Reading 1st Samuel, 17:38-40
Then Saul dressed David in his own tunic. He
put a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head. David fastened on
his sword over the tunic and tried to walk around because he was not used to
them.
“I cannot go in these”, he said to Saul,
“because I am not used to them.” So he took them off. Then he took his staff in
his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of
his shepherd’s bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached Goliath.
Sermon
The Story of David and Goliath: I see
the story as Inspiration for Religious Liberals
We all know how that story ends with David defeating Goliath in the Valley of Elah where the Israelites faced the
Philistines. A shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more
than a single stone and a sling. And ever since, the names of
David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and
giants. David's victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn't have
won.
Conventional wisdom led the Philistines to assume that the physical
size of Goliath, protected by all of his armaments, would prevail over any
adversary, certainly a small shepherd boy. Consider this from Samuel
7:4-7:
“4 A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp. 5 His
height was six cubits and a span. He had a bronze helmet on his
head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand
shekels; 6 on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze
javelin was slung on his back. 7 His spear shaft was like a
weaver’s rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels. His shield bearer
went ahead of him.”
So the story of David and Goliath has been referenced
for centuries as a metaphor for the weak prevailing over
the strong in an unequal competition, the agile and quick prevailing
over the large and lumbering. In his new book, "David and Goliath: Underdogs,
Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants," Malcolm Gladwell says most
people get this famous Biblical yarn all wrong because they misunderstand who
really has the upper hand. It is because of, and not despite,
David's size and unorthodox choice of weapon that he is able to slay the
lumbering giant. In other words, Gladwell says, most people underestimate
the importance of agility and speed.
And I would add most
people underestimate the power of having confidence in your values.
For an interesting
introduction to Gladwell’s book, I suggest you watch the TED (Technology,
Entertainment, and Design) Talks video available online by Googling Malcolm
Gladwell’s David and Goliath.
So why should religious liberals take heart from this story?
David’s confidence in his ability to take the five smooth
stones he plucked out of the wadi in the Valley of Elah and use
only one to slay the giant, suggests we should be more optimistic about the
ability of our liberal faith movement to change the world.
John Luther Adams, tells us as much in his essay on the Guiding
Principles for a Free Faith. Adams has
been a major force in American social ethics and liberal theology for more than
half a century; important not only to Unitarian Universalist theology but other
liberal religions as well.
He was a
Unitarian parish minister, social activist, scholar, author, and
a divinity school professor for 40 years at Meadville Lombard Theological
School, Harvard
Divinity School,
and Andover Newton Theological
School. He wrote his
essay entitled “Five Smooth Stones of Liberalism” in response to attacks levied
against liberalism at the end of the 2nd World War.
He had been a student for a time in Germany at the
beginning of the Third Reich, and saw the brutality of a government
that didn’t have to answer to anyone or any institution. He was appalled
at the temerity of most of the established churches in Germany in
remaining silent as the Third Reich began its reign of terror. He must
have felt like David against Goliath at that time in world history. Thus, the metaphor
of the five smooth stones: small, but very powerful weapons of a
liberal theology in the face of regressive social policies.
His writings were in response to
the political reality of his day. I submit that
his ideas of the power of a liberal
faith are relevant today. We live today in
a polarized political nation that seems bent on regressive
policies and reversing progressive gains.
Let’s first parse the term liberal. In
the context of theology or religion, the term “liberal”
suggests openness to new truths, tolerance, not bound by tradition, authoritarianism, or orthodoxy.
When David took off the suit of armor that
the king, THE KING, had put on him, he was unbinding himself from the
king’s authority. It was an unorthodox, non-traditional thing that he did.
David used and relied on the tools and experience he knew best,
his slingshot and his stones. He relied on his own truth in which he had
great confidence. He had after all, become proficient in the use of the
slingshot as a necessary and critical weapon in his role as
shepherd…to kill predators of the sheep in his charge. He was a very
good shot! He knew it and was confident of his aim.
Adams uses the five smooth stones that David
picked up as metaphors for the five essential statements of a genuine and
vital religious liberalism. They are:
1. “Revelation
is continuous.
