Hilton Head Island, SC – April 26, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
I Samuel 16:1-16; 17:41-52
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” – I Samuel 16:7 (RSV)
The King and We: An Unlikely Hero
There is one man in the Bible who has more written about his personal life than anyone else in holy writ. He is not Jesus, as Christians might expect, or Moses, as Jews might expect. There is certainly far more in the Bible written about Moses in general, but not about his personal life. As for Jesus, we know very little about his personal life. But the man of whom I speak is David, Dovid ha-Melech, David, the second king of Israel.
The Hebrew Bible is much more likely than the Greek Bible to present the people it chronicles in all their foibles and fallacies along with their greatness and glory. That is, the Old Testament tells it like it was about its characters while the New Testament tells it like it would like it to be about its characters. Most of the people in the Hebrew Bible have realistic snapshots taken of them, but most of those in the Greek Bible are carefully airbrushed. It illustrates two quite different concepts of perceiving the action of God among human beings. If God is not willing to deal with all of us as we are rather than as we should be, we are all goners before we even begin. And in the pages of what Christians call “the Old Testament,” we see some notably ragtag folks turning into giants of faith, while continuing to possess feet of undeniable clay.
Today I am starting a sermon series about King David, who is one of those ragtag giants. Years ago I preached another series about David, but I know many of you were not here to hear it, and I trust that those who did, including yours truly, have forgotten nearly everything I said. Besides, these are completely new sermons about the same ancient character who lived three thousand years ago.
In the books of I and II Samuel and the first couple of chapters of I Kings, we see David in all his gore and greatness, sleaze and splendor, calumny and complexity. By the way, if you haven’t recently read this material as has previously been strongly suggested, I urge you to do so this week. You will understand the totality of these sermons ever so much better if you take the hour or two necessary to complete the biblical biography of David, because there’s so much there.
This morning we are looking at both gore and greatness, and it occurs in the first information we are told about David. For reasons I will not take time explain, God decided that He no longer favored the first of the kings of Israel, King Saul. Reading between the lines, we might deduce that Saul suffered from some form of mental illness, and he was becoming increasingly erratic in his leadership of the new and fragile kingdom of Israel. We get a hint of this when Samuel, who had previously anointed Saul as king (at God’s very reluctant command), told God he was afraid to designate another future king, because Saul might kill Samuel. But God told Samuel to go to Bethlehem and anoint one of the sons of a man named Jesse as the future monarch of Israel.
When Samuel arrived in Bethlehem, he presumably told Jesse he had come secretly to anoint one of his sons as the next king. Samuel looked at the oldest son, Eliab, and assumed he was God’s chosen one. And here we come to the text for this sermon: “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart’ (I Sam. 16:7). In other words, God chooses for reasons of His own, and those reasons are often not apparent to us. God wanted the next monarch to have a faithful and dependable heart for doing God’s work. Therefore Samuel next gave a close inspection of Abinadab, the second-born son, and then Shammah, and so on through seven of Jesse’s sons. But apparently none of these was the one God indicated to Samuel that He had selected as the king to follow Saul.
Then Samuel asked if Jesse had any other sons, and he was told about the youngest, who was out tending the family’s herd of sheep. So Samuel asked Jesse to go find the boy, which he did. Almost never does the Bible tell in particular what anyone looked like, but in the case of the young David it is uncharacteristically specific: “Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.” Is this terrific, or what? Not only shall Saul’s successor be able, and powerful, and a great composer of Psalms (David is said to have written almost half of the one-hundred-and-fifty Psalms), but he also was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. Who can explain why God does what He does? But in the case of David, God selected someone as king who looked like a king should look. Jesse’s oldest son Eliab looked the part as well, but apparently his heart wasn’t right for the job, so God told Samuel to keep looking until he found the correct son. And that son turned out to be David, the youngest boy. But the eighth of eight sons would not be a likely choice by anyone for anything.
