Bible reading: 1 Samuel 8:1-22.

When Samuel grew old, he made his sons judges in Israel. The older son was named Joel and the younger one Abijah. They did not follow their father’s example; they were interested only in making money, so they accepted bribes and did not decide cases honestly.Then all the leaders of Israel met together, went to Samuel in Ramah, and said to him, “Look, you are getting old and your sons don’t follow your example. So then, appoint a king to rule over us, so that we will have a king, as other countries have.”Samuel was displeased with their request for a king; so he prayed to the Lord who said, “Listen to everything the people say to you. You are not the one they have rejected; I am the one they have rejected as their king. Ever since I brought them out of Egypt, they have turned away from me and worshipped other gods; and now they are doing to you what they have always done to me. So then, listen to them, but give them strict warnings and explain how their kings will treat them.”Samuel told the people who were asking him for a king everything that the Lord had said to him. “This is how your king will treat you,” Samuel explained. “He will make soldiers of your sons; some of them will serve in his war chariots, others in his cavalry, and others will run before his chariots. He will make some of them officers in charge of a thousand men, and others in charge of fifty men. Your sons will have to plough his fields, harvest his crops, and make his weapons and the equipment for his chariots. Your daughters will have to make perfumes for him and work as his cooks and his bakers. He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his officials. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your grapes for his court officers and other officials. He will take your servants and your best cattle and donkeys and make them work for him. He will take a tenth of your flocks. And you yourselves will become his slaves. When that time comes, you will complain bitterly because of your king, whom you yourselves chose, but the Lord will not listen to your complaints.”The people paid no attention to Samuel, but said, “No! We want a king, so that we will be like other nations, with our own king to rule us and to lead us out to war and to fight our battles.” Samuel listened to everything they said and then went and told it to the Lord. The Lord answered, “Do what they want and give them a king.” Then Samuel told all the men of Israel to go back home.

Message.

I’ve never visited the city of Naples. And I’m not alone: a blog I read suggested that tourists often pass through it but rarely stay. It’s a city with a bad reputation: it has high levels of crime (although far lower than Rio de Janeiro or even Chicago), crumbling infrastructure with every walls defaced by graffiti, heaps of rubbish in squares and street corners, rude and aggressive drivers and areas of extreme poverty … one resident says that “it has its own set of rules to live by”. Above all, Naples is under the constant threat of obliteration by Vesuvius (and an eruption is well overdue) or of collapsing into the huge volcanic cavity which lies beneath it. So why do people still choose to live in a city with such well-attested problems and dangers?

Well, quite apart from the fact that many families have lived there for centuries and would never the think of moving, the city enjoys some of the best weather in Italy and is renowned for its gastronomy. It has a beautiful natural situation and an amazing historical heritage. There is a buzzing cultural scene, lively nightlife, good public transport, and low property prices in comparison to Rome or Milan. Yet scientists know that the danger posed by volcanic activity hasn’t gone away and keep a close eye on it. Equally the city authorities have devised evacuation plans, although there are grave doubts about how practical they are. And there are warnings of potential disaster: just over a fortnight ago the area was shaken by 160 earth tremors; one had a magnitude of 4.4 and was the strongest to hit the region in 40 years. Yet life goes on usual; I guess people say (in Italian of course), “Yes, it will happen some day; but it probably won’t be as bad as they say, we’ll be fine”. They are collectively displaying a phenomenon called “optimism bias”.

I suspect that’s what Israel’s leaders were doing, three or so thousand years ago. At that time, following the death of Moses and Joshua, the country had been led by a series of priests, prophets and judges (or chieftains) who were frequently fighting against Israel’s more powerful neighbours. Some of these leaders are familiar, for example Gideon, Samson, Jephthah, Deborah; others are not so well-known: Shamgar, Ehud, Ibzan, Elon and Abdon; some are good leaders and some are bad. Apart from a couple of stories which are staple Sunday School fare, this period isn’t one which we talk about much in church, it’s a bit of a “Dark Age”. But you need to know that it ended with corrupt priests, idol worship, and some of Jewish tribes fighting each other. By the time of today’s reading the great but ageing prophet Samuel has decided to appoint his sons Joel and Abijah as judges; however they were notoriously corrupt, taking bribes instead of judging honestly.

