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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Writing from exile, these master storytellers are inspired to trace God through their history. Every detail sets us up for what comes next. A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan and I traveled to California to celebrate our nephew's college graduation. That's right. I said college.
Speaker 1:Now I've known Jonathan's family since I was in college, so I knew Jonathan's sister before our nephew was born. And watching Judah grown up and accomplish something so rad filled my heart with joy. He graduated with a bachelor of science in chemistry from UC Merced and has big plans to pursue more of that. So yay, Judah. And also, my nephew Drew, who turned five yesterday, just got his yellow striped belt in Taekwondo.
Speaker 1:And Drew didn't realize in his test that he'd need to break a real board, not a practice board. So he was sure that he tapped into some superhuman strength when he, kayya, broke a board with his bare left hand. There is a video I'll spare you, but I watched it, like, 25 times already. It has been alright. Alright.
Speaker 1:You guys, you're the best. It has been a proud anti month for me, and I'll tell you what, I see something so profoundly cool about the kind of strength that these boys live with. Their strength is gentle and thoughtful, determined, playful and protective, which almost brings us to what we're on about today. We're gonna talk about strength through Samson, but first a little recap. The subtitle of our series is between chaos and kings, and we are making our way to Samuel, but first we drag ourselves through the muck and the mire of Judges.
Speaker 1:Now I am not of the opinion that Judges is just a wasteland. Take Deborah in Judges four for example. Now some scholars think that her title, wife of Lapidoth, is a mistranslation. Lapidoth is neither a name found elsewhere nor is it a place. Lapidoth sounds more like the Hebrew word for torch.
Speaker 1:In other words, the writer could be saying that Deborah is this fiery woman who decisively delivers her people from the Canaanites. So in this darkness of Judges, Deborah is a light. And the thing about Judges is that you have to look around the edges of these stories with the brutality of the ancient world to find something about God. That rascally spirit of grace drawing us forward in the story to Jesus. But we are not there yet.
Speaker 1:Today, like I said, we are hanging with Samson, a judge with violent virile strength and the opposite of what I see in my good nephews. Still, I have some anti love for Samson as you'll soon see. But before we dive in, let's take a moment to pray. Loving God and returning to this quiet posture like we do every week. We acknowledge the privilege we have to be a part of a peaceful place in the world.
Speaker 1:We are safe here. I pray that we are all safe here. And in a world where not everyone feels safe, that's something. So as we hold a posture of openness to how your spirit will nudge us to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with you our maker, we take a moment to ground ourselves. Just catch up a bit.
Speaker 1:We feel our chest rise and fall as we breathe in and out. We sense the gentleness of our heartbeat drawing us back again and again to the present. Thank you for all of it for breath and heartbeats and peaceful corners of the world. Amen. Alright.
Speaker 1:Now I am curious. Show of hands. How many of you grew up with the story of Samson as a hero in children's bible and Sunday school classes? Let's see all of those hands. There are many.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, we are going beyond the children's hero today, so let's get to the introduction. At the start of Judges 13, we read that again the Israelites did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord gave them into the hands of the Philistines for, hold on to this number, forty years. Now a man named Manoah has a barren wife. And let it be known, Manoah is not the bright star in this birth story.
Speaker 1:His nameless wife, identified again and again as just the woman, is the star. And it's argued that calling her only woman, Isha in Hebrew, alerts us to this major theme in the Samson saga. Samson has a complicated relationship with women. So an angel appears to the woman and says, you are barren and childless, but you are going to be pregnant and give birth to a son. Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink, and that you do not eat anything unclean.
Speaker 1:You will become pregnant and have a son whose head is never to be touched by a razor because the boy is to be a Nazirite dedicated to God from the womb. He will take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines. This story begins with hope. And if you're familiar with other barren women's stories in the old testament, you might be flashing back to Genesis 18 where Sarah is promised a baby in her old age. And soon in first Samuel, Hannah will cry out to the Lord and she will also have a son who lives under the Nazirite vow.
