Presence

1 Samuel 4:2, 5-11, 19-22; Psalm 77:1-12, 19-20

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

21 July 2024

               Wilda Gafney writes that in her “exegetical imagination” the voice we hear in today’s psalm is a survivor of the battle that the Israelites lost to the Philistines.  Or the widow of a solider.  Reflecting on her sorrow, in the midst of this awful defeat, the Psalmist asks, “Has God’s faithful love ceased for all time?  Has her promise ceased from generation to generation?  Has God forgotten to be gracious?”

            The psalmist proclaims that she is not comforted, even when contemplating God.  Especially when she remembers God’s past wonders on behalf of the people, the times they have been delivered, and she doesn’t understand what just happened and why the people have been defeated.

            And so the psalm echoes the sorrow of Phinehas’s wife as she suddenly goes into labor on hearing the news of the defeat and the death of her husband.  Today’s reading skips over the story in which the priest Eli hears the news of the defeat and the deaths of his sons.  Eli immediately drops dead.  Now all the bad news comes to Phinehas’s wife in this odd little story that has probably escaped our attention in the past.

            In her shock and sorrow, she immediately gives birth.  The story is rather vivid, isn’t it?  And then she expresses her pain in the naming of her son.  She feels that God has departed from her and from the nation.

            Wilda Gafney, in her commentary on this story and the psalm, writes that these passages are really about the presence of God.  She says, “Each of these texts speak of the companioning God but not always in the way or with the results that persons wish.” 

            The soldiers on the battlefield assumed that God was with them and would defeat their enemies when the Ark appeared.  But that was not the case.  I actually think that stories like this are included in the Bible in order to prevent us from having bad theology.  Bad theology that interprets God’s presence or action always on our side, for our benefit, doing what we want God to do.  Stories like this one remind us that God’s ways are not our ways, and that we should be careful to claim God’s action on our behalf.  Much that occurs in life is just the outcome of normal causation.  Much is just random.  Many things we fill with meaning are probably just coincidence.  Stories like this are there to teach us humility and skepticism in how we understand God’s presence and action.

            In this moment God was there, but not in the ways the people expected.  They made decisions and behaved with false assumptions.  God did not show up as a warrior, fighting on their side.  But God was there.

            This week at church camp with Sebastian, Virgil, and Wyatt, our curriculum was about the ways we are linked by love.  And the second day we learned about being present for each other.  We counselors experienced the beauty of watching the kids live out these lessons, as they were present for each other.  When someone fell and got hurt.  When someone was crying because they missed their parents or their pets.  The kids were wonderful in the ways they gently cared for and supported one another.

            We also learned that we can love one another because God first loved us.  God is the very power within us, making us capable of giving and receiving love, linking us to one another.  We can be present because God is present with us.  In fact, God is present to us in the people who care for and love us.

            And so, we people of faith have learned that God is actually present with us in our sorrow, our hurt, our pain, our grief.  That is where the glory of God resides.  Not in the victories on the fields of battle.  So Phinehas’s wife was wrong.  The glory of God had not departed from her or from Israel.  The glory of God was there in her pain.  God doesn’t guarantee victories in war.  That’s bad theology.  God does give love and comfort and compassion.  That’s good theology.  And these ancient stories teach us and form us in these truths.

            Another of the human problems this story highlights is the way we other one another.  The Israelites believe that God is theirs and only present with them and will assure their conquest over their enemies.  I’m sure the Philistines believed something similar.  And once we believe such falsehoods about God, then we begin acting upon it to treat people as other than us.  We are the chosen, the elect, the ones with a special destiny, and these folks who aren’t us are other than that.  Less than that.  And so we don’t have to treat them the same way we treat ourselves.  We don’t have to treat them with respect and dignity.  We don’t have to honor their autonomy, their agency, their feelings.

            This is a timely story to read, because right now there is a war going on in the exact same place between two people who trace their histories back to the same two peoples at war in this story.  A reminder that contemporary global events can have long and ancient histories.  And those long and ancient histories can contribute to making current resolutions even more difficult to reach.

            And so I as a preacher must handle this story gently.  Because this story isn’t just an ancient one.  This story has meaning and implications for our human siblings in our time.

            And I think we can read the story as a reminder that we shouldn’t believe that God is only on our side, always assuring our victory.  We should instead understand that all humanity are the beloved children of God.  All humans are our siblings, deserving of respect, dignity, compassion, and love.

            It’s interesting what modern archaeology and genetic studies have revealed about the peoples of the ancient near east.  For one, most of the stories about Israel as told in the Bible have no basis in the historical or archaeological records.  I’ll be teaching more about those details in my First Forum series beginning next week.  This lack of support has reaffirmed for us that much of the Bible should be understood as literature, a series of stories written much later than the times described.  And so the Bible isn’t intended to tell us what happened, but to teach us by inspiring our reflection and our questioning about matters of faith and morality.

            This ancient strip of land, known as Palestine, has for four thousand years been the home of a diverse and mixed group of people, often dominated by outside empires, always a major route of trade and cultural exchange.  And it’s difficult to determine any real racial distinctions.  The people always seem to have been a cosmopolitan mix.  The Philistines were not some foreign usurpers, but the indigenous folks who lived along the coast and built great cities that flourished because of international trade.  Some of those cities, such Gaza, survive to this day.  It is only in modern Europe that the term “philistine” took on its pejorative meanings of being uncultured and backwards.  The ancient Philistines were the opposite of that actually.

            The ancient Israelites were the people who inhabited the interior of the land, living in the hills and not the fertile plains.  If anything, they were the rural, more tribal people.

            So this story expresses ancient prejudices.  And our challenge as readers is not to continue the prejudices, but to learn from them and overcome them, so that we might learn to create the global beloved community that God intends.

            One of the great challenges of the 21^st century is for us to become more cosmopolitan.  As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, cosmopolitanism seems to name the challenge and not the solution to our problems.  How can all of us become citizens of the world, overcoming our biases and prejudices.  Appiah writes:

Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality.  The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

            And he admits this isn’t easy.  That cosmopolitanism remains an adventure and an ideal.

            Martha Nussbaum, in her work on the topic, reminds us that “to build societies that aspire realistically to global justice and universal respect, we need a realistic understanding of human weaknesses and limits, of the forces in human life that make justice so difficult to achieve.”

            But this challenge should inspire us, nonetheless.  That all of us are striving to flourish, should inspire “wonder, respect, and awe.”

            This strange, ancient, yet timely and current, story, opens up an opportunity to consider presence.  How God is present with us.  How we are present with each other.  And how we can aspire to the great moral adventure of respecting each other’s presence.  This is our human challenge.  This is the great mission for people of faith and goodwill.