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Fencing as a sport, while beautiful and wonderful, also has a lot of egotistical jerks who take part in it, and they often do well. Having grown up in the sport, I’ve seen it. I’ve suffered from it. As a result, I try to make an effort to be sportsmanlike, even when I lose, and to reach out to be kind and help others learn and grow to become better fencers.
Because of that, as a seminarian at the University of the South, I ended up becoming friends with fencers on the Vanderbilt team. In fact, one of their leaders while I was a student had family near Sewanee who fenced with us.
Nashville is also a fun place to visit, so coming into my final year, I made an extra effort to fence in tournaments there whenever possible, especially since I hadn’t gotten to fence a lot at all the year before.
One such tournament at Vanderbilt, fairly early in the school year if memory serves, I remember hearing one guy before bouts started talking about how tired he was and how he wasn’t sure he was gonna do very well that day, but in a way that it was hard to tell if he was being serious or just playing mind games. This guy, who we’ll call Peter (let it never be said I don’t extend the same courtesy to my rivals as I do my friends), was a very high-level épée expert who had just started his own club, meaning he either had great business acumen or was very successful in whatever work he was doing on the side. Now this was a foil tournament, my personal weapon of choice, but there are a lot of similarities with épée. This guy Peter, in other words, was no slouch. He was a known quantity that was expected to win.
Now as I’ve said, I’ve seen a lot of guys like this over the years fencing. After all this time, it takes a lot more to get to me. At this particular point in my fencing even though I was getting back into the tournament circuit, I was on fire, so it took even more to get to me. So I didn’t, let him get to me that is, and I won. I beat him. I won the tournament.
Even though I wasn’t their teammate, the Vanderbilt fencers took me out to dinner after that. I learned from them Peter had been causing them a lot of problems. He’d been trying to push them into doing things that, as an undergraduate club, they just didn’t have the resources to do. He had been a bit uppity and abrasive with them. It had been extra frustrating since no one could take him down.
I, on the other hand, had been kind to them. They liked me. So my beating Peter felt to them like a rebalancing of the world.
Unfortunately it often seems like the jerks and big guys win. That’s what seems to be going on in the world all the time. It seems like there’s no hope for the little guy or the nice guy (by “guy” I mean any gender).
Yet every now and then we see the underdog pull through. We see the nice guy win. Maybe, on that rare occasion, we even get to be that little guy.
That’s really what our readings are about today: the unexpected victory. We don’t just get examples of it. We hear why it happens, how it can even happen in the first place too.
First off we have David. Now David was a tiny guy. He’s so tiny, he can’t even fit into the armor he’s given. Goliath, on the other hand, is where we get this particular word for “giant”. He towered over the Israelites. He was unbeatable.
Yet David, lacking any conventional weapons or armor, takes down this undefeated giant. He does so only with the tools of his trade as a shepherd: some stones and a slingshot.
What he really paves the way for him, as David tells all with ears to hear, is the fact that “The Lord will save me.” God is David’s weapon. God is the reason David succeeds in the end.
This is what we hear in our Psalm today as well, a psalm of David in fact. There we hear that “The Lord will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in time of trouble.”
Jesus too shows the power of the small against the mighty. Here He is with His Disciples in our Gospel today in a boat in a storm. Now many of Jesus’ Disciples were fishermen. He was not. They would have known better how to weather a storm. Yet in their panic they turn to Him, even as He is sleeping.
Jesus gets up and calls the storm with just a few words in our translation, only two in the Greek: “Peace. Be still.”
Jesus conquers the storm with just two words, two commands. Yet Jesus isn’t mighty. He’s a human being just like the rest of us. That’s the whole point of Jesus. Jesus does great things not because He is mighty. He does them from the power of God within Him. He does them because He is God in the form of weak human flesh.
In the end, the weak do win out over the mighty. This happens for only one reason: God. We do not have to be better or stronger than others to win. We do have to be kind. We do have to trust in God and God alone to get us through. We cannot win otherwise.
We do not have to be a storm or a giant to win. We just have to realize our weakness and smallness. We have to recognize that the only One who can get us through is our Lord.