Speaker 1:More on that little guy, Samuel, next week. What matters here is that we, the readers, begin to feel some relief. Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:The Israelites brought suffering upon themselves when they broke the covenant, worshiped idols, and fell down on the job to settle the land and to love Yahweh. But by now, we know the pattern. It's failure then redemption, failure then redemption, failure then redemption is the dizzying cycle in judges. The question is, how long can this go on? So Samson is born into the Israel tribe called Dan in the Hills.
Speaker 1:The woman gave birth to a boy and named him Samson. He grew and the Lord blessed him. And the spirit of the Lord began to stir him while he was in Mahanah Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol. And the woman names her son Samson, Shimshon in Hebrew. There's this allusion in the meaning of his name, get this too, sunlight.
Speaker 1:And the o n suffix Samson indicates potency. So Robert Alter says Samson means the sun of potency. In spite of that, scholars often shrug their shoulders and don't really know what to make of it. But may I offer something? I think potent light is a very big deal.
Speaker 1:And the reason has to do with how the spirit is at work or how we understand the spirit at work here. The spirit of the Lord stirs Samson and the verb for stir is paam and it literally means to disturb, to trouble, to pound, and to pulsate within him. So right out of the gate, Samson's a ball of fire. A ball of fire that shines light on Israel saying, you can't hide in the dark. See yourself for who you really are.
Speaker 1:See yourself reflected in Samson. And maybe you're wondering like why would the spirit disturb? Why wouldn't the Spirit comfort and correct and just settle down? We don't really know. But maybe it's as simple as the Spirit not lying to us.
Speaker 1:Maybe spirit highlights what is true about a man, about a community hiding out in the hills, about the contents of our own hearts. Spirit works with what is real and genuine. So maybe when we see the ugly truth that's the work of spirit too. In their book, The Meaning of the Bible, Douglas Knight and Amy Jo Levine say that with Samson, what you see is what you get. He has no interior monologue, and his motives are abundantly clear.
Speaker 1:And throughout the story, you can see the workings of this fierce man by tracing his footsteps. Samson is constantly on the move. He goes down to the coastal territory of his enemies, and he comes up to the hill country of his people, up and down, up and down with this restless energy. So it kicks off. Samson went down to Timnah and saw there a young Philistine woman.
Speaker 1:When he returned, he said to his father and mother, I have seen a Philistine woman in Timnah. Now get her for me as my wife. They object. He insists. Now prepare yourself for the shaky cam Sampson highlights reel.
Speaker 1:It is like a boring movie. On his way to Timnah, Sampson kills a lion with his bare hands. Later, he scoops honey from the lion's carcass and licks it from his fingers. And then he shares that with his parents, but doesn't tell them that it's lion gut, honey. And Samson tells riddles that no one understands.
Speaker 1:His Philistine wife is forced by her people to figure out Samson's riddle, and with her help, they do. This enrages Samson, so he kills 30 men of the town. When he comes back down for his wife, she has been given to another man. In turn, Samson catches 300 foxes, ties them together, and attaches torches to their tails. The fire destroys grain, vineyards, and olive groves, Having it out for Samson, the Philistines burn his wife, who's one of their own, along with her father.
Speaker 1:So Samson attacks them again, slaughters them, and goes to live in a cave, as you do. The Philistines go up to Judah and find Samson. When they don't find him, Samson's own people sell him out. It seems that they are pretty tired of him too. And Samson agrees to let them tie him up, but the Philistines attack him.
Speaker 1:The spirit of the Lord moves powerfully on him, and he breaks the ropes with his arms and with the jawbone of a donkey kills 3,000 men. Right from 30 slain to 300 foxes setting fire to 3,000 more killed, we are meant to see the pattern. We are meant to feel the frenzy of Samson. He's governed by lust, impulsive with his cravings and far from the devotion that's meant to mark his life with purity as a Nazirite. Samson seems to only make matters worse.
Speaker 1:So what is the point of Samson? Is God with him or isn't God? In 14 verse six and nineteen, we read that the spirit of the Lord moves powerfully or rushes on Samson. And we are meant to notice the spirit but throughout the story, it seems like Samson himself is unaware of the spirit's influence. It's something that kinda just keeps happening to him.
