Faces of Our Faith: Deborah | Judges 4:1-7 | 6.28.26

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We're continuing our series this summer, Faces of Our Faith.

I should have made sure we had paper slips for the choir.

I'm so sorry.

Grab one afterwards.

They're in your pews.

And if if God brings someone to mind today as we read the scripture and as we worship together, who you're grateful for and whose faith you find trustworthy, you can write their name on the piece of paper and put it in the offering plate.

Our reading for today is from Judges.

And Judges only had one passage from the whole book.

Thanks.

Only had one passage from the whole book make it into the revised common lectionary.

And it's the passage we're going to read for today.

But because it's not a book we've revisit all that often, that means a lot of folks are less familiar with this book.

I think we don't read a whole lot of judges because there's a lot of mature content in judges.

If judges had a TV rating, it would be rated R for sure.

So maybe that's why we don't read it as often.

But but it's securely placed in the chapters of this book is a wise and courageous prophet named Deborah, whose story gives shape to God's pattern of wisdom and faithfulness in a unique and meaningful way.

But before we dive into that story in hopes of learning more about God's faithfulness, let's pray and ask God to bless the reading of Scripture.

You pray with me.

Holy God, we trust you are speaking.

Help us to hear.

We give you our attention.

Speak to us and guide us by your word and by the Spirit that we might grow ever stronger as your witnesses and closer as your beloved children.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

Now let's read together from the book of Judges, chapter 4.

Judges 4 · chapter mention

I'm going to read verses 1 all the way to 9.

Let's listen now for God's word.

The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord after Ehud died.

So the Lord sold them into the hands of King Jabin of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor.

The commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in Herosheth Hagoim.

Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help, for Sisera had nine hundred chariots of iron, and had oppressed the Israelites cruelly for twenty years.

At that time Deborah, a prophet, wife of Lapidoth, was judging Israel.

She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Israel, between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim.

And the Israelites came up to her for judgment.

She sent and summoned Barak, son of Abinoam from Kadesh in Naphtali, and said to him, The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you position yourself at Mount Tabor, taking ten thousand from the tribe of Naphtali and the tribe of Zebulun.

I will draw out Ziserah, the general of Javan's army, to meet you by the Wadi Kishon.

With his chariots and his troops, I will give him into your hand.

Barak said to her, If you go with me, I will go.

But if you do 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 hands of a woman.

Then Deborah got up and went with Barak to Kadesh.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

The book of Judges, generally speaking, is a tragedy.

It is a tragic book.

After Joshua's death, the tribes who were called to be a light to the nations become indistinguishable from the nations around them.

They absorb Canaanite violence and Canaanite religion and Canaanite values until by the book's final chapters, so you can barely tell the difference.

But running through this tragedy is a cycle that reveals something about God's character.

It's a cycle that repeats a dozen times in this one book, and we read about it in the first three verses that we read today.

The people stray from God.

They do evil, they participate in violence and idolatry.

And when the Israelites stray, there are real consequences.

Because of their choices, they are turned over to oppression and suffering and loss.

God does not shield his people from the weight of their own choices.

And yet, when Israel cries out, God responds.

Again and again, God raises up faithful people, a deliverer, flawed, sometimes deeply so, deeper and deeper so as the book goes on.

And yet, through that person, God works to bring them back to peace again.

The judges grow worse and worse as this book goes on, and the people grow worse, and the spiral funnels downward in this book into depravity.

And yet, still God keeps showing up.

That's the quiet, stubborn hope beneath all of the darkness.

Not that the people are so great that they deserve rescue, but that God is so great that God remains committed to them anyway.

And the book ends with God's people in ruins longing for a king.

And God knows that kings are not the way to go.

But as is God's patient and faithful way, eventually God accommodates our brokenness and continues to creatively and persistently offer us reconciliation and liberation.

Judges is a tragedy.

But it's a tragedy that has a lot of value for us in revealing both the truth of the human condition and ultimately it serves as a window into the depth of God's grace.

One of the high points, one of the points of light in this tragedy that peaks through the clouds comes through in this fourth and fifth chapters.

