#DelilahToo

Joshua 13-16
November 12, 2017

 I have been thinking about Samson for weeks, possibly more than a couple of months. I have been working on the Sunday School lesson, at least in the back of my head, for quite a while. I talked with my sister during all this and her 16-year-old daughter could not remember Samson, she had to look it up and read it again, because they do church well too. My niece decided the story of Samson is weird.

I appreciated her succinct conclusion.

The judges of Israel are heroes. Now, there’s this conquering, colonizing aspect of the stories in Judges, in many ways, you could argue that the reason the Philistines and the Canaanites who fighting the people of Israel is because the people of Israel are trying to occupy and kick them out of their lands.
But that’s not really the point today.
The judges were heroes.

They reminded the people of Israel of their covenant with God. They brought them back to God. They lead armies and, on one occasion, Deborah, the one female judge, lead another woman Jael to hammer a spike through an enemy’s general’s head. But instead of dealing with how awesome Deborah was, we’re talking about Samson.

Samson is one of the last judges of Israel.
Here is how the story is generally told: Samson was a great man of God, set aside for the work of God to defeat the evil and terrible Philistines. But this good man taken down by a nagging woman (Yes, that is the name a sermon I found online). This “nagging woman”, Delilah, she was a manipulative, hypersexual, she is called cunning, selfish, heartless, unholy warning to all men to beware of the charms and wiles of a wicked, scheming woman. And Samson, for all his physical strength, was weak before this woman, most women in fact.

If she hadn’t been so beautiful,
if she hadn’t been one of those people,
if she had been a better person.

Hedy Lemarr in Samson and Delilah, 1949 Paramount Pictures, Cecil B DeMille

The more time I spent in this story, the more sympathy I had for Delilah.

There are 4 women that we get to meet from Samson’s life. 3 of them remain unnamed. 1 of those is his mother. Her role is to bear this miracle child into the world, and set him on the right path so that he might be a blessing to his people. Then you can go away, mom. Then we don’t see her again, ushered to the sidelines with all the other unnamed masses.

Samson grew and became a man with physical strength, political power, and social position.

The 2nd woman is Samson’s first wife. She is a Philistine, an outsider, and dare I say, the enemy. I can’t say why he chose her but choose her he did. Samson saw her and decided he needed to have her and we are told that the full 7 days of the wedding feast she wept. Her townspeople, her people! threatened to burn her and her family alive if she didn’t get the answer to the completely ridiculous riddle that Samson told them to answer. Of course, she did everything she could to get that answer. Samson lashes out against the Philistines. And the reward she gets, lynched by a mob of her own people.

The 3rd woman was a prostitute in a Philistine city that he stopped by to… enjoy. The city men tried to trap him with her. We’re lucky he didn’t hurt anyone right then and there. Honestly, we know nothing else about this woman. A whore is a convenient plot point to move the story on. We move on because to the story, she was forgotten.

And woman number 4 is Delilah.

Do you think she knew about the first wife?
How the city men came to her and threatened her?
How she cried? How she died?
Do you think the other women from the city whispered stories of this powerful man taking away women for his own, just because he wanted them?

I think she knew.

I think they’re right, and she was probably smart, smarter than men of her time gave any woman credit for. Here she was, she had no title, no power, no strength, no position, no one looking out for her! If she was going to survive she was going to have to do it on her own and for 3000 years we have called her an evil whore. We have made her the villain, in black eyeliner and red lips with cleavage and her neckline to her navel.

Here’s why I struggled with this story, in 3000 years, what has changed?
In the last month, at least 38 maybe 40 powerful men, with status and clout and money, have been accused of assaulting women, men, and children. From NPR to Hollywood to the White House, current and previous administrations. Of course, it’s not limited to people in public power.

The first time a boy decided he could touch me without permission, I was 12 and in health class and I didn’t have the confidence or guts or whatever to elbow him in the nose like I should have.

My friend was raped by her boyfriend at 13. He was just so much stronger than her. From boardrooms to middle schools, from stores and bars to even churches, there are power dynamics everywhere,
it happens everywhere.

Did you know:
-1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men have been the victim of a rape or attempted rape.

-Every 98 seconds someone in the United States is a victim of sexual assault.

-1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men will be victims of severe violence by their intimate partners in their lifetimes.

Visit Rainn.org

And every November 20th, we will gather again, to remember and name, the transgender individuals killed during the previous year. As far as I can tell, this year, there were 155 persons killed, mostly women of color; and many of the international dead are brutally murdered and remain unnamed, like Samson’s first wife.

Someone looks at all these people, these men and women and children, and that someone decides that they are entitled to their bodies, physically, sexually, what their bodies ought to look like, how they ought to be covered and what they represent.

I tell you all this not because it’s scary, although it is, I say this because we have 3000 years of glorifying Samson as a superhero, giving him a pass for his sexual “mishaps” because “guys will be guys” and he, like so many others, are weak and lose control before a pretty face.

There are a couple of things I believe about the Bible:
1: The bible is full of the stories of people who had to live in the world and encountered God. But it is still their stories. This is how you end up with good guys and evil ones.
2: I believe I bring my whole self to these stories. I carry myself when start reading. All my history, beliefs, hopes, expectations, and experiences. I am not a blank slate. I carry stories of oppressed people in my heart and head when I sit with a story like Samson. This is how the Bible becomes the living word, because it develops in relationship with its reader, and as the reader grows in relationships with others.

I believe the hope in the story of Samson isn’t that he killed all those people, it’s that this living story. We can look at it, with the gratuitous violence, with the taking of women’s bodies, and the utter neglect of even remembering their names, and we can learn something new. We can see the world reflected in this story and know that these characters, and that we, deserve better.

We can read this story not as if everything that is contained in it happened just as the text says but as a warning against unchecked power that corrupts.

We need to read it with hope. A bit of hope for Delilah, who survived a dangerous situation, and as far as we can know, came out alive.

I believe in bringing hope to my reading of the Scriptures. That is the lens I always want to come to the text with. Sometimes we have to look a little harder. I see hope in the changing of society that stands up and says that women aren’t some possessions to be owned and that other people’s bodies can’t just be taken.

I find hope in the men and women who have stood up, even years later, and said this happened to me, and it wasn’t ok. Whether they are people of celebrity or the person sitting next to you. Being able to say,

“I am worthy of grace, autonomy, hope, love”
“I am worthy”

What we can learn from Delilah is that our stories are important. What we learn from the women and men who have said “Me too” in the past month, what we have been reminded of, is that sharing stories breaks open the darkness, and allows the healing light to come in.

We carry Delilah’s story with us throughout time because she’s you and she’s me,
unwilling to be limited, unwilling to be less,
unwilling to be marginalized, unnamed, forgotten,
unwilling to lay her life down for someone else’s battles whether they be external or internal.

We carry her story so that she can give us hope that while we see in many ways that the world hasn’t changed as much as we think it should have in the last 3000 years, we have hope that we don’t have to play the game their way, that we don’t have to remain silent and passive.

Beloved community, you are living Good news of God. You carry your whole selves to this place, to your reading and learning of Scriptures, and out to the world. It’s my longing that you find hope and strength and a desire for justice, and you carry that with you.

That you remember Delilah and those unnamed women, centuries of unnamed women and men, and remember that Delilah herself stood up for them, and you can stand up for yourself, and for them too.