October 20, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

Finding Strength in Unexpected Places

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

1 Samuel 17 (selected verses)

There are plenty of things out there about which you can say, “It’s hard to describe, but I know it when I see it.” Some people call it the duck rule: if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. The Supreme Court has famously used this kind of reasoning in defining pornography: “It’s hard to describe, but I know it when I see it.” Something that falls into this category for me is the idea of trusting God. It’s not easy to explain how that happens, but most of us know it when we see it. Tonight’s sermon is about that idea, which is grounded in the famous story of David and Goliath.

Many of you probably know the name Malcolm Gladwell. He is an author who is frequently published in the New Yorker, and he’s written several best-selling books, among them Blink and Outliers, books that explain unusual stories of success and achievement and that help us think about intelligence and capability in different ways than we often do. His newest book has a decidedly biblical grounding. It’s called David and Goliath, and it’s about what Gladwell calls “the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty,” uncovering “the true meaning of advantages and disadvantages.”

I want to say at the outset that I think Gladwell is a brilliant man and I love his writing, and I want that to be clear because what I’m going to talk about today is my feeling that Gladwell has written an interesting book but has lost something extremely important in the story of David and Goliath, and for the sake of those of you who may read the book or watch Gladwell’s TED talk about it or who may just hear second hand about this best-seller, I want to give you something additional to think about in response to Gladwell’s commentary.

First, I’m going to give a summary of Gladwell’s telling of the story. The Israelites and their archenemies, the Philistines, meet on the field of battle. Each army is encamped on opposite sides of a great valley, and because neither side wants to be the first to charge and end up literally fighting an uphill battle, they have come to a stalemate. At this point, the Philistines initiate a strategy to break the stalemate. They send out their biggest and fiercest warrior, a giant man named Goliath, and he comes and stands in the valley and taunts the Israelites, none of whom want to fight him.

Enter David. He’s not a great warrior; he’s a shepherd boy. When he volunteers to go out and fight Goliath, everyone thinks he’s crazy. Saul, the king of Israel, says he shouldn’t go at all, and then once David persuades him, the soldiers try, unsuccessfully, to clothe him in a suit of armor that is too big and heavy for him to wear and to give him a sword he can’t carry. After that experiment fails, David heads out to the battlefield without a suit of armor or a sword, carrying only a sling, which he uses to hunt animals in the wilderness, and five small stones he picks up off the ground. He walks out to the field of battle as Goliath laughs and taunts him, but before he gets within the length of Goliath’s grasp, David puts a stone into the sling and launches it, hitting Goliath square between the eyes. It’s unclear if the stone kills Goliath or if it just knocks him out, but when Goliath falls to the ground, David runs over, takes Goliath’s sword and kills him, and the Philistine army turns and flees.

The point Gladwell goes on to make about this story is that David is not, as one might think, an underdog. He actually has all of the gifts and advantages he needs in this battle and it should come as no surprise to us that he defeats Goliath. At this point, Gladwell gives an exhaustive list of David’s advantages and Goliath’s disadvantages.

First of all, consider Goliath. In ancient literature and history, there are a number of examples of people who are referred to as giants in the same way Goliath is referenced. Some scholars have suggested that these giants probably had a condition known as acromegaly, which results in not only in unusually large size but also limited eyesight. This could explain why Goliath is so much bigger than everyone else and why he asks David to come nearer. Goliath might have actually been vulnerable, as long as you knew how to fight him.

For David’s own part, he may not have been at so great a disadvantage himself. Most of us read that he had a sling and assume that it’s a child’s slingshot. In reality, he would have had a weapon—a rope with a pouch at the end that was wound up and fired. Ancient armies were full of skilled slingers who were frighteningly accurate and hurled stones at deadly speed. It is perhaps no surprise that David, who used a sling regularly to defend his flocks from lions and bears, could hurl a deadly stone at Goliath before the giant got close enough to attack him.

