Sermon preached at Evensong on the Second Sunday after Trinity 2026

There is a lot of division in our readings this evening.

In the first lesson, the famous division between David and Saul is getting more and more dangerous. David has fled from the King, who is furious at his son Jonathan for siding with this young, handsome, shepherd-turned-warrior. We can at least understand Saul’s anger, provoked no doubt by deep envy.

In the second lesson, Jesus is getting contrary responses from the crowd. One minute they are accusing him of being in the service of Beelzebul—Satan himself—and the next they are asking for a sign from heaven. Make up your mind, Jesus seems to say, if I am acting on behalf of Satan, whilst offering signs from heaven, then Satan’s kingdom is in real trouble.

Ironically, the crowd have hit upon a truth. Satan’s kingdom is divided, it is all about division—that is its nature. It may appear like a strong castle, well-armed and wealthy, but it is held together only by fear and coercion. The finger of God, Jesus himself, is working those stones apart, digging out the mortar of fear, undermining coercion with the promise of freedom.

Division is the nature of Satan’s kingdom; its power is to ‘divide and rule’, pitching people against one another, stoking division in order that it might stand over them all in a posture of benign, necessary, absolute authority. But the pose is false, or at least it cannot be sustained without the barely-hidden threat of horrifying brutality.

God’s kingdom, on the other hand, is not just another castle, holding everyone stewing in their divisions, armed to the teeth and hoarding plunder. ‘Whoever does not gather with me scatters’ says Jesus - God’s Kingdom is a place of gathering, to reconcile; a broad realm where scattering, the cultivating of division, has no place. This is a choice, Jesus tells us—are you with me?

'Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert (says Jesus), and house falls on house.’

Saul’s beef with David is certainly understandable. We all know where envy and fear can take us, whether that is to do with resources or opportunities or esteem. Our Darwinian instincts keep us alert to every potential threat; every possibility of unfairness. How dare David have such popular acclaim and attention—surely this can’t be anything other than a threat?

And such paranoia in high places soon finds willing lieutenants. David, we heard in the first lesson, sought sanctuary at the temple just north of Jerusalem, at Nob. He and his men, having no other resources, were offered the Bread of the Presence; the loaves offered daily to God, and this was noticed by one Doeg, a man of Edom, and one of Saul’s shepherds. Later in the first book of Samuel we find him reporting this sighting to Saul, precipitating the most appalling slaughter of the priests and then of the entire city of Nob.

Saul, with those lieutenants caught up in his paranoia, ends up profaning the very sanctuary of God. Division and suspicion keep gathering momentum, laying waste to everything in their path. Satan’s kingdom is in the ascendent. David keeps running ahead, finding temporary shelter under the terrifying King Achish of Gath, whose courtiers are also busy stoking the king’s suspicion. David pretends he is mad—an apt tactic in the face of such an unhinged political order.

Saul doesn’t seem to feel that there is any choice here. He just keeps dancing to the tune of Satan’s kingdom; nursing divisions, bringing down houses and temples, creating a desert. Contemporary politicians might feel a similar helplessness in the face of public envy and anger, with no choice but to court division. Just the way of the world.

But the coming of Jesus offers a choice, albeit not an easy one. In him there is a choice to unite, to gather, to reconcile, to refuse the kingdom of division. Not to ignore the anger and the envy, but to absorb it as he did, by opening himself to it—offering himself, his own body, to heal and to liberate. Not an easy choice, but we might be surprised at its results, beyond anything the Sauls of history could ever imagine.

Even if we, or our leaders, find the courage to make this choice, our second lesson includes a mysterious passage, which is a warning against any kind of complacency.

'When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, (Jesus said) it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting-place, but not finding any, it says, "I will return to my house from which I came." When it comes, it finds it swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first.'

Even if we could get our political house swept and put in order, outlawing every kind of discrimination, successfully muffling hate speech, quietening the anger by stopping the boats or smashing the gangs, these secular programmes and policies (important though they are) will never be sufficient.

The seeds of division (demons, perhaps) will keep finding their way back, in new and ever more alarming form and number.

You might think that I am being a bit literalistic in this talk of demons and Satan’s Kingdom—caught up in a medieval cosmology, which science and rationalism should have thoroughly replaced. But perhaps we are at a point in our history where we might be ready, as a culture, to acknowledge that there is more to be learned from the Gospel, and even from this kind of language—that we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss it in the name of ‘human progress’.

Few would deny that the Gospel has helped us to get our public life into some sort of good order over the centuries (a health service, education for all, a rationale for equality and for weaning us off various forms of slavery). 

But while it may have helped us to establish a half-decent social contract, there is perhaps less willingness to see it as an essential element in the on-going development of our public life.

I would argue that, at the very least, we still need it to encourage the kind of vigilance among us that can recognise the kingdom of division whenever it is resurgent; when it starts building castles, arming itself, gathering resources, manoeuvring into position as the only possible (because in fact the most brutal) guarantor of a very limited public good.

To oppose this we will need those distinctly unsecular practises of prayer and charity that are founded on the choice that Jesus alone makes possible; the choice to gather and not to scatter; to refuse the apparent safety of the castle; to open arms and hearts, like the crucified One, so that the anger and envy of the world may be, as the hymn puts it, ‘absorbed in prayer and praise.’

The Kingdom of God, on this side of its consummation, is a constant rediscovery of this choice amidst the dull inevitability of division—the divided kingdom of Beelzebub. It is the constant rediscovery that the demonic acquiescence to and cultivation of division is always being answered by the Spirit of God, pointing us to Jesus and enabling a different choice to be made, personally and politically, however costly.

‘Are you with me?’, Jesus asks, ‘Will you gather or scatter; will you divide or reconcile?’