Hilton Head Island, SC – February 7, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Judges 16:1-9; 16:23-31
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And Delilah said to Samson, “Please tell me wherein your great strength lies, and how you might be bound, so that one could subdue you.” – Judges 16:6
This is the fourth, and last, in a series of four sermons about the Book of Judges. I am sure no one is going to weep bitter tears over that fact. If it is any consolation to you, I decided to do this series about three months ago. It was after the Nov. 3 election last year, but before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol a month ago. That terrorist attack turned this series of sermons into something I never could have anticipated. January 6, 2021, is a major event in our nation’s history that will take years to sort out. It prompted sermon thoughts and ideas which otherwise never would have occurred to me. We might have imagined there would be universal condemnation of the attack on the United States Capitol building, but as we have since learned, that was not the case. It now appears there is strong support for both former President Trump and for the actions taken by the mob he clearly incited to do what they did on January 6.
The stories found in the Book of Judges are the kind of thing that a certain kind of person loves to hear. They are like fairy tales. In many but not all fairy tales, there is usually a bad person or persons and creature or creatures. Crucially, there also is usually a very exemplary hero or heroine. For example, the Big Bad Wolf is the bad guy in Little Red Riding Hood, and Little Red is the heroine. That theme is played out, to one degree or another, in almost every fairy tale --- good vs. evil, nobility vs. skullduggery, good guys vs. bad guys.
The problem with the Book of Judges, as with most fairy tales, is that the stories are far too simplistic. The Israelites are always the good guys, and their neighboring tribes or ethnic groups are always the bad guys. Furthermore, the stories are almost invariably bloody, and most of the blood that is shed belongs to the neighbors of the Israelites, and not to the Israelites.
From the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps even going back as far as Senator Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society in the Fifties, there has been a tendency in America to equate a strong central government with corruption, and somehow a small and intentionally weak federal government is equated with purity. That tendency was magnified during the last four years to an alarming --- and as it turned out --- a very dangerous degree. January 6 was the epitome of that particular political trend.
In various ways, I highlighted that theme in the previous three sermons. Now, in the fourth one, I shall again state that the key to the Book of Judges is a strangely muted and back-handed slap at the contents of the Book of Judges by whoever wrote the Book of Judges. Another possibility is that someone else inserted this sharp warning at the very end after another author wrote the rest of book. The last verse of the last chapter says (and by now I have referred to it so often that I hope it is imprinted forever in your memory): “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.” If there is no strong central governing structure, and no political/religious consensus that a people widely affirm, everyone is forced to do whatever they think is right, because there is no community consensus on what is right.
All of those were the themes upon which I had intended to focus when I decided to preach these sermons. Then came January 6, and a president holding an hour-long rally with his most “Book-of-Judges-like” supporters. Thus this series has turned into something I never could have imagined before the Capitol Assault.
. Donald Trump is a master at creating a political base from a large group of Americans who increasingly have felt that “the elite” have snatched away the American dream from them. And don’t deceive yourself; people like us are the elite in the minds of the former president’s base. They truly believe the election was stolen from Mr. Trump by folks like us, because conspiracy theories are the primary staple of their political diet. They are convinced that the majority of the Members of Congress are corrupt. On January 6 an angry mob of them believed they were going to clean out what they consider to be filthy leaders who control what goes on in the US Capitol.
There are some elements of truth in the mindset of the assaulters of the Capitol. For at least forty years they have been falling behind economically. They believe the government is the primary cause of that, and in some respects they are correct. By its skewed tax policies and other policies, the rich have prospered, and the middle and lower classes have suffered. The tax policies made that inevitable. But that was because a weakened federal government had neither the fiscal resources nor the political will to try to resolve the issues faced by the kind of Americans who comprise the Trump base. Donald Trump said he was their champion, but he did almost nothing tangible to assist them. Nonetheless he was a master at manipulating them. Their rage finally coalesced into a major mob action, ignited by none other than the president himself.
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The fourth of our four Judges is the only one nearly everyone knows. He is Samson. People know Samson because they also know Delilah. Most of you may be old enough to remember that in 1949, Cecil B. DeMille made the first of four Samson and Delilah movies. Four Samson and Delilah movies seem like Hollywood overkill, but there it is.
Before we go farther into the Samson and Delilah story, though, we need to get a quick history lesson. All of the judges in Judges had enemies to fight, and Samson’s enemies were the Philistines. The Philistines were a Greek-speaking people from somewhere in the Aegean islands who arrived in Palestine sometime between 1500 and 1400 BCE. That was a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty years before the Israelites moved in to try to conquer the land under Joshua and then under the Judges. The Philistines settled along the Mediterranean coast, from the ancient and also modern-day city of Gaza in the south to about the modern-day city of Tel Aviv, which Jewish immigrants founded in the 1920s.
Incidentally, the Philistines gave their name to the entire land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, even though they never settled inland more than fifteen or twenty miles..
For the better part of 3500 years this fairly narrow strip has been called Palestine, and only for three hundred years or so in biblical times and then again in the past seventy-five years was it ever called Israel. Odd, but that is the historical reality.
The Philistines didn’t last long in biblical history. They are recoded occasionally in the historical biblical books for a few hundred years, and then they disappear, along with other ethnic groups in what is called the Levant, the eastern end of the Mediterranean basin. The Philistines fizzled, never to be heard from again, except to give their altered name to Palestine.
In Samson’s time, the Philistines were the strongest and fiercest bunch of people in the fiercest section of the Middle East. They produced iron, and the Israelites didn’t. Having iron was like having nuclear bombs when no one else did. According to the Book of Judges, if God was going to save Israel, He was going to have to enlist an Israelite champion to take them on. Samson was the man whom God chose, says the Book of Judges.
