1 Samuel 2:12-26
Imagine hearing news that your priest is skimming off the top of the church's collections so he can build a mansion. Imagine turning on the news and seeing a report that a well-known minister is going to jail for child abuse. Imagine seeing firsthand a staff member of a church beating up a homeless person. Imagine being a newcomer to a church, and being told by the preacher to give all your money to avoid the fiery pits of hell.
It's not that hard to imagine this stuff, because it really happens. It happens way more than we know. The major stories get out to the public, but the smaller more discreet stories stay behind closed doors. We see them going on around us, and it angers us. It makes us want to abandon whatever ideas that were spurning us to walk through the doors in the first place. We abandon the church, the religious leaders, and God altogether. We're at a loss for words because our spiritual desires have been replaced by a burning resentment toward the exact ones who were supposed to lead us and give us hope.
What do we do when this happens?
In today's passage, we're told that the two servants of the priest, who happen to be his sons, are not faring well in the public eye. They're breaking the rules they agreed to as sanctuary servants, and are stealing the meat that people are offering up to God. They're ripping people off and sleeping with the women who come to help out at the temple. Despite being told by their father - the high priest - that what they are doing is absolutely wrong, they keep it up.
All the while, there's this boy Samuel. He's now a teenager. He's wearing his priestly garb and following the instructions in the book Priesthood for Dummies. The author tells us that while all this stuff is going on with the two corrupt servants, Samuel keeps serving God. It doesn't say that Samuel takes a stand against the corruption. It doesn't say that he starts maneuvering his way around to climb up the spiritual rankings in order to outdo his backsliding brothers. He simply continues serving God.
One of the hardest things for me to do is let go of my expectations of what a religious leader should be like. I expect them to be perfect. I expect them to be flawless. When they screw up, I feel a sense of anger and am compelled to do something about it. I'll start talking about them to my friends. I'll start putting them down. Yet, somehow in the process of seeing a wrongdoing and then reacting, I lose out on my own responsibility - to simply keep serving God.
The church is broken, as well as every other institution on the planet. The political system, the economic system, and the religious system. They're all broken. I would actually be surprised to go a whole week without finding out about some form of corruption in either of them.
When we look around and see our very own leaders acting in ways that make us cringe, their is one thing left for us to do. Keep simply serving God. Just like in the passage in which Samuel keeps his mouth shut and focuses on his own responsibilities, we keep our eyes focused on how God is growing and leading us. When we begin drifting off of that onto other people's wrongdoings and poor standards, we start taking on their characteristics.
Have you ever complained about somebody else's wrongdoings, and then found yourself three days later so full of resentment that you couldn't seem to keep your mouth shut? I have many times. What usually starts out as a "healthy" outlook on someone else's mistakes quickly becomes a source of deep-seeded prejudice and eventual hypocrisy.
Whether we experience it at work, school, in the church, or in politics, corruption is everywhere. Our job is to keep letting God be the judge, and continue focusing on simply serving. When we keep our eyes focused while the leaders around us seem to be living counter to the way we think they should live, we find ourselves standing on solid ground, confident in our own pursuits.
We all have our own unique interpretations of who God is, what God is like, and what God wants us to do and be. It's enough work to hone in on these aspects of the spiritual life, without constantly needing to gauge everyone else's lifestyles and actions. When the leaders around us are showing us what not to do, it's up to us to keep doing what we know to do. We don't have to be affected by what's happening around us. It may make us angry for a bit, but we have to find a way to stay aligned with our understandings of God, and to keep focusing on that. Let God be the judge of everyone else.
Today's Action: Today, we will experience corruption. Perhaps we will be a part of the corruption. When we see it, pause and pray, "May your will be done in this situation, and not mine." Keep our eyes focused on what we're doing, and not what everyone else is doing.
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