GOLIATH AND SANDUSKY: THE STORMS OF LIFE (i.e., to bad coaches aren't BOUND by the same OATH as our beloved doctors, eh?)

 

​1st Samuel 17:1-49 / Mark 4:35-41 / 2nd Corinthians 6:2

 

            Who are today’s Goliaths?

 

            Surely one of them is Jerry Sandusky, finally convicted on Friday of 45 counts of sexual abuse, indecent assault, endangering the welfare of children, and on and on.  The foreman of the jury, a gray-haired, middle-aged man, stood in the back row of the jury box and named each of the 45 counts, saying after each in a firm, strong voice, “Guilty.”  Guilty not only of the act of raping children itself, but guilty of abusing his fame as a football coach and of conducting a charade of charitable work to entice the poorest, often fatherless and most vulnerable of the town’s youth so that he could prey on them to satisfy his sexual greed.  It was, time and again, these vulnerable kids whom Sandusky chose to target, trick, molest and injure forever.  Under the camouflage of mentoring, the coach stripped them of their innocence and left them like dirty towels on an empty locker room floor or alone in his dark basement on a ratty old waterbed.  His victims told story after story in the witness stand.  Guilty.  Guilty.  Guilty.

 

            When the verdict was read, the crowd that had gathered outside the courthouse roared with cheers and shouts of joy.  Yet just seven months ago—November 9, 2011—the crowd gathered at Penn State to protest that charges were made against the coach.  With bullhorns blaring, students marched from Old Main to Beaver Stadium to support their hero, Sandusky.  It’s easy to cheer the verdict today, but what is the responsibility of the crowd who gathered seven months ago to support their hero?  That crowd cried, “Be true to your school!” and said that bringing charges against Sandusky was unpatriotic.  Are they guilty, too?  What about the college administrators who turned a blind eye because Sandusky was a sports hero?

 

            Our Bible story today uses the word “champion” to describe Goliath.  It says that Goliath was the champion of the Philistines and was 9 feet tall.  Jerry Sandusky is 6’2.”  Over and over again he was described as a hero, as a man among men, as an example to follow.  One assistant coach who witnessed Sandusky raping a boy in the shower testified that he didn’t stop it because he couldn’t believe his eyes because “Jerry Sandusky is a saint.”  A few years ago, President Bush praised Sandusky as a “shining example” and Senator Rick Santorum honored him with an “Angels of Adoption” award.  It begs the question: Is it good to have champions and heroes?     

 

            Because of their holocaust experience in Nazi Germany, the Jews of modern Israel have a wary relationship with the concept of heroes.  After all, Hitler was a hero to the Germans.  There is that sense of a hero as being someone beyond criticism, someone everybody else idealizes, and someone whom the rest of us turn our personal power over to. The classic definition of champion is exactly how it’s used in this Bible story: a champion is someone who fights our battles for us and, ultimately, makes our moral decisions for us…as Hitler did for the Germans. 

 

            So Israelis have an educational campaign in their contemporary culture that teaches that “democracy is anti-heroic.”  What they mean is that democracy depends upon all of us taking personal action (in a collective way) by never giving our power to a single hero or champion who makes decisions for us.  To illustrate this, a steel statue stands in the ruins of Caesarea by the sea, the Roman capital of the ancient occupation of Israel.  From a distance it looks to tourists like the typical Greek, Roman or Aryan statues of athletes and gods that we’re used to, but, as you get closer, you see that it is really a grotesque figure, a male twisted into a monster wearing a Nazi helmet from World War II.  It makes you stop and wonder: is it good to have heroes and champions, or is it better for us each to take personal responsibility (in a collective way) and never give our power away to a single leader so that, in this sense, “democracy is anti-heroic.”

 

            Let me say one more thing about Jerry Sandusky.  Because the children he abused were boys of 10 or 11, we can be sure that Fox News and the Religious Right will use this tragedy to scapegoat all gay people, even though statistics prove that pedophilia is done disproportionately by heterosexuals and that pedophilia and sexual orientation are not the same thing because, like rape, it is more about power than sex.  The swamp out of which characters like Sandusky evolve is homophobia and heterosexism.  Sandusky is guilty and deserves life imprisonment, but he is also sick—and it’s a social sickness.  A hero and a scapegoat are two sides of the same coin. 

