Somebody Else’s Armor

Scripture: 1 Samuel 17:38-49
Ephesians 6:10-17

I was six or seven years old and Halloween was coming up and I was sorely in need of a costume. My father was away, and my mother was working long hours, and those big Halloween pop-up stores wouldn’t arrive on the scene for roughly half a century. Back then, if you hadn’t ordered a costume through the mail or bought one early at the local department store, then you would be making your own.

That posed a significant problem for me because more than anything in the world I wanted to go trick-or-treating dressed as a robot. And designing and assembling a convincing robot costume seemed like an impossibly ambitious do-it-yourself project for a boy of my age. I badly needed a major assist from somewhere and, lo, the Lord delivered one unto me.

You see, it turns out that there are some advantages to having an older, beautiful sister who guys want to impress. They think that the way to her heart lies in pretending to have a deep and abiding interest in everything you—her annoying little brother—say and do and desire. If you are a sufficiently devious child, then you can easily capitalize on the opportunities this presents. I was, and so I did.

My sister Sandy’s would-be boyfriend, an energetic lad by the name of Jim, threw himself at the project with enthusiasm and ingenuity. He took a large cardboard box and cut out holes through which I could place my arms, legs, and head. Then he attached a smaller cardboard box to the top, with holes for my eyes and mouth.

He affixed colored light bulbs to the top and sides of the small box and connected them to a battery pack. On the front of the big box he put a switch I could use to turn the lights on and off. He spray painted the boxes silver and similarly painted the legs of one of my crummier pairs of jeans and the sleeves of one of my rattier shirts. I tried the costume on in the living room of my grandparents’ sprawling old house and officially declared it to be the Best Thing Ever in the Entire History of Best Things.

On Halloween night, I triumphantly donned my costume and embarked on my quest for goodies. Things went fine for the first block or two but then went swiftly downhill. The painted clothes were rigid and difficult to move in. But the bigger problem was that I couldn’t see where I was going through the eye holes. As a result, I tripped over everything a human being can possibly trip over, including some of my fellow trick-or-treaters.

After a few dozen tumbles, I took a spectacular header over a bush and crashed onto the ground like I’d been dropped from a helicopter. The small box detached from the large box and parts of the costume went everywhere. I yelled in frustration, untangled myself from the wreckage, and—being the conscientious person that I remain to this day—abandoned the mess on someone’s front lawn.

I finished that Halloween night dressed only in pants and a shirt that were spray painted silver at their extremities. As you might imagine, this outfit elicited from each adult who was handing out candy the question that every child dreads most on Halloween: “So, what are YOU supposed to be?” When the question came, I would look wistfully off into the distance, like an existentialist philosopher at a Paris bistro, and say: “Well, I used to be a robot, but it didn’t work out.”

The debacle of my Halloween costume always comes into my mind when I read the story of David and Goliath. I feel David’s pain when he tries on Saul’s armor, discovers that he can’t walk in it, and abandons it on someone’s front lawn in the Elah valley. Plus, Goliath’s taunts of David, one of history’s earliest examples of trash-talking, sound a lot like he’s asking the young warrior: “So, what are YOU supposed to be?”

I like to call the story of David and Goliath “the text of 1,000 sermons,” because it is an endlessly rich source of inspiration and instruction, much of which lies in its details. Today, I want to spend some time thinking with you about that curious little incident involving Saul’s armor. It may at first seem like a minor detour in the narrative, perhaps a bit of comic relief in an otherwise tense story. But I think it raises some very interesting and provocative ideas.

Now, toward the beginning of this sermon, my observations about those ideas may feel a bit abstract and disconnected from your experience. But, if things go well, I hope that in the end you’ll see why this detail of this story—particularly if read through the eyes of a certain carpenter from Nazareth—might help a little with something that I suspect every single one of us is struggling with these days. In any event, that’s my goal.

Let’s start with the broad subject of armor in general, about which the Bible has a lot to say. We find references to armor throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but especially in the letters attributed to Paul. Indeed, Paul seems never to have met an armor metaphor he didn’t like. Much of it comes in that famous passage in his letter to the Ephesians, but he uses similar language in 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, and his letter to the Romans.

