1 Samuel 17: 1-49
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Sermon Starters (Proper 7B)(2021)
What qualifies a person to be the main leader of a nation or a state or a church? Commitment to certain causes? Level of education or experience? Personal charisma or moral rectitude? Mental acuity or psychological stability? Campaign promises? Demonstrated loyalty to the organization? Those are the kind of questions people asked in the last election in my country. Interestingly, and sadly, very few seemed to be looking for the one characteristic that made David Israel’s greatest king—a heart commitment to the living God, a deep trust in the saving power of the God of Scripture. Given our standards, is it any wonder that we are always in turmoil?Facing Our Giants
...less than 150 years ago, Thomas Edison was already celebrated as an outstanding inventor thanks to his creation of the phonograph. Even so, many experts scoffed at him when he announced that he would attempt to develop an incandescent light. The best and brightest knew that such a thing could never be done. Edison’s public announcement was considered so ludicrous that the British parliament set up a committee specifically to look into the possibility. Their final report came back with the conclusion, “Good enough for our transatlantic friends ... but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.” A few years later, Henry Morton, who was president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, referred to Edison’s light bulb when he said: “Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.” Significantly, he said that after Edison had already given the first public demonstration of a working bulb. Similar stories may be told about skeptics weighing in on the possibility of innovation after innovation. In 1899, Literary Digest published this prediction about cars: “The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.” In 1902, Simon Newcomb, who was then Director of the US Naval Observatory, stated his conclusion that “Flight by machines heavier than air is impractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” At the end of the very next year, the Wright brothers proved him to be wrong. The so-called “Father of radio,” who was himself an inventor, said “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially, I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”...
Resources from 2018 to 2020
David and Goliath
Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, has written a secular book for managers titled David and Goliath. Gladwell instructs his readers about how to use the story of young David as motivation to take on the economic behemoths that are their adversaries. His chapters have titles such as “The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages). The book doesn’t provide much insight for Christians and Jews trying to understand this ancient narrative from the Hebrew Scriptures, but it’s a reminder of the timelessness and universality of what we sometimes refer to very glibly as “the word of God.”...Preaching Helps (Proper 7B)(2018)
In his inimitable style, Frederick Buechner describes Goliath: he “stood 10 feet tall in his stocking feet, wore a size 20 collar, a 9 1/2 inch hat, and a 52-inch belt. When he put his full armor on, he looked like a Sherman tank. “Even stripped to the bare essentials, he had plenty to carry around, and flesh and bones were the least of it. There was the burdensome business of having to defend his title against all comers. There were the mangled remains of the runners-up. When he tried to think something out, it was like struggling through a hip-deep bog. When he tried to explain something, it was like pushing a truck uphill. His dark moods were leaden and his light moods elephantine. He considered under-arm deodorants a sign of effeminacy.”When the Storms of Life Are Raging!
In the movie, the Green Mile, based on a novel by Stephen King, one of the prisoners on death row is a really, really tall, barrel chested man, described by one of the guards as, “HUGEâ€. In the movie he towers over everyone else! I read that in reality, this actor is shorter than at least one other cast member! Creative camera angels were used to make him seem much larger than he actually was...The Still Point
“The world looks different now…. Something is over. In the deepest levels of my existence, something is finished, done. My life is divided into before and after.” So writes Nicholas Wolsterstorff — once Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale. What he’s writing about here is no great philosophical idea. It’s intensely personal. Those lines come from a book of his called Lament for a Son. It’s a memoir of an event that changed his life: an event that seems to violate the natural order, the experience they say no parent should ever have to go through: burying one’s own child. Wolterstorff’s son, Eric, died at the age of 25, in a mountain-climbing accident. “He was a gift to us for twenty-five years. When the gift was finally snatched away, I realized how great it was. Then I could not tell him…. I didn’t know how much I loved him until he was gone. Is love like that?” Yes, I’m sorry to say: I think it very often is...
