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Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's June 25, 2006 Sunday worship service. Let No One’s Heart Fail Mark 4:35-41; I Samuel 17:39-52 Bethel 6/25/06 Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD The King James Translation of the Bible I received when I became a member of the Glenn Springs Presbyterian Church outside of Spartanburg, SC in 1967 had something that I bet few Bibles, at least those intended for an adult audience, now have. In those days, the Bible had vivid, hand-drawn pictures, which, as a boy, I assumed must have been drawn by someone actually there on the day of the event in question. My Old Testament had only three pages of these, what we might call, color plates, front and back, and which the Bible always seemed to fall open to because the paper was of a different, heavier quality. My favorite was a picture of strikingly beautiful young Egyptian women rescuing infant Moses from his basket of reeds; but there was also a depiction of Pharaoh’s minions getting his comeuppance in the Red Sea and Moses about to smash the tablets on Sinai, and of course, the story that every young boy liked to dream about, the heroic David, who couldn’t have been much older than I at the time, about to slay the heavily bearded, fully armored, menacing giant, the champion of the Philistines, Goliath. The moment is frozen in time on the page: a Goliath with his gigantic spear about to thrust through his youthful opponent, barely a few yards away; fair-skinned David, his arm back, slingshot spinning, about to release a single, smooth stone he had just picked up from the creek bed. On the page, they seemed so close that I figured David had to jump out of the way when Goliath tumbled forward, dead, from the shepherd boy’s deadly aim. God, I was convinced, was always on the side of the underdog, and here was a picture to prove it! I could hardly have known it at the time, but all of us have moments when we fasten onto coming-of-age stories: we identify with a youthful hero or heroine and see there an ideal to which we can aspire. I’m sure, in my pre-adolescent mind, this image of David slaying Goliath became entangled with the TV depictions of the super-heroes of my own day – the original versions of Superman, Batman, and Robin, the Boy Wonder, who never backed down from a fight if it meant rescuing the innocent and who always were on the “good” side, and who always won, in the end. In Israel’s religious imagination, young David’s life and exploits represented a similar coming of age story for the nation. Israel was just coming out of the period of the judges, when the 12 autonomous tribes had their own individual champions, but no one who could bring a sense of unity to the tribes as one nation. Saul, the first King, was not living up to expectations, and God decided that Samuel should anoint another ruler who would be a kind of King-in-waiting. David, a mere lad, had been called in from tending the sheep of his father Jesse in Bethlehem, and was selected and anointed by Samuel ahead of all of his older, more qualified brothers; God then sent this shepherd boy, who happened to be able to make music on the lyre, to sooth the tortured soul of King Saul and to apprentice in the royal court; and, then in a climatic moment of proving his royal mettle, David took it upon himself to reverse Israel’s public humiliation and almost single-handedly routed the Philistine army as he decapitated the enemy’s greatest warrior. Although interpreters are quick to point out the many foibles and the debilitating hubris of the adult David, especially his later lustful play for Bathsheba and the sordid episodes that followed, this amazing story of the giant-killing, youthful David promoted the ideals of the nation and furthered the allegiance of the people to this boy-king being groomed for greatness. Small wonder that the story of David slaying Goliath is not only one that Israel remembered well, but that we remember, too. We root for the underdog; we like the simplicity of faith that eschews donning the heavy armor of someone else; we prefer our heroes fearless, our battles quick, our victories decisive. The power of scripture is, of course, that it asks us to draw connections between ancient stories of faith and the story of our life that we must live each day. Not always easy, in the case of this story, since there can be ambivalence over who, exactly today, are the giants whom faith should slay; moreover, the battle lines between God’s friends and foes are ever harder to discern and delineate. In the ancient world of the Hebrew people, the heart was the metaphorical seat of the emotions, the intellect, the moral impulse, the point of contact with God. In other words, the heart was a symbol for all that a human being stood for, what he or she was capable of being and doing – and the place where one met the presence of God. Still, today, we think of the heart as more than a physical organ: it is an emblem of our inner self, and many Christians, for example, employ the language of “giving our hearts to God or to Jesus,” and some would say the soul resides where the heart is, at the center of the self. Israel was on the brink of disaster; no one could handle the Philistines; they had begun to waver in their commitment to God. But David had an answer. In the face of this looming crisis, David appealed to the hearts of the people – their deepest convictions and loyalty: “let no one’s heart fail,” he declared, “because of this enemy . . .” Maybe it was only intuitive knowledge on young David’s part, but he seemed to know that he lived in a defining period – the nation would turn even further away from God if Goliath and the Philistine threat went unchallenged. Is it possible that our nation, like Israel long ago in the days of young David, suffers from potential heart failure? Like you, I read the news and see frightening evidence that we have lost our way, lost our devotion to the ways of God: I see the deception, distrust and more deaths which follow in the wake of our tragic dependence upon militarism and force-first policy as a way to control and to silence our enemies; I see the problems of our inability to distribute our great wealth sufficiently so that poverty and health care no longer have to be such problems for so many (it seems we are more willing to cut taxes to the rich than we are to raise the minimum wage for those who need a financial boost the most); we expect more and more personal responsibility from the poor, the disabled, and the elderly, yet we remove the social resources that could help them be more independent; we, who have more incarcerated people per capita than any other nation in the world, seem to rely on building more prisons instead of funding education and opportunities to curb the tendency to violence and acts of desperation; I see people desperate for a better way of life trying to cross the desert and getting