Proper 7
June 21, 2015

1 Samuel 17:la, 4-11, 32-49

• Peter Storey is a South African Methodist minister who is a former president of both the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and the South African Council of Churches. He’s currently a Professor at Duke University Divinity School. During his 40-year ministry in South Africa, he became one of the Christian leaders in opposition to the racial policies of the apartheid government, as well as being chaplain to Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners on Robben Island. Here’s how he describes the way he became involved in opposing apartheid:
  • “I remember my excitement at being appointed to South African Methodism’s premier pulpit at a relatively young age. I remember standing in that pulpit on a weekday, just getting the feel of it you know. This great church, the center of our largest city. The things I was gonna do ... for God of course. It wasn’t my fault that I was sent there in 1976. And on June 16th, 1976, the first great Black Revolt took place in our land. The uprising of our youth in Soweto, just down the road.
    “And looking out at that congregation of white faces, because of course it was a white church, and knowing deep in my heart that unless we could model, in that congregation, the new South Africa that God dreamed of, we could have nothing authentic to say to our society. And standing up on the Sunday after June 16th, and preaching to that white congregation about what needed to happen to them and to our church, if we were to have any word to say.
    “And then coming the following Sunday and looking at the yards and yards of empty leather; empty seat after empty seat. And then facing after that, having made that clear commitment to integrate that congregation.
    "Now all of us know the pain involved in losing a family from our church. It’s a deeply personal angst, which happens. It’s not easy to watch 200 of them go. Two hundred white members, and if they’d only gone quietly it would have helped. But they liked to tell everybody else where they were going to. And I can remember looking into the mirror and saying, ‘God, am I to be the pastor who will go down in history as the one who emptied Central Church?’”
    “Peter went on to say that he knew that if he failed to struggle, if he avoided the suffering inherent in God’s call, and in that great Biblical truth that […] ‘all are members of God’s household’: that if he failed that witness and avoided that struggle, that he could have had the largest church in South Africa, but he would not have today what is his most prized possession. Today, his most prized possession is a photograph of his congregation, where every color of the rainbow is there. Where God’s dream of the new South Africa is already alive and well!” (Steven M. Smith)
  By the time Peter Storey was appointed the pastor of the Central Church in Cape Town, apartheid was such a deeply-entrenched system that many White citizens who benefitted from its inequities took it as a matter of course and didn’t even think about it any more.

The idea of dismantling apartheid must have seemed like the task of facing down Goliath. It was, in the words of the song from The Man of La Mancha, “To dream the impossible dream/To fight the unbeatable foe.” But, of course, that dream ultimately succeeded, even if it happened at a glacial pace and exacted a huge price.

Our Old Testament lesson today is the story of another unbeatable foe, but it reads almost like a fairy tale because it is written in such a way that the impossibility of the task becomes more and more pronounced as you go through the story until, at the end, our hero succeeds so dramatically that he doesn’t even break a sweat.

Generations have taught the tale of David and Goliath to Sunday school children — in spite of its very violent overtones — because, at heart, it’s the story of a story about a little guy defeating a big guy. Those earlier Christians wanted to teach their children while they were still little that when we work on behalf of God, nothing is impossible.

That’s a beautiful thought to keep in mind when confronted with the many difficult issues of our world. But some people have a hard time accepting that it could be realistic. Sometimes our Goliaths loom far too large, sometimes our personal liabilities make us shrink too far into ourselves to believe that we could be a part of any miraculous transformations like those we see in the Bible.

Certain spoil-sport biblical scholars go so far as to try to undermine the story of David and Goliath itself, by pointing to 2 Samuel 21:19 which says, “Then there was another battle with the Philistines at Gob; and Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, killed Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.”

They say that that verse shows that someone else killed Goliath and David’s official court biographers simply borrowed that heroic story to burnish the image of the king. In other words, these scholars suggest that David’s biographers were acting like our modern spin-doctors.

The problem is that, in their hurry to debunk this story, these scholars forget the ancient custom for kings to adopt a new name on their coronation day, much like the Popes still do.

So Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis upon his election to the Holy See, as a sign of his hope that his tenure would express the values of Francis of Assisi. Similarly, Elhanan — which means “the one whom God has graciously bestowed” — became King David, which simply means “the beloved.” That name was intended to stand in contrast to Saul, the king whom God rejected.

