“Short Stories, Lasting Call” Part 7: Eli

September 3, 2023 — Ordinary Time

1 Samuel 3

Pastor Mike

Eli’s story is told in the first four chapters of 1 Samuel. His is a story of endings and beginnings – painful, all-encompassing endings; fragile, hidden beginnings. Eli is a tragic figure. He is betrayed by his family, let down by his nation, and at a distance from his God. His ministry context is a rapidly deteriorating religious and social order. Even so, he helps bring a new order into being. He’s not a hopeful person but a faithful person. And that’s the Word for today. God’s call is even for those of us who fail to have hope in what the future will bring, yet remain receptive, committed, and alert to signs of grace.

Eli was a priest in the town of Shiloh. That’s where the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant came to a semi-permanent rest after the Israelites conquered portions of the Promised Land. Eli, along with his sons Hophni and Phinehas, oversaw worship at the Tabernacle. At this time it was believed that God’s glory lived in the tabernacle. Israelites who wanted to worship God directly had to pilgrimage to Shiloh and offer their sacrifices. God had chosen the tribe of Levi, and Eli’s lineage in particular, for this priestly work. They got to live in proximity to God and handle holy things. It was a family trade.

Unfortunately, Eli’s sons abused their ministry position. They slept around with the female worship attendants and, whenever anyone brought an animal sacrifice to Shiloh, Hophni and Phinehas would take the best portion of the meat for themselves. This is from chapter 2:

Now the sons of Eli were scoundrels; they had no regard for the Lord or for the duties of the priests of the people. When anyone offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, and he would thrust it into the pan, or kettle, or cauldron, or pot; all that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. …Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the Lord; for they treated the offerings of the Lord with contempt. (vv. 12-14, 17)

That indictment could apply to the abuses of church leaders today. Eli’s sons trampled upon what Eli cherished most: the priesthood, the ministry. They actively sabotaged their father’s work.

Eli either could not or chose not to curtail the actions of his sons. God faulted him for this and at one point sent a nameless “man of God” to Eli. This “man of God,” who appears in chapter two, prophesied against Eli and warned him that God was going to take the rights to the priesthood away Eli’s line and would start by killing Eli’s sons. That’s what was happening at home in Shiloh.

Farther afield, all of Israel was in trouble. A neighboring people, the Philistines, attacked them. Eventually, after a bloody battle, the Philistines overcame the Israelites, and they captured the ark of the covenant, which had been trotted out to the battleground because the people thought God’s presence would secure their victory. Eli’s sons were killed in the fighting along with 30,000 others. When Eli, as a 98-year-old man learned what had happened, it was not the news of his sons but of the ark’s capture that did him in. Grieving, he had a heart attack and died.

To spiritually sum up the disastrous state of affairs at this time, Scripture says: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread” (3:1). God seemed absent, which is always achingly painful for a person like Eli, whose life is devoted to serving that God. Given that his family and his nation and his faith were in shambles, Eli was able to do something remarkable in the years prior to the Philistine invasion: he was able to perceive a small spark of living faith when it appeared to him, and to fan it into flame.

That spark was burning in the heart of Hannah, a woman who desperately wanted to have children. Every year, Hannah and her husband came to Shiloh to offer their annual sacrifice. One year, Hannah went into the courtyard of the Tabernacle and began to weep and plead with God, silently but with mouth moving, for a son. When Eli saw her like this, he thought that she was drunk, and at first, he reprimanded her. But then Hannah told him that she had been “pouring out [her] soul before the Lord” and “speaking out of [her] great anxiety and vexation” (1:16). This was real, living prayer. Honest prayer. Intimate prayer. Prayer naming the injustices of life, asking God in earnest to do something about them.

Eli realized his mistake. He blessed Hannah and asked God to honor her prayers. Hannah returned home with her husband and conceived. She gave birth to a son and named him Samuel. She brought Samuel back to Eli and dedicated him to a life of ministry in Shiloh. She left him with Eli to be raised in the priesthood. After dedicating her son, she sang a song, recorded in chapter 2, that centuries later would serve as the pattern for Mary’s Magnificat. For his part, Eli received the gift of this child who would one day grow up to anoint David as King.

This brings us to the heart of the matter, chapter 3, which Lou read for us. This scene occurs at night. Samuel hears a voice calling him by name. He assumes it is Eli. He gets up and goes to Eli, but Eli hasn’t been calling him. So he goes back to sleep. It happens again. It happens a third time. When Eli is roused by Samuel the third time, he realizes what is happening: God is speaking to the child directly, calling him by name, for the first time. He teaches Samuel how to respond to God’s voice. “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening’” (3:9). Samuel lies down and the voice comes a fourth time. Samuel responds as Eli has taught him, and God gives Samuel his first prophetic word. Devastatingly, it is a word of judgement against Eli, the very man who just taught Samuel how to really listen.

In the morning, when Samuel tells Eli about all this, Eli simply says, “It is the Lord, let him do what seems good to him” (3:18). Eli is not scared, angry, or offended. This was not the first time a word from God had been spoken against him and his family. He accepts the coming end to the world he has known and the privilege his family has enjoyed and abused. He remains committed to raising this boy, this new beginning; he keeps stoking this new flame. Repeatedly the story insists that something good is afoot in the life of Samuel, with verses peppered in like 2:26: “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people.” But make no mistake, as 3:1 puts it, “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli.”

What can Eli teach us about living with God and responding to our call?

For one, Eli’s story is a parable for one possible relationship between older and younger generations. One narrative that is easy to fall into as we age is that the world we have known and the things we have valued, including our own way of relating to God, are passing away or under assault, and that what’s coming to take their place is inevitably worse. Usually the blame falls on “the young people,” the very people the Church is supposedly so desperate to draw in. Eli was old and he was betrayed by those younger than him as well as by his contemporaries. But he managed to be reasonable and to recognize that every new generation contains both threat and hope. It might not come from his sons, but it could come from this obscure little child born and offered through faith. He taught this child how to listen. That’s the job of the old, to teach the young how to listen. What the young hear and then must say is between them and God. The elders can only say, like Eli, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.” But the lesson must be taught.

Eli also challenges the idea that belonging to God means we must have a dynamic, intimate relationship with God. Eli never received a word of God directly from God. God’s words always came to him secondhand: Hannah’s tears, the man of God’s prophecy, Samuel’s call. But Eli was very adept and faithful at acknowledging and conforming to these secondhand Words. With God, he nurtured a new destiny for faith in the heart of a mother and then in the heart of a child. For some of us, it is enough to have hope in the faith of others, to believe in their hope – enough to give ourselves to the nurture of their hope and their faith, even if most days we lack faith and hope ourselves. We live in a time that privileges authenticity over commitment. Eli’s story flips the script.

When the Israelites took the ark out with them to battle the Philistines, before it was captured, scripture says that “Eli” – who by this time was 98 and blind – was sitting upon his seat by the road watching, for his heart trembled for the ark of God” (4:13).

Sitting at attention.

Watching, though he could no longer see.

Heart trembling out of concern for the things of God.

Meanwhile, “The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord” (3:21).

Eli ministered between the times, as we sometimes do. And though he’d never walk it himself, he helped prepare a new way.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.