By any standard, Samson was not an exemplary human being. In fact, he had only one positive attribute, if even that was a virtue. He possessed extraordinary physical strength. Surprisingly, many people remember it was because he had long hair, although the Bible doesn’t bother to tell us why that was so. I guess many professional athletes think there must be something to that notion, though, because legions of them have long locks. Go figure.
Samson happened to see a beautiful Philistine woman. He said to his parents, “I saw one of the daughters of the Philistines at Timnah; now get her for me as my wife” (14:2). He didn’t say, “I realize Israelites are not supposed to marry foreigners, Dad and Mom, but….”. No, it was just “I saw this woman; I like her; go get her for me.”
There are several other highly dubious things about Samson, but I will only recount a couple of them, so that you understand just how disreputable this man was. Apparently his ardor for his new Philistine wife quickly cooled, and he gave her to the best man at their wedding. That doesn’t seem kosher to me by any measure. Then he killed thirty Philistines. Then he killed a thousand Philistines with what is described as the jawbone of an ass, a donkey. I doubt the strongest donkey’s jawbone could annihilate even a thousand munchkins without disintegrating, let alone a thousand full-grown Philistines who would be doing their best not to get slain by it. In their details, all of these stories are simply ridiculous. They are childish war stories.
Again we are forced to ask a question: Why? Why is every judge whom God chooses such a semi-dunce, even if sort of a cunning dunce? Why wouldn’t God select someone who was a genuinely admirable person? Could it be because there were few or no admirable people “in those days when everyone did what was right in his own eyes?” Had the Israelites become disengaged from the God of their ancestors because they allowed themselves to fall into a period of political and societal chaos and anarchism? “Anarchism” literally means “without rule,” when there is no government, nobody is in charge. And that’s the whole point of the Book Judges; nobody is really in charge! Somebody appears out of nowhere and goes off to whack Israel’s enemies, but there is no political coherence, no spiritual center, nothing to hold Israel together!
The only reason Delilah had anything to do with Samson was because she was commissioned by the Philistines to find out what gave him his enormous strength and then report it back to her handlers. She was a Philistine Mata Hari. When he finally (and foolishly) told her that it was his long hair which gave him his massive power, a whole platoon of the fittest Philistines came, overpowered Samson, cut his hair down to his scalp, and gouged out his eyes. (The Book of Judges loves that kind of gory detail. It’s just like Arnold Schwarzennegger back when he was The Terminator and before he was the governor, except that Samson has even more attitude than The Terminator.)
Well, you can imagine that the emasculated and now blind Samson was not going to take what the nasty Philistines had done to him lying down. One day they had a big feast in a huge hall. There were three thousand people on the roof of this huge building, it says. When the men of Gaza were at least two sheets to the wind, they brought Samson before them “to make sport,” it says. A boy went to fetch him from prison, and brought him to the hall. His long hair had grown back, but the Philistines were also a bunch of dunces, and they had not thought to keep Samson a Yul Brynner. Samson asked the boy to place him between two of the pillars which were holding up the roof. Then Samson took a mighty Samsonite grip on each pillar, and with a mighty herculean tug, he pulled the pillars together, causing the roof to collapse. All three thousand Philistines cascaded to their deaths, killing them and everyone else in the hall, including Samson.
Do you believe this stuff? Do you? Everything in this peculiar book is absurd! Surely none of what Judges tells us happened actually happened!. It is all just fairy tales for grown-ups. It is Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox. It is the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow. It is Rip Van Winkle.
Then why tell these stories in the first place? Here is why: The stories are told to dissuade anybody from ever acting like this! A people cannot stay united if they have leaders like this! These people don’t lead. They emote. They become easily enraged. They wantonly kill. They do not act; they only re-act. They are reactionaries against the people around them, all of whom they perceive to be their enemies. In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes. Totally individualized morality results in a chaotic community.
For over fifty years I have preaching sermons which attempted to apply biblical principles to political issues. None of those sermons was ever as specific as these four sermons have been. I hope I never feel circumstantially compelled to preach such sermons ever again.
January 6 was a greater threat to the United States of America than anything after the firing of the cannons on Fort Sumter in 1861. Pearl Harbor was less of a threat; The Battle of the Bulge was less threatening; the Cold War, as serious as it was, was not as dangerous as January 6, because in it nothing truly major ever happened. Nothing enormous happened on January 6 either, but it could have been a prelude to an enormous catastrophe. 9/11 was bad, but its potential was not as bad as January 6. Bad as 9/11 was, January 6 was actually far worse, because the threat was internal, not external. It was us vs. us, Fort Sumter all over again. What happened in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 potentially could turn out to be the beginning of the darkest days in American history, including the darkest days of the American Revolution.
Were the barbarians at the gates a month ago? Some of them unquestionably were terrorists, but most of them were just purveyors of conspiracy theories who stayed outside the Capitol. However, the Capitol Assault didn’t happen in a vacuum. Those people need to be heard, and their concerns need to be addressed, but what they did precludes a peaceable discussion. They must lower their actions and government officials must raise their level of hearing if progress is to be made in narrowing this wide gap. Nevertheless, they were encouraged to do so by a former president who even now has a 35 to 40 percent approval rating.
President Biden is absolutely correct in calling for unity. But by himself he can never achieve it. He needs the help of every American citizen, especially all who are Members of Congress.
Shall we find the national unity which has eluded us for at least two generations? Only time will tell. But this much is unquestionably correct: taking the path of the biblical judges is absolutely not the way to go. That was tried on January 6, and it failed, both before and after the assault. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.