Speaker 1:So what's up with that? Samson doesn't just absorb rage and unleash it. Again, he reflects it back. Judges tells the story of the people of God and how they are a long way from home. And I don't mean that literally.
Speaker 1:They are in the land that they were meant to possess, but they do not hold on to the hand of their God when they get there. Over and over and over again, they let go. They make messes. They fail to grow up. They are still unsettled.
Speaker 1:And in Samson, they see something of themselves. Samson is this sun that burns everything up. Get too close and you're on fire too. So if God is anywhere in this story, God is somewhere in that liminality, wanting justice, working with what is true, and showing us that when we put our hope in a fierce man to make everything right, well fierceness on top of fierceness does not bring peace. It keeps violent cycles rolling forward through time.
Speaker 1:Sure. You can read this story as one of God using Samson's wildness to bring vengeance on the Philistines, but you can also hope for something more by reading it back through Jesus. And we're gonna do some of that in the next chapter in the Samson saga. So enter Delilah. After a night where Samson is hounded by the Philistines, he visits a nameless sex worker and then we get this next surprise.
Speaker 1:Sometime later, he fell in love with a woman in the Valley Of Sorek, whose name was Delilah. This is the first woman in Samson's story who was given a name. And this word love, it sticks out. Right? It almost clears the smoke of the violence for a moment.
Speaker 1:Even so, it's not exactly a rom com, though I would totally watch it. Delilah will challenge his love, and Samson will literally tell her everything that is in his heart. But who is Delilah? Well, based on the reference to the Valley Of Sorek, Delilah's ethnicity is ambiguous. The valley is an in between space.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's Israelite, maybe it's Philistine, maybe it's a little bit of both. Delilah straddles worlds. And so the rulers of the Philistines go to her and say, see if you can lure him into showing you the secret of his great strength and how we can overpower him so we may tie him up and subdue him. Each one of us will give you 1,100 shekels of silver. Now this sum right here, it is an absurd amount of money, the kind that empties city treasuries.
Speaker 1:So 3 times, Delilah begs Sampson to reveal the secret of his strength, and three times he lies to her. Interestingly, in the whole story she never lies to him. Wearing him down with this game is one thing but she never lies about it. The fourth time she says, she asks him, tell me the secret of your strength. And Samson tells her the truth about his strength.
Speaker 1:Once the money is in her hands, she lulls him to sleep on her lap. And to me, this is where the story comes full circle. Delilah is a foil to Samson's mother. Both women knew him up close and through him made plans for their deliverance. When Samson is asleep, Delilah shaves off his Nazarite dreadlocks.
Speaker 1:His strength leaves him And to wake him up, she cries, Samson, the Philistines are upon you. And they rush and seize him and gouge out his eyes, which is ironic in the story because Samson has been led by the lust of his eyes. Finally, they take him captive and force him to grind grain day after day in the mill. All hope though is not lost. In verse 22, we're told that the hair on his head begins to grow again.
Speaker 1:Samson's getting stronger. Now, centuries of commentary have reduced Delilah to a one note seductress, And I think that's a very poor reading, which is probably no surprise to you, because the text is eerily quiet about her motives. Does this power over Samson turn her on? Do the Philistines terrify her when they demand that she figure out the secret of her man's strength? I mean, what happened to Samson's first wife, the Timnite.
Speaker 1:She was burned to death. Delilah is in an impossible situation and we know nothing about her loyalty except maybe the loyalty she has to this idea of survival. Not something I can imagine. When I let Delilah's story work on me, I see a woman tired of a world falling down around her. I see a woman so frustrated with all these men and all their lies and all their wars.
Speaker 1:I see a woman who has learned the hard way not to trust and to seize a moment of security when it is offered to her. So yes, she accepts the money and she sells Samson out. Let's not assume that that calculation was easy for her. But ultimately, what we know about Judges is that it's a story of Israel's deterioration. So I'd say Delilah is caught in its downfall.
Speaker 1:The point of judges isn't to just find the good guys and decide with them. I mean, this far in the story, we realize that really there are no good guys. Well, there used to be one, Samson's mother, but that story has left her behind. There are no good guys, and that's the point. But is that where we stop the story?
