The readings for today are below (to read them, click on each; links are given where available):
1 Samuel 17: (1a, 4-11, 19-23) 32-49
David and Goliath. Now there’s a story every child in Sunday school learns: how the lad David (he was perhaps a teenager) came up against the giant Goliath and killed him with a pebble fired from a slingshot. All the men of Israel’s army were afraid of this gigantic Philistine. According to the measurements given in the Bible — translating them into terms we know — Goliath was about 10 feet tall, and his coat of mail weighed 150 pounds, and the head of his spear weighed about 19 pounds, and the shaft of his spear was like a weaver’s beam — you know, like on a weaving loom. Imagine carrying that around, much less trying to throw it.
The armies of Israel are arrayed against the Philistines in battle. And Goliath taunts Israel’s army, telling them to send someone to fight him. If Goliath kills the Israelite, then Israel will be servants of the Philistines, but if someone can kill Goliath, then the Philistines will serve Israel. No one wants to take up the challenge, except for David.
This is not the only battle we hear about in today’s readings. In fact, each of the readings describes coming up against some mighty power. In the Gospel, the disciples are in boats on a lake, and a storm arises, with a great gale and waves, and the boats are in danger of being swamped.
The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, also describes being up against a great power. This one is a bit different — not a single human enemy, like Goliath, nor a force of Nature, like a storm. Paul is facing persecution for doing the ministry of Christ. He lists what he has endured: beatings, imprisonments, riots, sleepless nights, and hunger, to name a few. The force he faces is the power of a world opposed to the word of Christ.
In our own day, we face various forces. But in the past 18 months or so, the whole world, all of humanity, has faced a powerful force in the form of a virus. A tiny thing, so small that we cannot even see it with the naked eye, has brought the world to its knees, has completely changed how we live and work and study and exercise. It has changed everything. Even as we emerge now from lockdown and go back to what we would like to say is normal, we know it is not life as we knew it before.
In the face of a powerful and deadly force, one needs a defense. Our defense against Covid-19 has been face masks and social distancing and hand sanitizers. Then we grew into having vaccines as defenses, to protect us from the unseen but very real force.
But these are defenses against the virus itself, against infection and illness. Physical illness is not the only danger we have faced. We know the other dangers: anxiety, isolation, loneliness, financial hardship, to name a few. They are dangers and forces that we already faced as a society anyway, but Covid-19 has brought them to the forefront and made them even more obvious.
What is our defense against such forces?
Well, to pose an answer to that question, let’s go back to our readings and see how David and Paul and the disciples dealt with the powerful force each of them faced.
When David offers to fight Goliath, he does not use the usual defenses. The king, Saul, tries to cloth David with armor: a coat of mail and a helmet. But David cannot even move with all this stuff on. He takes them all off and tells Saul he is not used to them. David uses his courage, and his ingenuity, and his faith in God. He tells Saul that he has defended his father’s sheep from lions and bears, and he considers Goliath to be a similar sort of enemy. He has courage.
He also has ingenuity. He thinks outside the box, as we say these days. Instead of trying to throw a spear at Goliath, or slay him with a sword (how could he even get close enough?), he reasons that a forcefully slung stone, well-aimed at Goliath’s forehead, will kill him.
And he has faith. Now David’s faith is partly belief that the Lord will protect him. He says to Saul, “The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine.” But there is another side to David’s faith that also serves as a defense: he is indignant that Goliath would dare to insult the living God. His love of God is so great that personal fear for his own safety evaporates in the face of someone who he feels has insulted God. When Goliath laughs at him, saying, “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” David says in response, “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.” David has no thought of himself; his thought is of God.
In Paul’s defense against persecution, he relies on the power of God and on the fruits of God’s spirit. In the face of the afflictions and hardships he has endured, he and those with him have defended themselves with purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, righteousness, and the power of God. Many of these things he names here are named elsewhere in Paul’s writings as the fruits of the Holy Spirit. These are the movement of the Spirit of God within us, and they defend us against all sorts of troubles by helping us to rise above them. In the face of some evil force attempting to defeat us, we respond with the opposite, by drawing in faith upon the power of the Spirit of God within us.
And then there are the disciples in the boats on the lake, facing the powerful storm, in fear for their lives. What defense do they use? They have no way to stop the storm. Their defense is essentially a prayer. There is Jesus in the boat with them, but Jesus is asleep. The disciples wake him up and say, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” It is a prayer, for any question blurted to the Lord in such anguish and distress is a prayer. “Do you not care that we are perishing?”
Jesus wakes up. He rebukes the wind and commands the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the storm is gone. And the disciples are filled with awe and wonder just who this is with them, “that even the wind and the sea obey him.”
The disciples have the ultimate defense, of course, against any calamity. They have Jesus himself, who is himself the power of God in human flesh. What David and Paul have are reflections of such divine power, given to them in personal characteristics of ingenuity and courage, and in the gifts of faith and the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
And what of us in the face of Covid-19? We have the vaccines and all the rest to oppose the virus itself. Against the more insidious effects of the virus on individuals and on society, we need to rely on the defenses we heard of in the readings: the kind of faith that David had — being indignant that a virus, a small little thing, could have such terrible effects on human life and refusing to let it defeat us; ingenuity — thinking outside the box, not relying on the same old solutions; and courage — the willingness to step out boldly. Our world needs not to return to what we knew before, for we need new ways of being and living. For that to happen, we need to depend on the fruits of the Spirit of God — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, and self-control.
And above all, we need to be like the disciples in the boat — not like them in their fear, but like them in their willingness to cry out to Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” It is genuine, heartfelt prayer: “Lord, help us. Lord, guide us.” So we pray to you, O Lord.