Deborah: Judge and Warrior, Sitter and Singer

sermon by Carrie Eikler
Judges 4:1-10
June 13, 2010 (3rd Sunday after Pentecost)
Second in Series: God's People in Hebrew Scriptures

“The book of Judges is one of the most exciting, colorful, and disturbing books of the Bible.” So says commentator Dennis Olson . “It combines stories of political intrigue and assassination, lies and deception, rape and murder, courage and fear, great faith and idolatry, power and greed, sex and suicide, love an death, military victories and civil war.” (New Interpreters Bible Commentary) At the beginning of the summer blockbuster season at the theaters, it almost feels like we should be serving up popcorn in the back of the church, as we brace ourselves for this Biblical Blockbuster.

But before the feature presentation, let me back up to the previews a bit. Remember last week when I gave an introduction to the lectionary—that sequence of scripture readings that guide weekly worship? If you remember, one reason I said I liked using the lectionary was that it tied the Christian community around the world by hearing the same scriptures on Sunday morning, no matter where we are. Well, there’s another reason I like using the lectionary that helps mediate myself a little bit. By giving me four options of scriptures to choose from, I’m encouraged to encounter texts that may be less familiar to me, scriptures I’d rather not deal with.

In short, it forces me to wrestle with a variety of scriptures that I might too easily dismiss simply because I don’t like the story. It’s too tempting to preach on the scriptures that I like and I think others will like and that make writing sermons a whole lot easier. Lots of lilies of the fields and blessed are the peacemakers would be coming from my lips.

Unlike last week’s story about Balaam and the talking donkey, today’s scripture actually is in the lectionary, but not on this specific day. And I’m sure if I came upon it, I would feel torn. It is about a woman in leadership, but our introduction to Deborah paves the way for a grisly description of war and murder. Hmm…I think I’ll skip over that. Too challenging. Not peaceful. Let’s see what else the lectionary suggests…

But here I am, our second Sunday in our series on Old Testament characters—and let me tell ya, there are a lot of characters in the Old Testament—and I’m presenting to you the story of Deborah. Deborah the judge. Deborah the prophetess. Deborah the woman whose name was familiar to me but whose influence on the Israelite people and Biblical literature I was largely unaware of. A fate, unfortunately, of many Biblical women: if they are lucky enough to be given a name in scripture, they are unlucky in that we don’t often remember who they were and what they did.

Now to call Deborah a judge is accurate, but perhaps a little misleading if we think about her in our contemporary understanding of a judge. We might be tempted to see her, sitting under her palm, dispensing justice like some ancient Israeli Judge Judy. She did settle disputes, but judges during this period in Israel’s history were the rulers, the warrior leaders who led Israel in fighting oppressive enemies.

Deborah is the only female judge we know about, but is the only judge to be called a prophet—a mouthpiece of God! The judges early on, including Deborah, were successful and faithful, but as we read further in the book of Judges, as we encounter more and more violence, the leaders became more unsuccessful and unfaithful. By the final chapters of Judges, Israel has fallen into anarchy and it says “all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” The makings of another blockbuster.

Our scripture starts with a bit of political background. The Canaanites had captured the Israelites and it says they “had oppressed the Israelites cruelly for twenty years.” And then we are introduced to Deborah, judge, prophetess, sitting under a palm, people bringing disputes to her. Wisdom being dispersed. Resolution being offered. Seeking calm and giving leadership in a time of war.

Scripture translates her name as Deborah, wife of Lappidoth, which is actually one of three possible translations from the original Hebrew. It could mean Deborah, wife of Lappidoth. It could mean Deborah, woman of the town Lappidoth, or it could mean, “woman of torches” or… “fiery woman” ! It sure seems as though given the situation surrounding the Israelites at the time, it would be less important whose wife she is, or where she is from, but the character of this judge—this fiery woman, this judge Deborah, this prophetess!

And here is the plot background of our summer blockbuster, (just imagine it being recited with a big booming, Hollywood voice): Fiery Deborah summons Barak to be her general, and tells him that God has commanded him to take ten thousand men to Mount Tabor to the battle against the Canaanites. Barak will only go if she will as well, and she agrees to go, but tells him that he will get no glory from the victory for the “Lord will deliver Sisera (the enemy leader) into the hand of a woman.”

And that woman is not Deborah, but another woman named Jael. Sisera comes to Jael’s tent because his people and her people have a peace agreement. She welcomes him in, makes him a bed, gives him warm milk, covers him up…takes a tent peg and a mallet and hammers it into his temple…

No you can see why I have a problem with this scripture, and generally the book of Judges because it is filled with violent images and actions, often done by people motivated by God’s voice. But I’m not going to beat around the bush here. I’m not going down that road. There is enough to wrestle with this text, and I’d rather do it as a conversation and beside, it feels like there is something else troubling here. A word we don’t like to use very much. Something we’d rather not hear, or give, sermons about: leadership.

Some of you would rather now go back to the tent peg through the temple scene, I imagine.

