Surfaces (20th Sunday after Pentecost; 1 Samuel 16:1-3; October 22, 2017)

Surfaces

20th Sunday after Pentecost
1 Samuel 16:1-3
October 22, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Saul was king over the tribes of Israel but it wasn't working out very well. He had become rather erratic, moody. And to make things worse he seriously messed up some instructions from Samuel. He had been told to attack an Amalekite city and destroy everything: the people, all livestock, and anything of value.

(I pause here to observe that this is, of course, morally reprehensible. This is neither the first nor the last time that Israel seems to been required by God to commit an atrocity. The story is ugly. It's there and there isn't really anything we can do about it. It's also not particularly relevant for today's reading, so I'm going to let it go.)

When it came down to it, though, Saul and his army attacked the Amalekite city, and overran its defenses. They captured Agag the king alive but put the people to death. They also kept the sheep, the cattle, the fattened calves, the lambs , and everything of value.

God sent Samuel to confront Saul about his failure to do as God had demanded. Samuel found Saul at Gilgal. Saul met Samuel and told him, "I've done what Yahweh demanded."

"Oh, yeah?" Samuel said, "Then why do I hear sheep bleating and cattle mooing?"

And Saul replied, "Well, um. See, we, um, decided to keep the best for, um, um, to sacrifice it to Yahweh. Yeah, that's it. Yeah."

Samuel then killed Agag the king and Samuel and Saul went their separate ways. They never saw each other again.

So God told Samuel to go to Bethlehem and overthrow the government. So Samuel went to Bethlehem. He went with fear and trembling. Anointing a new king is a really bad idea when the old king is still in power and that's exactly what Samuel was doing. So God gave Samuel a cover story: Samuel's public story was that he was in Bethlehem to perform a sacrifice for no particular reason. The town worthies were gathered as were the offerings. Jesse and his boys were invited. They purified themselves and came to the sacrifice.

As Jesse introduced his sons to the out of town celebrity, Samuel and God had a running conversation. Samuel saw the eldest son of Jesse, Eliab, and said to God, "He's good looking. That must be the new king. Right, God?"

"No," God said, "that's not the new king and what's more I don't look at things like you humans do. Humans see only what the eyes can see. I see right into the heart."

"Oh," said Samuel, "Then how about Abinadab?"

"Nope," said God.

"How about Shammah?"

"Nope."

And so on through seven of Jesse's sons. Samuel was puzzled. The new king was supposed to be one of Jesse's sons. "Do you have any other sons?" Samuel asked Jesse.

"Well, yeah. But he's the youngest and he's watching sheep."

"Send for him," Samuel said.

When the youngest son of Jesse arrived, God told Samuel, "That's the one!"

So Samuel took his horn and poured oil on David's head. God's Spirit fell on David. Samuel left Bethlehem and went to Ramah. End of story.

Well, really, it was the beginning of the story of David and the eventually founding of the only ruling dynasty of Judah. David and his descendants reigned over Israel until the division of the kingdom and then over Judah for the next four hundred years.

But there is something odd in this story. Did you notice it? When Samuel saw Eliab, Jesse's oldest son he thought, "That must be the one."

But Yahweh said, "Have no regard for his appearance or stature…God doesn't look at things like humans do. Humans see only what is visible to the eyes, but the Lord sees into the heart."

People see surfaces. God sees depths. Got it.

But notice what happens when David is brought in from watching the sheep. The narrator comments, "He was reddish brown [dark complected? well-tanned?], had beautiful eyes, and was good-looking." And God told Samuel that David was the one.

What are we to make of this? The most attention to appearance paid in the story is paid to David in spite of our having been warned not to pay attention to appearances.

It’s like we can’t help ourselves. We look at surfaces and pay attention to appearance. "Don't judge a book by its cover," we are told. But publishers spend a great deal of money on covers because they know that covers sell books.

Appearances don't matter, but orthodontists are doing pretty well as a profession, if the number of parents shelling out lots of money for braces for their kids is any indication. Is there any such thing as a child with teeth that are "good enough"?

I think we can agree that singers should be judged on their voices. But how much of a singer's success hangs on whether they conform to our notions of visual beauty?

