NUCC
Pentecost 3
1 Samuel 17:32-49
Mark 4:35-41
Wow! What a feat!
Little David defeats the giant Goliath with one small, well-placed stone.
Jesus calms a mighty storm.
We could give each of them a big pat on the back, congratulating them on a job well done. But they defer, in effect saying: “Give God the credit.” David faces up to Goliath with the confidence that God, not he, will defeat Goliath. Jesus stares down the storm full of the knowledge that he is the “Son of God.” “Have you still no faith?” he asks the disciples.
Give God the credit. Trust in God’s power. This is easier said than done.
1. We are used to trusting in ourselves.
Part of our cultural heritage is to be independent and self-sufficient. Here in
Much of this is quite positive. We don’t want to be a bunch of conformists with each of us following one another. When Pete Seeger sang about houses being made out of ticky tacky and all “looking just the same” we like to think that he was not talking about our houses.
But sometimes we get too proud of our own power and begin to believe that God is on our side, not that we are on God’s side. This week Karen and I viewed a movie on the Crusades. Time after time crusaders confused their desires with God’s desires. They would desecrate a city and say: “God wills it.” They would commit acts of murder and say: “God wills it.” In the end these Crusaders discovered that their will was not God’s will. Their way failed.
2. There are also times when we discover that our way fails. We think we have life by the tail and that we can do what we want with our bodies and our health, but then later on we pay for it. We pollute the air and the water and the land with short-sighted lust speed, wealth, or convenience, but later on we pay for it. We have great dreams, but those dreams do not always become fulfilled.
Emily Dickinson, sitting in her upstairs room, wrote:
I took my Power in my Hand--
And went against the World--
'Twas not so much as David--had--
But I--was twice as bold--
I aimed my Pebble--but Myself
Was all the one that fell--
Was it Goliath--was too large--
Or was myself--too small?
Sometimes when we take our power in our own hands, we discover that our power is not so great, and we learn we must turn somewhere else.
3. In today’s scripture lessons we turn to God and learn to trust in God’s way. David trusted in God rather than mighty armor. Jesus had confidence in the God who could still a raging storm. They tell us to also trust in the God of the pebble and the God of the calm.
David had the insight that the Philistines could not be bested on their own terms --- not with longer swords or stronger armor. As David said: “The Lord does not save by sword or spear.” David tells us there is a better way. In our day we face the reality that whole systems of power, technology, and violence cannot be beaten by creating countersystems of power, technology and violence. Arms races may create stalemates between opponents bristling with arms, but cannot bring peace. This is the reason why the violence of crime is not overcome by the counterviolence of brutal prisons and capital punishment. It only breeds more violence.
David tells us to trust, not in the technology of force but in the power of truth. And the truth in this story is that God is ultimately in opposition to arrogant and self-serving power and its violence.
We must relearn this lesson of God-trusting opposition to oppression in every generation. I confess that I did not believe that I would see in my lifetime the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the end of the system of apartheid in
What do we learn today? We learn to trust in God. It is God’s way or the highway. The challenge for us is to navigate God’s way of truth, justice and love. And then what we need to do is give God the credit because we give credit where credit is due. Thanks be to God!
