It is election season. You can tell it is election season because the people are deliberating and debating. They are complaining, campaigning and caucusing.

Having heard them out, the incumbent Samuel takes his turn on the podium. He begins by defending his record. Failing that, he shifts his strategy to that of protecting his legacy. The people will have none of it. They have had enough of prophets and judges. Their wandering eyes have strayed over to the surrounding nations. They like what they see there. They want one of those. They are campaigning for a king.

Samuel explains in some detail what they can expect with a king. To summarize: they can expect taxes, war, the power of eminent domain exercised, patronage and enslavement. Dire as these predictions are, you can see why the people might not take these warnings to heart, coming as they do from the incumbent.

Which reminds me, here we are, in the midst of our own election season: a season seemingly without beginning or end, a season of biblical proportions. We, too, are out to get ourselves a king. On second thought, considerably more than a king: we are out to elect the new leader of the free world!

Like the people of Samuel’s day we have rather given up on the idea of God’s judges: the Samuel’s, Deborah’s and Gideon’s, the Jephthah’s and Samsons, those judges who once ruled the people of Israel. Yielding to a world of religious pluralism; yielding to the fact that theocracy never really worked anyway; yielding as well to the terrifying state of international relations in the 21^st century, we want a real ruler.

Like the ancient Israelites, we want a leader who can lead us in wartime. We are not agreed whether we favor being led into war or out of it, but we want a leader who can manage as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Friends, today you find yourselves to the church that brought you the Boston Tea Party …

which is to say, a church that bears some responsibility for having once extricated this land from the clutches of a king.

Mixing politics and religion is old hat for Old South. We take our cue from Moses whom God sent into Egypt’s statehouse to lobby on behalf of an oppressed minority. A God who loves and liberates slaves is a God you have got to admire. A God who sends his very best prophet in to get the job done, is a God who invites us into the hard world, the mean world, the tender world of human need.

The ancients believed that life is a dream from which death awakens us. The truth is rather different. The truth is that for a great many people, life is not a dream; it is a nightmare.

As in the days of Samuel, we are anxious for a leader who can help us with matters that weigh so heavily upon us as a nation and as a world … matters that make this life, not a dream, but a nightmare for too many of God’s children … children in the Congo and Sudan, in the Gaza strip and Pakistan, children in Roxbury and Dorchester.

In the days of Samuel and in the face of the people’s demand for a king, God relented. Heaving a great sigh of resignation, God said to Samuel, “Go ahead. Give them what they want. Get them a king.”

In other words, our king-making and our president-making is not God’s highest and best hope for us. But God appears to be resigned, as I think we are resigned, that this president-making will go forward. What’s more, the alternative is probably even worse.

So, here we are, casting about for words to utter, positions to take, a leader with whom to cast our lot in this season of president-making … this election season of biblical proportions.

It is humbling to recall that it was not that long ago that the people of New England turned to their clergy (my professional forebears) to inquire of their clergy how to order their common lives as a nation under God. It was the responsibility of Puritan clergy to lay out the ideal Christian society … a blue print for all to follow.

It was to this end, that John Cotton invented the Election Sermon … the single most important annual sermon in Puritan New England. It was preached on the day of the elections, after the elections, to the newly elected leaders. All the elected officials would gather – from the chief magistrate down to the lowliest public servant – to give ear to the most prominent and trusted among the clergy.²

It was the highest honor to be asked to preach this most important sermon. After all, this was what the errand into the wilderness was all about. This was what the City Set Upon A Hill looked and acted like: all ears straining to hear the divine word with one of the great Puritan Divines acting as the conduit for God’s very voice. ³

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Well, we are not in Kansas, or Puritan New England, anymore. Few clergy or churches enjoy the ear of the chief magistrates of the land. So, what is our best word to, with, and for those whose ears we do have?

The business of king-making, like the election of the leader of the free world belongs to the world of chronos: chronological time, ordinary time. In ordinary time there is suffering.

In ordinary time there is illness and death. In ordinary time there is warfare, an AIDS pandemic

and poverty on a catastrophic level. In ordinary time the earth is groaning in travail under the weight of deforestation, pollution and global warming. In ordinary time the four-leggeds, the winged creatures and those that swarm in the seas are suffering and dying off.

We live, fight wars, raise our children, go to work and vote in chronos-time, ordinary time.

But, we are not stranded here! As Christians we have one foot in ordinary time, but the other is always in kairos time, God’s time.

In God’s time the lion lays down with the lamb. In God’s time swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. In God’s time the dead are called from their sleep

and there shall be no more weeping, and every tear shall be wiped away. In God’s time sovereigns and satraps, potentates and presidents bend the knee to the child whose birth we recently celebrated, the one of whose coming the angels sang. In God’s time a Southern Black preacher rises up to become a prophet to the most powerful nation on earth.