Speaker 1:Is it? I don't think so. What if we read Samson and Delilah with more sympathy? And dare I say, the compassion of Christ which we access. I mean what else are we doing here church?
Speaker 1:So let us have sympathy on Samson, a man driven by impulses he does not understand. As if you and I don't know something about the cycles of abuse, our internal states of anxiety, our restless knocking about to find something to relieve our pain, We know about impulses that we don't exactly understand. And let us have sympathy for Delilah, a woman driven by the influences that bear down on her, as if you and I know something of the power of world making systems. Or that feeling of being caught between a rock and a hard place, or that moment when you realize you only have one choice and frankly, it stinks. We know something about the forces that bear down on us.
Speaker 1:So it's hard to see the good in the wreckage of judges. But if we keep moving forward, Jesus will confront us with something more later, much later, Jesus will step right into the wreckage, look around at all of it and say, oh, yes. I can work with this. I can work with all of this. Samson's story does not end happily.
Speaker 1:Not all stories do. After twenty years of evading the Philistines, Samson is finally in their keep. The leaders call him up from the prison so that they can humiliate him. They worship Dagon, the god of the grain. Remember, Samson, now blind, is forced to mill their grain.
Speaker 1:It's a huge crowd there. The Philistine leaders are there, and 3,000 women and men assemble along balconies to watch. As Sampson is led out to entertain, he asks the attendant to put his hands on the pillars that support the structure. After a rare prayer, Samson says, let me die with the Philistines. Then he pushes with all his might against the pillars and the world crumbles down around him.
Speaker 1:Thousands die, more than he's ever killed before, and he dies too. Eventually, Samson is buried in the tomb of his father, Manoah. Finally, Samson rests. His story ends with this statement. He led Israel twenty years.
Speaker 1:And that's interesting because remember at the start of the Samson saga, we read that the Philistines ruled over Israel for forty years. Samson is the final judge and he doesn't get the job done. The book ends far away from the hope that his mother placed in this baby. So what's next? Well, for just a little longer in Judges, chaos will reign.
Speaker 1:There's more death, more sexual violence, more nearly being wiped off the map. Here's the final line before the curtains close. In those days, Israel had no king. Everyone did as they saw fit. What a depressing ending.
Speaker 1:And still, there's more. Writing from exile, these master storytellers are inspired to trace God through their history. Every detail sets us up for what comes next. After judges they ask, don't you maybe want a king? Like a monarchy to unite us?
Speaker 1:But will a king be any better? We have to ask. That's a story for another day. Today, we really are just left with Samson and his death. But there is one more layer to it.
Speaker 1:These ancient people imagined that the world was a platform. And in their prescientific cosmology, the sky is this dome, and it required pillars to support it. And so after the longest story of the worst judge, Samson didn't only crush the Philistines, he crushed his people too. To do justice to this story, we're meant to face what is hard, to really travel down to the bottom of the ending. When life is brutal and it's hard to hold on to hope, there could still be, I think there still is, always like a little bit of light getting through.
Speaker 1:Samson, whose name means the sun, shines light on the kind of strength that destroys, which means there's an opposite. As followers of Christ, we have another face of strength. Strength that brings hope, offers forgiveness and turns violence back on itself. Strength that loves enemies and offers them a path to heal. So thanks be to God for a blessed new way.
Speaker 1:Let us pray. Loving God, the fact that Samson isn't the last story in the scriptures, It's not where we end ultimately is a sign of hope. The sacred text, it keeps going. And we see again and again that you work with what you've got. We live in a world in need of new definitions of strength and really, I can see them everywhere.
Speaker 1:In a nephew's generosity, in a parent's gentle presence, in the faithfulness of those who work so quietly for justice. So we ask for wisdom to see past a first reading of these stories as old as they are and to notice what is inspired in them and how we can be inspired too. I loved thinking about Delilah this week. Maybe no one and nothing is as simple as they seem. So spirit of the living God present with us now, enter the places where we feel like so much has fallen apart and heal us of all that harms us.
Speaker 1:Amen.
Speaker 2:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 2:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.