07/22/12 "Not the Same Weapons" Spencer GUMC
If we were to try to make a list of the Bible stories that are most well known by the church and even the larger culture, the story of David and Goliath would almost certainly be close to the top of the list, along with stories like Noah's ark and Jonah and the whale. In fact, this story is known and talked about more often, both in the church and out of it, than many of the stories that directly involve Jesus. It is because it is so fantastically well known that I have felt free to limit the time that I spend this morning retelling it in order to free up time to explore a particular aspect that has been impressing itself on me recently.
At the time when David shows up to the battlefield where he will ultimately slay Goliath, he was not yet a warrior. In fact, he was nothing more than a kid, likely no more than fifteen years old. He was so far from being known as a great warrior that even his brothers were amazed that he would volunteer to go head to head with a giant like Goliath. And yet, though he was young, though he had no credentials, though to all outward appearances, he was nothing more than the youngest of a large family, his appearance at this time and place is inherently political.
Remember that David has been introduced to the reader in the previous chapter, and that introduction took the form of the prophet Samuel, on orders from God, going to Bethlehem and anointing him as king over all of Israel. This is, from a purely political point of view, high treason, since Israel already had a king, Saul. It is fascinating to me that in the slaying of Goliath, David is able to defeat the Philistines, the very thing that Saul was not able to do with an army.
All that aside, it seems to me that the most common aspect of this story that gets emphasized in Sunday school, Bible studies and sermons, is the need to stand in faith, knowing that God is far greater than the giants that we see in our lives, no matter how big they seem or how many of them there are. All of this is entirely true. I do not mean to minimize that conclusion in any way, shape, or form. However, I want to place my stress on a different detail, because I think that it is both something that I forget, though it is so obviously included in our normal way of discussing this passage, and because I feel it is something that is very much appropriate in this place and time.
I want to draw your attention to the interchange that David has with Saul, where Saul tries to equip David for battle. This is what we read. "Then Saul clothed David with his armor; he put a helmet of bronze on his head, and clothed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword over his armor, and he tried in vain to go, for he was not used to them. Then David said to Saul, 'I cannot go with these; for I am not used to them.' And David put them off. Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in his shepherd's bag or wallet; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine."
I feel that it is important to stress that, when David went after Goliath, he did not use the same weapons as Goliath did. Now, this seems like a silly and trivial observation, doesn't it? After all, we know that, while Goliath had a sword and a shield so big he needed someone to carry it for him, David simply had an ordinary sling with five stones. However, I think that we often get so caught up in the glory of the victory, that David actually is able to defeat Goliath, that we forget how significant this fact really is.
Think about the sheer absurdity of David's decision. He is only about fifteen years old, going up against a man who has been a warrior, likely for longer than David has been alive. Goliath is trained in all the best military strategies, he knows how to use his sword, he knows how to fight, both in battle and in single combat. David has none of these things. He has spent his youth far from the battlefield, caring for sheep and playing his harp. Saul is giving the best advice he knows. The only way that makes sense to Saul to approach this incredibly significant battle is armed to the teeth, covered in armor and with the best weapon you can find, at least one that was created for battle. Remember, Saul is no weakling, but is an accomplished warrior himself. The maidens of Israel used to sing, "Saul has slain his thousands."
David walks out, completely naked from a military point of view, and does not just face his enemy, but defeats him. What would the people's response have been? I can imagine it would be something like this. "How amazing is it that Goliath has been defeated at all, let alone by this young man, let alone with a sling and a rock." The great glory is that God brought about victory in spite of David's weakness of weapon.
But what if that reaction misses the entire point? What if God's victory wasn't in spite of David's inexperience, in spite of his unimpressive weaponry? What if God brought victory precisely because of those things? What if David didn't just find a way that worked as well in that moment as that of the great warriors, but found the only way that would work? The fact of the matter is that if we wanted to say that the reason that David was victorious, even with a stone and sling, was because he was such a natural warrior, we would have to say that he could have defeated Goliath with Saul's sword and armor, he just didn't feel as comfortable doing it. On the contrary, I think that the story forces us to conclude that, if David had gone to the battlefield doing things the way Saul told him to, meeting Goliath with his own versions of his armor and sword, the event would have ended very differently. David would have been killed, Israel would have been defeated, and the whole history of the world would have changed forever.
