Our story today is about a young man named Gideon.
Some of you who were at Vacation Bible School will remember Gideon. Gideon is the one who was threshing his wheat in a winepress, which is a large pit in the ground.
That’s a strange place to be threshing wheat.
To thresh wheat, you bang it with a large mallet or whack at it with a large stick. As you do so, the heads separate from the stalks. You do this out in the open, because you need room to swing, and also so that the wind can blow through and help separate the grains from the chaff.
It doesn’t work as well if you’re down in a pit.
But Gideon had to thresh his wheat in secret. He had to hide from the Midianites.
The Midianites were cruel and ruthless. The Midianites were mean and vindictive. They would come in and destroy the crops and steal the wheat and kill the livestock of the Israelites. They would come at the Israelites like a swarm of locusts - they were too many of them to count.
So Israel became very weak, and worn down, and Israel cried out to the Lord.
God sent a messenger - an angel - to Gideon. The messenger said: “God is with you, you mighty warrior!”
But Gideon thought the messenger was mistaken. He didn’t feel like a mighty warrior. You remember this from VBS, right?
It’s hard to feel like you’re a mighty warrior when you are in hiding.
Gideon doubted the messenger’s words.
Gideon also doubted himself. He doubted his own abilities. He didn’t think he was capable.
So God said to Gideon, “You have strength. You have the strength you need, to go and rescue Israel from the Midianites. I am with you, and I will be your strength. And you will defeat the Midianites, that mighty swarm of locusts, as if they were just one person.”
When God is with you, you have all the strength you need. Some of you don’t feel very strong. Some of you feel weak. Some of you feel old. Some of you feel tired. Some of you feel incapable.
But when God is with you, you have all the strength you need. When God is with you, and you accept that, you are given an inner strength, the strength of a mighty warrior, just like Gideon.
Some time later, the Midianites set up camp in the Jezreel Valley. They were joined by the Amalekites and others, making their numbers even greater and their power even stronger.
By this time, Gideon was starting to accept his status as a mighty warrior and a leader of warriors. Gideon summoned his people, and gathered an army together and set up camp not too far from where the Midianites were camped. A battle was coming, a battle that was sure to be one for the ages.
The Lord said to Gideon: “You have too many people. The battle will be too easy, and the Israelites might claim credit for themselves rather than for me, thinking, ‘We saved ourselves.’”
The Lord told Gideon to send some people home, so Gideon said that anyone who was afraid or who wanted to go home was free to leave. 22,000 people left, leaving only 10,000 in the camp.
The Lord said, “there are still too many. Do this: Take them down to the water, and have them drink.”
So Gideon did.
Some bent down on their knees and scooped water up in their hands to drink, while others got down and lapped the water like dogs do. God said, “Those who lapped the water with their tongues, keep; let everyone else go home.”
After that, there were only 300 people left. The army had gone from over 30,000 to just 300.
Does it seem strange that God would stack the odds against God’s people? 300 vs. an army of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people is hardly a fair fight. In fact, it would appear to be impossible.
Not long after Gideon, the Spartans would try the same thing: 300 Spartans went against an army of 100,000 Persians at Thermopylae. Sounds crazy. Impossible. 300 soldiers, against an army of 100,000...
Let me ask you a question: have you ever faced a situation that you thought was impossible? A personal challenge, perhaps? A health scare? A difficult time of employment (or lack of employment)? Family issues, family members in trouble with the law, or caught up in addiction? Or maybe you were the one facing the addiction?
Some years back I caught an episode of the TV show The Biggest Loser. I don’t know if it’s on anymore. It’s not a great show, but I couldn’t help but be impressed by the participants, who would lose an incredible amount of weight through diet and exercise and turn their lives around. That’s not an easy thing to do! Walking when you’d rather be sitting, running when you’d rather be walking, and completely changing your eating patterns. For many people that’s an impossible change. For many people taking on a challenge like that, the odds are stacked against them. Like going up against an army of 100,000 when you only have 300. But they did it. For some of them, the changes didn’t last, but for some they did last.
So many of the challenges we’ve faced and overcome, we did so with God’s help. We know that God was there with us, giving us strength, and that without God, facing those challenges would have been impossible. We remember that, and we give glory to God.
God made it hard for the Israelites, on purpose, so that the Israelites would know that it was through God’s strength that they had prevailed.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The battle hasn’t come quite yet. Gideon still had his own fears to overcome, his own anxieties, his own insecurities. These things had not gone away. This story began with him hiding in the winepress, claiming that he was the smallest brother from the weakest clan, a man who was by no means a “mighty warrior,” and even now, on the eve of the battle, he still had his doubts… just like many of us still have our doubts about our worth and our own abilities.
So the night before the battle God said to Gideon, “If you are still afraid, sneak over to the Midianite camp and hear what they are saying.”