2. All
relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual free consent and not
on coercion.
3. We have
a moral obligation to direct one's effort toward the establishment of a just
and loving community.
4. We deny the
immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation.
5. The
resources that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify
an attitude of ultimate optimism."
To paraphrase
those five essential statements or stones:
1. There
is always something new to learn.
2. Treat others as
they would have you treat them.
3. We are obligated to
make the world better than it is.
4. The work is ours
to do; no one else is going to do it for us.
5. No matter how
tragic life is, no matter how hopeless you feel, the gifts of grace in this
world are abundant and demand that we recognize them and act on them.
Let’s examine the five smooth
stones of liberal faith in more detail.
1.
Revelation is continuous (or there is always something new to
learn.) Truth does not reside in a singular book, no matter the
number of people who say so. Revelation does not reside in a single set of
beliefs, no matter what our fundamentalist relatives might insist.
Revelation comes from and to each individual, and there is
always something new to learn: from study, from others, and from
meditation/reflection/or prayer.
Revelation
is the act of revealing or communicating divine truth. In the
orthodox Judeo-Christian traditions, the Ten Commandments were a revelation.
They were taken as revealed directly from God to Moses. The Koran was revealed
directly from God to Mohammed. The prophet Maroni
revealed truths to complete the Book of Mormon. I was always confused as a
boy how God revealed different truths to different people and expected me to
choose one path over the other. The Orthodox tradition also holds
that revelation is sealed; that at some point God stopped revealing God’s self
to humankind. All truth is contained in the Bible: God wrote it, it is the
revealed truth, and there is nothing more to talk about.
But
Adams begs to differ, saying that nothing is
complete…ever. Creation is an ongoing process and within
that process, God reveals God’s-self to us …. over and over again.
This
is a good time to point out that Adams was a liberal Christian and
used the word God, even though he recognizes that the word is “heavily
laden with unacceptable connotations…and may be scarcely usable without
confusion.” He used the word God to mean, “that which ultimately
concerns humanity”, or “that in which we should place our
confidence”, or “that in which we may have faith.” As a religious
humanist, this is how I understand the word God: “that which ultimately
concerns humanity.”
Continuous
revelation is a concept that honors our individual experiences. Feminist
theology begins with women’s experience. Liberation theology begins with the
experience of oppressed people. Both of those theologies fly in the face of
orthodoxy and are serious threats to it because those theologies give so
much power to the individual.
For
religious liberals, new revelation is always possible. All of experience adds
to interpretation and understanding. We need to be open to the possibility of a
deeper understanding of that which ultimately concerns humanity or
that in which we may have faith. We need to be open to
the possibility of a new revelation of compassion, or justice, or love. We
need to be open to the possibility of transformation in our lives.
There are bits of ongoing revelation that confront us every
day. They are holy. They are ours.
Ongoing bits
of revelation help us in our search for inner wisdom because of their
ability to elicit “aha” responses in us. When we hear or read or see something
and are moved deeply, it is because the event is expressing a truth that
we already knew but hadn’t articulated. Something was revealed; it was a
revelation.
This
notion that there is always something we can learn leads religious
liberals to offer radical hospitality to those “not of our tribe”.
The “others” have something to teach us.
Adams second smooth stone of liberal faith is
this:
2.
All relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual free consent and
not on coercion. Or, treat others as they would have you treat them.
Adams here is talking about free
consentas a protest against government oppression and ecclesiastical
oppression. It is a protest against both state and church when
appropriate. It is a protest against having to obey, having to
believe, having to be what someone else thinks you ought to do, believe, and
be. “If we all are children of one God,” Adams
says, “then all persons, by nature, have the potential to share in the deepest
meanings of existence. We all have the capacity for discovering or responding
to a truth that will save us, and we all are responsible for selecting and
putting into action the right means and ends of cooperation for the fulfillment
of human destiny.”
Adams is suggesting that each of us is responsible
for fulfilling our own destiny, and each of us is responsible
for all of human destiny. There is a bit of Universalism
there; the notion that it is not possible for one to be
saved. It is all of us or none of us; we are all in this
together. We work both individually and corporately for the improvement of
humankind.