I have entitled this sermon series The King and We. You may have assumed it is a variation of the Broadway musical The King and I, which it is. Coincidentally, I read that there is a new version of The King and I that just opened at Lincoln Center in New York. This is 64 years after the Rodgers and Hammerstein show first opened a few blocks farther south on Broadway. But here we are not thinking about Anna and the King of Siam, which is what the musical is about. Instead we are thinking about David, and how his story is inevitably tied to our stories. King David and we are connected in more ways than we can imagine, and in some ways that we might choose to ignore, as we shall see.
Centuries after David lived, a biblical editor assembled all the stories he knew about David’s life. But he didn’t do a very good editing job, because he often omits proper connections between the stories. For example, there is an episode which follows immediately after Samuel’s anointing of David as the future king. It is written as though it knew nothing of the previous anointing account. It says that King Saul had “an evil spirit” (presumably some form of madness) come over him, and he wanted someone to play the harp to soothe his tortured soul. One of his courtiers told him about a son of Jesse in Bethlehem who was very skilled on the harp, and that is how David came into Saul’s court and into the Bible. But already we have heard about him.
Next we are told that the Philistines had become the primary enemy of Israel at that period, which is about 1000 BCE. The Philistines were an advanced Greek-speaking people who had settled along the southern coast of Canaan a century before the Israelites arrived under Joshua. They were excellent warriors, and they were capable of making iron, which was an ability the Israelites had not yet acquired. Thus were the Philistines the most dangerous adversaries Israel had in their neighborhood, which has always been a very tough neighborhood indeed.
Now I shall quickly recount what happened next, since I didn’t read it earlier. The Philistines gathered to fight the Israelites. Their greatest warrior was Goliath, who was a giant of a man. He challenged the Israelites to send their best fighter to come against him. Goliath said that whoever lost, that man’s army would have to declare defeat. David offered to fight Goliath, but his oldest brother Eliab made fun of him. Nevertheless, neither Eliab nor anyone else had the courage to go against Goliath, so David did. Remember, this is a teenage boy of perhaps fourteen or fifteen. David faced Goliath in the valley of Elah, by the brook which runs there.
And now for an interlude. One time on an impulse I bought a sling in the village of Bethany, just east of Jerusalem. The Arab who sold it to me showed me how to use it. This kind of sling is two long leather thongs tied to a leather pouch. You put a stone in the pouch, swing the stone rapidly with one hand, and then release one of the thongs, catapulting the stone at an amazingly rapid speed for a very long distance. The Arab shot it straight up in the air for at least a hundred yards. Well, it happened that on that particular trip our tour group went to the valley of Elah, and it was the only time out of ten visits to Israel that I was ever there. When we arrived at the historic place, we got out of the bus. The Bible says that David took five smooth stones and put them into his shepherd’s bag as missiles to fling at Goliath. I, wanting to show the group how a sling works, took a smooth stone from the edge of the brook, swung it around several times, and let one thong go. Unfortunately the stone did not fly far at all, but whizzed past my head, nearly whacking me on the ear, and it fell limply ten yards away. I concluded there and then it was a good thing it was neither Eliab nor I who challenged Goliath; providentially, it was David.
So, in the rest of the story which you heard earlier, David took a stone, whirled it around several times, and it drove like an arrow into Goliath’s giant forehead, killing him instantly. Then David took Goliath’s sword and cut off his head. And this is both the gore and the glory of this singular story. It is the Middle East, after all, where increasing numbers of people are currently being beheaded by frenzied religious extremists in their increasingly tough neighborhood. Tragically, all beheaders seek glory by their grisly deeds.
And where, you are asking yourselves, is all this leading? How does this relate to the king and us? Who is David to us in this story?