The brothers’ appointment provoked a crisis. A deputation of tribal leaders went to Samuel and cried, “Enough is enough! We’re not having them as judges over us, in fact we’re fed up with the whole useless system. What we need is a proper king, like the other nations. He’d lead us properly, he’d enable us to hold our heads up high, he’d make our nation great again. We want a king and we’ll get one!” This request doesn’t sound too unreasonable, does it? Everyone recognised that no-one – neither Israel nor God – should let Samuel’s sons take charge; surely the wise and godly Samuel knew this as well. And in any case Samuel, by creating a family dynasty and assuming that his sons will take over from him, had already begun to replace Israel’s way of choosing its leaders through God’s anointing. We might say that he was already halfway to setting up his own royal family; however the heirs to the throne were hardly worthy of that position.

We’re told that Samuel was “displeased” by the leaders’ request; I think that’s a huge understatement. The personal reproach must have hurt – Samuel as a parent hadn’t managed to get his sons to follow in his footsteps, surely a source of sadness and regret. More to the point, he saw the people’s plea for a king as a lack of trust in God: for hadn’t he said that he himself would lead them and fight for them? The request was a sign of spiritual decline. And there was one other thing. Israel saw itself (and, to a degree, still does) as a special nation, God’s possession. As such, it was to be distinctive and different from the nations around it. One of the markers of that distinction was the fact that it had no king. But now, thought Samuel, our nation is going to be the same as everyone else. Why should it even exist at all? These were sad days.

So Samuel prayed, and God responded in a surprising way (just don’t ask me how). He basically said, “If that’s what they want to do, let them. This has nothing to do with you and your family: it’s me they’ve rejected and betrayed, it’s me who’s hurting, it’s my covenant that they have broken. So don’t argue; tell them that they can do whatever they want. But be sure to make them aware of the consequences”. And Samuel did just that. He told the leaders that a king would draft their sons into his army and force them into hard labour to support his wars; equally he would force their daughters to bake for him, cook for him and make perfume. A king would steal the peoples’ best lands and give them to his officials, he would demand their prize animals and produce, he would effectively turn ordinary people into his slaves. And if they then turned back to God to complain, he would simply say, “Tough: you made your choice, I’m not going to turn back the clock”.

Samuel clearly framed the request for a king in spiritual terms, which was absolutely correct. But we must also see it as a political request: the Hebrews fervently believed that a monarchy had to be better than life under the judges, any warnings could be dismissed as the last gasps of a failing system desperate to cling to power. But they were wrong.

Germany at the beginning of the 1930s was in a state of economic and political chaos – my parents knew that, they were there. Its democratic institutions had collapsed. President Hindenburg often ruled by emergency decree and could appoint and dismiss chancellors as he saw fit. In the federal election of November 1932 the Nazi Party won 196 seats, against the Socialists’ 121 and the Communists’ 100: no-one had an absolute majority. On January 30^th 1933 the President appointed Adolf Hitler as his Chancellor, believing that he would be a strong and popular choice yet still controlled by Parliament. The same evening Nazi brownshirt paramilitaries led a torchlight procession through Berlin – a potent sign of the catastrophe that was to follow.

Yet there had been warnings. As early as 1922, an American reporter attended a meeting in Munich in which Hitler spoke in such stridently anti-Semitic terms that some prominent Jewish citizens were already preparing safe mountain refuges to flee to in the event of persecution. However the reporter believed that Hitler was “actuated by lofty, unselfish patriotism” and was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch many followers and keep them enthusiastic and ready for the time when his organization “was sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes”. Other Americans of the time thought that Hitler was nothing more than a clown.

