Scripture: 1Samuel 17:1-11, 31-51
I often like to focus my preaching in the summertime around portions of the Hebrew scriptures, just step back and for no particular reason pick a particular book or a cycle of stories and stick with them over a period of several weeks. Two years ago, I did that with the stories in Genesis—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and the almost-sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Last year I focused on the Psalms. This year I suggested to the small group that got together to talk about worship themes for the summer, that one possibility was to do the same sort of thing with the series of stories involving David. Of the suggestions I threw out the group seemed to like that one the best, so I’ll be focusing on David for the rest of July and August. The story of David and Goliath is a logical place to begin since it’s a well known story and is one of the first stories about David in the Bible. That meeting that decided I should focus on David was some weeks ago—it seems like “ages past” by now—so I have known for quite some time that I would be preaching today on David and Goliath.
I was pretty good though about not thinking about sermons over vacation, pretty good in general about following the advice more than a few of you gave me not to think about Sojourners while Ava and I were away. But on the way home last weekend I couldn’t help myself, and as I began to turn David and Goliath over in my mind, I began to wonder whose idea this was. This must be something like buyer’s remorse. It happens to me often, that after I settle well ahead of time on a preaching topic by the time I get around to doing it, I’m wondering what I was thinking of.
In this case, several things actually played into my having doubts about the topic. For one thing, my vacation reading included a book called The Chaneysville Incident, which I had been trying to get to for some time. I became aware of this book when the African American authors book club, which several Sojourners are a part of—Enid, Jane, Faye, Ava—read it as one of their selections and recommended it to me.
The book is a novel, but Chaneysville is a real place. It is a place that many slaves seeking their freedom probably passed through, since it was on one of the routes of the underground railroad. It is also a place where a dozen or so escaped slaves are buried, people who were tracked down by bounty hunters, and who rather than be captured, tortured, or murdered chose to take their own lives. According to some sites on the internet, the graves of those people can still be seen in Chaneysville, but only if you know where to look for them. Chaneysville, a little town, or rural crossroads, in Pennsylvania about ten miles north of the Maryland state line, which is also the Mason-Dixon line, does not make itself easy to find, and has no signs directing visitors to the graves.
I know this because Ava and I paid a visit to Chaneysville on our way home. Ava had read the book some time ago and I had just finished it, and we just wanted to go. It wasn’t far out of our way. We were ready to visit the graves and spent a little time in one cemetery that we decided was not the right place. Beyond that we didn’t know where to look, and as I say didn’t get any help from the town and weren’t prepared to do much investigation. So we turned around and headed back to the interstate, having seen some beautiful countryside and communed with the ghosts of those people we were wanting to pay homage to.
It struck me that there are probably countless stories like this rooted in the ground we walk on or drive through in this country, stories that need to be known and told and repeated, stories that are part of our past and our present. In the light of such stories that continue to haunt our lives in a very real sense, why should I be spending my time poring over a story that is separated from us by something like 4,000 miles and 4,000 years?
Add to this the effect of the other book I was reading on the day we drove to Chaneysville, and in fact still am reading. It’s called The Hairstons, and it’s about two families, or really one family with two branches, one black and one white that had a common origin in the plantations around the area of where Archie and Max come from in southern Virginia. Their story needs to be heard too, because in various ways it is our story, and maybe I’ll have more to say about the Hairstons after I finish the book. But in the light of Chaneysville, and the Hairstons, the story of David and Goliath, as much a part of our culture as it is, has a flavor of irrelevance to it. Or at least that was the feeling I was having last weekend. Do I really need to be immersing myself in David and Goliath, when there are these other more urgent feeling stories to be in touch with?
Another part of my doubts about preaching on David and Goliath came, as it so often does, from the story itself. When you think about it, you know, it’s not really such a nice story. I’m sure I learned it sometime in my childhood. Probably everyone who has Sunday School in their background, and a lot of people who don’t, learned about David and Goliath somewhere. It is nicely adaptable for children, since from one perspective Goliath is just a big bully and this is a story about how the little shepherd boy comes along and gets rid of the big, bad bully so that everyone can live happily ever after, or at least so that everyone can play on the playground. David is easy to root for and Goliath is easy to root against, and David wins. Yay for the little guy! Yay for the underdog! The moral is: Don’t give up before you start. Don’t be intimidated by bullies. You don’t have to be big and mean to succeed. And all that’s fine, as long as you don’t read the story too closely or think about it too much.
For one thing, the bully in this case is not humiliated, or taught a good lesson, or sent packing to see if he can find someone else to pick on. The bully here gets capital punishment, and even people who don’t have any religious or philosophical objection to capital punishment probably would be hesitant to apply it to cases of bullying. In fact the story includes not just capital punishment, but some extra gore thrown in as David chops off Goliath’s head for display.
Oh, but this isn’t really about bullies, is it? It’s about war. Over here on this mountain we have the armies of the Philistines, and over here on this mountain we have the armies of the Israelites, and they are getting ready to have a war over the land. Goliath has the sensible suggestion that instead of having a whole lot of people get killed and have bodies and blood all over the place, that each side choose one person and they can duke it out. David’s contribution to this is that he is willing to fight Goliath because this is not really a battle between people, but between the Philistines and their gods, and the Israelites and their God. So now we have a story about a religious war, in which people think, in which our hero David thinks, that god is on his side. Things are not getting easier here.
