Sunday Service 24th August

Theme: We want a King

17/8/25

Sermon

Over the summer we have been delving into Christianity and culture.

How we can see God in science and story and music?

But today we look at culture itself.

And that leads us to big questions.

There are two very big extremes.

One is to withdraw from culture completely because it might corrupt us.

Down that way is the way of cults and folk like that who withdraw from society to create a different culture.

But even in a lesser sense many church folk like to withdraw from the world so that they are not ‘tainted’.

When i was young I used to go to THE BAND OF HOPE.

The band of hope was a youth group that was there to stop children from ever drinking alcohol. Each week we would get a slide show where the dangers of drink were shown in broken families and broken people and then sing hymns that told us that we would ever take the demon drink.

Other churches wanted their flock to never go to the cinema.

When I was at university studying divinity there were other students that told me I couldn’t be a Christian because I played a game called Dungeons and Dragons.

I know some parents that refused to let their children read such dangerous books like the Harry Potter series because it would encourage their children to use witchcraft.

The other extreme was just as bad, down that road we have have those that want to control everything, those ideas spawned the Spanish Inquisition and witchhunts.

The evangelical right in America voted for Donald Trump because he promised to ban abortions.

The problem with trying to control everything is who becomes he arbiter of right and wrong. There is no space for grey.

Like some illegal drugs are the only way for some to find the pain relief they need. So do you imprison those who have the wrong kind of cancer because they are seeking not to be in pain.

This is not a new problem

In our reading today we have a theocracy...the church,, or in this case the prophets, control everything.

Samuel, God’s prophet, was effectively the arbiter of right and wrong.

From what we can tell he was pretty good at it, he wasn’t susceptible to bribes and gave judgements that tried to be fair and honour the wishes of God.

The only rouble was that he was a terrible father and his sons had gone off the rails. Samuel wished to keep the power in the family but the peple were terrified of what would happen when Samuel died and there was no one to curb the excesses of his sons.

So they looked around and saw those other nations, the nations that looked powerful and scary...they had kings. So maybe if they had a king they would be powerful and scary and no one would harm them and they would be safe.

Their first go at it was a guy called Saul, the responsibility of the job destroyed him, making him paranoid and destroyed his mental health.

Then there came David who started ok but struggled to control his worst traits when there was no one to hold him accountable.

So what do we do?

How do we interact with culture, with the world?

Do we try to protect ourselves from it, do we cut ourselves off from it?

Or do we try to control it, force the world to be good?

Well I would suggest we do neither.

The first thing we do is we become realistic aboit the world.

Yes it can be scary, and unpredictable.

And yes, we will not find our answers of security or happiness in chasing anything of the world.

True security, true happiness, true peace, comes from something bigger than the world.

It comes from a relationship with the God who made the world.

That should always be our guiding light; that is the basis of how we judge ourselves and everything else by.

Is the thing we are doing bringing us closer to others or further away?

Is the thing we are craving driving us closer to God’s peace or further away?

Is what we are doing increasing fellowship or breaking it down?

Let me give you a simple example.

A couple of weeks ago my daughter got a phone called from another mum who was really, really angry, because my granddaughter, who was meant to be friends with this girl, had put chewing gum in her hair.

The mother of this girl wanted to know what my daughter was going to do about it.

I have seen parents react badly to this kind of accusation.

I remember as a child thee two mums in the street screaming at each other because one mother was accusing the child of another mum of doing something. And one mum shouted at the mother, ‘My child’s no angel but he wouldn’t do that.’

And i looked at the boy and thought to myself, ‘Well the mums half right, he rally is no angel, but he looked as guilty as sin.

In maybe versions of our culture you never admit weakness, you never admit guilt, you hide your flaws and pass the guilt and blame to someone else.

I was proud of my daughter because she realised that natural desire to go into defence mode wouldn’t sort out the problem, it wouldn’t increase fellowship.

So she said she would talk to her daughter immediately and get her to apologise.

I was even prouder of my 8 year old granddaughter because when my daughter phoned her she was already on the way to her friend’s house to apologise.

That calmed everything down.

By the time my granddaughter had got back home the mother of the other girl had phoned to say that her daughter had been teasing my granddaughter and crossed a line, at which point my granddaughter crossed a line.

It was just tow silly hurt kids being children, but their way of dealing with it recreated the friendship.

It comes down to the simple phrase...

Love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbour like yourself.

Once we are grounded in God’s love for us...our respect, our self worth, our value as a human being...is not dependant on anyone else’s values, but our worth God’s love gives us.

We are precious because God was willing to do anything, sacrifice anything, to help us see his friendship and love for us.

No one can take that away from us...except ourselves.

And with the security of that love...we can risk anything for the fellowship and love of others.

So the only power the culture has over us, is the power we are stupid enough to give it.

But what do we do with all that power?

I would suggest that we try not to use it to control the world.

Instead we use that power to be there for them.

I suspect when he was younger, Samuel’s real influence came because he was there for the people.

It is obvious from the way the Bible tells his story, that he had a base in the Temple in Shiloh, and from there he wandered round a circuit visiting villages.

While there he would do funerals, and weddings

Share meals with people that needed advice, maybe lead some communal worship, make judgements of matters that needed a third party to adjudicate.

His presence made people’s lives better, and in doing that he helped them be better.

Maybe that is what Paul meant when he said the xchurch should be a priesthood of all believers.

That we live our life in such a way that we help people’s lives to be better, and in doing so help them to become better people themselves.

Trust me, the world isn’t that great just now, so it doesn’t take a lot to make someone life a bit better...and it does change people to be better.

I have seen it myself when you get some poor soul trapped in a side street and they can’t get out because of the traffic on the main road.

You let someone out and invariably that people then lets someone in at the next junction.

We cannot escape the culture we live i, and we will never control it.

But we can influence it.

As God has touched out lives with love, and helped us change for the better, so we can touch the world, and those in it, with love, and change them for the better.