RCL Proper 10B
9 June 2024
Church of the Epiphany
Surrey BC
For more than forty years I have made use of and been guided by the Myers-Briggs Personality Types. It’s a tool that can help a person understand themselves, how they work, how they engage the world and how they relate to other people. It’s a helpful tool because it can also help a person understand how they respond to stress and conflict.
When I am ‘in the grip’ of stress and conflict, I react in a number of ways. I become negative and pessimistic about everything. I alternate between being helpful and not being helpful. Instead of taking responsibility for my actions and decisions, I blame other people or circumstances. I become inefficient and unproductive and can even shut down for long periods of time.
Because I know these things, I also know how to get ‘out of the grip’. I take some time away. I set smaller goals and accomplish them. I seek help in setting priorities and ask others to work with me.
What is true of me as an individual is also true of communities. When communities are ‘in the grip’, they also behave in ways that are less than helpful. They may even act in ways that are potentially self-destructive.
When the people of Israel entered the land of Canaan, they were a people who were guided by the Law God gave to them on Mount Sinai and by the wisdom God’s Spirit gave to the judges and prophets like Joshua, Deborah and Samuel. But over the centuries things began to fall apart. People being people, they often disobeyed the Law and ignored the advice and counsel of the judges and prophets. And, as so often happens, not every judge or prophet was of the same calibre as the judges and prophets from ‘the good old days’. Political and military catastrophes caused public confidence in their traditions and leadership to evaporate.
Instead of a healthy re-boot of the tradition of the Law and a renewal of the leadership of the judges and prophets, the people now wanted a king. They wanted to be like every nation around them. So, in response to their desire we heard voiced in the first reading, God agreed and gave them a king – Saul.
‘But be very careful what you wish for’, Samuel said to them. There will be some good kings like David and Solomon, but there will also be some really bad ones like Ahab. The country will also eventually split into two distinct kingdoms, Israel in the north, Judah in the south.
Perhaps their corporate mistake was failing to ask some basic questions of themselves as a community.
· Who are we?
· What are our strengths?
· What are our ‘growing edges’?
· What are our hopes?
· What are our fears?
Instead they reached out for someone else’s solution that fit someone else’s social, cultural and political situation – not the social, cultural and political situation of the people of Israel.
What was true for the people of Israel three thousand years ago is true for us as Anglican Christians in the twenty-first century. We are ‘in the grip’ of social and cultural stress. We could, like the Israelites of Samuel’s time, reach out for someone else’s solution to someone else’s challenges, or we could examine ourselves carefully.
· Who are we now?
· Who do we wish to become?
· What are our strengths and values?
· What are our ‘growing edges’?
The good news is that we do not travel this road alone. God walks with us wearing many guises and offering wisdom through our shared knowledge and experiences. Our life will not be free of problems, but God will preserve us and give us grace to endure and overcome them. We travel with our sisters and brothers in other congregations. We share a life of worship and service with them. We are part of a wider community whose resources join our own in building the future we hope to see. We do not need a king; we have someone who has called us his friends and who is our way, our truth and our life.
Let us pray.
O God,
you have called to your servants
to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,
by paths as yet untrodden,
through perils unknown.
Give us faith to go out with good courage,
not knowing where we go,
but only that your hand is leading us
and your love supporting us;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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