“The Trouble with Kings”    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   June 10, 2018   

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1 Samuel 8:4-20

4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, ⁵and said to him, ‘You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.’ ⁶But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, ‘Give us a king to govern us.’ Samuel prayed to the Lord, ⁷and the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. ⁸Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. ⁹Now then, listen to their voice; only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.’

10 So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. ¹¹He said, ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; ¹²and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. ¹⁵He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’

19 But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, ²⁰so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.’

The United States, a nation of more than 300 million people, has a senate that is limited to 100 members. Our senators are a tiny body of elite legislators who provide oversight to our entire nation. 

Last Sunday, a senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, traveled to Brownsville, Texas to the site of a now closed Walmart that has been converted to serve as a detention center for children who have been taken away from their parents at the border, when they came here to seek asylum. By the way, an asylum seeker is not an illegal immigrant. The legal process for seeking asylum is to show up at the border and ask for it. 

The Trump administration’s ramped up policy is treating asylum seekers as if they are criminals, sending the adults into detention and sending children to facilities where we only hear stories about how the children are cared for. Senator Merkley provided dramatic evidence that not only are reporters denied access to know what is going on, but even a sitting United States Senator cannot even enter this federally funded program to just see how the children are being treated. The for- profit operators of this facility in Brownsville, TX called the police who barred Senator Merkley from entering the front door. It is as if we were living in a new imperial America. 

Later this week, the Senator did gain access to the facility only to confirm what we had feared: that the children in this repurposed Walmart are being kept in small cages, like dog pens. 

This is how it starts, when an American border agent demands that a crying child be torn from the arms of her mother to be housed in a cage, possibly for months, without ever seeing a family member. This is our imperial government at work.

I don’t want to be melodramatic or emotionally manipulative but it is too much to suggest that we should really study this child’s face for a moment because this is what our nation has come to and I don’t think that any of us should be passive about it. What you are seeing right there is a child being traumatized. It may be that she will be released to the foster care system, never to see her family again. She may be subjected to the nightmares we have heard too much about – what really happens to children who disappear into the system. Where do terrorists come from? Why do so many people hate America? If you think about it, it really isn’t all that hard to figure out.

This came at the end of a week when the president declared that he had the right to pardon himself for any and all crimes and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, publicly stated that the president could have shot FBI director, James Comey, and the president could not have been indicted because, he insists, a sitting president cannot be indicted. If you are sleeping well these days, you are not paying attention.

Almost 500 years ago, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, Samuel Rutherford, wrote the book whose title gave us the phrase “Lex, Rex” or “Law is King.” Rutherford wrote as the English Civil War around Charles I abuse of power was being challenged by Parliament and Charles responded to their complaints by dissolving the Parliament. Though Rutherford’s book and the philosophical argument he described in Lex, Rex about limited government power and the need for a constitution to be more important that the whims of the monarch, you can’t say that he was a successful author. He was charged with treason and would have been executed had he not died prior to his trial and his book was the subject of the last official book burning in England. 

His basic argument was that the law should rule over everyone, including the king, a concept that heads of state frequently seem to find to be too limiting.

It is almost impossible to believe that in the last week our head of state’s attorneys actually sent a letter to special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, saying that the President has absolute authority of the judiciary and that he could fire Mueller, or order the investigation closed, or pardon anyone involved. 

And while this is clearly some of the dumbest and most irrational tripe that any attorney has ever written, a large portion of our country is ready to burn copies of Lex, Rex all over again, applauding the fact that our president is placing himself above the law. 

I have received a couple of letters this week from a local pastor who has been shocked and offended by my newspaper column in which I called President Trump “a dangerously incompetent, misogynistic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, racist.” This young pastor tells me that he “thanks God” every day because Trump is president.

And there you have it, a large portion of society is willing to be subjected to an imperial president, no matter how dangerously incompetent, misogynistic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, or racist the imperial president may be. 

