GIANTS AND STORMS
1 Samuel 17:19-23, 32-47; Psalm 9:9-12; Mark 4:35-41 4th Sunday after Pentecost — June 20, 2021
Pastor Ritva H Williams
According to ranker.com, David and Goliath is the 4th most popular story in the Bible. Some of us may remember the Davey and Goliath claymation series from the 60’s-70’s. Another generation delighted in Veggie Tales “Dave and the Giant Pickle.” We love to imagine ourselves as David — the youngest, the littlest, the ignored, the forgotten — facing off against a fearful giant and winning the day.
But what if we are really Goliath? Have you ever used your physical size, economic or social status, accomplishments or possessions to dominate someone else, to put them in their place?
Our first response to any biblical story is to connect it to what Richard Rohr calls my story. What can I learn from David and Goliath? What is God trying to tell me?
But what happens when we expand our horizons from my story to our story? The story of David and Goliath begins with armies fighting. They are engaged in a combat of words. Every day for 40 days Goliath steps out of the Philistine ranks to challenge, taunt and insult the Israelites. His goal is to minimize blood shed by settling the war through a match between two leaders. Goliath is the Philistine champion, representing a society of warriors who wreaked havoc, violence, oppression and death from Syria to Egypt. David steps forward as Israel’s champion. He is a shepherd like his ancestors were before they were enslaved in Egypt. David represents former slaves, struggling to establish themselves in a new land, yearning to be like other nations with a king to fight their battles.
When we read the story of David and Goliath as our story, as a story of a community, it becomes much more difficult for us white middle class Americans to imagine ourselves as David. We are not former slaves. Our whiteness gives us privileges historically denied to our black neighbors. Admitting white privilege does not mean that I personally have never struggled. It means that the color of my skin did not make those struggles more difficult. Our story is the story of white, northern European immigrants to this continent. Our story intersects with the stories of Native Americans, the stories of my black neighbors who ancestors were brought here from Africa in chains, and the stories of immigrants from South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific Islands and so forth.
But in every case where our stories intersect white northern European culture is Goliath, representing a culture of privilege and dominance, a culture that preserves its sense of privilege by insulting, demeaning and marginalizing people who are different, using aggression and violence to keep “others” in their place. In this country Goliath is always white, most often male and heterosexual. Even if we don’t individually or personally behave like Goliath, we benefit from the characteristics that align us with Goliath.
Dylan Roof is part of our story. He is a white man, baptized and confirmed in an ELCA church in Columbia, South Carolina. An administrative error enabled him to purchase the gun he used to shoot and kill nine members of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston as they gathered for Bible study and prayer. Dylan Roof is one of us. Did the pastor and members of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church teach Dylan to hate black people? Probably not in so many words. Very few of us overtly encourage hatred and killing. But how often do we confess our own implicit biases, speak or act out against racism and white supremacy?
To complicate things, Pastors Clementa Pinckney and Daniel Simmons were graduates of the Lutheran Southern Seminary. These black men, members of the African Episcopal Methodist Church attended that seminary because part of our Lutheran story intersects with part of the AME story. The part about inclusion, about recognizing the image of God in every person regardless of color, religion, or what denomination of Christianity they belong to. When a white stranger walked into their Bible study group, Pastors Pinckney and Simmons welcomed him, thanked him for coming, saying how much they enjoyed his participation. How well do we enact such warmhearted hospitality?
Our Gospel lesson begins with our story — disciples in a boat together. They take Jesus on board just as he is. Other boats come alongside. There is a flotilla of boats. Jesus is tired and takes a nap. A windstorm whips up the waves until the boat is being swamped. The disciples cry out to in fear. Jesus wakes up, rebukes the wind and says to the sea “Peace! Be still!” The disciples are filled with a great fear and wonder who Jesus really is. Our reading moves from our story to THE story.
As Professor David Schnasa Jacobsen writes, “Jesus faces down the storm not with personal bromides (you have to face your fears, friends), but silences the storm and rebukes it … Those two verbs [silence and rebuke] are exorcism words … The storm … is cosmic, demonic … As strange as it sounds, Jesus is not offering therapy for our fears but an exorcism for a world out of whack.” (www.workingpreacher.org)
THE Story — the Gospel — the Good News is that God so loved the world that God sent God’s only Son into the world not to condemn it but to save it (John 3:16-17). THE Story — the Gospel — the Good News is that Jesus came to save a world out of whack, to set it right, to heal what is broken and diseased within it.
As Professor Jacobsen writes, “More is at stake and the wound is far deeper than just me, my superego, and my id. This wound reflects a kind of cultural trauma, a displacement that asks deep questions that touch on our life together and the shared forces that threaten to upend us all.”
Racism and white supremacy are wounds, traumas that put our world out of whack. The commemoration of the Emanuel Nine martyred on June 17, 2015 confront us as Lutheran Christians with just how out of whack our world is in an especially pointed way.
All of us here at St. Stephen’s are baptized members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and we join our voices in the following apology issued by the Church Council on June 27, 2019:
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) apologizes to people of African descent for its historical complicity in slavery and its enduring legacy of racism in the United States and globally. We lament the white church’s failure to work for the abolition of slavery and the perpetuation of racism in this church. We confess, repent and repudiate the times when this church has been silent in the face of racial injustice.
The apology calls all of us to do better going forward. St Stephen’s has committed itself under the leadership of our Anti-Racism Team to work toward a deeper understanding of slavery and its legacy, of institutional and structural racism, of white privilege, and of the attitudes and foundations of white supremacy.
We rejoice in the signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act making June 19th — Jubilee Day for our black neighbors — a national holiday. On this day in 1865, two and half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Union Army ended slavery in the state of Texas. So this morning we will sing together “Lift Every Voice and Sing” written by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother J. Rosamund Johnson in 1905 for the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. We sing it as a tribute to our black neighbors, to honor their courage and persistence in the face of the giants and the storms of racism and white supremacy. As we sing we pray:
Good and gracious God, you invite us to recognize and reverence your divine image and likeness in our neighbor. Enable us to see the reality of racism and free us to challenge and uproot it form our society, our world, and ourselves.
Amen.