Because of their wickedness, the Israelites have been handed over to the Canaanite king and have been cruelly oppressed for 20 years under the military occupation of a Canaanite general named Sisera.

And the people cried out to God for deliverance.

And at this point in the story, the wide-angled lens starts to narrow in.

The camera would pan down from the hot sun beating down on the people in their camps, and it would peek through the leaves of a palm tree.

To a woman sitting quietly underneath it, listening intently to two of her neighbors as they bicker.

Each one of them sharing their side of the story in some clear dispute.

One is missing his grain, and the other is missing a goat.

Each blames the other for their losses.

They present their evidence.

At times they're shouting over one another.

And as we zoom in on the face of the woman who's listening, she closes her eyes, and the two neighbors, having finally felt heard, say, Deborah, what do you believe should be done?

Deliver us a judgment.

And so she takes a deep breath and mutters a short prayer before opening her eyes and looking confidently at each of them.

You will spend the next month of mornings helping your neighbor carry his grain jars from the market.

And you, you will spend your next month of evenings helping him milk his goats.

Do you understand?

Neither of them was fully satisfied, of course, but they knew Deborah.

Her authority came from her relationship with them and with the people.

Her wisdom and her care.

Her service and her fairness had led to her becoming one of the Israelites, one who the Israelites came to when problems arose.

She was trusted in the community.

She had a way of speaking sense into people, and a way of sharing the will and ways of God with the people, such that the first word used to introduce her in this book is prophet.

That's the first word used to describe her, one who speaks to and for the Lord.

One who is with the people.

Next, after she's called a prophet, she is called woman of Lapidoth.

Now, in Hebrew, Lapidoth means torches or flashes of lightning.

And it's interesting, even because most often it's translated as wife of Lapidoth, Lapidoth's wife, there are no other Lapidoths in the Bible.

In the Chad translation, I'm going to suggest that this is not the name of her husband.

This is a description of the woman.

She is a woman of fire.

She is a fiery woman.

Some scholars say it points to her prophetic zeal, that there was something burning in her, something lit from within that others could see and feel when she spoke.

Others suggest it may have described her work.

They say, well, maybe Deborah made candles for the tabernacle, the torches that lit the house of God, that before she was a judge, before she was called a prophet, she was tending the flame, keeping the light on.

And I guess it's possible that all those things are true.

Maybe the woman was married to Lapidoth and also kept the lamps burning in the dwelling place.

And was also the woman who relit the embers of faith in the heart of a lost people.

She lived out her calling with such wisdom and embodiment that it spilled out into a community that came to trust her, to trust her judgment.

And one day a word came to this prophet.

And she knew she had to tell Barak what God had said concerning the subjugation of God's people.

So she called him and told him that he should organize 10,000 fighters from the two bordering tribes at a place called Mount Tabor, near Awadi called Kishon.

You don't have to raise your hand or anything, but Wadi is not like a really familiar term to a lot of us.

It's a geographic uh feature that we don't have a lot of uh here in our part of the world.

Awadi is a river bed that for most of the year forgets that it's a river and is dry.

Uh most of the year it's just a scar in the earth, a dry channel carved through the dust and stone.

You could walk to the bottom of it, and you would never know you were standing in the path of something powerful, but then the rains come.

And wadis, uh, they remember.

They remember that they were rivers and they fill, and they don't fill slowly the way you might imagine.

It fills the way a held breath is finally released, all at once rushing and roaring, carrying everything in its path.

Flash floods in Wadi country can appear in minutes.

Sometimes without a cloud overhead because they're fed by storms miles away.

And people who lived in these areas, they know this.

They know what parts of the year to avoid these areas.

And so Deborah tells Barak that God has called him to assemble the people on a high ground near a Wadi.

And Barak knew what this meant.

It meant a battle was coming.

He was worried.

I don't know if you heard about the 900 iron chariots.

I mean, I it sure hadn't seemed like God had been there for this people in quite some time.

Could he trust that God would show up?

He's not sure.

But he trusted Deborah.

If you go with me, I'll go.

