Emmanuel Baptist Church 275 State St.  Albany, NY 12210 (518) 465-5161 Click here for directions
A Welcoming and Affirming Congregation

Strength and Salvation

 Judy Henningson

9/23/2007

What does it mean to be strong?

            Most of you know I am a science teacher.  You can’t hang out in any faculty room for very long before you hear some social studies teacher use the famous quote of the philosopher Santayana who said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  More than a century before, the German philosopher Hegel was even more cynical and bitter about the lessons of the past.  He said, “What experience and history teach us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it”.

          These were precisely the sentiments troubling the Jewish scholars in Babylonian exile 2500 years ago.  As you know, the city of Babylon was located in the country we now call Iraq, about 40 miles south of present day Baghdad.   The poetry of Jeremiah that we heard a few minutes ago was written about the Babylonian invasion of Israel and the suffering of the Jewish people that followed that invasion.

          Oh, that my head were a spring of water

                   and my eyes a fountain of tears,

          that I might weep for my people...

 Psalm 79 was also written in response to that destruction, begging God to forgive the sins of Israel.  In a part of the Psalm you wouldn’t want children to hear, the text says:

          They have given the bodies of your servants

                   to the birds of the air for food...

          They have poured out their blood like water

                   all around Jerusalem!

Psalm 137 may be the most familiar of these poems of anguish:

          By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down

                   and wept when we remembered Zion...

                   Our captors are requiring of us a song.

          How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

          Far from their homes, captured by the victors, living in slavery and mourning thousands upon thousands of their dead, the Jews of the Babylonian exile asked of themselves and of their God, “Why have we been abandoned?  How long, o Lord?  Will you be angry forever?”  They were without homes, without respect, without hope.  They were under great pressure to turn away from the God who seemed to have failed them.  They had only one thing that held them together as a people and that was their holy books.  These were scattered as scrolls and as memorized verses in the minds of the refugees.  Here is a great historical irony:  the compilation and editing of the great books of the Jewish religion did not take place in Judah or Israel and were not assembled by the King’s courtiers in Jerusalem.  The assemblage of what we call the old testament, one of the world’s great books, was a desperate act of faith by a beaten and bewildered group of disenfranchised librarians.  It was pieced together from remnants as fragmented and confused as the people themselves.

          The scholars sifted through almost a thousand years of sacred texts and stories. The stories covered the emergence of the Jews as children of Abraham, as were all the people native to the land of Canaan.  The stories described a previous exile in Egypt and the deliverance from that exile.  The stories recorded the contract established with Moses and the history of a growing population under the prophet/warriors called the Judges.  The stories chronicled the history of the nations of Israel and Judah under the Kings. 

          We don’t know how long it took them to assemble all of this history, perhaps as little as 10 or 15 years.  What we do know is what they found buried in the stories.  They found a reason for their exile and they found hope for the future.

          When they put all of these stories together they found one clear pattern:  that before God ever abandoned God’s people, the people abandoned their reliance upon God and put their faith in their own human power.  There is a good word in Greek for this arrogant over confidence;  it’s called hubris.

          The story of Samson appears at the very end of the book of Judges, one of the books assembled from fragments in Babylon.  In Judges, God’s people long to be a powerful nation.  They assemble armies.  They make war on their neighbors.  They connive for power among themselves.  They substitute deceit for truth and riddles for wisdom.  Again and again their plans fail and the other tribes of Canaan overwhelm them...  Again and again the people repent and God sends them a warrior prophet to save them and lead them to victory.  But the victory is always short lived and the people of God return to the pursuit of Earthly power and wealth.

          The story of Samson occurs at the end of this downward spiral of history.  Samson’s parents are told by an angel before his birth to dedicate the boy to God. They prepare him to be a holy man, observant of Jewish law.  But Samson has a weakness for beautiful Philistine women and big parties.  He deceives his parents and puts his faith in his own strength and charisma.  He is hubristic, arrogant, over confident and proud, and in his arrogance, he is defeated utterly.  Only in his weakness, in his humble acceptance of his own blindness, in his willingness to give up his very life, only then does he find strength again.

          This is the lesson that the Jewish scholars of Babylon wanted the people of God to write on their hearts:  God’s mercy is everlasting but God’s judgment is swift.  God raises up the humble and restores the downtrodden who repent, but God knows the hearts of the people, and what is prized among people is an abomination in the sight of God.

          Those are the words of Jesus.  Jesus the rabbi was a scholar of these texts, just as those Jewish librarians in Babylon were.  Over and over again, Jesus tells his disciples, “Do not place your faith in the wealth of this world or in the powers of this Earth.  Place your faith only in God.”  and because Jesus in his wisdom knew how completely foolish humanity can be, he gave himself as the ultimate gift and the final lesson.

          Think for just a moment about the parallels between Samson and Jesus.  In both cases angels foretold their births to incredulous but faithful  parents.  They are both hailed as saviors of a people threatened by outsiders.  They have miraculous, God-given powers.  But Jesus, whether tempted by the devil or taunted by the Pharisees, never uses his power for personal gain or glorification.  Jesus the scholar, Jesus the teacher, tries to show us by example the true nature of strength.  He does not slay a thousand with a jawbone, he feeds five thousand with some fish and bread.  He does not speak in riddles to trick his antagonists or to win a bet.  Jesus speaks in parables to educate.  He does not party among the rich and powerful, but eats and sleeps among the poor.  Christ lays aside his crown for our souls.

          So what is the history lesson for Christians of the 21st century?  Were Santayana and Hegel correct?  Can we learn from this book of history and wisdom that we read every week?  We find Samson everywhere in our popular culture:  he is Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry and Jodie Foster as “the Brave One” and in a dozen other movies about violence and vengeance, but where do we find Jesus? 

          What is happening in Babylon, in Baghdad,  today and in Jerusalem?  What lesson, passed down from those librarians in exile have we written on hearts?      

          Oh, that my head were a spring of water

                   and my eyes a fountain of tears,

          that I might weep for my people...

          They have poured out their blood like water…

          Where have we placed our faith?  Have we placed our faith in armies and missiles?  in private security firms and metal detectors?  What wealth do we prize?  A healthy stock market?  Oil?  or justice?  Have we acted in arrogance or in humility?  Have we behaved like Samson with the asses jawbone or like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane? Are we praying like Samson for revenge or like Jesus for mercy and forgiveness?  Have we fed the thousands or have we slain them?

          God’s mercy is everlasting.  Christ’s wondrous love will redeem every repentant sinner.  Our hope is always and only in Jesus and in his loving example, but the choice between Jesus and Samson is always ours.

Footnote

Jeremiah composed c. 537 in response to Babylonian invasion and exile of 597-582 BCE.

Judges 13-16 was composed during the exile about events that took place over 500 years before, c. 1160 BCE, before the reign of the first king.  It records the conflicts between the Israelites and the Philistines, who occupied what is now Gaza.  The Philistines may originally have been Greeks as they were a sea-faring people who settled there from “far away”.