Sermons

“Swords into Plowshares”

Micah 4:1-5; I Samuel17:1a, 3-4, 32-51 – Seminarian RJ Lucchesi

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – November 12, 2017

Merciful God, open our eyes to see with the clarity of your vision, and open our ears to hear the subtleties of your word, so that we are empowered to walk even more gently on your good creation. In Christ’s name, Amen.

What vivid and visceral images we are presented with here. Two lines, spread out against one another. A valley separating the two groups of armed warriors. An incensed giant stomping up and down the front of his own army lined with weapons and shields glinting in the sun. Goliath’s booming voice echoing across the valley in defiance of Israel and their God. The terrified Israelites embodying the fear they felt from forty days of emotional terror at the thought of facing this warrior in single combat. A young man unexpectedly arising from the crowd in heroic confidence to face this opposition. Awkward attempts to don the armor of a stout, battle hardened king. The smooth stones in the young David’s hand. A charge by both men. The flung stone piercing the skull of the Philistine champion. The beheading of the dead Goliath. Vivid. And visceral.

It’s a triumphant and pivotal scene, not only for the armies of Israel and our young hero David, but for us as an audience as well. A collective victory story, as Israel runs off the Philistine army, David cements his place into this ancient society and history, and we as hearers of the epic story are comforted by the affirmation that yes, we also can overcome long odds via God’s divine providence. A story that reinforces the promise to all involved that God’s fidelity is real and can be trusted. It proclaims a God that delivers, a God that is sovereign over our earthly affairs. And we get to see this unfold thru an unlikely hero, David, the youngest of many sons, a simple shepherd from rural Bethlehem. This is a true underdog narrative, with so much entertainment and perfect story arcs that you would think it was written for the big screen. No wonder we like it so much! It’s a wonderful account in many ways. Perhaps this is why it is one of the preeminent children’s ministry narratives from the Hebrew Bible. I am sure there is not one person in this room who grew up in the church that doesn’t remember hearing about David and Goliath at some early point in their religious formation. Again, it’s for good reason, it has all the necessary parts of an amazing story, and names a God that is simply on our side. On the side of good.

I invite us to take another look at this widely enjoyed legend of David’s victory over Goliath. Because I believe while still maintaining its significance in the formation of our religious identities, it also deserves critical reflection from our contemporary eyes. If we have ever lived in a modern time that demands we as people of faith make an inward turn of thoughtfulness towards our widely-held assumptions of meaning, especially regarding texts that create sacred meaning, it is certainly the era we find ourselves in. I invite us all to examine the story’s relationship, with violence. What does it say about this all too real aspect of our society and indeed human condition?  Does it glorify violence? Considering the graphic nature of the details – the stone entering Goliath’s forehead, his beheading – and the outcome of God’s deliverance being made manifest thru this act of violence, I would say that glorification of the act itself is a safe claim to assert. What does this glorification do to our psyches?  How does it contribute to the construction of our views and energy towards violence in our culture? These cultural legends help create our reality. They form us in our youth. They influence us in our development. They live in our subconscious at present. They work in us, as we do our work in the world. Indeed, they shape our history, our minds, our identities, our very way of being in the world.

Not questioning what we are given as culturally normative or dismissing the task as irrelevant or futile leads to a stagnant culture void of the living God. Void of the Spirit that lures us further into a future built around God’s vision for her creation. Not questioning the status quo – the way things are – leads to a culture that experiences the events that unfolded last Sunday morning in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. It leads to a culture that only a few weeks prior to this, experienced the worst mass killing in modern United States history. A culture where two of the five most violent events in recent US memory occurred in the span of a single month. And this is only the past several weeks, in the United States, and specifically regarding mass shootings. We don’t have enough time or emotional energy this morning to name even a miniscule fraction of the width and depth of violence across humanity.

And of course, I’m not saying or attempting to claim that somehow the story of David and Goliath is responsible for these horrifically painful events, but what I am saying is that we cannot take anything for granted or assume all is well with our traditional ways of ordering ourselves or society. I am saying we cannot be satisfied with the realities that contribute to the ways of violence operating in the world. I am saying that these stories are used unintentionally, and intentionally, to justify violence. And sometimes the way we nonchalantly approach religion and the stories that comprise the whole, reinforce unhealthy manifestations. I believe that if we truly want to honor our spiritual ancestors then we need to stop doing violence to the text itself in our spiritual allegorizing of theses harsher biblical narratives, and take them for what they are. Immensely human stories that give us insights into our own history, our minds, our souls, our existence. By diving into the raw truth of the scripture, we can discover exactly that, the truth.

