I dislike weeks like this past one. First there was the strange story of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, and who knew Spokane needed an NAACP chapter? Then there was the announcement by Pizza Hut that they were releasing a pizza that had 21 mini hotdogs baked into the crust, because that’s exactly what we all need. And finally Donald Trump declared that he was going to be running for president, and every comedian rejoiced. For a normal week that would be enough and unfortunately, these stories sort of typify certain aspects of American culture. But then there was the news that we all woke up to on Thursday morning of the shooting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, which sadly is also a part of American culture. As a pastor I know that such tragedies need to be addressed, but as a preacher I’m never quite sure what to do. Do I stay with what I was originally going to say, or do I change it all up in order to address these issues?
I had a good sermon about David and Goliath all planned out that I was going to try and somehow connect to Fathers’ Day. And while I wasn’t really struggling with that message, it wasn’t exactly coming together either, and so Linda asked if perhaps I needed to stop working on that message and instead talk about what happened in Charleston. And yet the story of David and Goliath I think also has a lot to say to us about this very issue because of two things that are easily overlooked.
But let me start by saying what might be the most important thing and that is that God did not cause this event to happen, or allow it to happen, as some part of God’s master plan. Because if that is true, then God is not on the side of the victims, but instead on the side of the perpetrators. But what we see time and time again is that God sides with the victims and with the least, the last and the lost, and that takes part in the story of David and Goliath as well.
This passage can be seen as a story of violence and yet it’s also a story against violence. Goliath calls to the Israelites and asks for one person to come forward and fight him. This is known as single combat, and the purpose was to try and eliminate the largescale death and destruction of war, by having only two people fight. Sometimes the people doing battle would be the best soldiers, and other times it would be the respective leaders who fought each other. Perhaps this should be something we should think about as it would certainly greatly limit the saber rattling of our politicians if they knew that instead of sending others off to fight for them that they themselves would be fighting.
