1 Samuel 7:2-17
“From the day that the ark was lodged at Kiriath-jearim, a long time passed, some twenty years, and all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD” (1 Samuel 7:2)

Biblical time is often confusing.

At times we hear of people living well into their hundreds (or more!) and we just can’t believe it. We rationalize it by saying things like, “They didn’t have clocks and calendars the way we do” or “Maybe ‘a year’ means something different to them.” (Though, let’s be honest, these are agrarian people who are probably more aware of the seasons – and therefore time – than most of us who only adapt our lives to the daily weather). Other times, we read something like from today’s 1 Samuel 7 passage about how the Ark of the Covenant (that is, God’s presence) was outside of Israel’s control for 20 years. 20 years!

All of us have had a dry spiritual season. Most churches have had bull years and bearish years. But two decades? An entire generation’s time? That’s a really long time to be cut off from the full worship of God. How did they persist?

When we read such things, I suspect most of the time we just gloss over it. We read “twenty years” and instantly translate that to “a long enough time.” We don’t dwell in what 20 years would really mean, what it would feel like, how we would respond. So, let’s do that. Just as a change of pace.

First, can a group of people languish spiritually for 20 years? I’m guessing most folks don’t think that likely, but let’s assume that it can happen. What would that languishing look like? How would people relate to one another? I’m just guessing here, but I would assume there’d be a lot of finger pointing, right? “You know, I heard Esther was worshipping Ba’al with Martha. No wonder God is mad at us!” I’m almost certain there would be a lot of renarrating and renarrating of history. A lot of discussion about how they lost the Ark. Who was to blame? What could’ve been done differently? I’ve been around enough guys who can spend a week bemoaning a playoff loss for their favorite sports team to know that we’re more than capable of dragging our souls over top of hot coals again and again.

And this is the point where the reflection starts to make sense, I think. Because one not need be in the church – any church, our church – for very long before you start to learn where the past pain points are. “This pastor really did a doozy on us” and that sort of thing. I mean, it’s been nearly 20 years and I’ve witnessed people bristle at the mention of certain past pastors. So, yeah, maybe we’re not so terribly different from the people of God we read about in the Old and New Testaments.

So, where’s the hope? The hope comes when Samuel drives the people forward by having them “return to the Lord.” I like that. It is both progress and history happening at the same moment. It isn’t returning to the past and playing coulda, shoulda, woulda games, but neither is it only moving forward with no touchpoint to the past. It’s moving forward by returning to the Lord.

The hope offered to us in this story is that no amount of history is too great for God to break into and bring grace. There is no season too long that God can’t appear and begin our transformation anew. There is no sin too big and too entrenched that God still can’t wedge Himself in there. And so, maybe you’ve been sitting with a spiritual dry patch for a long time and you’ve grown accustomed enough to it that you no longer even expect God to do anything about it. Rejoice! He can. If invited, He will!! Maybe you’ve even felt a relationship has been strained for too long to be repaired. It hasn’t! The hope Samuel brings – the hope of moving forward by returning to the Lord – is still available to us all. Thanks be to God! Amen.