By Rev. Christina Tinglof, delivered on Sunday, July 20, 2008
The story of Samson always frustrates me. I was talking to Dylan Elliott-Hart about the story this week., and he just about summed it up for me when he said “Samson was pretty dumb.” Pretty dumb, indeed. If I was a teacher and had Samson in my high school class I might write on his report card, “needs improvement, doesn’t live up to his potential, never learns his lesson.”
Samson’s beginnings are hopeful. Although Samson’s parents are unable to have children, an angel appears to them and tells them that they will indeed have a son, that that son will have a special calling as a Nazirite. A Nazirite was simply a man or woman who was set apart for God’s purposes for a certain amount of time, and during that amount of time had to follow three rules: they could not eat grapes or drink wine or wine vinegar, they could not cut their hair, and they could not be around corpses or graves. Samson was to be a Nazirite from birth, meaning he would be under the vow his whole life. If he kept his vows, he would be blessed with incredible strength, strength that would help him live up to his calling. The angel even promised Samson’s mother that he would begin Israel’s deliverance from the hands of the Philistines, a people who had been oppressing Israel for 40 years – you may remember the Philistines from the story of David and Goliath – Goliath was a Philistine. Add all of that together, and I’m sure Samson’s parents were thinking — “Wow. Our son is going to be awesome.”
So, here we have young Samson, born to a woman who wasn’t supposed to have any children, set aside for a special purpose by God, supposed to help free the Israelites from the oppression of the Philistines, the last judge of the Israelites. Samson starts off with a load of promise. The Bible says he ruled as a judge for 20 years after his disastrous first marriage (in a nutshell, his Philistine wife betrays him to his Philistine enemies because they threatened to kill her), and those years go by without comment. But the rest of Samson’s story is highlighted by his flaws, which for me come under three categories of misunderstanding.
First, Samson didn’t really understand power.
Second, Samson didn’t really understand love.
Third, Samson didn’t really understand God.
Let’s talk about power first. Samson was given a huge gift from God when it came to his strength, but he seemed to depend too much on that strength and not enough on God. In the chapters before our story, the times when Samson is able to defeat his enemie, each time it is said that the Spirit of God is upon him. His own superior strength appears most powerfully and effectively only when God is behind it. But Samson doesn’t really recognize that – not once does he offer a sacrifice or a prayer of praise – in fact, in the story of Samson, he only offers two prayers – the first a kind of sarcastic prayer for God to get him some water when he’s really thirsty in the desert, and the second, at the end of our story, moments before his death, the prayer of a slightly humbled man.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Samson misunderstanding power is obvious in the passage we read today. Samson meets a woman named Delilah and falls in love with her, and almost immediately she starts scheming to trick him into giving her the secret of his strength. She’s doing it for money, those dreaded Philistines are back again, and have offered her silver to get that secret from him.
Delilah is determined. She tries three times to betray him until finally, on the fourth try, she is successful. The question of the hour is: why does Samson allow himself to fall into the same trap 4 times? One would think that after the first time, and at the very least the second time, Samson would figure out what was going on and decide that Delilah herself was untrustworthy. But he doesn’t. I can speculate that two things might be going on. Possibly Samson is so confident in his own power that he doesn’t really think anything can take away his strength. After all, he has not acknowledged God at any other point, so it is entirely possible that he is overly confident, and believes his strength will save him in any circumstance. What he doesn’t realize is that power is not just physical. Delilah is quite powerful herself. She is the brains in the relationship. She is totally focused, she is not caught up in feelings for Samson, but she is singlemindedly bent on exploiting his weaknesses (his over confidence, his attraction and fondness for her). Ultimately, she is more powerful than him – she probably couldn’t beat him in an arm wrestling match, but through her wits and perserverance she defeats the strong. After her fourth attempt, he tells her the truth, and as a result he loses his strength and is sent to be a slave for the Philistines.
I said before that I can speculate that two things might be going on with regards to Samson’s “dumbness” in his relationship with Delilah. The first is that Samson is overconfident in his own strength and power. The second is our second point, that Samson doesn’t really understand what love is. The passage says that Samson fell in love with Delilah, but not that she fell in love with him. It’s pretty obvious to the modern reader that she doesn’t really love him – why isn’t it obvious to Samson? My dad told me if you ask someone out three times and they say no every time, it’s not going to work out and you should just give up. So maybe Samson’s parents never sat down and told him that when if a woman attempts to steal your God given strength to betray you to your mortal enemies FOUR times, it’s not really love and you should just give up. Paul hadn’t written 1 Corinthians 13 yet, you know the one that says, “Love is patient , love is kind, love does not boast,” so Samson couldn’t compare Delilah’s or his own behavior to that framework and see that neither of them was being very patient or kind. Whatever the case, despite Delilah’s repeated betrayals and nagging, Samson still seems to think there is love there – and so when she accuses him of not loving her because he will not tell her how he could lose his strength, he caves in and tells her. And then he loses his strength – are you beginning to see why I find this story so frustrating?
From the beginning of chapter 14, when we first start hearing about Samson as an adult, he immediately comes across as self centered and overconfident. The story of Delilah only confirms it. It is not until he is finally captured by the Philistines that he begins to really understand where his strength and power really come from. It’s not until all that he has is torn from him that he turns from overconfidence into humility.
Let’s take a pause here. Samson’s script is not an unusual one. I’ll allow that the specifics are different – none of us (I hope) has been betrayed so terrifically by our significant others – but is it so unusual to have someone who kind of forgets about God, and instead lives according to their own strength, counting on their warped understanding of their own power to save them? Is it so unusual to have someone who so completely misunderstands what love is that it becomes their undoing? Is it so unusual to have one person make the same mistakes over and over, to the point where we drop our head in our hands in frustration? When I phrase it like that, it sounds pretty familiar. It sounds like it could even be me at different points in my life.
