Resisting Saul’s Armour
Sermon by Jamie Howison on 1 Samuel 17: 4-11, 19-23, 32-49
As I begin, just a little background on this story from 1st Samuel. In our reading last week we learned that King Saul had been discredited in the eyes of God, and so this young boy David has been secretly anointed as the new king; the real king. Saul knows nothing of this, and as this story opens he is positioned with his army in the valley of Elah, facing the enemy Philistine army. The Philistines have this giant of a man named Goliath, who has just issued a challenge: “Choose a man for yourselves, and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants; but if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us.” Never mind a full-scale battle, let’s just hang the entire works on combat between one soldier from each side. Easy for you to say, Goliath… look at the size of you! “When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.” Yep, they sure are.
And into the scene comes David. His older brothers are soldiers in Saul’s army, so their father Jesse has sent the shepherd boy to the army camp with food for the brothers. While he’s there David hears about Goliath’s challenge, and goes straight to Saul to offer his services. You? You’re but a boy, Saul replies. “David said, ‘The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine,’” at which point the king accepts David’s offer. Clearly he’s become rather desperate, has King Saul.
And now comes what is to me the most intriguing part of the story:
Saul clothed David with his own armour; he put a bronze helmet on his head and clothed him with a coat of mail. David strapped Saul’s sword over the armour, and he tried in vain to walk, for he was not used to them.
And back to his basic shepherd’s garment he goes, and then it is off to select five smooth stones from the brook to use with his shepherd’s sling. And of course, you know the rest, with the first stone fired from a distance felling the Philistine warrior.
Saul had thought that any fight must be waged wearing armour, and that his own armour would be best. Never mind that the boy can’t even walk when he’s wearing it—after all, earlier in 1st Samuel it was noted that Saul “stood head and shoulders above everyone else”—in Saul’s mind his was the best armour. And therein lies the heart of the message of this story.
Saul is exercising precisely the sort of kingship that Samuel had warned against when the people first began asking for a king. You’ll remember that, I’m sure. If you have a king, your sons will end up in his army, your daughters will be made servants, your land and your crops will be taxed. Kings are a risk.
And so here is Saul, head and shoulders taller than all the others, with his precious armour and strong sword, able to think only in terms of royal military strategy, and prepared to send out a boy as a sacrificial lamb. Saul’s armour represents precisely the sort of kingship Samuel had warned against, and the storyteller knows it. When David has all that armour strapped on to his body, he knows it too. I can’t even move in this, he says. This isn’t who I am. If I go, I go only with what I know, and part of what I know is that God will go with me.
Not that he wanders out and charms Goliath with his ruddy good looks, bargaining for a peace treaty. No, he does go out to do battle; there’s no way around that. But he doesn’t go out encumbered with all that was slowly sinking around the feet of the failing King Saul, which included both a trust in his own military and royal savvy, and a willingness to sacrifice the life of a boy rather than taking a risk himself.
This is the story that introduces David’s promise of becoming a king unlike Saul. It is a winding path that will eventually land David on the throne, and we’ll be wandering along that path in the coming weeks and months. He will continue to show himself a very different figure from Saul… though there will be times in his kingship where he will put on “Saul’s armour”; where he will begin to make the sorts of decisions that often come with unchecked royal power, rather than from a foundational trust that says, “God will go with me.” The writers behind these texts know that the painful truth of the man lies ahead, and they will not gloss that over. There is an undercurrent in these stories that says, “Oh David, had you only remembered those five smooth stones you picked out of the stream.”
That’s the thing about Saul’s armour, you see. It might be rejected on this or that particular day, but it is always hanging in the closet as a temptation to begin thinking that he—David—or any one of us, frankly, knows best how things really should be run. It is the very thing that landed David in his adultery with Bathsheba, among things.
And, I would want to suggest, Saul’s armour is the very thing that churches of various denominations decided to put on back in 1876, when The Indian Act was enacted, and the federal government invited us to have a role in establishing and running the residential schools. That is not something we were ever meant to do; not if you read the gospels and get a picture of Jesus firmly in view, and not if you look at the expansion of the early church and the way it embraced peoples of various cultures and nations.
When the original Selkirk Settlers first arrived in this part of the world in 1812—people who themselves had been dispossessed of their land in the Orkney Islands—the only reason they survived those first winters was on account of the generosity and hospitality of Chief Peguis and his people. The very first treaty, struck in 1817, long before Treaty One, is known as the Selkirk Treaty. It was negotiated with Indigenous leaders in the area, and allowed for the settlers to use the land extending in two mile tracts along both sides of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, leaving the rest of the land to the Indigenous peoples. This was a good agreement for all, and while Saul’s Armour would soon be hanging in a cupboard in Upper Fort Garry, most of those settlers were not inclined to want to see it taken out.
But time rolled forward, more people arrived, deals were made with the historic fur trading companies, the land was deemed more and more valuable, such that the 1817 treaty became less and less relevant in the eyes of those who sought for Manitoba to enter confederacy, and slowly Saul’s Armour lumbered out of that cupboard, to be donned by government and then—tragically—by the churches. As a gospel people we should have recognized that we couldn’t walk in that armour; that we were encumbered by it. And maybe some did recognize that, but not enough, and not before this gospel people had that armour so tightly bound on our body that the churches began to really believe that it fit. And sadly, we trusted that armour, and those who had first been our hosts in these lands were deemed savages who needed to be cleansed of their primitive ways and made to be more like us. Never mind the fact that Peguis himself was baptised in the church; apparently that wasn’t relevant.
Saul’s armour, you see, is that seductive. David would eventually don that armour and do his dreadful damage, but thanks be to God, the one known as the Son of David resisted that temptation when he faced down the Satan at the end of his forty day fast in the wilderness. And because he wouldn’t don Saul’s armour, we all have been given the chance of starting again. There is no grace to be found in Saul’s armour, but only in the One who definitively refused to wear it right through his life and death and resurrection. And he calls us to refuse to wear it, and repent when we have.