As I was writing this sermon I was reminded of how real all of this is. I was searching on Google images for an appropriate depiction of this biblical scene, and to be sure there were many, but as I scrolled thru them my cursor passed over an image of David holding up the severed head of the Philistine champion Goliath, with the website of its origination in the bottom corner of the picture – davidduke.com. A known white supremacist leader, a known evangelizer of violence against people of color, using an image from our sacred history to justify an agenda of violence. An image that should be noted, by our current standards of human rights, would constitute a war crime. This is why these things matter. This is why it matters how we understand the stories of our spiritual ancestors. The way we talk about them. The way we internalize them. Let’s reclaim this beloved story in the name of a merciful God, by telling the truth of it, and finding the good news together, because it’s there!

Returning to the ancient Palestinian battle scene of three thousand years ago, we can still hold David as our hero. Because despite the truth of the text, David is heroic, albeit in ways we may have not originally understood him to be. Truthfully, he’s not the “lad” we always see him pictured as. Yes, he was youthful, lithe, and handsome, but he was no boy. By ancient standards he was a young man, full grown in his later teens or early twenties, or even much later in life according to others. He was also aware of the scene, as the long standoff between the two lines of armies and Goliath’s call for an Israelite champion was something that David had been witnessing for weeks, despite the narratives’ suggestion of his sudden inspiration to fight the giant. Do we overlook the bounty that was also part of the process? Do we not pick up on his deep verbal cuts at the character of Goliath? Do we even stop to consider that the Philistines, although certainly antagonistic to the people of Israel and Judah, were simply another ancient people operating in the same militaristic ways of the Hebrews? I say all of this to add context to the raw truth of the story, the raw humanity of the scene in 1^st Samuel chapter 17.

Because in fact, our hero David – and all those around him, on both sides – were human as well. And in the case of David, we come to later understand that like ourselves, he is a flawed human. Deeply flawed in fact. We see glimpses of it here in the scene, in his wild ambition, his pride, his contempt for the enemy, and indeed his brutality. We see his humanness. The good, and the bad. And in the transparency of his humanness we see a reflection of ourselves. A reflection of our humanity. Like ourselves, David had brokenness within him. And yet, in his brokenness he was still loved by God, delivered by God, even anointed by God! God knew all these things about the nature of this elevated figure, witnessed all these things within him, and still used him as an instrument to further the kin-dom of God at that point in history. And despite the brokenness made visible in his brutality, David absolutely was a force of God’s agenda on Earth, even if it was often problematic. Of course, these challenging tendencies of our hero eventually were his downfall, suggesting the original storytellers who spoke the full truth of their ancestors, perhaps left us breadcrumbs in this story as a foreshadowing of sorts of his future behavior. Today we deal with similar issues regarding violence, and while much remains the same in terms of our nature, we in fact have progressed, even if it’s hard to see. We as humanity have inched our way forward ever so incrementally to a new point in the history of the kin-dom of God.   And like David, God is working within us, proclaiming this coming of the kin-dom, this coming here on earth. Like the young shepherd, God loves us, delivers us, anoints us, even in the midst of our often-severe brokenness. And like our hero, we are also called to help usher in the commonwealth of God, moving the needle forward from where we are now, to the future that God calls us into.

Now that we have an additional lens to view this beloved story, how will we internalize it?  How will we tell it to our children?  How will we proclaim the wisdom it teaches us?  First, having an internal awareness of what within us is death-dealing, and what within us is life-giving is important. Because indeed we all have both, and yet we are still embraced as children of God. Second, discovering where are we invited by God to challenge these parts of ourselves, the parts of those in our lives, and the parts of the societal powers that keep us stagnate in these ways of violence, helping shape the narrative inspired by a loving God. And finally, in the cracks that emerge from our pushback, following thru on the path that God has already laid before us by owning our inner heroic David, staring into long odds. Because the path itself we know. It’s clear. We just need to be courageous enough to walk it. That’s the good news here. The path forward. The words of the prophet Micah proclaim it. At the risk of naïveté and idealism we must proclaim this. These Hebrew prophets did. And did so in the world of David. Not to mention the even more radical proclamations of a later rabbi we all know so well.  Following in the footsteps of them all, we must beat the shadow within our hearts into the presence of the light. We must beat the false constructions of our sacred texts into ones that realize the life-giving nature of the commonwealth of God. We must beat the standard of culturally acceptable violence into an unfolding of radically compassionate response, that currently is right at the horizon of our human vision. Truly and faithfully, we must beat the swords into plowshares. Amen.