This is the third week in our Summer Sermon Series, Picture of a Prophet(ess) where we dive into the stories of Hannah, Esther, Deborah, and Miriam.

Week three brought us to the story of Deborah, a liberating judge who serves as a lightning rod for the people’s connection to their God and this relatively fresh covenant life they’re still trying navigate. She shows that there is still a connection to God’s voice even if it seems to be growing faint and they must strain to hear it. You can read the Sacred Story for this week here.

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This week in my Pastor’s bible study group, someone shared that they grew up in a fairly conservative Christian home and weren’t allowed to read novels like Harry Potter, so they read the Bible instead. Their parents must have missed the book of Judges…and plenty other stories in scripture. It’s messy – literally and figuratively. But I suppose that’s life too. Still...

When I come across scripture like this…that seems to split me in two…and/or send me rushing to a tidy bow that will explain it away…

Like: “This ancient time was simply one of violence and this is just how they saw the world.”

Or, “yeah, you mess with God’s people and you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

“Am I really this excited about gruesome triumph?” (nods head enthusiastically)

Or even better, “If I just never talk about Judges, can we all pretend like it isn’t there?” And I can keep the well-worked images of God and people that I have in my head.

When I read scripture and I find myself doing this, this push to resolve…I wonder, what is the story doing here among our sacred text anyway? WHY do we tell it for so long? Why do we keep singing this song of Deborah and Barak and Jael?

In the opening number of the musical Hadestown, which tells the messy story of an old Greek epic, they sing:

It’s an old song….

It’s an old tale from way back when

It’s an old song

and we’re gonna sing it again…

Deborah serves as Judge for the people of Israel. She is one of the earliest Judges after Joshua brings them from the wilderness outside Egypt to the land of Canaan where they were promised flowing milk and honey. From Joshua to Othniel, to Ehud, and now Deborah. While their role includes settling disputes, this Judgeship is not just a courtroom function. This is more like our county judgeships in Texas, an executive leader, THE point person for the people and their well-being as a people. Even more than that, she is the commander-in-chief. She is warrior. And she is woman. And this shapes the way she leads – by nature and by patriarchal precedence. Instead of the more formal setting of male counterparts, Deborah sits under a palm tree, in the wide open public. It’s a proactive measure to prevent anyone from undermining her with claims of impropriety. This way no one can accuse her of abusing her power in private and neither can they take advantage of privacy to harm or manipulate her.

Deborah is also a Prophetess, a lightning rod for the people’s connection to their God and this relatively fresh covenant life they’re still trying navigate. She shows that there is still a connection to God’s voice even if it seems to be growing faint and they must strain to hear it. Like Hannah the discerning mother, and Esther the courageous queen…this prophet who precedes them, seeks and proclaims God’s call for the life of the people in community, particularly as they struggle and venture away from its centering truth, as they continue to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord…again. In the language of Godly Play, this experience is spoken of as when someone draws so close to God and God draws so close to them, that they know what God would have them do.

Deborah is all these things – judge, leader, woman, warrior, prophet…in no particular order. I often think of the prophets as those who walk alongside power, but she embodies her own political, military, economic, social, and theological power. She has agency. She doesn’t wait for help to come from somewhere else, she acts on the assurance that help is promised and mobilizes for the help her people need to be free from years and years of cruel oppression.

In a sacred library that rarely even gives women the dignity of a name, sometimes I have to stop and marvel at all this… and the way all these aspects of her identity are tied together and integral to her being. Perhaps having navigated such a vast identity is what makes her such a good collaborator – someone who can utilize and notice the strength of different people moving in different ways to serve the larger work of liberation. Some she helped organize and some were beyond her, and yet in the end she sings of their being part of the same divine work.

And just when I’m feeling really good about where this could go…A well of questions and concerns rises within me.

900 iron chariots, an entire army, its general and a silent tent peg - that’s a lot of blood, even in the name of freedom. Part of me cheers for Jael, who wittingly uses the submissive and dismissive assumptions of oppressive patriarchy against itself. And part of me bristles with a sense of underhanded betrayal and gruesome tragedy. But I notice that this same sense of internal struggle doesn’t rise up within me in the same way when I think about David and Goliath, or Moses closing the Red Sea on the Egyptians, or the many other biblical stories before and after of God using the underdog to liberate and dismantle oppressive might…particularly in conventionally male and militaristic terms.

It disturbs me to think about all the times when violence has been declared just and holy in ways large and small. It begs the question of if and when violence may be considered necessary.

Is it possible for some violence to be the lesser evil of a greater violence, or to go even so far as to call it good? Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with this as a Lutheran Pastor dedicated to consistently, powerfully, and publicly opposing Nazi ideology and white supremacy and ultimately was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

Sarah Jobe, a contemporary Pastor and prison chaplain, has written about how this story can be a balm to women unfairly serving time for killing their cruelly oppressive abusers. As this weekend marks a national holiday of independence won through war, we must reckon with the interlocking pieces of unjust oppression, violence, and liberation. Is it a riot or a revolution for the soul of a nation? Our perspective often depends on whether we’re living under constant fear of overwhelming iron chariots or trying to hide under the rug.

While this victory for the Hebrew people is a triumph in overcoming, it is also incomplete as long as violence persists as the necessary means of liberation. The perpetual cycle of harm remains a symptom of greater brokenness. The rest of the book of Judges is a series of escalations that just dig the hole deeper and deeper until there’s a kind of rock bottom. In the process of overthrowing their oppressors, they become indistinguishable from their oppressors. I don’t know how to draw the line exactly of when it’s justified or not, but I do know it’s not what God has promised us the world can be. The people will eventually come out of this era asking for a King, and they get some decent ones. But what God’s people mainly need isn’t a king who can rescue them from their political enemies, but a king who can rescue them from themselves.

Jesus is crucified as “King of the Jews”, he stares down the worst of our violence and hatred and oppression on the cross, and refuses to play by the same rules that got us there. God breaks the wheel of injustice and violence (not because Old Testament god is mean and violent and New Testament god is nice….because, trust me, God’s people were still and are still stuck in the same cycles of power and harm…).

In Jesus, God enters into the cycle so deeply that it is disrupted and uprooted from its eternal machinations. Jesus has their own run-in with the Canaanites…a woman pleading for her daughter’s healing. Jesus, being fully human as well as divine, tries to brush her away and uses racially hateful language by calling her a dog. In her confrontation, Jesus must recognize her sacred humanity over all the messages that have taught disdain and dismissal.

As it turns out, in God’s kingdom there’s plenty room for the Canaanites. More accurately, there is room for even Jesus to change and learn and grow in his thinking about Canaanites as enemies unworthy of care and move toward recognizing the Canaanite woman’s place at the table of faith.

God proclaims, “Enough!” and no one, no empire, can stop this ultimate liberation. Liberation does not arrive quickly or cleanly, but it does arrive. The story of the prophet judge Deborah is heroic and tragic, inspiring and cautionary. We cry out to be saved from oppression but also from ourselves.

It’s an old song, It’s a sad song, it’s a sad tale, it’s a tragedy, but we sing it anyway…

Cause here’s the thing…

To know how it ends and still begin to sing it again

As if it might turn out this time…

It could make you see how the world could be

In spite of the way that it is

Can you see it? Can you hear it? Can you feel it?

Is it coming?

Is it coming this way?

It’s a sad song, it’s an old song, but we keep singing even so.

Amen

Deborah: the liberating judge