Last week I was in northern Michigan visiting an old friend who lives in Leelanau County, which is at the tip of a peninsula extending into Lake Michigan alongside Grand Traverse Bay. Its really beautiful country, and among its many charmsare miles of sandy beaches where amateur geologists search out a kind of fossilized corral known as petosky stones. I didn’t find any of those gems, but I did spend many happy hours wandering the beaches with my friend picking up pebbles, one of which we both agreed was the best find of the trip. It was an innocent smooth grey stone that looked like any other on the beach, except that it had a kind of pit carved into it, in which small crystals had grown. A reminder that the most ordinary thing might contain something totally unexpected within.
That was last week, when the sun was bright and the beaches were clean and friendship was abundant and all seemed well and safe in my own privileged world. I didn’t know that a young white man just about the age of my sons was at that very time plotting the mass murder faithful Christians in Charleston South Carolina. Of course, none of us knew that. But on some level we had to know that something was terribly awry, because if we ave been listening to our black brothers and sisters, we have heard them telling us that they are not safe.
Not safe. Not safe in the presence of the police who are supposed to protect them, not safe in public schools, not safe in jails, not safe on the streets. And now we are reminded, in the most horrific way, that black people in our country are not safe in church. Not safe even when gathered to for prayer and Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church—the church they called Mother Emanuel—wherein nine beloved children of God died last Thursday.
In light of this horrific act of terrorism, I’d almost rather cry than preach this morning. But last Thursday I spent the evening in a prayer vigil at First AME in Oakland, where local black clergy had gathered to preach and praise God and exhort God’s people to practice justice and compassion. So with fear and trembling, I approach the Bible today, insisting that it bear good news. And the first thing I notice is that all of our of lessons address the fear that seems endemic in the human condition.
“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Our gospel shows us those clueless disciples once again crying out in fear, evidently having forgotten that they were in the company of the One who is sovereign over the wind and waves. Paul, on the other hand, seems to gotten the message. And so he insisted to the fractious Corinthianchurch that the things most people fear—afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger—can bear witness to God’s ultimate victory. It’s a reversal of what we expect, right? But it’s David’s story that really catches my attention today, because it highlights the way that God upends the usual relationship between coercive power, fear and retaliatory violence.
The colorful battle of David and Goliath is a lesson we like to teach to children, perhaps because it suggests that the small and the young can exercise power over what seems big and fearsome. Which is true, but its also only one example of the many reversals of power that are paradigmatic of our sacred scriptures. The smaller triumphing over the bigger, the younger over the older, the slave over the free and, ultimately—as we come to Jesus—life triumphing over the forces of execution.
In light of this larger narrative of subversion, there’s an intriguing detail in David’s story that caught my attention. Its one that I might well have skimmed over without much notice, had I not been rock hunting in Michigan last week. We hear that David slew Goliath—the source of his people’s greatest fear—with slingshot and a single stone. But recall that there were four more stones in his shepherd’s pouch. Now I don’t know what David had in mind when he took five smooth stones from the river—I’m not so sure if he’d have had a second chance if he’d missed his first shot—but I do know that he came prepared with enough light weapons for a long battle.
We have giants to slay in our day. For those of us committed to the reign of God I think there are actually quite a few threatening giants out there, but the one that looms largest in this moment—threatening to destroy our culture in the manner of Goliath—is surely the giant sin of racism. So I found myself wondering; what might be the five stones we need to take up?
We might begin by picking up a stone that I’ll call “examining our fear.” Which means a willingness to notice that we are actually scared, rather than to deny or cover up or medicate our feelings, or to preemptively attack before we understand the danger.
Which brings me to the second stone which I’d call “recognizing the real enemy.” Because fear tends to cloud our judgment, we may have to pause for a moment in the riverbed in order to identify this stone. Many of us—especially the white people among us—have good reasons for not wanting to acknowledge the deep sin of racism as our enemy, especially when the enemy lives within us and all around us. But if we don’t name it, we can’t fight it.
Thankfully, our God has given us priceless stone of conversion, which means that we do not have to be defined by our enemies. Not even by the enemies who are deeply embedded in our culture and politics and economy. The black church has taught us that. We can change, we can be changed, we shall overcome.
Which draws my attention to the stone I’ll call “choosing our weapons”. Did you notice in the first lesson that Saul tried to give David heavy armor and a sword, but David refused him? I find myself wondering, on this Fathers Day, what might have happened if Dylann Roof had the wherewithal to refuse his father’s gift of a gun. Or what if his father had chosen the weapon of statecraft like the late South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney, whose gift to his children was a vote against open carry?
These may seem like small weapons in the face of enormous enemies whose tools are coercive violende, but that is the story of how our God works. Five small stones are what we have, and even one of them may be enough. So be of courage and take up the stone of trust, which is the one that we don’t even have to go looking for because God in Jesus keeps handing it to us. “Have you still no faith,” he asked? Then listen to his words anew. “In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!”
