Later on, at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife, bringing along a young goat. He said, “Let me go into my wife’s bedroom.” But her father wouldn’t allow him to go in. 2 Her father said, “I was so sure that you had completely rejected her that I gave her in marriage to one of your companions. Don’t you think her younger sister is even better? Let her be your wife instead.” 3 Samson replied, “No one can blame me now for being ready to bring down trouble on the Philistines!”
4 Then Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, turned the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. 5 He lit the torches and released the foxes into the Philistines’ grain fields. So he burned the stacked grain, standing grain, vineyards, and olive orchards. 6 The Philistines inquired, “Who did this?” So it was reported, “Samson the Timnite’s son-in-law did it, because his father-in-law gave his wife in marriage to one of his companions.” So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father to death. 7 Samson then responded to them, “If this is how you act, then I won’t stop until I get revenge on you!” 8 He struck them hard, taking their legs right out from under them. Then he traveled down and stayed in a cave in the rock at Etam.
9 The Philistines marched up, made camp in Judah, and released their forces on Lehi. 10 The people of Judah asked, “Why have you marched up against us?” “We’ve marched up to take Samson prisoner,” they replied, “and to do to him just what he did to us.” 11 So three thousand people from Judah traveled down to the cave in the rock at Etam and said to Samson, “Don’t you realize that the Philistines rule over us? What have you done to us?” But he told them, “I did to them just what they did to me.” (Common English Bible)
“Heroes, not Kings: The
Days of Israel’s Judges,” Week Six
The
1948 Arab-Israeli War was a watershed moment for human rights, across the
entire ledger of populations. As a result of the war’s territorial exchanges,
700,000 Palestinians were suddenly made homeless. 700,000 Jews were likewise
expelled from Arab countries. Ownership of the land gained and lost in that war
has, in the case of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, still not been
conclusively resolved.
Taking
part in that war on the side of Israel was an elite unit of commandos, one of
whom was a soldier named Uri Avnery, who had previously served in the
pro-Israel militia Irgun, which had been founded in the wake of disappointment
with the primary Israeli paramilitary group, Haganah, following the riots of
1929. Avnery took his experience in Irgun with him to the 1948 war, in which he
was wounded twice in action, and after the war, editorialized in Israeli media
that Israel should wage a pre-emptive war with Egypt and assist in overthrowing
the monarchy of Jordan.
Yet
something happened within this hardened soldier over the following decades, as
he emerged as a voice not for more war, but for peace between Israel and
Palestine, campaigning assiduously and at great cost to himself for a two-state
solution that achieved both security for Israel and sovereignty for Palestine.
To this day, he heads up the Gush Shalom peace organization that he founded in
1993, and writes and organizes extensively in support of both Israel’s
existence and a Palestinian state.
And
the commandos that Avnery served among in the Arab-Israeli War? They were known
as the Shu’alei Shimshon—“Samson’s
Foxes.” Except instead of the ones Samson tied torches to, this one from modern
times seeks the preservation of the land for humanity and for peace rather than
war. And in the wake of the carnage that the neo-Nazis of our neighborhoods
wrought in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend, a lesson on how to cut free
our own fire-bearing foxes is sorely needed.
This
is a (no longer altogether that) new sermon series for the season of summer,
and it reflects in part my desire to proffer a balanced spiritual diet of sorts
in my preaching. We have just spent two full months in the New Testament for
Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, so it’s high time to slip into some Hebrew
Bible Scripture, and for me there are few stories more compelling anywhere—not
just in Scripture—than the stories of Israel’s judges.
The
term “judge” is a bit of a misnomer to us now in the Biblical sense. In our
government, judges are the black-robed guardians of justice who sit from on
high and issue opinions and decrees that interpret the law in such a way as to
protect and uphold the United States Constitution. My dad quite enjoys his gig
doing exactly that as a judge on the Court of Appeals of the state of Kansas.
But
“judge” in the Hebrew Bible sense refers to a very different sort of role: that
of a unifying figure who arises as a result of popular acclamation to unite the
otherwise disparate twelve tribes of Israel temporarily into one nation to face
down an external threat (typically, a neighboring nation of people), and who
may serve as judge for life, but who does not necessarily have an automatic
heir and thus is unable to turn their rule as judge into a dynasty of kings.
Hence, the title of this sermon series: “Heroes, not Kings.”
We
began this series with the story of the left-handed assassin Ehud, and we
continued the series with the female judge Deborah and her aide-de-camp Barak.
We heard in succession about three more judges—Gideon, Abimelech, and Jephthah,
and we now come to perhaps the most well-known judge of all, and whose story
the book of Judges goes into the greatest detail with: Samson.
Samson
is the closest thing the Bible has to a Hercules, an almost demigod of a hero
whose strength is of divine provenance and whose deeds make him a folk hero among
mere mortals like ourselves—an angel appears to his parents in Judges 13 to
tell them of the son they shall bear who shall be imbued by the Lord with
extraordinary strength as long as his hair is never shorn. Except that Samson,
while a brutally effective fighter and an uncommonly fearsome adversary, really
had very few other redeemable qualities as a person or as a judge, which he
still did for twenty years.