But you know what? Once I noticed that David not only did not fight Goliath using the same weapons, but deliberately avoided anything resembling conventional combat equipment, I started to notice that this is not the only time in the Bible that this kind of thing happens. It turns out that almost everywhere you turn, there is someone doing something that makes absolutely no sense if we think about if as an outsider but we hardly notice it either because we have been trained for so long to see it as normal or because we are so quick to read the end of the story into its beginning that we never notice how odd it really is.
Perhaps the single best example of this happening is Jesus. Here is a man who was being called the Messiah, the anointed one, the Son of David. He was a man who was associated with the restoring of Israel and the hopes and dreams of the people. He spoke of a kingdom that was coming but yet was already there in his person. He gathered followers, he spoke against those in authority, and he sharply critiqued the ways that Israel had become just like the pagan nations. And finally, when the time comes to complete his work, to release the people from bondage, to cast the powers of this world to the ground and shatter them, what does he do? He dies! He doesn't march on Jerusalem with a rag-tag army like the Maccabees did over a hundred years before. He doesn't take up his rightful place on the throne of Israel and restore the Davidic line of kings. In fact, Israel was still ruled by Rome and the people's lives were not noticeably different after he died compared to before. When you think of it, it is a pretty funny way of establishing a kingdom.
And yet, we don't say that God established his kingdom here on earth in spite of the death of Christ, do we? No, we say that God established it through his death, that there really wasn't any other way it could come about, that to try to establish the kingdom of God using the same "weapons" as human kings use would make absolutely no sense at all. If Jesus' kingdom depended on how well he was able to marshal troops, to combat and defeat trained Roman soldiers, we would have no choice but to say that he was an absolute failure. And yet, we don't say that, do we? We don't say that because Christ's death wasn't a sign of his failure, it redefined what it means to succeed. Success is not an avoidance of death, but an emerging on the other side of death in resurrection. From the outside, we would have to say that the Jesus movement was kept alive in spite of Christ's death. From the inside, we know that there was no other way, and to do it in another way, a more conventional way, a way that made more sense to the outside world, would never actually work.
Look at just about any hero of the faith. Abraham was over ninety years old when God called him and told him that he would be the father of a great nation, something that is very hard to do if you have no children and are not likely to have any. Moses was an eighty year old shepherd with a speech impediment who had burned all his bridges with the Egyptian royalty. Gideon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into leadership in order to overthrow the nations that were ruling over Israel. Jonah was a bigot who hated the Ninevites, the ones he was called to preach to, with every ounce of his being. The list could be made as long as we like. The point is that if we ever imagined that the standards of the world were the best way to move forward in God's eyes, not a single leader in Israel's history, including David and Jesus, would have been taken seriously.
What can we learn from this? I am sure we can learn many things, but what I am increasingly convinced of is that it means that we should not pay even the smallest bit of attention to how other people do things, at least if they are people that we could consider, on one level or another, to be our enemies. If David attempted to meet Goliath using the same kinds of weapons and armor that he used, he would have been killed; if Jesus tried to establish his kingdom like earthly kings, not only would it not have worked, we would have missed out on the real kingdom of God, which is far greater than the kingdoms of this world.
This means that we need to stop looking over our shoulders and seeing if we are keeping up with the Joneses, to see if we are doing the same things as everyone else, because what they are doing has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what we need to be about. Trying to measure yourself by other people can only lead to pride, if you think you are doing well compared to them, or despair, if you think you aren't doing as well. The same is true if you think that the only way that God could be calling you to behave is the way others behave.
