So, I had the delight of preaching at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church this past Sunday. I had the twin tasks of talking about Peaceful Borders, the grassroots refugee agitation that I help run in London and Calais, and reflect on the anointing of David, a strange tale narrated in 1 Samuel 16.

This is an expanded version of the script I had, which itself contained more than I was able to deliver in the allotted time. It’s offered here for you to reflect on

God of the subterfuge and the long game…

1 Samuel 16:1-13

Well, we all make mistakes. Get over it, move on.

That’s the gist of God’s word to Samuel as this story opens.

The question is, whose mistake was it? Clearly Samuel’s? Well, his mistake was giving in to the crowd, allowing the popular clamour to set policy for the state.

We want a king

A king will mess you up

We want to be like all the other nations

A king will enslave you, take your sons into the army, suck wealth out of the economy and into the royal coffers

We want a king

Ok. Have this one. Samuel rubber stamps God’s choice of Saul (why God played along with the crowd and chose Saul is for another sermon!).

But it all goes pear-shaped. God realises Saul is a waste of space and rejects him (15:10).

So the experiment ends in failure; Samuel was right all along – kings are bad news. And now Samuel has to clear up the mess left by this one (15:32f).

Maybe populism doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes!

No wonder Samuel is moping in 16:1. But God tells him to get a grip and do it all over again with a different candidate. But Saul is still king and will be for another twenty-plus years. It takes time to unravel a bad decision; there’ll be a lot to live through!

Samuel is out of his comfort zone in so many ways. In particular, he is in the deep south, away from his and Saul’s power base in the North. The response of the city elders tells us all we need to know – Samuel and his king aren’t welcome here! (v4)

But God sends him with a cover story on a covert mission: organise a feast and under cover of the whole town partying, anoint a successor to Saul who will be the polar opposite of that showy member of the in-crowd we chose first time round.

Along the way God gives Samuel a lesson in spotting what counts in a leader and leads him to the runt of Jesse’s litter, the one beyond the perfect seven brothers, the one not even invited to the feast, so little does he matter. He doesn’t even get a name until the very end of the story (v13).

Indeed his name seems to arrive with the Spirit of YHWH rushing mightily on the baffled boy to the bewilderment of his family (v13).

And his name means ‘loved’ (irony or what!)

And Samuel doesn’t hang around to brief the boy on his new role, coach him in the fine art of leadership, running a court, the royal dress code, reading the will of his restless subjects. He takes off to Ramah.

And apart from God and Samuel (and us) who knows what just happened? David obviously feels different but what does his family think has happened? And who in the town knows the momentous event that has just taken place.?

It will be 26 years before David is properly acknowledged as king in succession to Saul.

There’s something for us to learn here about our mischief-making God; lessons in how God achieves what he wants in the world of politics and human affairs.

Is this a coup? Israel is not yet really a state in the way it will be when David hands over his Kingdom to Solomon (who shatters it by being exactly the sort of king Samuel said all kings would be!). So, this is God’s attempt to correct the faltering start Israel’s monarchy has made. He wants to replace wrong leadership with the right stuff and that is all about the heart rather than physical prowess and looks.

If Saul had known, of course, he would definitely see it as a coup and sent soldiers to nip it in the bud.

There are two things I want us to reflect on in this story.

The first is that God appears to be lampooning the whole succession process but at the same time, he sets it on a path to redemption. I suspect this is how God works all the time. We’ve certainly seen it as we’ve accompanied displaced people on both sides of the Channel.

Let’s explore these

Firstly, lampooning the process

Only three people know what’s going on in this story: God, Samuel and us via the narrator. But we do have to work out what the story is actually telling us.

The action speaks for itself – Samuel is anointing a king like he did before only in different circumstances. But it’s the circumstances that tell us something else is going on here, something below the surface.

The first anointing was a tense public affair but everyone in the story knew what was happening and why (chapter 10). This anointing is a sly, surreptitious affair, something done while the bulk of the audience is looking the other way. So what is going on?

By picking the runt of the family in an obscure southern village and doing it under cover of something else, God is lampooning the way the world does kingship; he is mocking their pomp and circumstance, their show and parades. They don’t mean a thing!

You might be armed to the teeth and wearing a mask but I’m in a frog costume and your power is a charade!

In the Calais we saw this way of working bearing fruit against the odds. On a damp February day in 2016 the French authorities decided to start demolishing the camp, home to 5,000 or so people at the time. They sent in workers in orange jump suits guarded by the CRS, Frances intimidating paramilitary police force armed to the teeth. On the Monday people responded by throwing stones at the lines of uniforms who reacted as expected. This after all, is what they are trained for – repelling violence with even greater violence.

So, on the Tuesday, the Sudanese residents whose homes were being consigned to skips made tea for the gangs destroying everything they had, offered breakfast pastries. Meanwhile we hoola-hooped and played keepie-uppie with footballs on the frontline. Little changed. But mid-morning, the women and children’s centre sent a group of kids with flowers. Each stood before a CRS officer offering a single white flower. Within 15 minutes everything ground to a halt, the CRS withdrew and the talking started.

Lampooning the process led to an outcome no one expected.