In Britain, Winston Churchill was worried about the news coming from Germany. In September 1930 he met Prince Bismarck in London and the topic of Hitler inevitably arose. Churchill acknowledged Hitler’s declaration that he had no intention of starting a war of aggression, nevertheless he was sure that Hitler would seize the first available opportunity to resort to armed force. The Prince sent a record of the conversation to his Foreign Ministry in Berlin, together with a note from a senior official: “Although one should always bear in mind Winston Churchill’s very temperamental personality when considering his remarks, they nevertheless deserve particular attention”.

In 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power, another American journalist said that Nazism was in Germany to stay, and that Americans should take precautions to prevent it spreading across Europe. He stated that there was no hope for the Jews in Germany: the young must leave while the older ones would stay and suffer. The mass of German people had been “duped” by Hitler and would not wake up until it was too late. The chances of war were growing, and within a few years Germany would have a army capable of fighting any in the world.

So there were credible warnings about Hitler; yet most Germans, and many otherwise sensible foreigners, refused to heed them. Why? Reasons included the worldwide economic depression, the rising power of labour unions and communists, high unemployment rates and the ineffectiveness of democratic government. Allied to these was the humiliation still felt by Germans after the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War One. Hitler, who as we know was a powerful orator, promised to restore prosperity, create civil order (by crushing strikes and street demonstrations), eliminate the alleged influence of Jewish financiers, and make the fatherland into a world power once again. It was a beguiling vision which people eagerly bought into; limits on personal freedom probably wouldn’t affect them and Nazi thuggery could be tolerated or ignored if it brought about the desired results.

Let’s turn now to Britain which, even with an established Church of England, doesn’t have the same relationship with God that ancient Israel had. Our modern ideas of monarchy are very different to those of past generations; indeed the cry here, as we saw on Coronation Day, is more likely to be, “We don’t want a king”. (Those who favour the monarchy will ask republicans to look back to the period of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell and ask, “Do you really want that again?”). However we are now approaching an election after years of turmoil which have included the repercussions of “getting Brexit done”, the huge rises in energy costs due to the war in Ukraine, the ongoing and unsolved challenges of migration and the Middle East, and a rapidly-diminishing sense of confidence in politicians.

All the parties are promising bread, of some kind, tomorrow; most are also warning us of what life will be like if “the other lot” gain power. We may well think that the promises being made aren’t worth the paper they’re written on or the airtime that they are given; however I think that we need to examine them closely with the lens of Christian values and see if they throw up any warnings. So, for example, are promises on law and order consistent with free speech and human rights? Do promises about prisons contain a desire to educate people into freedom? Will promises on tax and pay hurt the poorest people in society? Will promises about defence spending lead to cuts in vital services elsewhere? Will promises on transport have an effect on pollution and global warming? Every political party that wants to be elected makes promises that it thinks will be popular – but we need to think if they’ll have harmful consequences. If Samuel was speaking to those tribal leaders today he might have said: “You think you’re making a wise request. But you need to read the Terms and Conditions: you may be letting yourselves in for an unpleasant surprise”.

The political parties will soon publish their manifestos; they’ll be scrutinised by the media but few of us will bother to read them although we probably should. I know that Jesus didn’t explicitly get involved in first-century Palestinian politics, which disappointed some of his followers. But he did have a manifesto, which he proclaimed at the start of his ministry: to bring good news to the poor, to offer liberty to the captives and sight for the blind, to free the oppressed and to announce that the time has come for God to save his people. I don’t think that the final section will feature in our current political race, but Christians should study the rest of what Jesus said, compare it to each party’s stated aims, and use it to guide their choice on July 4^th.

I’ve said quite a lot this morning; you may be thinking that little of it has come from the Bible. In a sense that’s true – but what I’ve been trying to do is relate a 3000-year-old story to the present day. For I don’t believe that our faith is confined to the inside of church buildings; nor do I believe that God is unconcerned with politics or the state of nations which, at the end of the day, are nothing more than collections of people he loves. We are citizens of God’s Kingdom and citizens of the world. Please do vote when the time comes; I’m certainly not going to tell you which party you should vote for. But, before you put that little cross on your ballot paper, do think seriously of the potential consequences of your choice. That’s our civic, and our Christian, duty.