Now, the armor that Paul talks about in his letters, the full armor of God, has a singular pedigree: It comes to us from the Lord. And it consists in only good things—truth, righteousness, faith, salvation, the Holy Spirit, the Gospel of Peace. We can therefore say with complete confidence that donning this armor is always an excellent idea. It gives us all of the protection we need and, as the saying goes, “the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” And we might note that, while David took a pass on Saul’s armor, he did indeed go into battle wearing the full armor of God.

The other armor that we put on in life, in contrast, is a much more complicated matter. Sometimes we put on armor that doesn’t come from God but from ourselves. That armor can come laden with lots of problems, but I need to save those for another day and another sermon.

The story of David and Goliath focuses on yet a third kind of armor—the armor that doesn’t come from God, or from us, but that comes from somebody else. Granted, that armor may be shiny and alluring and may feel good when we first put it on. But, once we walk out into the world in it, we may discover that we can’t see clearly, we can’t move comfortably, and we can’t find our way. And the protection it offers may be as illusory as that provided by two cardboard boxes painted silver.

When somebody else offers us their armor they may do so out of the best of intentions. They may sincerely believe that it’s for our own good. That’s one way to read the story of David and Goliath. Saul understood the danger David faced and so generously offered him his own armor, which (since Saul was king) presumably would have been of the highest quality.

But, let’s be honest, sometimes people try to armor us up for less noble reasons. Sometimes people armor us up because they benefit somehow from feeding our fears, or from limiting our range of vision, or from constraining our freedom to move, or from sending us into a battle that isn’t our own. Like pretty much everything else in life, somebody else’s armor can further good agendas—or bad ones.

That gives us an alternative way to read the story of David and Goliath. Maybe Saul actually had a devious reason for lending David his armor. Think about it this way: Assume that David walked out onto the battlefield in Saul’s armor, looking for all the world as if he were Saul himself. Only two things could happen. If David prevailed, then the people would probably mistake him for Saul and would receive Saul as a great hero. But, if David were killed, then Saul would remain safe on the sidelines eating popcorn.

That’s a very dark reading of Saul’s intentions, and it may not be right. But it might be. To say the least, Saul had mixed feelings about David and his emerging position as a leader of the people of Israel. And, as my favorite philosopher, Lily Tomlin, once sagely observed, sometimes “no matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”

Interestingly, I can’t find a single instance in which Jesus, unlike Paul, draws on the idea of armor in a favorable way. In a sense, this is unsurprising: As a Roman citizen who grew up marinating in a martial culture, Paul would have found armor an attractive—even comforting—metaphor. But Jesus, a Jew who grew up under the yoke of Roman oppression, probably viewed armor with considerable suspicion. So, while Paul urges us to take up the sword of the Spirit, Jesus warns us that if we live by the sword we will perish by it.

Jesus may have been suspicious of armor for another reason as well. The whole point of armor is to create a barrier between human beings—a barrier based on fear and suspicion and hatred and violence. And if the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth is about anything, it is about breaking down such barriers.

Jesus had a perfect understanding of human nature and he knew how these barriers typically come into being and how they operate. He recognized that it often starts with somebody persuading us that some person or group of people out there pose a threat to us. Then that somebody urges us to layer on the armor that they offer—armor that bears no resemblance to the full armor of God.

They press us to put on their breastplate of fear, their shield of tribalism, and their helmet of paranoia. They encourage us to take up their sword of hatred and to start swinging until we hit something. And do you know what happens? The sound of all that armor creaking and clanging and clacking drowns out the voices of the angels and the prophets and the Son of God himself saying: “Be Not Afraid.”

That’s a sad and ironic outcome, because some of the most formidable amor available to us comes in those very words and in that very idea: “Be Not Afraid.” Psalm 27, a psalm attributed to David, says: “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid?” Alas, all too often—at somebody else’s urging—we trade the full armor of God for a couple of cardboard boxes and some colorful lights.