I took as our wisdom lesson today the Old Testament lesson suggested by the Revised Common Lectionary from the 8^thchapter of I Samuel. In this church, we do not read passages from the Bible because of our loyalty to church tradition and certainly not because we think that God wrote or inspired the Bible. If I read a passage of scripture in our services it is because it strikes me as being true. The Bible is not the Word of God but it is the collected wisdom of a whole lot of people over a very long period of time and though we respectfully disagree with large portions of it, when you read something like this passage today, every cell of your body stands up and says “Amen!”

The people of Israel, according to the text, had lived as fairly disorganized tribes who had respected the leadership of prophets and judges but they had lived without a king, without a head of state. And they were demanding of the prophet Samuel that he anoint a king for them and he really didn’t want to do it.

Now, mind you, this text was not actually written before there were kings in Israel, and it wasn’t written by Samuel or any contemporary of Samuel. It was written by priests in the temple who had already experienced how corrupt the monarchy could be. The monarch could probably have written about how corrupt the priesthood could be, but priests have a better shot at getting their musings published in the Bible. Even though the account is very one sided, you have to admit, this priest nails it. He records Samuel as warning the people:

 ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; ¹²and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. ¹⁵He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.’ 

Beyond the obviously dated illustrations, this is true enough isn’t it? An Imperial President will give tax cuts to his wealthy peers and shift the burden of supporting the nation onto the backs of those who work the hardest and have the least. An Imperial President will spend heavily on the military while cutting the programs that provide health care, education, and basic food and housing to the poor. He will literally enslave the majority of the population through economic exploitation and endanger the world through hapless military threats and misadventures.

What I want to say clearly today, and I hope all of you are with me in this, this passage in I Samuel was not written 3000 years ago to warn us about Trump. Though Trump is our tyrant de jour, this text was written to defame several ancient kings who had already usurped too much of the people’s power for their personal gain. This is not so much about Trump as it is about power . . . that classic observation that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

Sadly, examples are not difficult to find. I know of no swing greater than my own contemporary, the Haitian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide graduated from seminary about the same time that I did. He and I, and people like Archbishop Oscar Romero, were schooled in Liberation Theology. He was passionate about confronting the abuses of the Duvalier dictatorships. So much so that entered politics and was elected president. He attempted to initiate a number of major reforms, nationalizing businesses, raising the wages and the standard of living of the poor of Haiti.

But he got a lot of opposition from both businesses and the military. There were coops and violence and “the little priest” of Haiti was transformed into a violent dictator who used a practice called “necklacing,” in which his opponents had a car tire chained abound their neck, the tire was then filled with gasoline and set on fire.

Aristide was heard to say one morning, “I love the smell of burning tires.” Opposition turned him into just the kind of violent dictator he had despised. Now, I mentioned Oscar Romero because, in El Salvador, Romero took liberation theology to new heights, suffered repeated imprisonments, and beatings, and was finally murdered by an assassin while he was saying mass. Last month, Pope Francis started the process of making Romero a Catholic saint. I mention Romero and Aristide side by side because we have to recognize that while power almost always corrupts, it doesn’t have to. You can choose to do otherwise. 

No one is perfect. No one is immune to the seduction of power, whether it is to make your own life more comfortable, or to acquire more money, or whether it is the ego appetite for power itself, none of us can claim to have never strayed from the straight and narrow. 

We all do exercise power, either by what we do intentionally, or when we choose to stand idly by while injustice spreads like a dark cloud over the earth. It is horrifying that we have elected a narcissist with little intelligence and no relevant experience to the highest elected office in the world. This has been a horrible mistake, exposing some of the greatest weaknesses of our democratic systems. 

However, what I think we really need to drill down on is the psyche of the American voting public that once having elected an aspiring dictatorial tyrant who uses the office to enrich himself and his friends, who legitimizes racial and religious and gender prejudices, and who seems willing to assert power in ways unheard of in America, that those who voted for him are still cheering his every step towards an imperial presidency that looks a lot like a third-world dictatorship.

