Called to the Colours in a Darkening World

A sermon for Evensong on Trinty II, 14 June 2026

Ps 42 - 43; I Sam 21.1-15; Luke 11.14-28




It is clear that many people are extremely concerned about the state of the world. When I first read 1984, George Orwell’s satire on totalitarian power – predictably enough in 1984 – I thought that the picture it painted, with the division of the world into a few blocs of super-power, and Big Brother taking absolute control, and constant surveillance through cameras, screens and endless propaganda, all felt rather far-fetched, an impossibly distant scenario fit only for the end of the world.


But what Orwell wrote almost 80 years ago, today rings terrifyingly true. The billionaire (and now trillionaire) oligarchs hold us in a slavery in which we (I speak of the population at large) have willingly, even joyfully colluded, lately through our subjugation to the mobile phone. These very few men have such unimaginable power and wealth (they’re the same thing) that they are cushioned from all the evils that await present and future generations through political totalitarianism, ecological disaster, and the likely collapse of civilisations. They are also exclusively qualified to receive any benefits, like the new life-saving cancer medication currently being developed here in Oxford, for which the likes of us, reliant on the NHS, would be unlikely to qualify.


Meanwhile, governments of small and medium-sized nation-states like ours are left looking rather irrelevant, like a school council of junior pupils whose only power is to choose the colour of the toilet rolls.


Power as we see it in tonight’s First Lesson is something that King Saul and King David know rather a lot about. For each of them, it is vitally important that they establish an impregnable dynasty, exercise unassailable power, and make themselves as rich as possible. This royal instinct is one reason why the Jewish Law is rather ambivalent about kings, and why in Deuteronomy 17 it expressly forbids any king to marry multiple wives, grow excessively rich, or possess large numbers of horses. (At least Her late Majesty was safe with the corgis.)


In his own exercise of power, Saul has attempted to have Philistines remove his rival David by sending him into battle against them, a trick that David himself famously employs later on when trying to rid himself of the inconvenient husband of Bathsheba, Uriah the Hittite. Saul also tries to keep David close by marrying him to his daughter Michal, setting the bride-price at 100 Philistine foreskins. Alas for Saul, David is a military genius who defeats Philistines for fun. He certainly makes very light work of depriving 200 Philistine corpses of their foreskins (one assumes they’re corpses), thereby ensuring his marriage into the royal family.


The popular and populist adulation that swashbuckling David enjoys is the main source of his political power, as is the fact that both of Saul’s own children (Michal and Jonathan) have less loyalty to their father than to David, whom they assist in escaping Saul’s continual attempts to bump him off. Indeed, when we catch up with him in tonight’s reading, David is again on the run from Saul’s wrath, calling on the Priests of Nob and making up some story about being on a secret mission for Saul , while actually gathering supplies and ammunition – the legendary sword of Goliath no less – for his onward journey to recruit for his army.


Journeying on from the priests to Gath, and the court of king Achish, David’s military reputation as ‘a slayer of tens of thousands’ starts to feel like a liability, as if it might be putting a target on his own back and attracting the interest of his royal host who may think that this house-guest is just a little too powerful to let live. So, in a move that is pure Monty Python, David pretends to be mad, damaging the palace paintwork and dribbling uncontrollably. Achish responds with one of the great comic lines of the Bible: ‘Have you brought me this man because you think there aren’t quite enough mad people here already?’


Moving on to the Second Lesson, power remains very much in focus: the power of Jesus as healer; the power of mental illness; the power of the crowd; the power of the religious authorities who manipulate the crowd; the power ultimately of the Empire, against which Jesus the divine Son of God (itself an imperial title) proclaims and practises the craft and creed of the Kingdom of the Father.


The truth is that Jesus, every bit as much as Saul and David, has set out to build a dynasty, a Kingdom of and for God, to exercise power through delivering the poor and vulnerable from sickness and death, by renewing in them the image of their Creator, and by being for them the perfect sacrifice to sanctify and save them.


When the crowds, like ventriloquist’s dummies, question the source of Jesus’ power to heal, suggesting that he works only through the Evil One, he wags the finger of God at them, and proclaims that Kingdom of God which, in the end, is all that we have to offer a world that will always tire of its toys and come to its senses. It is the invincible Kingdom of justice and peace that unfailingly draws men and women to its colours and to its captain, Jesus Christ.


It is this Kingdom-and-Gospel that shows up the hollow emptiness of the oligarchs and their chums. It is this Christ who will always outlive the narcissistic megalomaniacal men-children, like the Emperor Nero, who like to lord it over empires, grow in power and wealth, manipulate the truth for their own purposes, and maintain their own position at all costs.

It is for this Kingdom, this Gospel, this Christ, that we pray for the grace to give our lives even unto death, to hear the word of God and obey it. For when the chips are down, only the Gospel has the strength to inspire opposition to the forces of evil, to offer a global programme as the only coherent alternative to it, and to sustain the men and women who will be charged, by Christ himself, to bring it about. The task has begun. And we, albeit in our own small way, are called to the colours.