Tag Archives: saul

Sermons and Preaching

David and the Gibeonites

Read 2 Samuel 21:1-14 to start.

Before I begin this morning, I’m going to start with a warning. This is not a pleasant or happy passage of scripture, and this is not a pleasant or happy sermon. It details with a lot of disturbing and violent things, so if you are squeamish, I apologize in advance. It also raises some real and important questions that I think we all need to address, now perhaps more than ever.

I will start with the questions, there are three of them.

  1. How do we behave when the balance of power tips in our favour?
  2. How do we react when things go wrong?
  3. How do we respond when we are treated unfairly?

We’ll get to those in a few minutes, but first, here’s something that you probably don’t know about me. You might know that I was born in a country that no longer exists, namely, the former Yugoslavia. But you probably don’t know that technically speaking, I’m Serbian Orthodox. They baptized me into that particular church when I was a baby, because my mom had been raised Catholic, and really, really wanted to make sure I got baptized right away. Serbian Orthodox was the most readily available option in Belgrade in 1975.

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Sermons and Preaching

The Tragedy of Jonathan

Read to start

I’m going to start with an assumption that everyone here has at least heard of William Shakespeare. That should be a pretty safe assumption, he’s only the best known playwright in the history of the English language, and frankly, easily among the most widely read and studied authors in any language. Shakespeare’s plays generally fall into one of three categories – histories, comedies, or tragedies. This of course is not a lecture about a playwright who lived four hundred years ago, this a sermon about people who lived three thousand years ago. But when I was in university, studying English literature, I looked at the account of Saul as we see in the book of 1 Samuel and found him to be highly reminiscent of the archetype of a tragic figure, such as you might find one of Shakespeare’s plays, a character like Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth.

Saul is a fascinating character, and one that is well worth examining in detail. We can definitely learn from his successes and from his mistakes. But it’s not Saul that I’d like to focus on this morning. It’s his eldest son Jonathan.

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