After Jael killed Sisera, and the Israelites are again freed from slavery, Deborah sings a song. It is a song recounting the entire oppression, the battle, the death of the enemy. She sings out of her memory, a story for her people. It is actually one of the oldest writings in the Bible, Deborah’s song. What, as people who pursue peace and question violence even in the Bible, what can we see as admirable, as worthy in this story. How can Deborah challenge us into faithful leadership? As 19th century women’s movement leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton asks in her commentary on Deborah, can we “slay the enemies” of our time, which to her were ignorance, superstition, and cruelty in order to restore peace?

Church of the Brethren and Mennonites are part of an Anabaptist theology which emphasizes the priesthood of all believers. We are all leaders, and not just in the church. Our lives blur the line of who we are called to be as Christians and who we are “out” in the world. Our call to lives of discipleship, as a priesthood, is also a call to be leaders where we are, with what we have, “out there” as much as “in here.”

It doesn’t matter if you have leadership positions or not. It matters that you bring to the world God’s light. To me, that’s discipleship, and that’s leadership. And I think that fiery Deborah can teach us a lot about that life. Now I know it is hard to think of ourselves as leaders. Those are often “other people” people “trained,” people who have that special something that makes them worth following, right?

I appreciate what pastor Talitha Arnold had to say on the matter. Here are her words: “As a seminarian, I was impressed by Deborah's many roles and responsibilities. She was a leader of men when women could only be wives, sisters and mothers. A judge, when a woman's testimony never counted as much as a man’s. On the front line, when a woman's place was in the home. I am still impressed by all that. But 20-plus years later, as a minister with a considerable number of roles myself, [or you could insert here…a teacher, a bus driver, a lawyer, a student] I'm equally impressed with the phrase: "She used to sit." I think it's the most radical thing she did, especially as a leader. We leaders organize, plan, execute, strategize. We lead. We don't sit.

“My mother used to sit. As a widowed parent to four children, a science teacher and a volunteer for church and 4-H, she had little time to sit. Yet every morning before we got up, she'd sit in her chair in the living room, a cup of coffee in one hand, the Bible in the other. If the afternoon permitted it, she did the same, although a cup of tea or a can of beer (if the day had been really long), and with the newspaper instead of the Bible. We kids knew the time was sacred and did not disturb her with "What's for dinner?"

“I think we knew that sitting made all the other activity possible. It didn't solve all our problems as a family, of which there were many, or guarantee order out of chaos. But sitting offered my mother a chance to catch her breath, to remember life was more than the task at hand, and to tap into some sense of peace in the midst of the maelstrom.

“I suspect that was true for Deborah as well. Leaders need wisdom and courage and can't find those qualities if they're always out front leading the charge. Sometimes they need just to sit.” (Christian Century, 2002)

And when Deborah stopped sitting, she started singing. That song of encouragement. That song of memory, of recalling who we are as a people and God’s presence among us through the opression and victory, joys and concerns, the times when we feel deeply blessed and deeply depressed. We sing by sharing the story with one another. We think of leaders like Barak (the general, not necessarily the president) and the bloody work, the adreniline pumping work, the glorified work.

But Deborah, fiery Deborah. She’s a leader for me. Maybe for you. Not because we are lazy, but because we know that it is a blessing to sit so we may love others. To sing our encouragement to others. Deborah doesn’t give us permission to breath a sigh of relief because all we have to do is sit there and do nothing. She says we sit so we listen for God so we can then sing the words of God to our people.

The late Catholic priest and theologian Henri Nouwen wrote about his move from the ivory towers of Harvard where he was a well established professor, to L’Arche, an intentional community of people with mental and physical disabilities. In his book In the Name of Jesus, he reflects on Christian leadership out of his life with those who are considered marginal in society’s eyes. He became convinced that Christian leaders, and that’s not just me, but that’s you, too, need to make a move from being moral judges, what is right and wrong, to becoming mystics.

Nouwen reflects that when we are securly rooted in relationship with God, the source of life, we will be leaders by remaining “flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative.” (A mystical leadership yet a fiery leadership. A leadership rooted in sitting and singing, like Deborah.

Again, the glitch is that many of us don’t want the responsibility of title “leader.” Too much will be asked of us. We already did our time as leaders. It’s time for others to step up and do it. I’m not a leader, I’m a follower. For Anabaptists, we understand the call to discipleship and the call to leadership as one in the same. Through our baptism we have taken on the mantle of leader in our own special ways. By quietly sitting and listening for God’s word. For bravely leading the people into the struggles of church structure. For singing the song of encouragement. For being a warrior in prayer.

It is mystical work for a fiery people, we Pentecost people. “The central question is,” asks Nouwen, “Are the leaders of the future”—are we-- “truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God’s presence, to listen to God’s voice, to look at God’s beauty, to touch God’s incarnate Word, and to taste fully God’s infinite goodness?”

Claim it. Accept it. Deal with it. You are a leader because Christ’s light burns within you.
Sit with it. Sing it out. How will you let it shine?