I have no problem believing in the historicity of the David and Goliath story. However, I do have one other problem with this story. To explain that, let me share the words of Jeffrey Spencer:

“But take [this story] off the Hollywood set, and you’ve got to wonder about David’s sanity. Does he think he’s indestructible, the way so many teenagers do? It is hubris? Is David delusional? Or is it faith? Or maybe it’s a little of all of the above.

“I find myself wondering, what if Goliath ended up killing David? Would we still look to David’s courage as an act of faith? If David’s faith was in God’s protection and he ended up dead anyway, then his faith would have [seemed to have been proven] false. But I maintain, that he could have had faith in God, faced Goliath, lost, and his faith would have been proven true. I think it takes more faith to stand up to Goliath not knowing the outcome than to stand up to Goliath knowing what’s going to happen.”

In my opinion, the sad thing about the David and Goliath story is that, after a lengthy build-up, the climax arrives in an instant. It’s over so quickly that the ending partially undercuts the very real danger David had placed himself into.

Yes, I realize that the author may have had to write it that way because that’s the way it actually happened. I also realize that the lengthy build-up may be as long as it is in order to counterbalance the nearly instantaneous climax. But that said, it still feels more fairy-tale like than the Goliaths we face, for the simple reason that the struggles we encounter — like the movement to end apartheid — may take generations.

That’s important to remember when we hear things like the shooting that occurred this past week at Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooter’s words, as reported by one of the survivors, make it abundantly clear that this was a racially-motivated mass murder.

This is just one more incident in a series of events this year that have painfully demonstrated that, contrary to what many of us Caucasians may wish to believe, racism remains both powerful and pervasive in this country. Speaking metaphorically, racism is like a Goliath so huge that we only see its massive shoes and pay no attention to those giant legs stretching far off up into the clouds.

Racism has long and deep roots in America, planted during the earliest days of settlement when twin injustices were allowed to run rampant. First, slavery was accepted because it was imposed on people who looked different and so it could be claimed that they were somehow subhuman and thus could be cruelly exploited.

Second, the idea that White settlers, by virtue of their superior weaponry and self-proclaimed superior culture had some right to wrest this land away from its inhabitants — a long-buried portion of history that continues to cast a long shadow over the lives of Native Americans.

The fact that such acts are no longer overtly acceptable may be clearly demonstrated by the powerful reaction against the killings caused in Charleston last week due to that same type of mind set. However, what lurks under the surface is another matter.

A week or two ago, I mentioned the old adage that fish don’t see water because they are so thoroughly immersed in its environment. The same may be true of white privilege. It is such a deep-rooted part of our lives that we don’t realize that not everyone in this country lives the way we do. We benefit from our position of privilege even though we rarely become aware of that fact.

Which of us have heard car doors locking around us as we walked down the street? Which of us have had to have a heart-to-heart talk with our children about the ways to safely react if stopped by the police so as to not provoke a reaction? Yet, that’s a common discussion in the Black community and the need for that talk has been demonstrated time and time again in the past couple of years.

We’re willing to tolerate lower standards for education in impoverished areas and conditions so unsafe that, at times, even the police are afraid to enter. We allow our justice system to imprison Blacks at a far higher rate than Whites to the point that they make up nearly 40 percent of our prisoners even they though represent only 13.2 of the total population.

Perhaps some of that disparity may be due to higher rates of crime within largely-Black poor areas. But the truth is that some of that disparity is due to the fact that our justice system is far more likely to deny Blacks alternative means of sentencing than it does Whites.

Science has taught us that racial distinctions are barely detectable from a biological point of view. But more importantly, Christ has taught us that all people are our brothers and sisters. Therefore when anyone suffers, we should have compassion. That’s a word that literally means to “suffer with” someone. Their pain should become our call to action to ease and end their suffering.

The families of the Mother Emmanuel Church victims have already given us an excellent example. Bethane Middleton-Brown, the sister of the murdered DePayne Middleton-Doctor said, “I am a work in progress and I acknowledge that I am very angry. But one thing that Depayne taught me is that we are the family that love built.” Then she added, “We have no room for hate, so we have to forgive.”

The Kingdom of God is built on such courageous love and forgiveness. God has called us to stand before the Goliath of racial injustice and offer genuine hope and peace. We must genuinely recognize the image of God in everyone and refuse to compromise on that truth.

Unlike David, we may not conquer the giant of intolerance in our lifetime, but that doesn’t mean we should remain cowering on the sidelines like the Israelite army trembling before Goliath. Ask yourself if you really believe that all things are possible with God. Amen.

(Comments to Jim at :jmfpc@sbcglobal.net.)