Women of the Bible: Deborah, Diana Prince, Bravery and Presence A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA On July 16th, 2017
Judges 4:1-10
Today our summer sermon series on Women of the Bible continues with a look at the prophetess and judge Deborah, whose story is told in the book of Judges. Judges during this time in ancient Israel were not people who sat around in black robes and decided on cases and sentencing. Rather, they were individual men—and in the case of Deborah, a woman—whom God chose to lead the people of Israel out of bondage to their enemies. Now these judges could in fact be wise—but not all of them were, Samson being a case in point—and, sometimes, as in Deborah’s case, they were sought out to decide disputes among people. But, at least in the time of the book of Judges, what it meant to be a judge was to be an instrument through whom God brought deliverance to the Israelites.
Deborah’s story is told in chapter 4 of the book of Judges, which is followed by a song she sings in chapter 5. Listen now to the first 10 verses of chapter 4. Pay attention to how God uses Deborah to make a difference.
The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, after Ehud died. So the Lord sold them into the hand of King Jabin of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor; the commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in Harosheth-ha-goiim. Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help; for he had nine hundred chariots of iron, and had oppressed the Israelites cruelly for twenty years.
At that time Deborah, a prophetess, wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim; and the Israelites came up to her for judgement. She sent and summoned Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali, and said to him, ‘The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you, “Go, take position at Mount Tabor, bringing ten thousand from the tribe of Naphtali and the tribe of Zebulun. I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by the Wadi Kishon with his chariots and his troops; and I will give him into you hand.” Barak said to her, ‘If you will go with me, I will go; but if you will not go with me, I will not go.’ And she said, ‘I will surely go with you; nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.’ Then Deborah got up and went with Barak to Kedesh. Barak summoned Zebulun and Naphtali to Kedesh; and ten thousand warriors went up behind him; and Deborah went up with him.
Thursday evening, Judith and I went to see the movie Wonder Woman. I’m not generally a fan of comic book superhero movies—too much violence and the characters are too broadly drawn—but I felt compelled to see this one. Part of it was knowing that I’d be reflecting today on the story of Deborah, the ancient Israelite prophetess and judge who helped lead the people into battle against the Canaanites. Part of it was that all of my friends who are women have been telling me “You have to go see this movie.”
Deborah was not exactly a superhero, but like Diana Prince, the Wonder Woman character, she exhibited a bravery and battle presence—a kind of no-fear, I’ll go with and ahead of you into battle— that comic books and Bible passages don’t typically associate with female gender identity. It’s not that women aren’t brave in the Bible and in comics. It’s just that scripture passages and action movies tend consign their bravery to quieter, but no less important, things like Mary saying yes to bearing God into the world, or Rahab (who we will talk about next week) hiding the Israelite spies, or the Hebrew midwives defying Pharaoh’s orders, or the Syro-Phoenician woman boldly challenging Jesus to heal her child, too, or, for that matter, the women being present at Jesus’ crucifixion when all the male disciples have run away. There are plenty of examples of women being brave in the Bible. Just not so many examples of them going with men to the front lines of battle. That’s what makes Deborah sort of unique among Israelite women. She is brave in battle.
I have a number of female clergy colleagues who have written and spoken about how moved they were by the movie Wonder Woman, to see this Amazon Diana Prince going toe-to-toe with the men, the World War One German soldiers, ready to take on even the war god Ares to end war forever, seeing it as her mission to engage in the struggle as a strong female presence. She doesn’t take any guff from anybody. She is not relegated to the sidelines, she is not a damsel in distress. She is right in the thick of things and out in the lead.
There’s a marvelous scene where Diana Prince is in the trenches of World War I with the British soldiers, right next to her male friend, the American spy Steve Trevor. She is asking him why they don’t engage the Germans across no man’s land from them.
Steve Trevor responds. “This is no man's land, Diana! It means no man can cross it, alright? This battalion has been here for nearly a year and they've barely gained an inch. All right? Because on the other side there are a bunch of Germans pointing machine guns at every square inch of this place. This is not something you can cross. It's not possible.”
Wonder Woman replies, “So... what? So we do nothing?” When Trevor protests that they ARE doing something and that they just can’t save everyone in this war, that that’s not what they came to do, she tells him that’s what she’s going to do. Then Diana Prince, Wonder Woman, rushes out of the trenches, with her shield and arm bands deflecting the hail of bullets coming at her, using her golden whip and her sword to take down her enemies on her way to try to get to past them to the German High Command and an eventual face to face battle with Ares. When Diana goes first, when she goes first, when she takes the lead, Steve Trevor and the rest of the men pour out of the trenches behind her.
I couldn’t help but think of the prophetess and judge Deborah when I watched that scene. Because she, not Barak the Israelite general but Deborah the prophetess and judge, is the one who demonstrates what it means to be brave. Deborah is the one who tells Barak to go into battle, and when he protests that he won’t go unless she goes with him (which is an echo, by the way, of what Moses tells God in the Book of Exodus), she does. She goes with him. She goes ahead of the people. She goes to fight the power that had kept them oppressed for 20 years.
How did they get in that pickle to begin with? As the Book of Judges tells it, in typical Deuteronomic fashion, the people of Israel had done evil in the sight of the Lord so that God had handed them over to King Jabin of Canaan for twenty years, and they needed someone to deliver them, so they cried out to God, and God sent them a leader.
