When I was a kid, the story of God calling to Samuel was a popular text for youth retreats. In the telling of my youth, it was a sweet story about a young boy and his wise mentor, who together came to understand that God was calling Samuel into the ministry. Only much later did I realize that this story isn’t a sweet story at all. It is the story of a religious establishment that has lost its way. It is the story of priests who blaspheme the name of God to further their own selfish interests. It is the story of a feeble old chief priest who enables them. It is the call the young man God is raising up to overthrow the religious establishment.

The supposedly sweet little story of Samuel is in fact the story of a religious revolution. As such, it has enormous implications for the future of the church in our own time.

A Religious Establishment with No Vision

When Samuel was a boy, the story tells us, “the word of the LORD was rare…visions were not widespread” (1 Samuel 3:1). It’s not that God had ceased speaking. Rather, the text tells us that Eli, the chief priest at Shiloh, had begun to lose his vision. His “eyesight begun to grow dim so that he could not see” (3:2). While this is a comment on Eli’s age and physical infirmity, it is also a statement about his ineffective religious leadership. Having grown old, he was no longer able to see God’s action in the world.

Later in the text, the text explains what was actually happening under Eli’s leadership of the sanctuary at Shiloh. His sons Phinehas and Hophni, who are in line to inherit the priesthood at Shiloh, are “blaspheming God” (3:13), and Eli has done nothing to restrain them. There is generational corruption in the religious leadership of the sanctuary of God.

While we don’t know precisely how Hophni and Phinehas blasphemed against God, the Hebrew meqallim lahem suggests that they have been using God’s name in their own self-interest (literally “making light of God for themselves”). They have used their position as priests at Shiloh to gain material and political power for themselves, blaspheming God’s name in the process.

Phinehas and Hophni are like the leaders of the Christian Right in our own day. They have turned their backs on the true message of God in order to pursue their own advantage. They have belittled the covenant in order to enrich their own bank accounts. They have cozied up to political corruption in order to secure their own power. They have allowed the poor to suffer in order to further the prosperity of the wealthy. They have used their religious positions to further their own self-interests, using God’s name in ways that are unworthy of the God of justice.

While Eli himself doesn’t seem to have participated in the corrupted activities of his sons, he is no better. The text tells us that God holds Eli accountable for the actions of his sons because “he did not restrain them” (1 Sam 3:13). Like many well-meaning but silent Christian progressives in our own day, Eli didn’t have the backbone to stand up to the blasphemies being perpetrated in his own house. He knew what his sons were doing—and yet he did nothing.

The way the story is told in 1 Samuel 3, the background of Phinehas and Hophni comes at the end of the text in God’s pronouncement against the house of Eli (3:11-20). Perhaps not unexpectedly, this prophetic overthrow of the religious establishment isn’t included in the main lectionary selection, which confines it to a parenthetical addition. The lectionary committee must have understood the implications of this text for its own religious establishment!

The religious establishment of Shiloh—and the religious establishment of America—has lost its way. And so God had to intervene.

The Prophetic Call of a Younger Generation

It is no accident that Samuel is still a boy when God calls him as a religious reformer. This isn’t a cute story about how God can work even in the lives of young people. Rather, Samuel’s youth is precisely the point. The calling he receives could not have been received by anyone older than him. God calls Samuel precisely because he has not yet been institutionalized into the ways of the religious establishment.

Samuel had been born miraculously to his mother Hannah, who had dedicated him to God from birth (1 Samuel 1-2). Samuel had been serving in the sanctuary since a young age, but he had not yet risen to a position of influence in the religious structure. The text tell us that “Samuel did not yet know the LORD” (3:7). This enables God to speak a fresh word to him.

God calls Samuel the boy is tending the lamp of God in the sanctuary. Samuel at first doesn’t understand what is happening. He rushes to Eli, thinking that his master has called him. Twice Eli sends Samuel back to bed. But the third time Eli realizes instructs Samuel to wait for God to call again and then to reply, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening” (3:9).

When Samuel finally responds to God as instructed by Eli, God explains to Samuel that the religious establishment of Eli and his sons will soon be overthrown. God says,

I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. I have told him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever. (3:14).

God doesn’t have a childish task in mind for Samuel. Rather, with the boy Samuel, God starts a religious revolution. God is going to destroy the religious establishment and start over with this boy who has not been corrupted.

Overthrowing the Religious Establishment

To me, one of the most remarkable aspects of this text is Eli’s response to God’s prophecy against his continued religious authority. At first Samuel is afraid to speak to Eli about God’s plan to overthrow him and his sons.

But rather than hiding from the inevitable future, Eli invites Samuel to tell him everything (3:17). When Samuel says that God is planning to overthrow his priesthood at Shiloh, Eli simply replies, “It is the LORD; let him do what seems good to him” (3:18). Eli continues to raise and nurture Samuel until God does, in fact, overthrow Eli and his sons to put Samuel in charge of the sanctuary.

As I read this text, I can’t help but wonder if we have reached just such a moment in the story of Christianity in North America. It seems to me that we in the predominately white churches in North America—both Evangelical and mainline—have lost our way. Our expectation of cultural significance has blinded us to what God is doing in our midst. Some of us have become corrupted by power, blaspheming God in order to achieve our selfish political ends. Others of us have become enablers, afraid to risk our own comfortable positions to restrain our blasphemous brothers (yes, the gendered language is intentional).

I think we have reached the point at which the future of the church lies in other directions. God is calling younger generations who have not yet become enmeshed in the blasphemies and complacencies of the past. God is raising up a new and diverse generation of leaders, transforming a church that has lost its vision of what it means to worship God in this time and in this place.

Like, Eli, we can nurture the generations of leaders who will overthrow us. We can acknowledge that God’s voice is not the same as our own, sending them away to consult directly with God. We can inquire of them what God has said to them, even if it is bad news for us. We can embrace the future that God is working out in our midst, even though it will mean letting go of a past in which we held the positions of influence.

But the future lies with a new generation that can yet see what God is doing to transform the world.