I believe in God’s time. I believe in that city not made with human hands, eternal in the heavens. I believe that God’s world has, and does, and will continue to break into this one. I believe that the Christian church can open the way to kairos time.

I am not suggesting we do not meddle in politics. By all means, meddle! Meddle away and may the winds of the prophets’ words be ever at our backs: blowing us into statehouses, into rallies and marches, lifting our hands to write to elected officials, opening our lips to speak to senators.

<>Meddle, because we are followers of the God who loves and liberates slaves. Meddle, because chronos-time is not incidental. Meddle, because while the man or woman we elect in November is merely occupying chronos-time, he or she does have the power to deploy soldiers and wreak havoc upon the earth. He or she owns the power to embark upon preemptive wars and, conversely, the power to sign such things into law as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The recent verbal scuffle between Clinton and Obama concerning the Civil Rights Act points this out. The scuffle concerned the question:Who was more responsible for the Civil Rights Act? Was it Martin Luther King, Jr.: prophet and preacher? Or was it Lyndon Baines Johnson: president? Both, of course. And many others besides.

Occasionally, with lots of work and prayers, not to mention the blood of martyrs, the world of prophets and the world of presidents come together. Occasionally, that moral arc of the universe

about which Dr. King was so convicted, bends sharply and God and the world of politics dance in harmony. (Although, in the contest between King and Johnson,let’s be clear which of the two did the heavy-lifting: that would be Dr. King. The spiritual heavy-lifting. The moral heavy-lifting. The life-sacrificing heavy-lifting.)

Dr. King proved to a whole nation that God’s time and this time are not parallel universes.

He proved to a grudging nation that the moral arc of the universe can bend, and has bent, and will bend again and God and the world will dance. He took us to the mountain and we saw what he saw and we believed.

That is what Christians can reach and work for in an election season of biblical proportions.

The trouble with the people of Samuel’s day is that they had lost their nerve and they had lost their hope and they had lost their ability to believe in God’s time. They were stuck in chronos.

Look carefully at what Samuel did and said. Here is his mistake. He scolded and warned them about life under a king. But he never helped them see anything better. He never once gave them even a peak into God’s-time. He never even tried to stir their souls, to excite their imaginations,

to jump-start their cold hearts with the fire of God’s anger, God’s hope or God’s love.

It is ours to do what Samuel failed at: to speak of what we ourselves have seen and tasted, touched and known: to tell of a King, but such an unlikely one! …to tell of a King who doesn’t abscond with our land, but who makes his home in our hearts; a King for whom the kings of the world have no power and who has never held a weapon except a hammer and saw; a King who has sent not one single soul to into war. It is ours to tell of a boarder-crossing King who never drew boundaries around his territory, or posted armed guards, or erected fences or built walls. It is ours to tell of a Sovereign who hosts spontaneous outdoor picnics and tells stories of God’s prodigal generosity. It is our delight to know a Ruler who takes our brokenness and wraps it in healing, redemption and love.

And, get this: it is by God’s most amazing grace that we have met and known a Monarch who stares us in the eyes – you and me, sinners all; inept, stammering heralds of God’s great good news; such poor earthen vessels into which to poor such grace – and says, “I love you. You are good enough. Get on with it: go, heal, forgive, serve, meddle, speak of good news in this bad news world and do this in remembrance of me.”

So then, in this election season of biblical proportions, go ahead: debate, discuss, opine, caucus and vote! Do so wrapped in the healing and love of God. Do so with the hope and the prayer and the vision that chronos-time and God’s time, might yet come together. Do so knowing the difference between the kings of this world, and the Sovereign who makes his home in our hearts.

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I Samuel 8: 4-22a

⁴Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, ⁵and said to him, “You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.” ⁶But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to govern us.” Samuel prayed to the Lord, ⁷and the Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. ⁸Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. ⁹Now then, listen to their voice; only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.” ¹⁰So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. ¹¹He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; ¹²and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. ¹⁵He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” ¹⁹But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, ²⁰so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” ²¹When Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the Lord. ²²The Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to their voice and set a king over them.”

1 I adapted this sermon from the one I preached on January 21, 2008 at Bangor Theological Seminary’s Annual Convocation, held at the Hammond Street Congregational Church, Bangor, ME

2 Over the years, Old South clergy were among those chosen to preach the Election Sermon (e.g., Ebenezer Pemberton in 1710 and Thomas Prince in 1730). John Cotton invented the genre of Election Sermons. The first were preached in First Church of Boston. When First Church burned in 1712, the annual Election Sermon was moved to Old South.

3 And, not that pride ever entered into it, but it was virtually assured that your Election Sermon would be printed, published and widely distributed.