1 Samuel
This is such an abused story. It's also so good I can't imagine people would pass it up.
Abused, because it's used in every context where something small beats something big. If the underdog wins in a law case, it's a "David and Goliath" story." If my poodle overcomes your Rottweiler, it's a David-Goliath story. If my pinto out drag races your muscle car--David-Goliath. But in the story itself, David makes it pretty damn clear why the story is important. David says: Guns don't kill people--God kills people. And so carrying guns, or really big spears and swords and being, if you'll pardon the expression, a "huge mother-fucker," is no help is God intervenes. God likes small people, so if you think you're big, watch out--that tiny dude has got a really big friend. So the story gets misused. It's not actually about small people. It's about their Big Friend.
Perhaps its entertaining quality is self-explanatory.
How we're supposed to make sense of this story in modern warfare is something of a mystery to me, in significant part because God seems to be advocating for refugees more these days than ensuring, say, the victory of one side over another in the Congo. And, disturbingly, Afghanistan vs. the US does not, in point of fact, make the US David. Quite the opposite. Should God choose to intervene, we're going to have our head sawed off by a little man, much to our embarrassment and the consternation of our friends.
And that leads me to what this story makes me wonder this week: how exactly do we get God on our side? That's the question this story should make us want to ask. Not: where's the nearest Goliath, I love hamburgers and ass-kicking, and I'm all out of hamburgers. But: how can we get a piece of that slingshot action?
And the answer is a real challenge. David didn't entice God to his side. God picked David. God may be a Big Friend to the small, but God seems to determine God's own involvement. We can't get a piece of that slingshot action--not by asking, not by begging, not by believing that our cause is truly righteous. Most righteous causes in Scripture suffer, get kicked down, carried into Exile, or crucified. God triumphs for the righteous, but not in the David-Goliath way. God seems to expect the righteous to be a bit more long-suffering.
No, the truly graceful thing about the David-Goliath story is that it has nothing to do with David. It has to do with saving lives, with protecting people from mercenaries, with defending God's people. But David can't call upon that--God called him, had Samuel dump a few cups of oil on his head to prove it.
So as we carry out into our daily life, we learn to lessons here. 1. Don't fight small men with oil dripping from their head. And 2. God is still an active force in the world, defending those Kingdom of God places that may be too small to see. It's tempting to become lost in the details of violence and warfare, in the politics of our age, and to believe that god has given up entirely on being involved in history. But the David and Goliath story reminds us: God is still at work in our lives, in this world, and in history, even if we can't see it--and frankly, we probably shouldn't bet against Her.