Gladwell’s argument goes on and on like this, examining every detail of the combat between David and Goliath. Numerous biblical scholars have explored these historical aspects of a great many Bible stories, and it’s certainly possible that all of what Gladwell argues about David and Goliath is true. Here’s my question, though: If David and his sling so clearly had the upper hand, why was no other slinger in the army of Israel brave enough to come down into the valley and face Goliath? Why was it the shepherd boy David? The answer to this seems to be the one part of the story that Gladwell does not address, even though it comes up repeatedly.

Just before this story begins, we read of the anointing of David, the boy who is identified as the future king of Israel. That story clearly states that when David was anointed, “the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward” (1 Samuel 16:13). When David arrives at the battlefield and sees the stalemate, the first thing he asks is, “Who is this . . . Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (1 Samuel 17:26). When David persuades King Saul to send him out to face Goliath, he says, “The Lord, who [has in the past] saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine” (1 Samuel 17:37). And when David approaches Goliath and Goliath taunts him, he says, “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand” (1 Samuel 17:45–46).

It’s quite clear that the point of this story is not that David is brave and skilled enough to defeat Goliath on his own, but that God is at work in David’s story. It’s not meant to be a historical story. It’s meant to be a theological one.

The reason that Gladwell’s approach to this story doesn’t surprise me is because it’s simply an example of something every one of us does. Far too often, we will look for any way we can find to explain that our strength and success comes from within us or from outside circumstance, but suggesting that we have somehow benefited from our trust in God is often one of the last things to occur to us. God has promised to uphold and strengthen us in all kinds of situations, but so much of the time we don’t want the help. David’s story is told the way it is to persuade us of another kind of thinking.

Part of the problem here is that it is often difficult to explain what it looks like to finally give ourselves over to trusting God. Fortunately, as I was thinking about Gladwell’s book this week, I had a talk with a friend of mine that made the point to me quite clear.

For the purposes of this sermon, we’ll call my friend Mike. Mike is the director of a nonprofit. It’s a Christian organization that was founded in a church, but Mike became the director a number of years later. He has been deeply connected to this nonprofit’s mission for some time, but he didn’t think of himself as a Christian. A few months ago, Mike sent me an email to let me know he had become a Christian. It wasn’t until this week that he was in town and had a chance to talk about it. Mike’s acceptance of God’s presence in his life came in a gradual and unexpected way. It was a series of conversations with individuals he trusted that finally got him there. He said, “I had been having all of these good experiences with other people who took the time to talk with me, and finally it ‘clicked.’” What clicked, I asked? Mike went on to tell me that most of his life had been pretty hard, going back to the house where he grew up, in an alcoholic family where abuse was common and there was much to be ashamed of. “For the longest time,” Mike told me, “I was under the mistaken impression that I wasn’t good enough for God’s forgiveness and love. I thought Christianity was for people who had it together more than I did, and for that reason, knew how to trust God. Just recently, what clicked is that the opposite is true. Christianity is for people who need forgiveness, who long for healing, who have a desire to draw on the strength of something greater than themselves. That’s what clicked.”

And that is the point of the story we read today about a brave young shepherd boy slaying a giant with a sling. You can spend as long as you want to explaining why David wasn’t really the underdog and finding a way to get the facts to line up to support that. But why David? Why, among all of the slingers on the edge of that battlefield, did this shepherd boy become the hero? The story is quite clear that David’s strength and his worthiness comes from God’s acceptance of him—acceptance that is available to all of us. He does not have all of the obvious weapons and advantages, but God finds that what David has is sufficient. In this way, I agree with Gladwell’s assessment: David’s story does illustrate that there are gifts within each one of us, often thing that are hidden, that reveal the true advantages in life.

Most of us will never find ourselves on the field of battle facing a giant. But for many of us, life often does feel like a cruel and unfair battle for which we have arrived unequipped. We carry around fears and anxieties and a sense of our unworthiness in much the same way Mike had done, in the same way David might have felt. But the truth is that God’s grace is there not for those who believe that they are worthy or mighty but for those who have a sense of their own unworthiness, enough to be open to God’s help and forgiveness, enough to be open to that moment when it finally clicks that we need not make our way through this life all alone. Amen.