A quick aside here. When I say “typical Deuteronomic fashion,” and maybe some of your eyes glazed over, what I mean is that from the book of Joshua through the book of II Kings, the one who compiles the narrative of Israel’s history casts it in a theological framework. There is a pattern that plays out over and over again. The people of God cry out for deliverance, a strong leader helps them overcome their enemies, things go well for them for a time, then they begin to falter and be disobedient to God, and then a new foreign power overtakes them. After a period of oppression, they turn to God again, and God sends a leader and the pattern repeats itself again and again. They forget God, are vanquished, they return again to God, and God sends a leader, over and over.
Now there is a value in this kind of theological framework because it names our tendency as individuals and as groups to forget God’s grace and provision, to wander away from God’s guidance, and to face consequences, only to turn again to God and receive God’s help.
Sometimes that’s the way it works. There is a value to that kind of theological framework. Sometimes you do good and you get good. Sometimes you do bad and you get beat. But that’s not the way it always happens, right? So the danger in that kind of theological approach is that it can lead to victim blaming. If bad things happen to you, then you must have done something to deserve that. And that is certainly not always the case. We have too many people at Immanuel who have faced too much hardship to believe that this always case. Not every hardship that befalls a person or a people is a consequence of what they’ve done or left undone. Sometimes bad things happen to people who have done nothing to deserve those bad things. History, our personal history, our national history, our world history, our communal history, is not Deuteronomic. At least not all the time.
Whether we’ve done anything to deserve them or not, when hard times come, when we feel overwhelmed by life’s circumstances, when we don’t know what to do or where to turn next, what we need is God’s help. Now that’s good theology.
In my experience, God’s help most often takes the form of a human being or human beings who are willing to be brave and present with us. We need a Deborah. We need a Diana. They don’t need to be superheroes, but we need someone to be brave and present with us.
What I’m talking about goes way beyond military warfare, though there are times when such warfare has felt necessary. Those of you who have been in such battles know the importance of having someone with skin on go with and before you in those situations.
What we all need in this world are Deborahs who are willing to go up with us into the battles of life, the struggles against addiction or injustice, physical or mental illness, hatred and fear. It is easy to demonize and make enemies of other human beings, but the real battle of life is the battle to keep loving, and living, and serving and hoping when we’ve seen the best and the worst, both the terrible things people can do to each other in the name of hatred and fear and the lengths they’ll go to for love. The real battle of life is to keep trusting the message of Jesus, that only love—only love— can save the world. And to stay and fight and give for the world that we know can be.
We all need Deborahs—and we all need to be Deborahs—in that battle.
A Deborah like that will take you to chemo. She’ll let you cry on her shoulder. She’ll give you a pep talk, but she will remind you that no matter what happens, no matter what, you are not going into it this particular challenge alone.
A Deborah like that will go with you to a 12 step meeting and introduce you to other people who are up against the same sorts of compulsions you face, and she’ll tell you that they are people just like her.
A Deborah like that will take up the fight for the rights and safety of others and not just themselves, by standing alongside those who seem to forever get the short end of the stick, or the raw end of the deal. A Deborah like that will be an advocate for justice, and an embodiment of mercy, and an instrument for peace.
A Deborah like that will tell a timid, scared companion, like the Israelite general Barak, that in the final analysis the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
What helps to be Deborahs? That’s my question. What helps us to be Deborahs?
Here’s a stab at an answer.
Do you know what the word Deborah means? It literally means Bee. Bee, like the buzzing insect that lives in a hive and pollinates flowers and helps produce sweet honey. Deborah means Bee! You can look it up!
If you want to be a Deborah, if you need a Deborah, remember that.
What do we know about bees? Bees function best when they are in community with each other, working together for the good of the hive and by working for the good of the hive, they bring blessing to the world around them.
Honey bees, by the way, are responsible for one out of every three bites of food that we ingest as human beings. So we’d better take care of them. Maurice Maeterlinck in The Life of the Bee1, lays out how crucial this is when he writes: “If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
Bees are important. Bees pollinate, they go out and touch other living things and help them to thrive. Bees produce sweet honey.
Bees have a queen around whom the community gathers and who gives birth to more workers. For the ancient Israelite community, that queen, for a certain period of time, was a woman named Deborah, who bravely went before her people into battle.
In her song in Chapter 5 (though never anywhere in scripture is it mentioned that she gives birth to any biological children of her own), Deborah calls herself a Mother in Israel. I think she calls herself that because her own bravery and presence helped bring courage to birth in the hearts and lives of a whole host of people in Israel, people who followed her into battle.
What better place to learn about bravery and presence than in the hive of a community of faith…
Do you know Sue Monk Kidd’s lovely novel The Secret Life of Bees. In the book a fourteen year old white girl named Lily runs away from home and her abusive father and comes to live with a group of African-American sisters who keep bees. Before too long, she is introduced to their work by the sister in charge, August. All of the sisters have month names. Here is Lily’s account of what August taught her about bees.
I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves
1 Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee (Dover Publications, 2006) and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”2
(Whistling “Jesus Loves Me”)…
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
2 Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees. (Penguin, 2003)