Resources from 2015 to 2017
Peace, Be Still
("The tale Lady Gregory recorded is of two Irish warriors, Streng of the ancient race of the Firbolgs, and Bres of the Tuatha de Danaan who had just come to Ireland. Here is the story in the words of Lady Gregory:...")Proper 7B (2015)
("In his fine book on David, Leap over a Wall, Eugene Peterson states that the image in the David & Goliath story that most arrests his attention is the one of young David kneeling down by the brook to gather up his five smooth stones. Peterson thinks that the whole David saga is finally about becoming human, about awakening to the reality of a God-infused world...")Stories of Crisis
The man in the wheelchair was fifty-three, but he appeared almost infinitely older because of what cancer had done to him. The dozens of men who had gathered to hear him speak were well aware of his illness and how this would be the last time he would meet with them. The man in the wheelchair was Bonaventure Zerr, abbot of a Benedictine community in Oregon. The men around him were monks of that community. Eight years earlier, they had elected him as abbot, expecting that he would occupy the position for a good twenty years. They knew him well, this very large man with an imposing intellect who yet was totally affable and compassionate and confident. They knew him well, and in a short time he would be dead. The assembled monks looked on Bonaventure Zerr with affection and respect. They also looked on him with reverence, for according to the Rule of Benedict, the abbot holds the place of Christ in the monastery. So here was their Christ – Christ in a wheelchair, days away from death. His very last words to the assembled monks were almost exactly what he said to them moments after he had been elected abbot eight years before. “In biblical times,” he told them from his wheelchair, “when God’s people were in trouble, he would send an angel to help. He has not sent an angel this time, but I have an angel’s message.” This bear of a man, sick yet strong, slammed his fist down on the table in front of him, and commanded with a loud voice, “Stop being afraid!”*Facing Our Giants
("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 Overcomers
["There's an old story about an archaeologist who was digging in the desert in Israel. He came upon an ancient mummy. After looking it over, he immediately called the curator of a famous natural-history museum. "I've just discovered a 3,000 year-old mummy of a man who died of heart failure!" said the archaeologist, with great excitement. "Well, I guess you'd better bring him in, said the curator. "We'll check out your findings..." and another illustration, as well as some discussion of racism after the shooting in Charleston]
Resources from 2009 to 2014
Goliath Moments
An unfinished chapter in American history concerns the labor movement and its struggles against oppressive conditions. A most unlikely David arose in the person of a poor Irish widow named Mother Jones. Some spoke her name with contempt, but she was a mother to the great masses who labored in the dark coal mines or worked 65 hours every week in the mills. In the 1890s, she served as an agitator for the United Mine Workers where her fiery speeches would move men and women to tears and compel them to action. In Colorado, she approached a machine gun poised to open fire on a line of demonstrators; she placed her hand on the barrel, turned it to the ground, and then walked on by. She once told a congressional committee, “My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression.”...Set People Free from Fear
There are many Goliaths abroad in our land. A Goliath today may not be a supersize warrior with heavy armor and a bad attitude. Today’s Goliaths are diverse. They are institutions, corporations, organizations, movements, popular attitudes, persistent prejudices. What all of them have in common is that they endeavor to defy the living God. They stand on the side of injustice and roar their insults. In our time, they do not blaspheme against God so much as they offend against divine justice, they show no mercy, they trample the poor, doing deeds that may be legal, but are manifestly immoral. Today’s Goliaths are diverse...
Resources from the Archives
Survivor
On a jungle island in the South China Sea, for 39 days, 16 castaways are marooned. They are forced to band together and carve out a new existence, using their collective wits to make surviving, without any conveniences of the modern world, a little easier. Day by day the location and tropical sun tests the endurance of the castaways. For every three days there is a one-hour Survivor television episode. The survivors must form their own cooperative island society, building shelter, gathering and catching food, and participating in contests for rewards. Those who succeed in the day-to-day challenges will be rewarded with things to make island life more bearable-simple comforts like pillows, some cold beer, and clean clothing. Those who fail must do without. On the last day of each three-day cycle, the castaways must form a tribal council. At this meeting, each person places a secret ballot vote to send one fellow castaway home, eliminating him or her from eligibility for the one million dollars.