadia Bolz-Weber talks about a person
who told her that her “belief in Jesus makes them suspect that [she] intellectually
suck[s] her thumb at night.”[3] It comes to much the same thing, which is this idea that the ideal human being is
strong-minded, certain and sure of yourself, and subject to the ultimate authority of academic credibility.
All of this is
backwards for Christianity, because scripture tells us over and over again that
God is far more interested in the weak-minded than the strong; God seeks out
the uncertain and the powerless, and God humbles the self-righteous. God seeks out
the least and the last and the lonely and the lost and all people who we might
call weak, because those are the people he can work with. While we cling to
certainty as a virtue, God seeks out the uncertain, reminding us that doubt is
an essential aspect of faith, just as humility and meekness are hallmarks of
Christian witness. So, Jesse Ventura (who, ironically, chose the stage name
“Jesse,” the father of David) was right in a way: Believing in God is a form of
weakness, because it is admitting our ultimate reliance on the God who created
and redeems us. In every moment of our lives we are either trying to be God or
submitting to God; one is feigning power, the other admitting weakness. Ventura’s mistake is one
common in politics: he prefers the myth that we are self-made men and women.
If
God went around choosing the bravest and the biggest it would mean politics as
usual. That’s the kind of thing that’s going on in Washington right now. It’s the brashest, the
boldest, the banalest, and the biggest bullies that get the power of
determining national policy. Politics were this way even before David. If God
were interested in changing the world though politics he would have chosen Eliab
or Abinadab or Shammah or any of the older brothers of David who looked like leaders.
Appearance is
deceiving. God is far more interested in children and people with mental
illness and those who are born “different” than he is with people who look
successful. God is far more interested in working through people who we ignore: people who are too young or too old, have too many chromosomes or
too few, who fall behind in school or who are socially awkward; people who don’t fit
in at the work place, who have never quite figured out how to dress; people who
are senile or have Alzheimer’s or who show no common decency. Those are the
people God works though; the people you laugh at. Those are the people God chooses to get things done. The rest of us have our
chance to make a difference through the powers that we have created. And so we
sit by and watch while the government ties itself in knots, wheels spinning in
opposite directions, and for some reason we can’t make the connection that
choosing the biggest and the wealthiest, the most influential, the best
dressers, and the smoothest talkers just happens to be the most inefficient way
to get things done.
Politics will
continue to be politics. We’ll continue to wonder why we elect such terrible
representatives of our views. And, meanwhile, God will continue to choose the
least and the littlest; the ones we rejected long before Election Day. That’s
how the world works; that’s how God works. God looks at the “weak-minded” and
says, “My goodness, you people have this all backwards. But that’s OK. The kingdom of God is coming. Just give it time. The
least will be greatest; the mountains will be lowered, the valleys raised.
Everything will be made new. Just wait.”
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