A champion named Goliath from Gath came out from the Philistine camp. He was more than nine feet tall. 5 He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore bronze scale-armor weighing one hundred twenty-five pounds. 6 He had bronze plates on his shins, and a bronze scimitar hung on his back. 7 His spear shaft was as strong as the bar on a weaver’s loom, and its iron head weighed fifteen pounds. His shield-bearer walked in front of him.
8 He stopped and shouted to the Israelite troops, “Why have you come and taken up battle formations? I am the Philistine champion, and you are Saul’s servants. Isn’t that right? Select one of your men, and let him come down against me. 9 If he is able to fight me and kill me, then we will become your slaves, but if I overcome him and kill him, then you will become our slaves and you will serve us. 10 I insult Israel’s troops today!” The Philistine continued, “Give me an opponent, and we’ll fight!” 11 When Saul and all Israel heard what the Philistine said, they were distressed and terrified. (Common English Bible)
“The Philistines Are Upon Us: The Sea People’s Impact in God’s Word,” Week Six
One of the wildest books I have ever read in the past several years is Under the Lights and in the Dark, Gwendolyn Oxenham’s deep dive into the world of women’s professional soccer. You may think soccer is boring, but this book is anything but: internationally renowned women throwing it down in underground men’s futsal leagues, refugees learning the game in their adopted countries, athletes overcoming all sorts of discrimination just to ply their craft, and more. It is an absolutely wild ride to read, and I have to imagine was incredibly challenging for the women it depicts to have experienced.
For my money, the wildest chapter in the book is about American forward (now retired) Dani Foxhoven’s year playing soccer in Russia, and nothing I say can do it justice. Combine culture shock, wretched weather, never being paid, and a cartoon villain of a coach, and that’s just one set of bases.
I want to read to you two quick excerpts from that chapter, the first on how Dani as an American was perceived by her Russian teammates, the second on how her Russian coach perceived himself:
After each away game, the players climb onto the train, silent, subdued, and hungry. When they had won away games, they were treated to McDonalds before beginning the long journey home; when they lose, they get nothing. So far Dani has lost twenty pounds she didn’t have to lose.
During one ride back to Voronezh, Elena Terekhova, one of the Russian national team players, slips into Simone and Dani’s cabin. She sits on the bed, there to hang out, to talk. “How is it going?” she asks in English.
Dani, dumbfounded, stares at her. “You speak English? All this time, you’ve spoken English?”
(Elena) shrugs. “I just didn’t want to speak with you. I didn’t know if I would like you.” Americans, in the Russians’ eyes, were fake, fat, and stupid, she explains. “But you, Dani, are none of these things.’”
And in contrast as we move from the perception of others—of Dani’s teammates’ perception of her—to the perception of self, here is how their coach-slash-tyrant, Ivan Vasilievich Saenko, describes himself. This is a direct quote:
“I am the master of everything—I know everything there is to know about soccer. I’m the king of science. I am the team doctor, team coach, team strength and conditioner.”
Ego, perhaps, you may say, or an extreme case of narcissistic personality disorder. That is only one piece of the puzzle. Russian soccer is heavily mobbed up, with organized crime syndicates treating women’s soccer in particular as a front through which to launder ill-gotten monies. And Vasilich is one such mobbed-up figure. And thanks to his underworld connections, he acts with near-impunity over his players, abusing them verbally, psychologically, and physically in ways that are unprintable.
An extreme story, yes, but one which I believe carries the key to unlocking this famous and beloved Bible story: how we perceive ourselves inalterably influences how we perceive, and treat, others.
This is the penultimate installment of our first sermon series for 2022, and unspooling it has represented a labor of love on a topic I had been hoping to preach on for a while, and I think now is an especially relevant moment to scratch that proverbial itch: the cataclysmic impact of the Philistines upon ancient Israel in the Tanakh, or Old Testament.
You are hopefully by now a bit more familiar with the Philistines, one of the Sea Peoples, as the martial opponents of famed Biblical heroes like Samson and David. What I always found interesting about the Philistines is how they seem to quite literally show up on Israel’s shores one day, wreak absolute havoc, and then we essentially never hear of them again.
So, much like in the song (forgive me) Cotton-Eyed Joe, we ought to ask of the Philistines, where did you come from and where did you go? These, I think, are important questions not simply for the sake of ancient history, but for the sake of the themes the stories of the Philistines evoke, of God’s providence and guidance in the face of overwhelming adversity that materializes seemingly overnight. I see in all of this history echoes of our pandemic, as covid-19 materialized in just a few short months and has been a lethal threat to the world ever since. Questions around God’s grace and care in that circumstance are more than warranted, they are vital, and so I think the stories of the Israelites and the Philistines can act as a Biblical mirror of sorts for our own selves.