 

            Sandusky came of age before Stonewall in 1969, before the modern gay liberation movement, and his personality was twisted and perverted not only into pederasty but also into a life of devious manipulation rooted in extreme self-hatred.  In my experience, that perversion is almost entirely subconscious.  In the society in which Sandusky came of age, it was impossible for him to develop into a healthy and whole gay man.  When I was a pastor in Cleveland, I was called upon to counsel a man in jail who’d been found guilty of pederasty.  When I asked him how he could take advantage of his power over these children, he replied that he had no sense of having power over them, that on the “inside” he felt they were his peers, he felt that he was still 10 or 11, and that he was interacting with equals.  That’s sick, but that’s the point: it’s sick.

 

            What if Jerry Sandusky had grown up in a society in which he was affirmed as a gay boy?  What if the Catholic Church he grew up in had accepted and loved him and taught him that God loved him just as he was?  What if, as a young athlete, he had been encouraged to train for the Gay Olympics?  What if he had grown up in a school in which he could have brought a male date to prom?  I believe that chances are that he would have been able to develop into a healthy adult gay man.  But instead, just about the time he reached puberty, his sexual development was shut down by the culture in which he lived, and he would spend the rest of his life as a sexual pre-teen, trying to get his needs met through children whom he experienced as emotional peers. 

 

            Meanwhile, his adult ego developed into a twisted personality who married a woman who was obviously oblivious, with whom he had no natural children but adopted six and fostered many more.  He even started a charity for powerless, disadvantaged youth from which he picked his victims.  But his sexuality was completely split off from the rest of his personality.  After he raped his child victims, he abandoned them on the locker room floor or on the waterbed in his basement as he came up the stairs from his subconscious and shut the door on what he had just done, so that he could carry on with his conscious life as an American hero.  That’s a big part of why same-gender marriage is so important: not just to treat LGBT people equally, but because marriage functions in any society to help us all integrate our sexuality into the rest of our lives instead of pushing it down into the shadows where it is acted out in dysfunctional, twisted ways.   

 

            Our heterosexist, homophobic society created Jerry Sandusky.  One of the most tragic stories told on the witness stand (by the young man, now 28, known as Victim # 4) was that his  teenage teammates suspected that something inappropriate was going on between him and the coach but, instead of helping him, they teased him about being gay.  This insured that he would not tell or cry for help.  The same people who teased that victim of Sandusky as kids, gathered last November to protest Sandusky being accused, and then gathered again on Friday to cheer for his conviction.  In that sense they are scapegoating Sandusky for a social problem we all share.  

 

            We are so used to thinking of Davey & Goliath as a children’s story that we forget it was written for adults in a time of war 1,000 years before Jesus.  The Philistines were an aggressive enemy nation who lived in what’s now the Gaza Strip.  They came in big boats from Turkey and invaded the rich agricultural land along the coast.  They were advanced technologically with bronze weapons and chariots while the Hebrews still used stone weapons and leather shields.  So the Philistines were stronger militarily and pushed the Hebrews up into the mountain spine of Israel.  The Egyptians called them the Sea People.  The word philistine is Hebrew for “invaders.”

 

            When our story for today takes place, the Israelites have already suffered many defeats and are running scared.  They’re in the foothills, their camp separated from the Philistine’s camp by the Valley of Elah.  As the youngest of seven sons, 17-year-old David is at home tending the family flock in nearby Bethlehem.  Their father, Jesse, sends David to the front with a care package of breads and cheeses for his warrior big brothers.  What ensues is the story of how innocence and faith defeat a bully representing cynicism and power.

 

            What could be more up-to-date than a story about a bully?  Bullies are in the news these days, a problem so serious in our society that many state legislatures are fighting along partisan lines over whether to pass anti-bullying laws for our schools or whether anti-gay bullying is a form of “religious freedom.”  Just last week, the majority in the Michigan legislature bullied women representatives from the minority party into silence, thereby quashing free speech—the basis of democracy—as the majority steamrolled through a law curtailing the reproductive rights of women.  But the minority stood up to that Goliath by performing The Vagina Monologues on the capitol steps on Tuesday.