Politicians sell themselves to us by carefully constructing images of themselves and their opponents, weaving them together into a story that appeals to their chosen demographics. They are "pro" this and "anti" that, but these, too, are images. When pressed for details about how, they disappear like startled squids in a cloud of ink. They are masks and façades.

The reality is that our attention is given to appearance in all sorts of ways that we hardly notice. Our eyes slide along surfaces; we regard appearances. We are even governed by them.

I check my Facebook feed every day. I always find an article or two that I think deserves to be read. But while reading them, my gaze happens to land on a link that reads "Presidents Ranked from Worst to Best." Sounds like it could be fun. I wonder if their ranking is anything like mine? This is what is known as "click bait," a link that is meant to entice me into following it.

But off I go. Of course, each President has their own page and I have to click to get to the next page. Forty-five clicks, forty-five presidents, forty-five pages of advertising to get to the last page and guess who?--Abraham Lincoln. No surprise there. Well, that was a lot of effort and I didn’t get much out of it.

But I wasn’t the one who was supposed to profit from the experience. The advertisers were the ones who were supposed to profit.

And the advertisers are sophisticated. On television, ads are placed according to a general picture of the audience watching that particular show. On the Internet the ads we see are chosen for us as individuals, selected to fit the choices we have made. If we buy something from Amazon.com we will see ads for similar or related items for weeks. Our ads are also based on the links we choose. Ads selected just for us.

We interact with this medium to create our own individualized experience of surfaces chosen and substituted one for another as fast as we can punch the screen with our fingers. Each participatory click is a vote to regard appearance.

The media are a succession of surfaces. Not only can't we see the heart, but we suspect that there is no heart to see, only the relentless effort to capture market share to boost the value of the medium for advertisers.

Facebook perhaps epitomizes this shallowness. It is not that Facebook and other social media lack any value. We can get bits of news more frequently from our friends and family than we did under earlier regimes. But they are mostly Tagesreste, remains of the day, bits and pieces of our lives without much reflection or thought. There are exceptions, but no future biographers are going to publish books of the Facebook posts or Tweets of this or that famous person like they used to publish collections of letters.

Facebook at its heart offers us a place to construct a public self, a persona, a mask, a character, an avatar with which to inhabit without bodies this space that is not space. If we do it right, we will be rewarded with "friends" whom we have never met and about whom we no nothing except for the surface they have created for us. I would say that it is the perfect embodiment of capitalism, a fictitious space where we are both producers and consumers, where our work is to produce masks, icons, avatars of ourselves, where we volunteer to do all the work and Mark Zuckerberg gets rich.

This play and interplay of surfaces is the logic of late capitalism. In academic circles they call this "post-modernism." In the study of language post-modernism is the disorienting notion that the meanings of words are not stable, the discovery that words are all defined by other words in a network of definitions that is not necessarily tied to the real world of hard objects you can bump into. When we try to find meaning, post-modernists are convinced that we only slide from the one surface to another and never do and never can get to the bottom of anything. It is surfaces all the way down. Meaning for post-modernists is a bubble that must sooner or later burst.

"David was reddish brown, had beautiful eyes, and was good-looking." That's how David was sold to the tribes of Israel. They bought the image. They held up all their kings to that image to see whether they fit. Some even called Jesus the Son of David, an image of the image. Jesus rejected that title, you know. Although his followers failed to listen to him, he rejected the notion that he was descended from David.

"God sees into the heart." Perhaps that means that we can't. And we certainly don't do it very well. Or maybe, just maybe, it means that we are called to become like God in this way, to become conscious of more than shimmering surfaces, to become aware of a third dimension, to discover depth in the world around us. Perhaps we are called to see the way God sees, to see without stopping at the surfaces, to see into the hearts of our neighbors. Perhaps we are called to value the world as God values it, the one who looked into the heart of the world at every stage of its creation and said, "Oh, that's good!" Maybe we can learn to see into the hearts of the things around us, too, into the hearts of trees and even into the hearts of the rocks. Perhaps if we see well enough, listen well enough, they will tell us some of the secrets their depths hold. Maybe, maybe not.

One thing is for certain: They'll never post it on Facebook.

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