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When my parents got married and went to Birmingham so my dad could start his residency, they moved to a neighborhood that was colloquially known as “Diaper Row”. It got this name for all the babies born there just after World War II. When my folks moved in, a baby wave hit the area again with a lot of couples having kids one after the other. My parents stood out as one of the very few without any babies on the way, and that was hard. They prayed and prayed to have a child for quite some time.
Eventually my parents moved and, lo and behold, their prayers were finally answered and I came around.
Because of what they went through, I grew up knowing I was a child that had been prayed for and was loved. I grew up with parents that made sure, whether it was through teaching Sunday School or just going to church together, that I always knew God. In a very real sense, it was as if they were holding me up to God so that God would use my life however the Lord wished to. This led to my taking my confirmation preparation in middle school very seriously. It led me to be involved in the church and eventually go on a Diocesan youth group trip to England and Taizé, an ecumenical community in France, where I received and then discerned God’s call for me to go into ordained ministry.
Because I was a prayed-for baby, because of my call, and because of my young age when receiving that call, I’ve always felt an affinity with the Prophet Samuel. To really explain why, we need to take a journey back to before our reading in 1 Samuel today, much earlier in Samuel’s life.
In fact, we need to go back before Samuel was born even.
It is here we meet Samuel’s mother Hannah. Just as with my folks, she is struggling to have a child, so she goes to the Temple and prays. If she can just have a son, she tells the Lord she will give him to God’s service. That is what happens and that is what she does, giving Samuel over to the priest Eli and visiting him each year at her journeys to the Temple.
It is then, as we see in our reading today, that God calls Samuel to greater service, even as a child. His connection to the Lord is so strong that it takes the wisdom of Eli to realize what is happening, that God is speaking to him directly. What we hear in this passage is that Samuel’s call was to be a great prophet. In fact, Samuel was also called to Eli’s former role as Judge, the term for the leaders of Israel in the time before the monarchy.
There’s the positive of Samuel being called into service for the Lord. It is the same as what we see with Nathanael being called by Jesus in the Gospel today to be His Disciple.
Yet with Samuel’s story there is also a warning with God’s call, just as we see a warning in Paul’s description of the call to Christ in 1 Corinthians today. This warning in 1 Samuel is specifically about Eli’s sons. Because of their misdeeds, their being the stereotypical “Preacher’s Kids” (or P.K.s) with their ironic failure to do good, Eli’s role as Judge is being taken away. That role, again, is given to Samuel.
The further irony is that Samuel didn’t listen to God’s warning either. Later in his life his own sons turn out to be P.K.s just like Eli’s. This makes the people of Israel weary. They want a new system of leadership. Now they want a king.
The Judges were a different system of leadership and government. God raised up Judges in times of need. They weren’t chosen based on heredity or anything other than God knew they were what the people needed at that time. It was a system designed to remind the people that it was God and God alone they needed to rely on.
When the Israelites ask for a king, God assures Samuel they are rejecting God not Samuel. Yet Samuel’s failure to listen to God was the impetus for this demand.
Even so, Samuel has to rethink his ministry, as we all must do at times. Samuel shifts in his role as leader to anointer of kings. He anoints the first king, Saul, and that does not go well. He then anoints the next king, David, which leads to the Golden Age of Israel until it all comes crashing down two generations afterwards with the dividing of Israel into two kingdoms, leading to the eventual takeover by the Assyrians and then the Babylonians.
As our Psalm, the response to 1 Samuel, tells us today, we are all called by God to greater service to our Lord. You don’t have to be a child given to the Lord or even a prayed-over baby to be such. That call has a lot to offer with it. It is a chance to see God made manifest in our lives, the very meaning of the work “Epiphany”. It is the chance to hear God, like with Samuel. It is the chance to be with God, as was the case with Nathanael.
Yet God also offers us warnings to help us continue on the best path forward. If we fail to listen, the consequences might not just be bad for us. Our choices, as we see with Samuel and so many others in Scripture, can impact nations even.
From time to time, God invites us to reassess our role, as the Lord did with Samuel. We need to take the time to listen. That is the eternal question for us in life: are we listening to where God is calling and can we redirect ourselves when we need to turn back to the Lord, even if it means having to discern once again where God is calling us now?