But if you won't, I'm not going.

What a gift to have someone like Deborah.

She tells Barack straight away that if she comes with him, he won't get the credit as a leader.

He won't be the one known as the guy who took down the mighty Sisera.

She says Sisera will be delivered into the hand of a woman.

But Barack didn't care.

Sisera had 900 iron chariots.

In the ancient world, that is not just an army, that is an inevitability.

It's the kind of force that ends conversations before they start.

But Deborah knew something Sisera didn't.

She knew the ground.

She knew the skies.

She knew the direction of the winds and what they meant.

And she knew God's desire to now liberate her people.

She knew that the Jezreel Valley, for all its flatness and open space, all that room that looks like an advantage for chariots, she knew that it drains into the Kishon, and that the Kishon runs through Wadi Country.

And so when God opened the skies, the valley floor turned into mud.

And the Wadi Kishon woke up, and 900 iron chariots became 900 anchors in the mud.

The Song of Deborah puts it simply in chapter 5.

The stars fought from heaven, and the river Kishon swept them away.

What looked like Sisera's advantage became his downfall, and what looked like an empty ditch became a tool for liberation.

And the occupying army scattered and fled, just leaving their chariots in the mud.

This is what God seems to prefer when it comes to instruments of war.

This isn't the first time in the Bible when chariots have had water come crashing down on them, if you'll remember.

There's a pattern here in Exodus, even in Judges and in all the scriptures, that the pharaohs will fall, and the poor and oppressed will be lifted up.

The wisdom of God will come, and the word of God will come through unexpected people and unexpected places.

Now, Sisera, the story says, I'm going to deliver the most PG version of this that I can.

He had 900 chariots, but now he's fleeing on foot.

And he finds his way to a tent, and in that tent is a woman named Jael.

And he recognizes Jael as one of his people.

She was a Canaanite, not one of those Israelite people.

He recognizes her as one of his people, and so she offers him shelter, gives him milk and a place to rest, and he thinks he is safe, but he is not.

Just as Deborah had prophesied.

When Deborah says to Barak, he will be handed into the hands of a woman, of course, the reader, I thought it would be Deborah, right?

Deborah's the one who's going to win the battle, but it's not.

Not brought down by a general or a judge or a king, but by a woman with no army at all.

And she's not the first woman like this in Scripture.

You might think of Rahab sheltering spies behind her window.

You might think of Ruth crossing every border and boundary to stay faithful to her family in a new land with new people.

Over and over, God seems to find instruments of liberation in the most unexpected people.

Those who were never supposed to be part of the story, but those who found their way into it anyway.

And that pattern is worth remembering as we remember the faces of our faith.

Because here is what this story is asking of us, I think.

Deborah was wise.

And she used her wisdom and her knowledge of the land and of the people to serve and save them.

She was courageous, and she used her courage for liberation.

She could read the ground and the sky and the season, and she trusted God enough to act on what she saw.

We are called to grow in all of that.

We are all called to grow in that.

To cultivate the kind of wisdom that sees what others miss, that seeks wisdom from unexpected sources, and to build the kind of courage that says, I will go with you, even when the road ahead feels uncertain.

And even when I didn't get the word from the Lord myself.

But I trust you, and I trust what you know.

To keep our eyes open for the wadis in our own landscape, the dried-up places that God might wake with water, the empty channels that could become a saving flood.

And to keep asking, with Deborah's clarity and her fire, where are God's people being oppressed?

Where are the chariots of this world grinding people into dust?

And what does faithfulness require of us to do about that in this place, in this season?

The chariots always look inevitable until they don't.

Until the rains come and the ground shifts.

And what looks like power and has been described by power by everyone and everywhere becomes stuck in the mud.

And Deborah knew that.

And she believed it before anyone else did, and she called others into that trust and action.

That's what prophets do.

And in Christ, each of us has been invited into the prophethood of all believers.

We too can read the world around us with clarity.

Use the gifts that we know, the wisdom that we have for the liberation of the people God so loves in all parts of the world.

Be brave, friends, and be wise.

Amen.