In fact some people could read this story as making the argument that God intended Israel to have this particular land all along. God gave it to Abraham, and again to Joshua, and now again to David. God intervenes here, where humanly speaking David has no chance, and this proves that it is God’s will that the Philistines be defeated. The promised land is promised to Israel. The story can have disturbing implications, and certainly says nothing very helpful, to those who look and work and pray for peace, and for common ground, among the peoples of the Middle East.
OK so let’s not be so literal. Maybe this isn’t a story about war and land and the Middle East. Maybe Goliath is just a symbol, a symbol of someone or something that looms before us as some huge obstacle to our getting where we are trying to get. Maybe Goliath is anyone or anything that blocks our way to happiness or wholeness, to peace or justice or shalom. Maybe Goliath is “the enemy”, whoever or whatever that is, any enemy that seems evil and formidable and scary. We all know there are lots of those enemies and they can come in lots of forms.
The question is, for me anyway, even when we take this more symbolic approach to the story, is this idea of going out and slaying the enemy really a good idea? If the enemy is people, and we do have enemies who are people, of course we are not going to go out and literally slay our enemies but is this even a good metaphor. Jesus said love your enemies. The theologian Carter Heywood suggests that we are called not to slay giants but to tame them. Killing enemies, even figuratively, she says has not gotten us very far over the centuries. Maybe we need to let this story spark some images of how we, unlike David, might befriend or disarm the giant, rather than kill him.
Or what if the giant is not some person, and is not even out there. What if we have met the enemy and it is us, or at least part of us? What if the enemy is in us, as it so often is? An emotion maybe—some anger or bitterness or resentment or regret—or some habit of behavior or addiction even that can seem very much like a giant in the way of our own good. We may often feel like we would like to slay giants like these, just get rid of them once and for all, beat them into submission. My sense is though, without pretending to be an expert in such areas, that we may be better off with different approaches—acknowledging and befriending our shadow sides, taming the giants within, confessing, understanding, letting go. My sense is that slaying the giants we all have inside us probably just results in their coming back in different forms.
So where does that leave us with regard to David and Goliath? For one thing, speaking just for myself, it leaves me once again wrestling with the story, which is not such a bad thing, to be left wrestling with a Biblical story, that is. I am a firm believer that the Biblical stories and writings are not always meant, in fact are usually not meant, to give us some clear, straightforward moral lesson. They are meant to engage us. And sure enough the story of David and Goliath does that for me. It engages me on many levels—holy wars, the question of Palestine, different ways of dealing with enemies, different kinds of enemies, those “out there” and those “in here”, the sense of powerlessness we may feel in the face of our enemies, and so on. The story does engage me, even though it offers me little in the way of quotable answers to life’s problems.
As to the question of why even pay much attention to such an ancient story that doesn’t seem to offer us any clear instructions straight from the mouth of God, I have been once again led to reaffirm my faith that this encounter with these ancient scriptural text is worth the trouble and the wrestling. Of course it is not a question of choosing to pay attention to the ancient stories and ignore the more immediate ones. We don’t leave behind our Chaneysvilles, our Hairstons, we don’t leave behind our hopes and prayers for a just peace in the Middle East, we don’t leave behind our selves when we come to the scriptures. We bring it all with us as we engage the scripture and try to allow the scriptures to engage us. It is not up to the scriptures to be relevant. It is up to us to bring our cares and prayers and passions to the scripture, so that that encounter cannot fail to be relevant.
As to the question of whether there is a positive message that may be lurking somewhere in the story of David and Goliath, well I am still wrestling with that. I don’t have any definitive pronouncements, but I do have some kernels I am working on.
I’m thinking that a lot of children’s messages based on David and Goliath probably have focused on the need not to be overwhelmed or intimidated by powerful forces or scary things, and I’m thinking that’s not such a bad message for adults.
I’m thinking about David’s insistence on remaining vulnerable, on rejecting the armor and the self-protection that Goliath surrounds himself with, and I’m thinking that it’s not so much that God is on David’s side because he’s an Israelite or because he’s a believer, but that God is present in our lives, most fully present in our lives, that God’s heart and strength gravitate toward those people who are most vulnerable and toward those parts of ourselves that are most vulnerable. It is not the heroic David, the great, victorious giant-killer, the king-to-be of Israel we need to see in the story. It is the vulnerable David, the David who refuses the armor of Saul and Goliath, the David who says that God does not save by sword or spear, it is this David we need to pay attention to.
I’m thinking there is something here about not fighting oppression with the tools of oppression, not trying to out Goliath Goliath. I am thinking that God is indeed on the side of those who feel their powerlessness and the hopelessness of living in the shadow of some Goliath. I am thinking that there really are Goliaths who need, if not to be slayed, to be rendered less powerful. And I’m wondering how I can do that, or even better how we can do that together. And I’m hoping you will wonder with me. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 20, 2003