How is rebellion a sin of sorcery?

Meditation for 4^th Sunday of Easter

23 April 2018

“…How much longer do you mean to go on mourning over Saul,

now that I myself have rejected him?” –1 Samuel 16:1

“What we shall be has not yet been revealed…

when it is revealed we shall be like Him…”

--1 John 3:1-2

Recently my daughter brought me some old college literary magazines she’d come across.  She thought I might like to see them because they included some of my old poems and stories.  She was of the opinion that I might like to see them again.  I was grateful to her for thinking of me, but fearful of what I would find. Afraid of what I would see not only in the words, but behind them –in the young man who wrote them.

So, I let them sit for several days untouched.  Then, a sense of curiosity mingled with obligation and I figured I should at least take a look, so I could give them back to her. At first, I was struck by names of people I had not remembered, but suddenly recalled. It was a pleasantly bittersweet sensation; a nostalgia mingled with regret. I recalled those names; faces came to mind, but also the regret that I had not been kinder or braver. I know I was just a young kid –barely out of my teens—but I wish I had been less self-conscious, more generous toward them.

When I began to read my own works, it only got worse.  I suspect some truths should remain only memory.  By that I mean, being faced with a poem I had long remembered as being pretty good and finding some 37 years later that it just wasn’t… aah, ‘tis a stinging feeling. Like the old adage says of ignorance --it was bliss.  Being suddenly face to face with my own failure was very uncomfortable.  And I would say what was most uncomfortable about it was not that my writing was so mediocre, but that I had remembered it and imagined it so much better.  That feeling of shame at having –it seemed-- lied to myself was very disheartening and humbling.

And this brings me to two things I have read in scripture recently.  My slow walk through the Old Testament has just crossed into the books of Samuel, and I am reading of Saul and his failure at being Israel’s king.  He loses his way by seeking to please the people, instead of God. He is trying to be the kind of king the people want, instead of being the king God has planned for him to be.  And yet after Samuel delivers God’s message of failure, Saul is still concerned with how the people will perceive him.  That is a fascinating little bit of psychological insight on the part of the author, but what is even more interesting to me is the beginning of chapter 16 when God calls out Samuel with that beautifully odd chastisement:

“How much longer do you mean to go on mourning over Saul…”

God is calling Samuel to account. Why is he mourning over something that God has rejected?  What does he hope to gain? What is the point? In a sense, Samuel is rebelling against God’s judgment.  Instead of accepting God’s will, he is mourning over what might have been.  He is refusing to trust that God’s will is always good—even when we don’t understand it.

In the next sentence we learn there is another reason for God’s chastisement.  Samuel has a job to do. God tells him, “fill your horn with oil and go,” because there is another king (David)  to be anointed.  In other words: Why are you sitting here moaning about something you can’t change? Get up and fill your horn and go. I have work for you (cf. 16:1b). 

In a way that’s what I was doing as I looked through those old Laurels magazines. I was mourning over Saul. I was regretting choices I had made, but also promise that had not been fulfilled, dreams that had not been realized and all that might have been.

Of course, there are times when we should look over our lives with remorse and regret and that’s why some of us go to “Confession” and why other might go see a therapist.  We see that things haven’t always been right or good and maybe even that there are patterns of behavior that we want to change.  That’s healthy and good. 

But sitting and bemoaning what cannot be changed is a form of rebellion.  It is not just a refusal to accept the truth, but a kind of challenge to God.  Lurking beneath that moaning is the unhealthy suspicion that if God had left things up to us, we would have done a better job.

“Rebellion is a sin of sorcery,

presumption a crime of idolatry.”

–1 Samuel 15:23

Sitting there, ruminating over old hurts or even old failings, we become like a sorcerer stirring our pot, adding a pinch of spite to a dollop of indignities and then stirring in dash of unfairness and suddenly… voila! A bubbling cauldron of heart hardening stewed egotism ready for a bowl full of Saltines.  

And we can sit there stirring it all up and ladling it over and over until it is boils over, or we can hear that distant voice calling us from somewhere so close it seems to be whispering in our ear:

Why are you still moaning over that? Get up. Fill your horn with oil. There is work to be done.

And that is what I heard at mass this past Sunday. In the second reading from the first letter of John, I heard God calling:

Why are you dwelling in the past? Why are you moaning about what might have been?  That is not who you were made to be.  Who you were made to be has not yet been revealed.  But when it is…

The message of Easter is a message of new life. Yes, we all have made mistakes and yes we all have regrets, but to live in those regrets and to cling to the hurt of those mistakes or hard feelings is to live in a tomb. It is to rebel against the glorified Christ who destroyed death, who opened the tomb that it might be empty.  Why on earth would we want to go back in? To pull the stone back over us and hide in the cold and the dark?

It's not about who you were, or what you did or even who you wanted to be.  You are not the sum of all your mistakes, all your hurts, not even of all your successes; thanks to Christ, we are something new. Something more.  Something made in His image.  We can’t really know what it is, but we know it is something glorious –because it is like Him. So, Mr. Sutter… it is time to put away childish things. Fill your horn (get out your pen), there is anointing to be done.