Secondly, finding the path to redemption

It is strange to think of God working by subterfuge when we are talking about the transition of kingship. After all, the king is very public figure elevated on a throne above everyone else.

But God’s chosen method seems to be to pick the least likely successor to Saul and send him on a long apprenticeship to the throne – 26 years – working in the shadows, leading a band of bandits and raiders, way beyond the pale.

God uses someone on the margins to change things at the centre – but it takes an age.

What we learned from our friend Samer in the Jungle was hat talking to people is the most effective way of bringing about peaceful change. This is why Peaceful Borders is doing something called Weaving Trust in a variety of locations throughout this year. In a world that is shouting at each other across barricades, we are suggesting sitting together in a church or community hall with tea and cake and talking to each other.

It works a bit like speed dating! Each participant spends five minutes with another talking to them. Time does not allow the sharing of intimate and personal details, so it is about breaking the ice, getting to know a little about someone you have not met before, someone from a part of town or a community you don’t naturally mix with. At the end of the event everyone has met someone they didn’t know and found out a little about them. Maybe it will lead to deeper contact and connection; less shouting from a distance, more sharing over a cuppa.

That’s the hope.

What God does is outrageous, a sleight of hand. Send Samuel to challenge the current regime surreptitiously and set the ball rolling on ending the failed regime. It’s a slow-burn revolution. And it’s unstoppable – even though no one sees it at the start (except Samuel and God — and possibly David!).

In the same damp February, as the demolitions started, ten Iranian men sewed their lips together and went on hunger strike. They would fast to the death if necessary until all the demolitions stopped. The Prefect, the regional governor was horrified. The last thing he needed were martyrs in the camp. So, he met with them and promised the earth – even asylum in the UK if they would stop. But they would only stop if he stopped.

We took Lynne Green of the Baptist Union to meet them and spent half an hour in their shelter praying and sharing scripture (especially 1 Cor 12). It was a moving time. Indeed one of the coordinators of the Calais warehouse was there and caught me later in the day and said that she wasn’t religious but she had felt goose bumps during that session, like angels walking over her back. God does that sometimes!

For reasons no one could explain, the week after the Prefect met the hunger strikers the demolitions stopped and the authorities began to work more positively with the community leaders in the camp, ensuring street lighting, better sanitation, more showers. What had happened? Well, no one could really say. But I wonder if God was doing what he always does, working with the nothings and nobodies to undermine the somethings and somebodies and move his agenda surreptitiously on. I heard 1 Cor 1:26ff ringing in my ears.

God is perfectly willing to challenge the regime he grudgingly had a hand in establishing, because he is always pushing the world towards the light, always bending the arc of history towards justice. You could argue David was better than Saul even though he was riven with imperfections and his regime was not squeaky clean (hence Psalm 51 possibly written at a very low point).

It all ends with Jesus, another obscure king from Bethlehem; what is his regime like? What kind of politics does he espouse?

Well, I saw that in the Jungle too from a Muslim community leader. It was another wet day on which clothes were being distributed to cold people. A group of Afghan men turned up demanding shoes – the French police frequently confiscated shoes from camp residents found in town and sent them back to the camp.

Samer, my Sudanese friend, overseeing this distribution, walked the angry men into a clearing. He knelt in the wet gravel and undid his shoe laces and offered the leader of the Afghans his left shoe and began to loosen the laces on his right shoe. The mood suddenly changed; the Afghans said, ‘no, they would wait for the next time shoes were being distributed…’ Samer the peacemaker had struck again!

And as I watched him from behind his left shoulder, I felt a voice shouting in my ear, ‘you know when Jesus said, if your enemy demands your coat, give him your shirt? This is what it looks like. And this is what the effect is.’ Learning the politics of Jesus from a good Muslim friend; happens all the time!

And finally, what about me — us — in all this?

Coups — all lasting social change — require constant listening to God with plenty of ‘are you serious?’ moments. It is not enough to know everything has gone wrong, we need to be the people who rise to the challenge of changing it.

And to do that, like Samuel, we need to be told to get up off our backsides and pay attention. And having paid attention, we need to continue the conversation while taking the action God tells us to – however left-field that feels!

For me inertia is a real problem. I can see what’s wrong; I can analyse it; I can even suggest and chart what needs to be done. But that’s where it stops. Inertia rules while society goes to hell in a handcart around me.

I need to take a leaf from Samuel’s book, stop moping and take some risks for God and justice… Samuel had a certain spiritual stamina that all of us need

In David, God chooses an afterthought, a throwaway. This divine pattern of turning expectations upside down is strong throughout scripture. God chooses the least likely, the unexpected, the marginal, to achieve God’s purposes in the world.

Samuel does what is asked of him – however unlikely that was – and then gets out of the way. This story will play out largely without him. So often we feel that if we’re at the start of something we have to see it through to the end thereby stopping others from playing the part God has for them – hence the need for constant dialogue.

And we will do this by praying Psalm 51: create in me an uncluttered heart, one free from worries about how I look in all this, free of resentments and score-keeping, free of the need to be constantly in control. Such an open-hearted posture helps us to be available for the kinds of listening and discernment Samuel practices here.

And who knows what will happen in our world if we are like this….