rounded up and expelled from our borders; I see the national disgrace of torture being inflicted upon U.S. political detainees who have been held for years without a fair or proper trial; I see our political preoccupation with family values at the expense of equal treatment and justice for all our citizens. Yes, we Americans have an economic and market distribution system that is the envy of the world; yes, we possess the best army money can buy; and yes we can flex our collective muscle anytime and anywhere around the world and make others bow to our desires. But sometimes, quite frankly, in our defiance of the ways of God, we behave more like Philistines than Israelites, the chosen, covenant people of God. Our hearts, simply put, have failed to meet the challenge of giants like the hubris and excess of our national leaders, the scandalous reality of corporate greed, and the undemocratic sacrifice of essential liberties for the sake of fleeting notions of national security. The greatest irony, to me, of the failure of our hearts, is that many of our most vocal and influential national and political leaders claim bloodlines in Christian evangelical piety and traditions that practice a high view of scriptural authority. Many even use “heart language” to generate political capital, particularly among followers of the religious right. But evangelicals forget, including President Bush and our own state senators among them, that the evangelical tradition of Protestant Christianity is actually rooted in 19th century social activism on issues that helped those on the fringes of society: abolition, women’s suffrage, and universal education, to name a few. The faith of many of our leaders has taken the nation far away from the biblical ideals and prophetic model for how a nation should order its life, care for all the people within its borders, and live aligned with practices of compassion and mercy. In his book, Our Endangered Values: America’s moral crisis, former President Jimmy Carter writes about the many moral problems facing America. And where we are found most wanting, from his perspective, is in our collective commitment to demonstrate truth, justice, peace, freedom, humility, human rights, generosity, and a host of other basic moral values (Our Endangered Values, 199). Carter might say that our hearts, the heart of our identity in the God of love and justice, has failed us William Sloan Coffin, the recently deceased Christian activist and social prophet from Riverside Church in New York City, once remarked: “Christians forget that it was the Devil who tempted Jesus with unbounded wealth and power. And it is the Devil in every American that makes us feel good about being so powerful.” (Credo, 80) I believe we need a new kind of hero to lift our hearts as we face giant, seemingly intractable political and social challenges. For ancient Israel, young David represented a new kind of hero, one who didn’t rely on conventional military strategies such as putting on the heaviest armor available, but rather David demonstrated a radical trust and faith that God would provide the necessary response at the right moment. An odd thing about David is that his story is one of the few in the scriptures that feature a youth, not to mention the coming of age story of a youth. On the whole, the scriptures spend little time talking about children or young people. By way of contrast, our society idolizes youth: their story is everywhere. From fashion to entertainment to leisure activities, from the way we talk to the way we think about education and even spirituality, the choices and habits of youth set the trends for much of the rest of the population. Maybe the time has come to call upon those who are not young – the middle-aged, the aging, and even the old to have their own coming of age experience as they rise up to meet the giants that threaten God’s purposes for our nation. A strange notion, perhaps, that those of us who are not young could come of age and make a difference. Too often, as we see trouble looming, we pass it off as something the next generation will have to deal with. That can be the case no more. Retirees, especially, can come of age in a new way and exercise their collective gifts of time, foresight, and wisdom to overcome these amorphous giants that threaten to undermine a society built on the principles of justice, peace, and love of neighbor. If we who have the gift of years don’t work for political and social change, then one of these days, if he hasn’t already, Goliath is going to break our nation’s collective heart. I heard a very engaging segment on NPR’s Fresh Air this past Monday that featured southern novelist, Reynolds Price, from North Carolina who in his early 70s now, continues to teach in the English Department at Duke University. He recently published a book, Letters to a Godchild concerning Faith. Like myself, he was much influenced by the pictures in an Ilustrated Bible story book his parents bought him from a door-to-door salesman in the 1930s when he was a five year old. Entering the world of those pictures began for him a life-long faith journey with God. In the interview, he talked about his experience of being a parapalegic following a diagnosis with spinal cancer when he was in his 50s, his vision of Jesus bringing healing to the scars on his back where the cancerous tumor had been initially and partially removed, and then he talked about his ability to live a joy-filled life despite adversity. He also said that adversity forced him to reinvent himself, and, really, reinvent his life, because so much that he had known had to be unlearned or at least relearned so that he could function in new ways as a parapalegic. But the thing I remember most from this interview with Reynolds Price was at the end, when the host asked him, would you change anything about your life? He said, knowing what I know now about the last 22 years of my life, if I was somehow presented with a pair of magical buttons to push, either bypass or continue with, I still feel that most of the time I’d push the “continue with” button. As we think about the difference we have made and are making in our community and nation, as we reflect upon our ability to reinvent ourselves for a new time and for new challenges, would we push the “bypass” or the “continue with” button? Adversity, whether personal or national, in whatever guise the giants present themselves, requires singular forms of courage to meet and to overcome. Let us not look back over our lives with regret, but hearing again the words of David, “Let no one’s heart fail because of the enemy.” As the hymn writer says, “God of the coming years, through paths unknown, we follow Thee. When we are strong, Lord, leave us not alone, our refuge be. Be Thou for us in life our daily bread; our hearts true home when all our years have sped.” Let us sing our faith as we turn to #275, “God of our Life”
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