The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

June 20, 2021  •  The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Paul’s Within the Walls, Rome

Text: 1 Samuel 17:39b: “Then David said to Saul, ‘I cannot walk with these; for I am not used to them.’ So David removed them.”

I hope you will give me permission to talk about the Old Testament reading this morning, if only because it is one of the first stories from the Bible that any of us learns. It is a story of such power that it has basically given its name to a whole category of stories. We describe any situation of someone facing impossible odds as a “David and Goliath” story—and we know exactly what it means: Someone is facing a situation of overwhelming difficulty, and most likely facing it alone.

When I was young, I remember reading a big book of illustrated Bible stories that sat on the table in the doctor’s waiting room. By a long measure, this was my favorite story, probably because David was portrayed as the young boy I wanted to be, very athletic and good looking. 

What made the story even better was that he actually one two victories—the obvious one, over the giant Goliath, but also the victory over the doubts of all the adults in the story. That was the best part.

I have just arrived in Rome, and today I am beginning the remarkable gift of nine weeks in this parish. I’ve been looking forward to this season from the moment Father Austin and I made this plan together. But I will confess to you that as I began the work of praying my way through the scripture readings for this summer, the story of David and Goliath became new to me all over again.

The problem with stories that are so familiar is that we risk thinking we know all we need to know about them. And when that happens, we can miss things, things that might help us find new wisdom in the story.

Let’s start here: Everyone is afraid of Goliath. Goliath represents the power of something that appears beyond our ability to conquer. In the face of our Goliaths, we feel powerless and overshadowed. We might talk bravely, even boastfully—but deep inside we feel afraid.

The people who are first challenged by Goliath are the powerful people of Israel. The king, the army, the men with swords and shields and armor. They are the ones who should be taking on the giant. Instead the story tells us, “they were dismayed and greatly afraid.”

David is not a person who belongs in this story—at least that’s what the story itself wants us to think. He should be out tending the sheep his older brothers left behind when they go out to join the army. They should be the heroes of this story. Instead, David turns out up and starts rallying the troops.

You could say that King Saul admires David’s bravery, and decides to trust him with the future of Israel. Or,  you could say that he sees in David someone who will likely get killed instead of any of his best soldiers. 

Either way, King Saul does a very natural thing—he tries to give David the very best preparation for battle that he can. He gives David all of the tools he knows how to use—his armor, and his helmet, and his sword, all the things that history says you need to win a fight like this. 

And David tries to use them, at first—but then, at the turning point of the whole story, David takes them all off. “I can’t even walk in all this,” he says. And now, King Saul and all his soldiers are sure that David is a fool.

Well, we all know how the story ends. But think of it, if you will, in terms of the battle our church has been through this past year and a half. We have been confronted with what appeared to be an invincible power—the danger of the coronavirus. It forced us to shut right down. Just like the soldiers around King Saul, we spent a whole year dismayed and greatly afraid.

We had a lot of old ideas about how the church should overcome challenges and difficulties. Those ideas took shape in a very different time, under very different circumstances. They were like all that heavy armor and helmet and sword—useful in the old days, but not for the challenge ahead of us.

It was younger people who told us our church couldn’t walk in all that. It was younger people, easily and quickly comfortable with the technologies of camera phones and Zoom and social media and all of that, who quickly fashioned for the rest of the church the ideas and the structures that would allow us to confront the Goliath of the pandemic. 

Younger people, who, let’s face it, most of the rest of us doubted. Because they haven’t paid their dues, like we have. Because we’re not sure they know what they’re doing.

But wouldn’t you just know—even though we doubted them, even though we grumbled about putting so much trust in things we’d never tried before—it worked. We became a church of people gathered virtually, even when we couldn’t gather here—or anywhere.

Our old ideas didn’t help us face that new Goliath. All it took was a few smooth stones—like Zoom, and YouTube, and Facebook, and all the rest.

By the grace of God and the skills of scientists, the pandemic now seems to be in retreat. But we face other Goliaths. There are other challenges we face that seem to overwhelm our poor powers to respond.

Today is World Refugee Day. It is not a feast of the church, but it is something we take note of nonetheless. Living in Italy, we cannot fail to have an opinion about the problem of refugees—about what causes them to come, about what response we should make. 

But the problem seems so overwhelming, so intractable. And at its core, it involves vulnerable people suffering. Whatever else we may think of it, as Christians that fact above all demands our attention and our response.

The story tells us that Goliath’s first response when he sees David is disdain. And then what he says to him are some pretty chilling words: “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the field.”

Is that how we regard those who come to us—with disdain? Is that, effectively, what we say to them, when the bodies of their children wash up on the shores?

Well—remember what became of Goliath. Remember what became of his indifference and his disdain.

In that story, I’d rather that we be the improbable hero. I’d rather that we be the people with youthful idealism, with ridiculous optimism that we actually can overcome impossible odds and insoluble problems. Maybe that’s an American attitude. It seems to me it is a Christian attitude. After all, we proclaim a God who made himself absolutely vulnerable, naked and powerless on a cross, to defeat nothing less than death.

There are plenty of Goliaths for us to contend with. All we have to remember is to forget about the solutions that no longer work, to take off the weapons and the armor that never fit us anyway, and simply do what David did: Proclaim that God is still living among us, a god who does not save by either sword or spear, who will work through us to save the least, the last, and the lost. Amen.