There will always be another Trump, another Aristide, another Kim, who will worm their way into power and then use it in the most corrupt ways, as long as we allow indifference, fear, hopelessness, to silence our voices of protest, and to slowly erode our freedoms as a people. We have reason to be seriously afraid that if someone as clearly incompetent as Trump is, can do what he is doing, what would happen if an enlightened tyrant were to find her or his way into the Oval Office? 

Trump is a nightmare but there are much more talented people all around him who could bring about a moral apocalypse. I shudder to think of what a Paul Ryan or a Ted Cruz presidency might look like. The Handmaid’s Tale or the Hunger Games could become something like a documentary. 

I know that it is easy to assume that a preacher might be exaggerating but the seeds of this kind of tyranny are already planted in our society.  Cruz’s father is a pastor who has literally said that “My son is an anointed King, destined to take control of all sectors of society.” And before you get too comfortable assuring yourself that it could never happen, please realize that Cruz actually has a law degree, experience in government, and is much more intelligent than Trump and Trump has managed to become an imperial president. All it takes is apathy on the part of voters and it could happen.

There has been endless conversation about how Trump managed to win, whether it was clever manipulation of the Electoral College, or Russian involvement, or split votes for Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, but we should be painfully aware of this: nearly half of all voters did not vote. In fact, if “did not vote” had been a candidate, “did not vote” would have won in 41 states. Fatalism is our real enemy here. Defeatism, the acceptance that the poor and the middle class are just the hockey pucks of the Republican and Democratic parties. We must vote in ways that limit the power of government.

We live in a nation with over 300 million citizens. We cannot do what Samuel suggests and simply live as good people without a government. We have to have an organizing and regulating government to have this many people living this close to one another. And there is no doubt that a dictatorship is a much more efficient way to govern a large nation. There is less waste, less bureaucracy, things happen faster and more efficiently than any democracy. It is, however less satisfying for the citizens. Any one of us might be in favor of a government by enlightened despot as long as we could be the enlightened despot.

It is as Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for everything else.” Absolute power should never be given to anyone, especially not to ourselves. As messy as Democracy is and as inconvenient as giving individual rights to others can be, we have reason to remember what happens when you make anyone a king. 

A few years ago, a local Pentecostal church started a movement to repeal some of the city’s human right’s policies that provide protections to the LGBTQ community. I, of course, campaigned against this repeal and when my neighbors kept stealing my “vote no on April 7^th” signs out of my yard, I power-washed the message in six-foot-tall letters on a 40 foot stretch of my fence. Have I mentioned that some of my neighbors are jerks?

I have been very engaged in the fight for civil rights for the LGBTQ folk for more than 25 years. Not because I am gay, or because I have gay family members. I have put a lot of professional and personal risk into this because it is the right thing to do. But we lost that vote. We didn’t lose it by much, but we lost it. On April 7, of 2015, I was out knocking on doors, encouraging people who had not voted to go to the polls and vote.

My very last door on that day, just a few minutes before the polls closed, was the home of a young lesbian couple. They admitted that they had not voted. 

I told them where there polling place was and let them know that they only had about fifteen minutes to get there. They looked at one another then turned back to me and said, “Not this time. We’ll try harder to vote next time.” I had been fighting for their civil rights from before they were born. Perhaps their lives had not been so hard. Maybe they had not encountered the violent prejudice that same sex couples had endured in Springfield just a decade ago. . . but they very mistakenly seemed to believe that their rights were guaranteed and that nothing could ever take them away. 

And I am not going to blame that couple or the thousands of people like them who just didn’t go to the polls, even though, realistically, the failure of that referendum was their fault. But laying blame accomplishes nothing unless you can be satisfied with smugly saying, “I told you so.” 

We have to try to awaken the sleeping giant of indifferent voters. I spent my day yesterday, knocking on doors and registering voters. There is a better world waiting to be born and as messy and unattractive as that may seem, you are the midwives that will help to give birth to that world.

We need to help the poor, the hopeless, the defeated, the oppressed to become informed voters because we know that the alternative is an imperial king and haven’t we had enough of that already?

This is no time to surrender.