The prophet Isaiah quotes God’s as saying this: “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways” (55:8). God doesn’t see things as we see them. We see only through a smudged lens, but God sees the whole picture clearly. We cannot know the end of the story in the beginning or the middle of the story, but God observes the entire narrative, from beginning to end. This is just the start of the story of David, but what a start it is! And what an unlikely hero is the eighth and last son of Jesse, from whose root a shoot has sprung in the person of one who is to become the greatest of the kings, and also the Sweet Singer of Israel. Even if he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome, he was just a boy, a teenager, a mere child! How could he be the hero to stop the Philistines in their tracks and send them fleeing back to Gaza?
George Washington lost far more battles in the American Revolution than he won. But he did manage to win the last battle, at Yorktown, and that proved to be all that was really necessary for victory to be achieved. The Union lost far more battles during the Civil War than did the Confederacy, but at Appomattox, the Union won the last battle, and that was enough to save the union. A hundred and fifty years ago, as of two weeks ago, the President of the United States of America became the first American President to be assassinated. Abraham Lincoln was an even more unlikely hero than King David. He had virtually no formal education. He was self-taught. He was a tall, gaunt, depressive, melancholy Illinois lawyer who had served one term as a Congressman years before becoming President. His training for the office was almost non-existent, but his temperament for the task was unexcelled. No one could have endured what Lincoln endured unless God was within him. At his Second Inaugural Address, the Great Emancipator said of the conflicting armies, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” But then, reflecting on the immense carnage the war had visited upon a land torn asunder, he added, “The Almighty has His own purposes.”
In those purposes are unlikely heroes chosen. But do not overlook how this process occurs. God does not speak to anyone in the clear and unmistakable words of that person’s native language to declare he or she has a divine mission to do something or other. Instead God uses our own decisions for His own purposes. That is the description of the providence of God; it is God’s use of our decisions for His purposes. God forces or coerces no one to do anything. He internally urges each of us to do what only each of us can do for Him. No one, not even David, can do everything, but everyone can do something. And that something is where God, the ultimate King, and we become interconnected.
The movie The Imitation Game is about Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who cracked the code of the German Wehrmacht during World War II. His peculiar personality rendered him the least likely to accomplish this pivotal task, but he managed to do it anyway. He said to an associate in the project, who later became his wife, “Sometimes it’s the people no one can imagine anything of who do the thing no one can imagine.” That was David, a mere shepherd boy, standing in the valley of Elah, facing a battle-tested soldier who had crushed the spirit and probably the life out of countless Israelites. But the one no one could imagine anything of accomplished the one thing no one could imagine.
It is Gavroche, the young boy at the barricades in the musical Les Miserables singing, “Goliath was a bruiser as tall as the sky/ But David threw a right and gave him one in the eye/ I never read the Bible but I know that it’s true/ It only goes to show what little people can do!”
This sermon most certainly is not a call to go out and fight our enemies. Individually and internationally we have created more than enough enemies for ourselves. As General Sherman said, “War is hell,” and David, the man who would be king, discovered that very early in life. Strife and warfare are only part of the picture, including the biblical picture, but God sees the entire picture. He searches our hearts to see what it is that we, and we alone, can do to effect His purposes in His world. Who can speak the one comforting word someone desperately needs to hear? Who can provide the encouragement to the one who is about to surrender to despair? Who can do that one final experiment after previous thousands of experiments that breaks the code to the cause of Alzheimer’s disease or Lou Gehrig’s disease or colon cancer or rheumatoid arthritis?
God’s providence is His use of our decisions for His purposes. But unless we decide, and unless we decide to do something for His purposes, we cannot do great things for Him. There are countless people who can become unlikely heroes, but they must step forward when the need arises, or nothing shall happen.
David was a mess. We’re going to see it more clearly as time goes on. But he was God’s mess, and he willingly put himself in God’s hands. It wasn’t easy. It was hard, and befuddling, and mysterious, and depleting, and life-threatening. But he kept at it until he died, and when he died he was worn out rather than merely rusted out.
Who will stand up when everyone else shrinks back? Who will answer the call when others seem to be shoving their hands against their ears? Who recognizes that it is not necessarily ability which accomplishes God’s purposes in the world, but mere willingness? Who?