Gideon did, and the first thing he noticed was that the Midianite army was even larger than he thought. Calling them locusts was not even an adequate description; now they were like grains of sand on the seashore! That’s how many of them there were.
Gideon may have wondered what God was playing at, since this only increased his fear and anxiety, instead of calming him and giving him courage and confidence.
But then he overheard a man telling his friend about a dream. The man said: “Get this! I had a dream that a loaf of barley bread was rolling into the Midianite camp. It came in like a powerfully thrown bowling ball. It came to a tent and hit it, and the tent collapsed. In fact, it rolled the tent over upside down, so it fell flat.”
And the friend who was listening replied, “Can this be anything other than the sword of that Israelite Gideon? God has handed over Midian and its entire camp to him!
In hearing that conversation, Gideon was convinced. He realized that it was all true, that he had the strength of God, the strength to do what needed to be done, the strength of a mighty warrior.
And right then and there, when Gideon heard the telling of the dream and its meaning, he worshipped.
The scripture doesn’t say how he worshipped, or who he worshipped with. His servant had gone with him to the Midianite camp, so maybe it was just the two of them.
This worship comes at a key moment. Gideon had finally been made fully aware of the task before him: he had seen the immense size of the Midianite army, while his own army had been cut down to just 300. He had struggled to overcome his own doubts about his abilities, which really was half the battle. From hiding in the winepress out of fear to daring to lead an army of 300 against an army of tens of thousands - that’s quite a journey! A journey that would have been impossible, had God not been with him.
And now he hears that Midianites are having dreams in which Gideon is victorious, dreams which strike fear into their hearts, and Gideon knows that God is truly on his side, and that the battle, though it will be difficult, will be a success….
In the midst of all your battles and struggles, have you ever just stopped what you are doing - just stopped - and worshipped? In the midst of an impossible challenge, have you ever just stopped to give God praise and glory?
I hear from friends who are on the front lines for peace, the front lines for justice, the front lines for caring and working on behalf of the poor, immigrants, and minority rights; people who are on the front lines of the struggle for LGBT equality; people who are on the front lines of the battle to save the environment; people who are on the front lines of the struggle to get guns out of the hands of those who would use them to harm others...
I hear from them that, in these difficult times, they are tempted to lose hope. The situation in this country seems bleak. Hate is on the rise, racism is on the rise, oppression is on the rise, inequality is on the rise, violence is on the rise. The task before us seems impossible.
But those who fight for these things - those who fight for what’s right - know that God is on their side. The struggle does seem impossible at times, but God is on their side. God is on our side. God is on the side of justice and peace and equality. The struggle seems harder than ever. The challenges seem greater than ever - or at least greater than they’ve been in my lifetime and the lifetimes of those friends I know working for these things. How do we keep from despair? How do we keep from giving up?
By remembering that God is on the side of justice. By remembering that God gives us the strength we need. By remembering that, ultimately, the victory is in Christ. By remembering that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. By remembering that, though it may seem dark now, dawn is coming. By remembering that Good Friday is always followed by Easter.
That’s how we carry on. That’s how we do not lose hope. That’s how we remain strong.
Have you worshipped God in the midst of your struggle? Have you given God praise in the midst of your challenge? The battle was imminent. Gideon had 300 soldiers, against a Midianite army that was like a swarm of locusts, an army as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore. Yet in that moment when the battle was imminent, he worshipped. He worshipped, because he knew: in the battle that was about to take place, God was with him. God’s strength was with him. He wasn’t going into battle alone.
Here at BKCC, we are in a time of challenge. We are in a discernment process to figure out how we can more effectively carry out our ministry. The result of this time of discernment will likely be change. Maybe a lot of change. And make no mistake: change is struggle. We will struggle with the process, and we will struggle with the result of the process, and we will struggle to implement the decisions we make.
At times, it may even seem impossible.
With a congregation our size, especially…
But maybe this all has a purpose, and maybe that purpose is to make us realize that whatever happens, it is not our own doing, but God’s doing. If it were easy, maybe we’d be tempted to say, “Look what we did!” instead of saying, “Look what God did!”
...If we stand for what is right, if we keep our hearts pure, if we act in ways of love and kindness, and most of all, if we rely on God’s strength within us, then we, too, will humble ourselves before God and worship, right in the very midst of the struggle, before the outcome is known, and give thanks and praise to God.
Give thanks and praise to God for calling us into the struggle, for it is a struggle that is worth all that we commit to it.
Give thanks and praise to God for giving us the strength and the stamina we need. Maybe you need some reassurance from time to time, and that’s OK. Gideon needed reassurance, too! Just know that God’s strength is there for you, God’s strength will uphold you. As God says through the prophet Isaiah: “Don’t fear, for I am with you; don’t be afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will surely help you; I will hold you with my righteous strong hand.”
Give thanks and praise to God because God is calling us out of hiding, and has given us the strength we need for the battles we face.
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