Allow me to give some concrete examples. Any of you who have children who are still in school, especially if they are in middle school, are doubtlessly aware of a phenomenon called "drama." Drama, in this sense, is not to be confused with theatrics. Drama is an age-old issue with a new name. It is when one person, or group of people, starts spreading rumors about others, or begins to talk about someone else behind their back. Drama is the number one complaint I have ever heard from people who are in school. Seeing that it is such a big problem, and one that everyone seems to notice and understand, what do you think is the number one way to deal with school drama? More drama! As amazing as it might sound, the way that people in school most commonly deal with the drama in their lives is to instigate more drama, as if somehow, if we can just get the last word in, everything will be fine. What is this but a modern example of using Goliath's weapons against him? The result is never that Goliath is slain, but only that we get beaten, because he is a giant and we are small and he has more experience with them than we could ever have. The only way to win at the drama game by using more drama is to somehow become the kind of person who is better at creating turmoil than anyone else, and then you may have won, but you have become a person whose self-worth is determined by how bad you can make other people feel. You can only defeat Goliath using his own weapons by becoming a bigger, nastier, more cruel giant than him, which is no real victory.
When I was serving a different church, there were several churches, within convenient driving distance, who specialized in reaching out to college students. To that end, they had developed fantastic praise bands, they integrated contemporary culture into their services, and they had an amazing network where new people in the school could be reached by word of mouth. The people at the church I was serving were noticing that people they knew were traveling to attend these other churches and they wanted to find a way to get them back home. In order to do that, it was suggested to reinstate our own praise band that had been discontinued by a previous pastor and to try to copy these other churches and do what they do to get those people back.
Now, there are many reasons why this is a problem. First, there is a big problem with looking at other churches as being our enemies. They aren't our enemies. People may have left our church at one point to go there, but at least they are going somewhere, they are still putting themselves in a position of hearing the word of the Lord, of joining the larger body in worship, and learning how to live as Christians together. There are far too many people in any given town who are simply unreached to worry about those who are still Christians, just a different brand than us.
But beyond that, it is an idea that is doomed. There is nothing wrong with reinstating a praise band, there is nothing wrong with a church becoming more contemporary. The problem is when those things are pursued in the belief and with the conviction that they are the way to reach others. If that church had gotten a band together and said to the people of their community, "You should come to this church because we have a band," they could respond, "So does this other church, and their band is better." The fact of the matter is that we could never win if that was our strategy. The churches we would have hoped to compete against had been doing those things for a good twenty years. They had experience and money invested in it that we could never even come close to duplicating. It would have amounted to nothing more than looking at other churches and calling them Goliath (a problem in itself), and then saying that the best way to "slay" that Goliath is to do what they are doing. It would have been as disastrous as if David had fought Goliath with a sword and shield instead of with a sling and some stones.
So I urge you, in every aspect of your lives; in your personal faith journeys, in your relation to the church, in the way you treat people in your workplace, and in every other way, listen to God and do what God tells you to do and do it the way God tells you to do it, regardless of how silly or counter-intuitive it might seem. If David had said, "No way, God. There is no way I can go against a giant with just a sling and some stones," he would have never won the battle and would have never become the great king that he was called to be.
On top of that, do not allow other people to discourage you from doing it. What if Saul had said to David, "You will either fight Goliath my way or you will not fight him at all?" He would have never defeated him, or even may never have gone out to battle in the first place. Someone else would have had to fight the giant, maybe without listening to God at all, and that would also have been disastrous. If God has called you, and he has, he will make it clear what you should do. Do you wish that your church would develop a particular kind of ministry because it is something you care about and you know that others probably care about it, too? Go do it! If someone tells you that it is doomed to failure because you aren't doing it the way they would do it, even if you know that God isn't calling you to do it their way, keep faithful. Sometimes the greatest victories, as we see in the Bible, come when they are the most unlikely of all.
When God calls his people, he equips them, not in the way that seems best to the rest of the world, but in the way that is actually best for that time and place. We do not need to worry about what has happened before, or even what is happening right now. We need to be about participating in what God is doing in the days ahead and we need to join him in that. I am not sure that I know exactly where that is, and I am not sure that any other single person knows, but I trust that God will reveal it to us as an entire congregation and will do so by motivating individuals and small groups to step forward and make a difference. God is likely even calling you right now, in this season of your life. Be in prayer and be encouraged to step out boldly, for it not just a human being who believes in you and supports you, but the very almighty God of the universe. As silly as it might seem, cast aside your sword and shield and take up your sling and stones, for the weapons that are chosen and anointed by God are better than the best that we could find on our own. Let us pray.
AMEN
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