June 24, 2012 – I Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49; Mark 4:35-41
I Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49; Mark 4:35-41
In the Boat
4th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 12] – June 24, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
If Catriona had read on in the story of David and Goliath –
and she already had a long story to read! – if she’d read on a little,
we’d have gotten to a part of the story that the lectionary had pruned:
the part where sweet little David takes Goliath’s sword and cuts off his head,
then shows it to King Saul, and displays it in Jerusalem in order to
“show the whole world that there is a God in Israel.”
This, apparently, is how you know someone has a God: if he is more powerful and
more violent and more victorious in battle than yours.
Okay: we grant the story a few points.
For one thing,
it’s a story how with God the vulnerable and small overcome the great and the bad.
Fine.
For another thing, Goliath is one bad dude.
He’s nine feet tall! Yike!
And, something we don’t get taught in Sunday School, he’s one of four living descendants of
the really bad race of semi-divine giants in Genesis called the Nephilim who
rebelliously marry human women, (Genesis 6:1-4)
giants who, according to later stories, introduce to human beings
the dark arts and weaponry and fill the earth with violence,
bloodshed, oppression and death. (I Enoch 1-36)
Goliath is a representative of death. And of sinfulness.
So David takes Goliath’s own sword and cuts off his head.
As Augustine says, David “overthrew the devil with his own weapons.”
And there he puts his finger on the point that makes us uncomfortable:
he overthrew the devil with his own weapons.
How comfortable are we with this?
This is one in a long line of instances of so-called “holy violence” in the Bible.
A couple of chapters earlier in I Samuel, God supposedly tells the Israelites to kill
every man woman and child of the Amalekites (I Samuel 15:3).
Really? Did God really say that?
I’ve been reading the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book for this year,
a beautiful book by a 90 year-old Roman Catholic nun named Ruth Burrows.
About half way in she writes, How can we attribute the savagery of ethnic cleansing to the direct will of the Lord God? The cry for vengeance on enemies, sparing neither man, woman or child, runs down the centuries. In no way can we accept that “this is the word of the Lord.” No it is the word of man at a particular period of history. (Love Unknown, 67-68)
As she notes – and as our children are taught in confirmation class – our absolute authority for
interpreting all of scripture is Christ.
We look at everything in scripture through the lens of Jesus.
For if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God, then all scripture must be interpreted in light of that
fullest revelation.
You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.”
But I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
The Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller who was imprisoned by the Nazis during the war wrote:
It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies.
God is not even the enemy of his enemies.
I wonder what would have happened if, instead of killing Goliath that day,
David had knelt down and prayed for him, and for all a warring world in which
not event the innocent were safe.
I wonder.
In my mind I can image a series of animated cartoons that reimagines familiar Bible stories
filtered through the sensibility of Jesus,
a series that would take “Davey and Goliath” to a whole new level.
Put that down for our next council meeting, Anne!
For the moment, we need to ask how Jesus manages with the forces of death and destruction.
And we have a prime instance of that today in the story of the calming of the storm.
Here he is, with the disciples, in a boat, on the Sea of Galilee, in a storm,
and the disciples are frightened: the sea represents chaos and death in ancient literature.
And Jesus is sleeping!
And they’re like, “Hey! Wake up! Don’t you care about us? We’re gonna die!”
So he wakes up, and what does he do?
He offers the storm peace. He doesn’t kill it. He doesn’t cut its head off.
He invites it into peace, shalom.
Admittedly, he does it from a position of strength.
I know the NRSV says that he invites it to “Be still.”
We imagine that this is the nice calm sweet Jesus saying it in a nice calm sweet voice.
But what he actually says is “Shut up!”
And then, when he’s done dealing with the forces of death in the storm,
he turns his attention to the disciples and says,
“Why are you so afraid? Don’t you trust me?”
Ruth Burrows notes of this that what Jesus is really saying is this: “Does it matter if you go down provided I am with you?” . . . Our only real need is for God. We are made for God, Our destiny is in God and he created us in order to bring us to it. (76-77)
Would that we could but glimpse, even for a moment,
the utter lavishness, the excess of God’s love. (49)
God defeats even death – not with death’s own weapons – but with love.
And this we must remember. This we must always, always remember.
Death makes us angry.
I’m familiar with this, not only because I’m a pastor and in pastor school you have to learn that
one of the stages of grief is anger.
I’m familiar with this not only because I have sat with many of you in your grief and
sympathized with your anger.
I’m familiar with it because I too have experienced it.
Death makes us angry. Sometimes at God. Sometimes at the deceased who leave us.
But God is love. And Jesus loves even the dead.
When his friend Lazarus dies, Jesus is emotional, perhaps as emotional as he gets.
But he’s not angry. The response of the people around him is, “See how he loved him.”