By
this point in the story, Samson has already attempted to marry once, largely on
a whim—he sees a Philistine woman and asks his parents to procure her for him
as his bride in the shortest series of The Bachelor ever. At the wedding, in
order to make good on a bet that his groomsmen cheat to win, he kills thirty
men at Ashkelon, takes their belongings, and gives them to his shady groomsmen.
His nascent marriage ends in divorce, with his wife being given over to his
best man in marriage. It’s stuff you otherwise can only find on the daytime
talk shows, but it was what Samson fought for.
At
every turn throughout his story, Samson does not fight for the sake of Israel,
or for his neighbors, his tribe, or even his family, really. He fights only for himself, to avenge wrongs
done to him personally, and this tit-for-tat cycle of revenge is on full
display here in Judges 15.
Samson
hasn’t yet learned that his wife had been given away to his best man, so he
shows up seeking her, and her father has to break the terribly awkward news to
him, but then, because this was how women were viewed 3,000 years ago, offers
Samson his other daughter instead because, hey, one is apparently as good as
another, as though they were extension cords or bookends and not people.
That’s
not good enough for Samson, so he takes three hundred foxes, sets torches to
their tails, and lets loose the foxes to run through the fields of the Philistines,
burning up the Philistines’ crops. In turn, the Philistines show up and kill
Samson’s ex-wife and her father, and Samson beats them.
The
response from the Philistines is to basically declare war—they “marched up,
made camp, and released their forces,” according to verse 9. When asked by
Israel why they were doing this, the Philistines simply said, basically, “we’re
just returning the favor.”
And
so the cycle of vengeance, of eye for eye and tooth for tooth, continues
unabated. But as Mahatma Gandhi famously put it, an eye for an eye makes the
whole world go blind—a lesson we may well want to heed both abroad the saber rattling
between the United States and North Korea continued to escalate this week, and
at home, with the racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The
Philistines are blinded by their hatred of Samson. Samson is blinded by his own
rage at the Philistines. And around and around we go, until someone has at long
last had enough, stands up, and says, “Stop.”
It
does not even have to be on a scale so grand and great as that of a Gandhi, or
a Mandela, or an Avnery. After all—Samson fought all his own fights for
personal, rather than nationalistic, reasons.
But
today, we must speak of nationalistic reasons. We must speak of why, in the
face of violent white nationalism, we must let the foxes go free and untie the
torches from their tails.
It
is a simple instruction, but one for which we come up with any number of
excuses and justifications when presented with it, that it’s not realistic or that
revenge is the only option.
But
it is still an option to untie the torches from the foxtails, and let those
foxes go free, just as it is an option for us to lean upon the grace of God
when we make such a decision as brave and courageous free the foxes and to
trust in that grace that it was indeed right for us to do so.
It
is an option that clergy, among other counter-protesters, chose this weekend in
Charlottesville. With songs to drown out racist and homophobic chants, arms
locked to demonstrate solidarity, and stoles around their necks to show them as
slaves to the Christ who condemns the racism of white supremacy and neo-Nazism,
they took to the streets and to the pews alike at the University of Virginia to
express a message that love can indeed still stand up to hate, and even more
than standing up to it, will emerge victorious over it and must emerge
victorious over it.
That
is a decision the church can choose to make—to broadcast that message of divine
love conquering human hate, instead of the message of tribal resentment and
violence that is set here in Judges 15, by our latter-day ilk in the “alt-right”
movement, and, frankly, by previous incarnations of the church that lent its
morally bankrupt blessing to all manner of displays of institutional racism.
Yet
it is decisions such as this, of choosing the way of Jesus over the way of hatred,
that can ultimately lead to peace—peace that lasts, peace that is enough, peace
that can indeed set free the foxes of Samson, extinguish the fires of their
torches, and at long last be liberated from the need to seek vengeance that
seems to be the Israelite hero’s only moral code.
Peace
without justice is not peace. But Samson’s moral code allows for no such
justice, only revenge for perceived wrongs, no matter how ahistorical or
revisionist they may be—not at all unlike the racist protesters in
Charlottesville, who took their resentment for perceived slights and ended up
killing someone with it, and injuring dozens more.
Samson’s
moral code cannot be our moral code, not if we seek something bigger than what
he sought. The Philistines’ moral code cannot be our moral code, not if we seek
something bigger than what they sought as well. The alt-right’s moral code
cannot be our moral code, not if we truly do seek something bigger than what
they sought and truly do seek a true and lasting peace in our world.
I
do not know if such a peace will come about tomorrow, or the day after that, or
the day after that. The fever of our fascist madness must break first, and we
must be among the ones to break it.
But
what a peace that will be to one day build. What a peace it is that we should
strive to build, one heart, one soul, and one fearfully and wonderfully made image
of God at time. Let that be our work.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
August
13, 2017
Original image courtesy of NPR
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