The Practice of the Presence of God

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, June 23, 2024

1 Samuel 17:32-49

by Allison Courey

When I was 20, I spent a year teaching in a slum on the south edge of Bogota. I’m embarrassed to think about how self-confident I was, bussing alone around the city with my broken Spanish. Oddly enough, I didn’t study social and economic development until I came home, so I could easily fill a novel with the crazy things I did that year. But the story that still makes me feel sick is about the time I racked up a phone bill for six million pesos, which was about $3000.

The short version of the story is that I had the wrong information about how my phone plan worked, so I’d been making long-distance calls through the wrong company. Their billing was three months behind, so I didn’t find out about the mistake until it had been going on for three months. I tried everything to fix the situation: I went to the company’s office and tried to convince them to pay for it, I had my boss write a letter, and I thought about just leaving the country. I barely had a dollar to my name, never mind $3000.

But if I’d left the country, the debt would have been passed onto my coworker. I laid awake at night going over and over the situation in my mind, trying desperately to make it all be different. Now I call this “striving,” when I try to make a situation different from what it is. Picture a tortoise with a long neck just streeeeetching up to get a leaf, but it’s no use. He’ll never be a giraffe. My parents agreed to at least loan me the money, so the day finally came when I had to stuff six million pesos into my socks and shoes and ride the bus to the bank. I can remember a certain sense of freedom in that moment, when I was finally able to accept the situation for what it was. It was like that bit of the serenity prayer, “grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change.”

In our reading from 1 Samuel this morning, the Israelites are also stuck in a situation that they desperately want to change. Perhaps they were a bit arrogant, like me, and challenged the Philistines to a fight they couldn’t win. But there they are in the valley, waiting day after day as Goliath comes out to taunt them and challenge a fighter to battle. I’m sure there was a lot of striving going on, as the soldiers wished they could get out of this situation. Then, when the only person willing to fight is a shepherd boy, King Saul refuses to accept the situation. He tries to fix it by giving David armour and a sword, but it’s no use. The armour is too heavy and he has no idea how to fight with a sword.

David sees that everyone around him is scrambling to try and change the situation they’re in. Maybe if they wait longer or worry harder, Goliath will go away. Or maybe the brave little shepherd will magically turn into a giant warrior. But David knows that striving is not going to change anything. The only way to get through the terrible situation in front of them is to accept it for what it is.

Here’s what David knows: there’s a huge warrior out there taunting my people. I am a young shepherd with no battle experience. But I do have experience with a simple weapon that could win this thing. And we certainly aren’t getting anywhere by sitting here worrying about it. 

What David does is radical acceptance. He says to himself, “here’s what we’re dealing with. Sure, we don’t like it, but we can’t hope it away. Our only choice is to tackle it head on for what it is.” It’s hard to know where David gets his confidence, because his family doesn’t seem to think much of him.

I think David’s ability to accept the situation for what it is, instead of striving to change it, comes from the time he spent alone in the wilderness with his father’s sheep. David is described as having a deep and unwavering trust in God, so I imagine that he often spent days and nights alone talking to God and learning to rest in God’s presence.

I imagine David doing what Brother Lawrence, a friar in the 17th century, calls “the practice of the presence of God.” Brother Lawrence was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery, where he wrote about learning to refocus his thoughts on God while he was washing the community’s dishes. Every time he found his mind wandering, he would bring his thoughts back to focus on Jesus, not in an intellectual sense, but at the level of consciousness, so that he was constantly refocusing his energy around God. If David spent years learning to rest in God’s presence like this, the result would be a spiritual root system that could hold him up during difficult and frightening experiences.

This painting was done for me by my cousin many years ago, and it’s meant to be a tree whose roots are strong and deep. A tree with a root system like that can withstand seasons of drought and disease because they’re able to reach down far and wide to retrieve the nutrients they need to survive. And when a storm comes, instead of anxiously scrambling for things to be different, they are able to take a deep breath and say, “Ah, yes. This is a storm. It is going to be frightening, but I will get through it.” That sort of tree doesn’t need to run in circles looking for someone else to help her survive, because she is aware that everything she needs, she already has.

The story of David and Goliath has often been interpreted as being about military might or God’s proclivity for choosing sides, but I believe it’s about the power of radically accepting the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s about the importance of resting in God’s presence often enough to grow deep roots, so that when a storm comes, we have the strength to remain standing and the wisdom to say and do whatever needs to be done in that moment. As the Psalmist puts it, “be still and know that I am God.”

Unfortunately, as David becomes more privileged and powerful, his ability to tap into that root system he nurtured in his youth begins to fade. The more he becomes fixated on wealth and victory, the less he is able to be radically present in the situations where he finds himself. 

I wish I could have known how to be still enough to radically accept my unchangeable phone bill all those years ago, or known how to shift my worries back onto God every time they came to mind. It was a few months later that I encountered Brother Lawrence and the Practice of the Presence of God. Since then, I’ve had years when my root system sends out many new shoots, and pulls up all the water it can hold. And other years, the drought is so bad it feels like I’ll have to start over again from seed. But what I know now is that even the oldest, strongest trees are still growing their roots.