Jesus loves the dead.
Jesus touches them, Jesus speaks for them, Jesus speaks to them,
and Jesus raises them from death.
Truly, it is a commonplace to say that Jesus loves everyone, no matter who,
no matter what they’ve done, no matter their gender, their status, or their age.
But Jesus loves even those considered most useless of all: Jesus loves even the dead.
Jesus’ response, even in the face of death, even in the face of the forces of chaos, is to love.
I’ve had an experience this week that has been changing me.
Some of you know that every year I lead a service for the U of M’s Department of
Human Anatomy and Cell Science.
It’s part of the Faculty of Medicine.
What I do is organize and lead a service for those who have
donated their bodies for anatomical studies.
Their bodies are used to train medical students in the actual structure of real human bodies.
The students call these people their silent teachers.
To read about a body in a book is one thing. To study an actual human body is quite another.
To study real bodies with all their infinite variations.
Leading this service for the third year now, I realize, has changed me.
It’s changed my attitude toward God, toward the dead, and toward life.
We lead the service and commend these people into God’s loving care because
we know in Jesus that God loves even the dead and will tend them till the resurrection.
But what I have come to realize is that for these people
even death could not stop them from loving us.
Here they are, for between 1 and 4 years still serving the common good, serving us in death.
What they have done benefits us, for if the students did not have real human bodies to study,
the quality of care we receive in this province would be drastically reduced.
I think most of us don’t realize this. I think this flies under our radar.
It certainly flew under mine until I became involved in this service.
God loves the dead. And even more, God can work against death even through the dead.
God can undermine death through this wondrous love.
God can cheat death, not by cutting off anyone’s head or killing anyone.
But by getting into the boat with his love in Christ and turning even death into life.
Does it matter if you go down provided I am with you?
And the answer is of course, No.
God truly can bring good from anything, even crucifixion. Even death.
God is capable of bringing Easter Sunday from our Good Fridays.
Because Jesus is in the boat with us.
It’s wondrous and sobering to think that our welfare is to a certain extent indebted to the dead.
This has changed the way I think about the dead.
I think, with Jesus, we need to love them.
And, if I could revise what I learned in seminary, I would add a stage to grief.
And I would name the final and last and most important stage love.
With Jesus, we need to love the dead. And thank God for them.
And remember the gifts that were given to us by them in life.
And maybe even in death.
Sorry Augustine. I’m nothing in comparison with you, but Jesus is not like David at all.
He doesn’t overthrow the devil with his own weapons.
He overthrows the devil with love, a love that we cannot possibly comprehend for its
immensity, its death, its grace.
But we can experience it.
Because Jesus is in the boat with us.
There is so much we can do when confronted with the immeasurable, lavish love of God we are
always invited into.
We don’t always, or even often, recognize it.
But surely if even the dead can accomplish so much, how much more the living?
As Ruth Burrows writes,
God offers himself in total love to each one of us. Our part is to open ourselves to receive this gift. . . . God is an ocean of merciful love that is pent up, longing to be released, to pour itself into each one of us, but human pride, lack of faith and trust, thrust up barriers against it. We find it so difficult to take Jesus at his word: that he alone is Saviour. We think we must first save ourselves, perfect ourselves and then offer ourselves to Love. No! Only Love can save, purify, and cause us to expand to receive more and more. (38-39)
So take heart. Trust this love that has its fullest expression in Jesus.
Confront death and the forces of chaos with love and with loving prayer.
Love the dead in your grief. Thank God for them. It can only lead to life and healing.
If it were not so inapt, we would call love the secret weapon against grief and death.
Except it’s not a weapon. It’s a medicine. And it brings healing no weapon can bring.
Jesus, who is love, is in the boat with us.
Does it matter if we go down provided he is with us?
You know what we’re in right now, right?
This part of our worship space where we’re sitting is called the nave, the Latin word for boat.
Because the church – God’s community in Christ – is like that boat on a sea that represents
the death that surrounds and confronts us at every turn in injustice and despair and
apathy and violence and disease and poverty.
But thing about all this is that Jesus is in the boat with us.
When we remodelled,
we made sure that not only was I in the nave with you as a fellow member.
We made sure that the word of God’s gracious love was present with you,
that Jesus spoke to you right here in the nave.
And we made sure that right in the middle on this table are offered week after week
the gift of Jesus himself in bread and wine,
where God offers himself in total love to each one of us.
We don’t need the head of a slain giant to show there is a God at work here.
All we need are a few living words, a little bread and a little wine broken and shared.
The signs of a love given to us, not taken from anyone.
Jesus is in the boat with us: So come and receive this gift.
Come and be strengthened by this love to confront all that would undermine it.
Learn to confront the Goliath of death with and active, living love.
There is nothing to fear. For even if we go down, he is with us.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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