The first text in the lectionary for this Sunday is a
portion of the story of David and Goliath (D&G). I was surprised to discover that I have never
preached on this text in thirty years! I
guess that the companion text from Mark, Jesus stilling the storm, always
seemed more immediately applicable. As
well D&G has so much baggage wrapped around it that I preferred to avoid
it. After all, how much time can one
spend saying what the text is not about before getting to what I think it is
about?!
However, encouraged by a week with Ched Myers and Bill
Blaikie at the Atlantic Seminar on Theological Education, I’m giving it a
go. Here are some initial thoughts.
Context: Despite our automatic preference for the
Israelites it’s helpful to me to remember that, about 200 years earlier, Joshua
and his people had come bursting into a land that was already occupied. The “doctrine of discovery” has a long
history in national interactions. Europeans used it to justify taking lands
from and enslaving indigenous peoples because the way they related to the land
was different than that of the newcomers.
According to the story, the Israelites, having escaped from slavery in
Egypt, after a generation of wandering came into “the Promised Land.” Shall we say, the discovered it. However, that land was already occupied by
people who had not read the same story and, not surprisingly, objected to their
land being given in promise by someone else’s God to someone else’s
descendents. At the same time, Egypt was the regional superpower. As superpowers have always done, the
Egyptians employed local tribes and nations to keep the status quo in
balance. In this case, it was the
Philistines. So while I was certainly
raised in Sunday School to see them as “the enemy” and “the bad guys” an
argument might be offered that they were simply doing their job, protecting the
community from the newcomers – the Israelites.
If anyone has ever complained about how the neighbourhood has changed or
what those “newcomers” are doing, they might sympathize with the Philistines
more than they imagined!
Regardless
of whether this is an actual historical account or not, Goliath is certainly
pictured as a larger than life character.
He’s one big, bad, dude! All the
details of his size and girth are designed to make him intimidating. Armies in those days were built around a
fairly small cadre of professional soldiers.
It was expensive to keep those otherwise useless mouths around, so this
small group of professionals would be augmented in time of war with recruits
and draftees armed with whatever they could find. Unless they were defending their own homes those
draftees weren’t too interested in putting their own, highly vulnerable, flesh
on the line for the monarch. So usually
the professionals, the champions with the training and equipment, would engage
in single combat. After a few weeks of
marching, posturing, shouting insults and so on, everyone could go home. It was certainly brutal and combatants did
perish, often horribly, but it was rarely the type of outright slaughter of
civilians that has become the norm through the 20th and into the 21st
century. So Goliath is doing his job,
putting down the Israelites and, since no one wants to take him on, things are
at an impasse.
Biblical
scholar James Sanders taught us all, years ago, that if we find a passage of
scripture making us feel self-righteous, we can be almost certain that we’ve
misunderstood. I’ve been haunted by that
wisdom as I contemplate this text. Where
am I, where are we, where are you the representative of someone else’s “Philistines”? Given the relative roles of the Philistines
and Israelites in the evolving reality of Canaan, am I the representative of
the status quo getting in the way of the “promised land” of someone else’s
faith? Who might say that I have been “Goliath”
to their “David”?
Clearly there is a good deal more to the story which will
need to appear in Sunday’s sermon, but that’s a place to start on a June
Monday.
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