In his great poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost uses a different metaphor to talk about the kinds of barriers human beings set up against each other. In the poem, the narrator describes how he and a neighbor gather every spring to reassemble the wall that separates their properties, each replacing the stones that have fallen on their side. The narrator doesn’t know why the stones get loose every year—maybe it’s the freezing and unfreezing of the ground, maybe it’s hunters. But, in any event, he’s confident that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

His neighbor enjoys the exercise and talks about how “good fences make good neighbors,” but our narrator isn’t so sure. He acknowledges that sometimes you need a fence, for example to keep the cows in—an issue familiar to those of you who read the Leelanau Enterprise police blotter. But he notes that here there are no cows and he declares: “Before I build a wall I’d ask to know / what I was walling in or walling out.” He repeats: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Indeed, something there is that doesn’t love a wall. In our faith, we call that something the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is the something that unsettled the wall that separated the human from the divine. It is the something that upended the wall that stood between the Most Powerful Force in the Universe and the Least in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Now, at the beginning of this sermon, which may seem to you a very long time ago, I promised that toward the end I would make the application of this message more concrete. Indeed, I suggested that the lesson here might be of some practical use to all of us as we contend with a shared challenge. Well, here we are, and here I go.

I think that today, perhaps more than ever in modern memory, many of us are struggling to engage in civil and productive conversations with people with whom we disagree about politics, religion, and other important issues. Many of us have lost friends or become alienated from family members as a result of arguments over those matters. It has already reached a fevered pitch in August, and we have months to go before the November elections, and it’s not as if the tensions will end there.

In all candor, I don’t think that the Bible offers us a tidy solution to this dilemma and I don’t think one exists. It seems to me that Jesus calls us to a place that honors the truth, which he assures us will set us free. He summons us to speak up. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “silence in the face of evil is itself evil” and in that spirit Jesus challenges our silences.

Jesus also expressly recognized that our service of the truth may rupture some relationships. Even very close ones. He acknowledged that discipleship means sometimes we will have to shake the dust off our sandals and move on.

But I also think that Jesus tells us to accept those consequences only as a last resort. Our first responsibility, always, is to follow the new commandment that he gave to us: To love one another. He implores us to think twice—three times, four times, seventy-seven times—before we set up barriers to other human beings. He urges us to hesitate before putting on somebody else’s armor. Like the narrator in the Robert Frost poem, before we build a wall He wants us to think carefully about what we’re walling in, and what we’re walling out.

I understand that what I’m describing is more easily said than done. People who disagree with us can be impolite, inconsiderate, thoughtless, and blissfully indifferent to facts, evidence, and data. They can believe things that we see as not only irrational, but dangerous. We can try to bring humility to the expression of our own beliefs and find none whatsoever in their expression of theirs.

But here’s the thing: In the end, we have absolutely no control over what other people do. At best, at best, we can control only ourselves. And what does the Lord require of us in that regard, but to act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God?

Years ago, the most dangerous man I knew was a guy named Clarence. He was a high-ranking Tae Kwon Do master with whom I occasionally sparred, an experience that always left me black and blue and humbled. A Vietnam veteran, Clarence had been wounded in his service of our country and bore the scars of conflict. He was an expert with a wide variety of weapons, was built as solidly as a fire hydrant, and was one of the few martial artists I knew who could break house bricks with his bare hands.

Clarence was also the kindest and most gracious man I knew. He smiled easily and he had impeccable manners. Once, when I was out at a social event with him and some of our younger karate students, a stranger said something rude to him. We all held our breath and took a step back, expecting World War III to erupt. Instead, Clarence laughed, made a joke of it, shook the guy’s hand, and defused the situation.

One of the youngsters, puzzled by this turn of events, asked Clarence why he’d been so nice to the man. “That guy is a jerk!” the boy declared. Clarence responded: “I did not treat him that way because of who he is. I treated him that way because of who I am.” In that moment it occurred to me that Clarence, who sometimes invited me to the three-hour-long services at his Baptist church in Ypsilanti, had been paying attention on Sundays.

Jesus tells us to spend no time judging others. He tells us to reflect instead on the question that our faith puts to us over and over and over again, as we meet all the challenges that life brings our way. Perhaps you can imagine Jesus seated near you, looking into your eyes, smiling slightly, leaning in, and softly asking that question:

“So, what are YOU supposed to be?”

“What are YOU supposed to be?”

“What are YOU supposed to be?”

And the people said: Amen.