“Then all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and said,
‘Behold, we are your bone and flesh. In times past, when Saul was king over
us, it was you who led out and brought in Israel. And the Lord said
to you, “You shall be shepherd of my people Israel, and you shall be
prince over Israel.” ’ ”
A little Bible history may remind us what a mealy-mouthed,
disingenuous endorsement this really is. At this point, David has been ruling as king over
Judah in Hebron for a full 7-1/2 years, while the tribes of Israel now
buttering him up have been engaged in bitter civil war against him, with
Ish-bosheth son of Saul as their chosen king and the tribe of Benjamin as the
power behind the throne.
Unfortunately both Ish-bosheth and his powerful and popular
general Abner are now dead. They won’t be governing anyone or delivering them
from their enemies.
Thankless Shepherding
So at this very convenient moment, when the house of Saul is
at its weakest and the house of David at its strongest, when Israel has been on
the losing side of their most recent engagement by a body count factor of 18:1,
when treasonous subordinates have murdered their own king, and when no other
realistic option exists, well ... that’s
the time the tribes of Israel decide that David is really a pretty good guy
after all.
“Behold, we are your bone and flesh” ... if you don’t mind overlooking the glaringly obvious fact that we were just trying to kill you.
Thanks gents. That’s wonderful. Oh, and you also just now
happened to remember that it was the Lord himself who said, “You shall be
prince over Israel”? So it’s actually the Lord you’ve been fighting all this time ...
Hmm. Would you want to try to shepherd these clowns? I sure
wouldn’t.
The Work of an Elder
Leadership is not always a good time. In fact, most of the
time it’s a ton of responsibility, and no end of headaches. To be a good
shepherd is to bite your tongue, suck it up, take the fake compliments and play
the hand the Lord has dealt you. And that’s what David did.
When I look at the difficulty churches are having these days
in finding qualified men willing to take on the work of an elder, I am profoundly
unsurprised. We are living in a time period in which men and women, more than
at any time in recent memory, are living and acting in the most atomized
possible way, as individuals giving little or no consideration to the
consequences of their own actions and the impact these actions have on other
Christians. We have “body life” with no concept of the Body, affiliation without
loyalty, and membership without commitment. Every man and woman does what is
right in their own eyes. I don’t mean it’s all evil, of course, but that it’s
always their version, their interpretation, their opinion and their choice.
Nobody else really enters into it.
Would you want to shepherd people like that? The question
answers itself.
Reasons to be Atomized
Perhaps this excessive individualism is a by-product of a techno-culture
that allows us to pick and choose every aspect of our news, music and
entertainment for ourselves. It is not uncommon today to find a family of four in
four different rooms of an evening, staring at four different screens. Maybe consumerism
has become so ingrained in us that we can’t conceive of the church as anything
more than yet another institutional entity flogging a product which we can
choose when and how to consume ... or when not to.
Individualistic thinking is certainly not mitigated by years
of meals grabbed from fast food places on the fly, or sandwiches slammed together
in haste on a person-by-person basis on the way out the door. A family that
doesn’t eat together regularly has little sense of its identity as a collective,
or of the special nature of each of its inter-relationships. After all, the whole cannot be greater than the sum of its parts if
you never bother to put those parts together. And if we have never learned to operate as functioning, contributing members of a genetically-related family, how can
we understand what it means to be part of the family of God?
Or maybe we are so individualistic because we work for
companies that outsource work to other countries, lay off employees here, there
and everywhere, and prize share values over people. It is all but impossible to
be anything but self-interested in the workforce these days. Your company doesn’t
love you, and it has no loyalty to you whatsoever. Why would you define
yourself on the basis of what you currently do for a living and who you do it
with? Most of us are as close to unemployment as the next dip in the Dow Jones.
No sense of shared mission or corporate identity to be found there.
Maybe we are obsessively self-interested because the media
we absorb, mostly uncritically, endlessly promotes self-actualization,
self-improvement, self-help and generalized self-centeredness. The only shared
identity promoted today is that of fellow citizens of the “global village”,
which is about as abstract an identity as can possibly be conceptualized. You’d
get a more identifiable sense of meaning and purpose from a Jackson Pollock
painting.
A Constructive Divine Purpose
Maybe it’s all the above, or something else entirely.
Whatever the reasons, it’s no easier to manage people who don’t see themselves
as members of a single body than it was for David to manage twelve extended families whose tribalism, hunger for power and status, and obsession with historical grievances far
outweighed any sense of national or religious identity David might have been able
to foster.
It kind of makes me wonder whether God didn’t deliberately
nudge other nations into conflict with Israel during David’s
reign with the intention of teaching Israel to fight together against a common
enemy rather than squabbling interminably with one another. Never before or afterward in Israel’s history did so many enemies step up to try their armies against the people of God within such a short period. It’s very possible the many unasked-for conflicts with the Philistines recorded in the books of Samuel represent more than God’s
richly-deserved retribution for Israel’s many sins; there may well have been a constructive
divine purpose at work too. And it wasn’t just the
Philistines; it was
Amalek,
Ammon,
Edom,
Zobah,
Moab and even
Syria.
Perhaps the solution for our churches is something similar.
I wonder if a little serious persecution might not be just the ticket to
instill in us a stronger sense of our corporate identity; a better grasp of who
we — by which I mean we, the church — really are in Christ, and what it is we are here for:
not to consume, experience or self-actualize as individuals, but to serve, worship
and grow together.
Hey, bring on those Philistines.
___________________________
Photo of Jackson Pollock’s studio floor courtesy Rhododendrites [CC BY-SA 4.0]
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