Sometimes, like Samson, I tend to see prayer as a last resort – as a method to try if all my other attempts have failed. I have so many resources at my disposal – education, experience, material stuff, that I tend to use the as a support and a crutch instead of turning to God. Sometimes I try to get at a solution to my problem at every angle, trying every trick in my bag until finally someone says, “Did you pray about it?” and I say, “Oh, yeah! I could do that.” Sometimes I’m as dumb as Samson.
We just finished two weeks of our full day summer program, Brighter City, here at the church – make sure to check out the pictures downstairs. As the director, every year I worry that we won’t have enough people to fill all the spots we need to fill at camp, every year I get a Chicken Little complex “the sky is falling! The sky is falling! Disaster! Nothing’s going to work out!” I try to use my own charm and persuasive wiles to get people to volunteer, but everything starts to seem dire to me around the end of May. I try to think about how I can cover any open spots by myself, jumping from art class to group leader to singing leader. And every year, my mother is the calm face of faith – it’ll work out, she says, I’m praying. And every year it does. Every year, and especially this year, when the volunteer roster looked more empty than ever, I think that Brighter City won’t happen because I don’t have the capacity to make it happen, out of my own sheer effort – I’m as dumb as Samson. Because it happens, and it happens because of God. People sign up, this year people we’ve never had at Brighter City before, people sign up and are wonderful and amazing, and it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with God. Every year this happens! Will I ever learn my lesson? Find me around late May or early June next year and see.
So what about Samson? Does Samson learn his lesson? Is the Samson at the end of our story different from the Samson at the beginning? See for yourself.
After his capture, orchestrated by Delilah, his eyes have been gouged out by the Philistines, and he is a slave. He probably has learned some level of humility, we would hope, because everything that he has normally counted on, like his strength, is gone. Even God, who he counted on only in times of desperation, seems to have departed from him. But Samson’s hair slowly grows back. One fateful afternoon the Philistines ask him to be brought to them in their temple to their god Dagon, so Samson can amuse them. But rather than amuse them, he asks a servant to put his two hands on the two pillars supporting the temple. He prays for one final moment of strength, pushes against the pillars, and collapses the temple, killing more Philistines and Philistine leaders than he had in all the times he had battled against them in life, and losing his own life in the process.
I remember in my old Picture Bible, Samson seemed to me like a hero, muscles rippling as he pushed against the pillars. But I don’t really consider Samson a hero, or call his final act a heroic one, and I don’t think the author of this story does either. Sure, he defeated the enemy who had been oppressing Israel for 40 years, sure his self centeredness and over confidence had been somewhat subdued but over all, he didn’t make a huge turn around. He didn’t learn his lesson.
Throughout the story he has misunderstood power and love, and consequently misunderstood God, who is both all powerful and the very definition of love. From the time of Samson’s birth, he never has a clear picture of who God is. He makes little acknowledgment of the presence of God’s Spirit at every fight he’s won against his enemies. He doesn’t even realize that the Lord has left him when he is betrayed by Delilah’’s shrewd deception and his own ignorance. Even at his final moments when he prays to God to give him strength, his reasoning for collapsing the temple is so that he can have revenge on the Philistines for his two eyes, not to vindicate his people, the people over whom he was judge, for the 40 years of oppression they have suffered. Although he finally attributed his strength to its true source, God, he was still more focused on himself and his own hardship than on the hardship of his people.
God is the source of all of our strength. God is the most complete example of love. I said that Samson didn’t have 1 Corinthians 13 to look at to understand love, what love is, and what love is not – but he did know the story of God’s deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. He may not have known the Psalms which glorified God’s love, but he did know about the creation of the world, God’s faithful care and tender love for God’s people from the beginning. From the first five books of the Bible, which to a judge like Samson would be well known stories. Samson knew that the Israelites had made as far as they had, only because of the hand of God, not because of their own strength. He just didn’t seem to think any of that applied in his own life.
Samson was dumb, admittedly, but we can be pretty dumb too – do we let the stories that we know, stories of God’s love and might from the Scriptures, stories of God’s faithful, tender care and power from our own lives and the lives of people around us – do we let those stories inform our lives and our decisions? God renewed God’s people after the flood, God delivered the Israelites from the bonds of the Egyptians and God delivered all people from the bonds of sin through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has sent the Holy Spirit to encourage and comfort us – what do these stories teach us about love and power? How does all of this information make a difference for us, if at all? Are we learning our lesson from the stories of Scripture? God was the driving force behind abolition, behind the civil rights movement, and more personally, every year God makes a small scale summer program at this very church come together, how are all of these stories making a difference for us, if at all? Are we learning our lesson from the stories of history, the stories of our own lives and the lives of the people around us? Or are we like Samson, continuing to depend on ourselves, constantly misunderstanding what power and strength really is, what love really is?
I challenge us all, myself included, to allow these stories to shape our lives, to allow these stories to teach us dependence on God and God’s strength, rather than our own, which has the tendency to fail us. I challenge all of us to allow these stories to teach us about selfless, unconditional love which is not dependent on how attractive we are, what we can bring to the table, but rather is only dependent on the fact that we are creations of an infinitely loving God. Will we allow this? Will we learn our lessons?
AMEN.
The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge that spans the Golden Gate (a narrow, deep strait) connecting the city of San Francisco to Marin County. Although close by proximity, the two sides of the strait are separated by significant natural obstacles. Crossing the strait directly by boat is dangerous because of strong currents and lack of suitable landings. Circumnavigating the Bay, however, involves a trip of several hundred miles and crossing several major rivers. From Wikipedia