| The Goliath Project |
July 16 , 2000
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Have you ever been confused?
I think Darva Conger is confused.
First the Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire fiasco...
Married, unhappy right away...annulment...
She seemed repentant and on national TV said,
"I made a mistake...I'm not all that... I'm not a gold
digger... money isn't important to me...
I just want to go back to my normal life!"
And I'm sure finances became a concern for her.
So she stepped out of her...clothes and received half a million
dollars to let someone take pictures of her without them and publish
them in a magazine.
She said in an interview,
"This is opportunity, and is it wrong to take it?"
I think she'd already made up her mind on that one.
Money speaks very loudly.
And one more thing.
I don't think we should judge her.
It's not our place.
Learn from what you see and be what God calls you to be.
But Darva does point out one of the key points of our
faith...
that is, that the difficulty of returning to normal life after doing
something dumb does not justify taking the easy road when things get
difficult.
A Christian understanding is that doing something dumb often
brings suffering that isn't cured immediately.
Jesus said it this way,
"The road to hell is wide and smooth.
The road to heaven is narrow and difficult."
I've just set up the scripture,
but it won't make sense that way for a few minutes...
Read the text...
1 Samuel 17:(1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49
The conventional spin usually casts this as a battle between a
runt and a giant.
The little guy against the big guy, and the little guy wins.
This view says the world has too many alpha male Goliaths running
amok.
We need more Davids, not Goliaths.
More run-of-the-mill runts, rather than extraordinarily colossal
creatures.
This is what Jesus was hinting at when he said,
"those who humble themselves will be exalted"
(Luke 14:11),
and what Paul was driving home with his words,
"God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the
wise;
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong"
(1 Corinthians 1:27).
This is also what drives the whole Harry Potter phenomenon these
days,
for who could be a better fictional David than Harry?
He's a powerful little boy who is smart and athletic
and kind and virtuous and forced to do battle with the evil Lord
Voldemort.
Opposite of Harry Potter is the disturbing way in which I
see the Goliath syndrome at work in the striving for
attention in teenagers and young adults.
The desire to be the best looking,
the one receiving the most attention...
I fear the influence of Darva Conger on young people coming up
into the sufferings of life.
I fear that what she is offering is,
when things get difficult, do what is easy.
High school is a battlefield...
to determine one's identity,
To try on different personality traits...
who will I be...
and to receive approval or disapproval from our peers.
To get attention and be popular...
to have the best legs,
to show the best bust,
to be willing to do what others want us to do in the back seat of
dad's car,
or in the family room before a parent gets home from work.
And many young people give away too much of their life to become
larger than life in popularity...
Goliath.
And in the end...
those who placed their hope in being popular and strong will come
crashing down...
alone.
But it didn't start with teenage years.
And it doesn't end when one turns 20.
I'm going to pick on the generation that preceded mine...
The first boomers were born in late 1945...
the last were born in the mid-60's.
All 80 million of them...
they are the Goliath generation.
And everyone has gotten out of their way...
Hospitals were built to birth them,
Schools were built to educate them,
Business boomed because of their entrance into the market,
And now as they enter retirement, a strong place to invest money is
elder care facilities.
They are going to control the political front for the next 40
years...
because no one votes more than retirees...
But for all of their lives the message to them has been,
"you can be anything you want..."
"aspire",
"build expectations and they will be
fulfilled"...
or as Jimminy Cricket croons,
"When you wish upon a star...
makes no difference who you are...
when you wish upon a star...
your dreams come true"
"If you only wish hard enough."
And so they aspired to become head of the company,
president of the organization,
"the best, the brightest, the leader..."
to be special...
We see it all around...
adults working to become the biggest and the best and the
cornerstone of the organization...
to get ahead and win....
to be the Goliath that everyone looks up too...
Purchase the signs of success on the battlefield...
it's called affluence...
Always striving to afford the next rung.
Unfortunately there are only so many CEO, and head office, and
leadership positions...
Only a few are called "the best"
Many would-be leaders and wanna-be bosses are stuck in middle
management,
stuck in the cubicles rather than the corner office...
and there is a palatable sadness about them...
and words like futile and ineffectual come to mind...
because they have not made peace with not being number one...
And so all of their hours are spent at work...
their kids raise themselves...
their spouses are alone...
but they're gonna make it, they're gonna achieve victory!
And in the end they come crashing down on the battlefield, alone.
Seems that when you make a choice to be the biggest, the
best...
then everything must turn,
must give way, to allow that to happen, to make that happen...
In fact and in fiction, God loves the underdog, the beta
with alpha potential.
It's good drama, perhaps even good theology.
But, get this, it is not the point of the story.
What if I could show you another way to view life...
maybe even a different purpose to your life?
In Matthew 18:1-5,
Jesus is asked a question by his disciples,
"Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"
(Which in the vernacular of our text today might read,
"Who will be known as Goliath in the kingdom of
heaven?")
He called a little child and had him stand among them.
And he said:
"I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like
little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest
in the kingdom of heaven.
And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes
me."
Before we get back David and Goliath, I think we might want to
listen to this, linger on it, think about the
characteristics of being like a child...
Like a child...
Humble, open to surprises, trusting, spontaneous, vulnerable.
Like a child...
Not self-sustaining, and reliant on a provider for sustenance,
dependent.
Jesus' words are not about character traits...
such as tantrums or getting your way or emotional outbursts...
but a different understanding of status...
Like a child...
because in that day children were regarded as inferior and without
status we might want to included these adjectives in our
thinking...
inferior and without status.
And this is exactly the way King Saul viewed the matter.
"You are just a boy," he said to David
(v. 33).
And when Goliath, the giant from Gath, saw David come out to do
battle, he said pretty much the same thing that King Saul
said...
text says,
"When the Philistine looked and saw David, he disdained
him, for he was only a youth"
(v. 42).
It is David, however, who understands what's happening.
The text makes it clear that the conflict is not between the
small and the big, the weak and the strong, the runt and the
giant...
but between a God-fearing person and a God-sneering person.
A person who trusted God to do what needed done...and a person who
was self-reliant.
"You come to me,"
David said to Goliath,
"with sword and spear and javelin;
but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts"
(v. 45).
The world may want Goliaths and may encourage us to develop a
good case of Goliath syndrome,
but God has an ongoing "David Program" that calls
ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
Maybe you're sitting there saying,
"I'm not a Goliath, Jonathan, I'm a member of your
generation
and following all 80 million in that generation my job
prospect has pretty much been,
"You want fries with that?"
Okay, maybe you're not a Goliath...
that's good.
But are you a David?
In that ancient battle in the valley of Palestine,
there was no shortage of spectators on the sidelines.
People who stood on the edge with their hands frozen at their sides
in fear...
who did nothing.
Only one showed up who could do the job.
Let me tell you something...
for our church in this new century, one is not enough.
We need to be Davids in the face of a Goliath world
where as a nation we are the biggest and the strongest and the
undefeatable.
We need to be Davids and stand against power that lifts up other
gods for worship.
And because standing up usually includes a great deal of
fear,
we must stand with each other and proclaim another truth of our
faith...
that is when you are standing for what is right, you never stand
alone.
We must be the church.
Go do it.
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