We just spent two weeks on the passages that bookended Samson’s epic four-chapter saga in Judges before last week accelerating ahead to 1 Samuel, where we remain today for the famed story of David and Goliath.
David and Goliath is so famous a story that simply those three words represents universally understood shorthand for an underdog emerging victorious over a heavy favorite. So wide is that understanding, and so deep has been its exploration by other preachers and scholars, that I have scarcely anything new to add there.
So lets talk today not about exegesis—of what we read out of the text—but of eisegesis: of what we read into the text, what we mentally and spiritually insert into the text.
Because we are each human with our own lived experiences, identities, and beliefs, eisegesis is impossible to avoid. We bring those experiences, identities, and beliefs to the text even if we try to check them at the door—a fully “objective” reading of the Bible simply is not possible, and we should not claim that it is.
Where does that leave us when we read the Bible, then? If we set aside the objective to be, well, objective, what can we strive to be when we enter the world of Scripture?
The David and Goliath story calls to us in part because the American ethos has always loved an underdog, whether it is a Cinderella team in a tournament or playoff, or a rags-to-riches story, or the growth of a person or organization from obscurity into fame. As Americans, we are taught to prize that sort of upward mobility and ambition from underdogs. We eat that stuff up.
If we know that about ourselves, if we can be self-aware in who we are, we can bring that self-awareness with us to God’s Word. David and Goliath’s ubiquity as archetypes means that identifying with one or the other is a pretty straightforward endeavor. If we know more about ourselves—about which we would identify with—that helps us not only better understand God’s Word, but also to better understand ourselves.
Why? Because as is so often the case, our perception of ourselves may or may not match up with others’ lived experience of us, just as someone else’s perception of themselves may or may not match up with our experience of that person, or group of people.
Put another way: are there Goliaths who think they’re Davids? Absolutely. And are there Davids who worry that they are Goliaths? Yeah, probably that too.
It is, as I’ve said, easy to identify with David because of that pro-underdog American ethic. But it is uniquely American of us to. Lots of countries hold to different ethics. One of my doctoral classmates lives in Sweden with her husband, a Swedish diplomat, and she told me about the ethic the Swedes have, called jantelagen, or the Law of Jante, which basically means, “Who do you think you are?” or “Don’t think you’re so much better than us.” It discourages the sort of American ambition and individualism we are accustomed to; in fact, a lack of ambition can make someone more likeable in Europe than here. And their perception of us is, well, not of David.
For in so many ways, we are Goliath. David was not only representative of Isarel in this duel, he was emblematic of Israel. He embodied Israel. Like David, Israel was small and underestimated by its neighbors, perpetually the rope in a tug-of-war between bigger, larger, and stronger empires.
And here in the United States, that is not us. It has not been us for many, many years. For many decades, we have been the bigger, larger, strong empire playing tug-of-war in other countries.
I’m not commenting on the wisdom of our foreign policy. All I am saying is that insofar as David embodies Israel in this moment, we are not David. We are not Israel. We may empathize, even sympathize, with David. We may root for him and cheer him on and wish for his success because we do so love a good underdog.
I love this line from Sarah Draper’s sermon from last month: There is a David for every Goliath. How I believe that and want that to be true with all my being, because it means that our human finiteness doesn’t have the last word with God.
But does that mean there is also a Goliath for every David? Someone somewhere out there has to play the part of Goliath. Otherwise, there is just David.
I had subtitled this series “The Sea People’s Impact in God’s Word,” but today, this is really about our impact on God’s Word. Because we do have an impact—we translated it from original languages, we read it and study it and preach it. All of these are acts of interpretation, and interpretation is always going to be at least slightly subjective.
Subjectively, we may see ourselves in the boy David. And understandably so.
But just as a maniacal soccer coach seeing himself as the master of everything and the king of all knowledge does not make him so, and certainly does not line up with his players’ wretched experience of him. And our identification with David does not automatically make us Davidic.
Yet—and here is the good news—we are always capable of confounding expectations: expectations of others, expectations of ourselves, expectations of the world. Dani Foxhoven did that in Russia. The perception of Americans as fake and stupid? Vanished.
The perception that does exist of Christians as narrow-minded, selfish, hateful, any number of terrible sins, I saw plenty of that perception in my time on the West Coast, and understandably so, because that perception was rooted in so many people’s painful experience of a Christianity that inflicted harm upon them. But you can confound that. We can confound that. Because once our perceptions of ourselves correspond with truth, we can then confound the expectations that others have of us.
Just as David did when he stepped forward to face down Goliath.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
February 20, 2022