Sampson and Michael 1996 | Judges 16

That old snake, Satan, and all of his angels, are cast down from Heaven after a bitter battle. Michael, leading Heaven's forces, succeeds in defeating that old dragon, and ridding Heaven of his turmoil forever.

Thanks a lot, Michael--yours might be a better neighborhood now, but ours has gone to the dogs! --or to the demons, as the case may be!

What you have just heard is a very recent addition to our tradition's mythology. Now when I say recent, I mean that this story came into prominence much later than most of our biblical stories and probably began to first circulate in its present form in the last couple of centuries before Christ.

Its origin is Persian--in fact all of our stories about angels originate here, and were inserted into the Jewish reckoning of things following the Babylonian exile. It is our tradition's Pandora's Box. If you'll remember that myth from Greek culture, the gods give Pandora a box and insist that she never open it. Of course, she does what they knew all along she would do--she opens it, and unleashes sorrow and temptation upon the world.

In our story from Revelation this morning, we see a parallel occurrence. Satan and his angels are cast to the Earth. Now that Heaven is free from mischief, planet earth, watch out! Because here is the source of trouble. Satan of course goes on in the popular imagination to become the snake who tempts Adam and Eve and brings all humanity to sorrow.

But it all starts here with the war in Heaven. Michael is successful, but Heaven's gain is our loss. Funny how there are two sides to every situation, isn't it?

Now before this myth gained popularity, the source of temptation was thought to be, oddly enough, God himself. We still hear a remnant of this in the Lord's Prayer when we ask God not to lead us into temptation. But over all, the Jews found it difficult to deal with a morally ambivalent deity, and so, as so many cultures have done, they split God into two opposing forces in their imaginations. Thus we have the unimpeachable God and the all-foul Devil to contend with, which, while it doesn't answer all of our philosophical dilemmas, at least it gives us someone to blame.

In our story from Judges this morning, it is very tempting to blame Samson's fiancée for the great tragedy that occurred. Samson comes off looking like the hero, and thirty Philistine men lose their lives.

This is of course a very shallow reading of the text. Samson is a beast, any way you slice it. This story is an echo of a story we'll hear later in our series, when Delilah acts very similarly to Samson's fiancée. Probably these are two separate traditions stemming from the same ancient tales. The editor of Judges, perhaps not wanting to choose the wrong one, includes both of them. We see this kind of reduplication of stories in both the Old and New Testaments, and this is clearly a classic case.

Now when I was a youngster hearing this story and the Delilah story in Sunday School, the message that came through loud and clear was "Beware of the Philistine women." I was sure that when my Dad sat me down for our obligatory talk about the birds and the bees, it would be mostly about the dangers of Philistine women. Now I had never seen a Philistine woman, and I wasn't sure how they differed in appearance from Baptist women, but I had seen a Bridgett Bardot movie on TV once, and so I had a pretty good idea.

Of course as I got older I realized that there are no "Philistine women" as such. Delilah and her counterpart in today's story have gotten a bad rap.

When we really look at the story, these women have less in common with Bridgett Bardot that they do with James Bond. There actions are about protecting the security of their loved ones, their nation, their way of life. There is nothing in their actions that we wouldn't cheer Sean Connery on for in the Bond films. In fact, their acts are heroic in their own right, and even if they are on the "other side" in these stories, we can affirm the right intentions behind their dubious actions.

But Samson, on the other hand, it is hard to be so kind to him. Does he seem to be a bit of a hothead to you? A bit of a bully? And yet, in our imaginations, he is the "hero" of this cycle of stories. What does this tell us?

One thing we can glean from this apparent disparity is the danger in assigning labels. Like our ancestors who thought it was too imaginationally taxing to love a good God who sometimes acts like the Devil, we have a tendency to polarize people and events in our imaginations. It is much easier to deal with someone whom we can pigeon-hole neatly into "good" or "bad" categories. We don't have to think so hard, we don't have to listen so closely, and we don't have to forgive quite so much.

If someone is established in our imaginations, we don't want to hear about their indescretions or dubious behavior, as the O.J. Simpson case made painfully clear. If someone has been labeled a "troublemaker" we don't want to hear that perhaps he or she has a point and should be listened to.

But we also find ourselves living in a fantasy world of our own construction when we do that, because the world is NOT neatly pigeon-holed into tidy black-and-white, good-and-evil categories. People are messy, and if we want to live in the real world, we have to embrace to whole messy lot of them, warts and all.

Only then is really intimacy possible. Only then is real community possible. And only then is real friendship possible--and that is what God wants of us. Does it require work? You bet it does. Does it require us to think? Much more than we are comfortable doing. Does it require us to listen? To an exhausting degree. Does it require us to forgive? It requires more forgiveness than we are capable of. And yet the requirement of the Gospel is clear. "How many times do I forgive my brother or sister? Seven times?" "No," Says Jesus, "But seventy times seven."

This morning I invite you to embrace the whole. While St. Michael succeeded in ridding Heaven of Satan, we are stuck with him. So, we can gripe about the lemons, or make lemonade. We can project the shadow onto our enemies and make the shadow bigger and badder than ever, or we can embrace it, domesticate it, and ask it to do the dishes now and again. We can demonize and polarize and make a slaughter of the wedding party, or we can open the doors wide and welcome everybody, warts, masks, faults and all. I believe the Gospel makes clear what we should do.

Next week we will continue our journey with our dubious hero Samson, as he continues his exploits terrorizing the poor Philistines. And if we've only learned one lesson out of this sermon, perhaps it's that Philistine women aren't so bad after all, and if anyone knows a nice one, you have my number. Amen.