Unitarian
Universalism is based on the principle of free will. We
are a non-creedal, covenantal religion. We do not require
adherence to a set of rules or beliefs written by someone else in a time long
ago and a country far away. Rather, we join freely in
mutual respect and walk together in love to support the individual
manifestations of revelation that each of us represents. William Ellery
Channing, the 18th century
Unitarian minister said, “This is a universal church, from which
no person is excluded except by the death of goodness in that person’s breast.”
Let’s
look at the third and fourth smooth stones together.
3.
We have a moral obligation to direct one's effort toward the establishment
of a just and loving community. To paraphrase, we are obligated to make
the world better than it is.
4. We deny the
immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social
incarnation. Again to paraphrase, the work is ours to do; no one
else is going to do it for us.
The
third and fourth stones of liberal theology drive our obligation to
create justice and the necessity of embodying justice in social
structures and that, of course, includes our congregations.
Adams wrote, “A faith that is not
the sister of justice is bound to bring us to grief” and that “the ‘holy’ thing
in life is the participation in those processes that give body and form to
universal justice.” He reminds us “freedom, justice, and love require
a body as well as a spirit.
We
do not live by the spirit alone,” This is our call to action as
a free liberal faith.
Quoting the
Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell, long time pastor at First
Unitarian Church
in Portland, OR: “I know I am preaching to the
choir, but get off your butts and sing!”
This
Congregation has a history of individual outreach to the community. You have
fed the hungry, clothed the needy, mentored the disadvantaged, read to the
young, and improved the housing of people in need. These
works restore dignity in people’s lives. You are
doing effective work to bend the arc of the universe towards justice.
But
of course there is much, much more that needs to be done to create the
Beloved Community that we long for.
So
we watch for revelatory events that will deepen our own understanding of our
link to, in Adams’ words, “that which
ultimately concerns humanity”, or “that in which we should place our
confidence”, or “that in which we may have faith”, or God… so that we
can find peace in our own hearts. This is the peace that passes all
barriers -- all understanding -- and finds us at peace with all of creation.
This
brings us to Adams fifth smooth stone of
religious faith.
5. The resources
that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify
an attitude of ultimate optimism. Said another way: No matter how
tragic life is, no matter how hopeless you feel, the gifts of grace in this
world are abundant and demand that we recognize them and act on them.
Here,
Adams is suggesting that we are justified in
having an attitude of ultimate optimism. He does not say immediate optimism,
but ultimate optimism.
Moreover,
progress is not inherited. It has to begin again with every generation --
and with every individual. That is you and me taking responsibility for
progress. We have divine resources available everywhere we look and most
importantly within ourselves. It doesn’t happen with just one of us doing
the work. It takes us all. Adams calls it
“dynamic hope.”
So, to summarize these five smooth
stones: The ongoing nature of revelation; the free will and freedom
of the individual; an obligation to create justice; the necessity to
embody virtue; and an optimistic worldview.
James Luther Adams challenges us to
embrace these five smooth stones to create a more virtuous world.
I close with his words to us:
“We of the Free
Church tradition should never forget, or permit our contemporaries to forget,
that the decisive resistance to authoritarianism in both church and state, and
the beginning of the modern democracy, appeared first in the church and not in
the political order.
The churches of
the left wing of the Reformation held that the churches of the right wing had
effected only half a reformation. They gave to Pentecost a new and
extended meaning. They demanded a church in which every member, under the
power of the Spirit, would have the privilege and the responsibility of
interpreting the Gospel and also of assisting to determine the policy of the
church. The new church was to make way for a radical laicism — that is, for the
priesthood and the prophethood of all believers.”
David, with his five smooth stones felled the
Giant. He wasn’t the underdog! He was small to be sure, but also
swift, agile, and confident of of the advantage he held.
The good news for religious liberals is OUR
five smooth stones of our religion: very powerful resources as we seek to
make this world a better place.
May it be so.
May we continue to make it so.
Text
of sermon delivered at 1stUUPB by UUA Moderator Jim Key, Dec 15, 2013.
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