 

            Whether it’s on the playground, in the locker room, in the workplace, on Wall Street, or in state legislatures, what power do we have against the superior force of bullies?  The core of the story of David and Goliath—the moral of the story—is in the verbal confrontation between the child and the giant in the Valley of Elah.  Goliath shouts, “I am going to kill you and leave your body for the vultures and the jackals.”  David shouts back to the bully, “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you with my faith in God.”

 

            The faith that David is talking about is not magic, but courage.  The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is fear.  It is magical thinking to believe that faith could have protected the victims of Sandusky from his abuse.  It leads to thinking, “If God existed this would not have happened.”  But it took faith for Sandusky’s victims to break through their embarrassment and shame and come forward to testify against him.  As David shows when he takes off Saul’s armor and walks toward Goliath wearing only his vulnerability, faith is courage, the opposite of fear.  As he walks toward him, Goliath taunts David like the bully he is.  But again, David asserts his faith and says to him, “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you with my faith in the God of Israel…so that all who are here will know that God does not save by the sword, but by faith.”

 

            So there we have it.  “God does not save by the sword, but by faith.”  We want to teach our children the Bible stories that organically implant faith in them.  Again, not faith as magical thinking, but faith as our relationship with the Whole, the Transcendent, the Big Picture, and with both justice and compassion.  We want to give our children a faith that will empower them, even when they’re young, not to cower, but to stand up for themselves in the storms of life because they know that they are not alone.  It’s up to us adults to be the grace that believes them.

 

            Our gospel story is about such faith development.  Jesus and the disciples are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee.  A great storm comes up.  The waves beat against the boat and are swamping it.  But Jesus is in the back of the boat on a cushion, sleeping like a baby in this violent storm.   

 

            It reminds me of the image of the Sleeping Buddha, which you have probably seen.  The Buddha is stretched out on his side, his head resting on his right hand.  His eyes are closed and the expression on his face is one of extreme peace.  Some say it pictures the moment of the Buddha’s death.  Others say it pictures the Buddha’s life and the spiritual path that leads to bliss, tranquility, and the calm joy that is true liberation. 

 

            Whichever, Jesus is certainly sleeping the sleep of tranquility in the midst of the storm.  Meanwhile, the disciples—which means us—are having a panic attack.  They wake Jesus up and yell, “Rabbi, do you not care that we are perishing?!”  Jesus wakes up and responds to the disciples’ absurd question by telling the wind to quiet down and says to the sea, “Peace; be still.”  Then he turns to the disciples and says, “Why are you afraid?  Have you no faith?”

 

            Storms will come, you can count on that.  Times may come when you feel God is asleep, not taking care of you, not protecting you.  Don’t you care? you will pray.  Of course God cares.  It’s just that God is not worried.  Not at all.

 

            You see, we are all perishing, bit by bit, day by day.  No matter how young we are, we are not long for this world.  That’s just part of life.  God won’t take death from you, won’t come between you and the storm.  But God will go through it with you.  Even as the waves of your fear beat against your boat, there God is, curled up in the stern, unworried, vulnerable, baby-like, sleeping the sleep of serenity and peace.  God is with you and God cannot sink.  We just need to remember that the boat is not our bodies.  The boat is our faith.

 

            Storms and bullies will come in our lives.  Our goal is to have enough faith to rest in the grace that keeps us calm in the storm.  When Jesus says, “Peace, be still,” who do you think he is talking to?  Even when facing the threat of a giant bully, David had the faith to remain calm and focused enough to pick up five smooth stones and do what needed to be done.  Even if this was to be his end, he knew God was with him in that.  Storms will come.  Peace.  Be still.

​For full story by Pastor Dan, visit: http://www.sixthavenueucc.org/sermons/320-goliath-and-sandusky-the-storms-of-life

 

 

Pastor Dan Geslin

6th Avenue UCC

12 Ordinary 2012