Women of the Bible, Part 3: Abigail

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

June 20, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Lord God of all Creation we come to you from our storm-tossed lives to seek your peace; we come to you with our questions and uncertainties, our worries and anxieties, we come to you from our joy and our happiness – each emotion a kaleidoscope of our feeling in life’s changing patterns.

More than all of that we come to you because of what you have done for us in the love of Christ who bought our freedom by his sacrifice on the Cross and showed us new life in his resurrection life. We bless you for the love which has no dimension of length, breadth or height, coming as it does from the perfection of your being. We come to you knowing that sometimes we have received your grace in vain.

We have not relied on your word or wisdom; we have not shown any concern or compassion when we should have; we have not loved our neighbor as we love ourselves. We have remained silent when we should have spoken and spoken when we should have been silent.

We seize the moment to ask you from our discordant lives for yet another chance of hearing you say to us ‘Your sins are forgiven’. May the mark of that forgiveness be your grace in us as we respond with grace and gratitude to your love.

Eternal God as we ask that you accept our prayers through Jesus Christ our Lord, we pray that from the grace we have received, what we say and what we do will enable those around us to glimpse the life of the your Son -- who calmed the storm with words which still echo down the centuries, ‘Peace be still’ . . . Amen.

Our Mother, Father, Creator God who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

 

1 Samuel 25: 2-3, 14-22

² A certain man in Maon, who had property there at Carmel, was very wealthy. He had a thousand goats and three thousand sheep, which he was shearing in Carmel. ³ His name was Nabal and his wife’s name was Abigail. She was an intelligent and beautiful woman, but her husband was surly and mean in his dealings—he was a Calebite.

¹⁴ One of the servants told Abigail, Nabal’s wife, “David sent messengers from the wilderness to give our master his greetings, but he hurled insults at them. ¹⁵ Yet these men were very good to us. They did not mistreat us, and the whole time we were out in the fields near them nothing was missing. ¹⁶ Night and day they were a wall around us the whole time we were herding our sheep near them. ¹⁷ Now think it over and see what you can do, because disaster is hanging over our master and his whole household. He is such a wicked man that no one can talk to him.”

¹⁸ Abigail acted quickly. She took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five dressed sheep, five seahs^[b] of roasted grain, a hundred cakes of raisins and two hundred cakes of pressed figs, and loaded them on donkeys. ¹⁹ Then she told her servants, “Go on ahead; I’ll follow you.” But she did not tell her husband Nabal.

²⁰ As she came riding her donkey into a mountain ravine, there were David and his men descending toward her, and she met them. ²¹ David had just said, “It’s been useless—all my watching over this fellow’s property in the wilderness so that nothing of his was missing. He has paid me back evil for good. ²² May God deal with David,^[c] be it ever so severely, if by morning I leave alive one male of all who belong to him!”

 

A Message

“Women of the Bible, Part 3: Abigail”

 

Friends, now we’re up to the third and final week (for now) where we’re exploring Trish’s request to talk about women of the Bible. This week Trish’s request to learn more about strong women from scripture overlaps with the request of a friend of mine from a previous church named Janet. Janet specifically wanted to hear more about Abigail. I was intrigued. I’ve heard a lot of sermons in my life, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone even mention Abigail, let alone make her the focus for a whole sermon. Challenge accepted!

 

Before we talk about Abigail herself, there’s something important you need to understand about how the Bible was written. When we pick up what we call the Bible we’re actually holding an anthology of 66 very different books about the people of God written by many different people over a long span of time. The stories in here are ancient, and were known and loved by God’s people for decades before they ever saw parchment paper. When you read a story in the Bible, you’re not reading a merely historical account. Not even in a book like 1 Samuel which is actually “history” by genre. The man who wrote this wanted to capture a lot of things for us to know, hear, and feel. Think of any story in the Bible like a famous story from your family that gets told and retold and retold at every summer barbecue. In my family you could use the story of how my parents met as an example. The bare facts tell us that the year was 1970, the location was Chicago; Mom was in nursing school, Dad was in the Marine Corps, and Mom’s school hosted a mixer with Dad’s unit. Mom will note that she struck up a conversation with Dad. Dad will embellish a bit. He was the highest decorated and most ruggedly handsome Marine in the room. He walked up to my mom and the wind was blowing through his hair even though they were inside. He said “I’m Jim Forney, and I’m here to rock your world”. And my mom was just plopped in a corner holding everyone’s coats. Mom will tell you there was some artistic license there, Dad was only 20 years old, he was away from his home in rural Indiana for the first time in his life after serving a tour in Viet Nam, and he was a shy country boy who wanted to say hi to the pretty girl in the cat eye glasses. Any detail they add is intentional, they’re setting the scene and mood. They don’t just want you to know what happened, they want you to feel what they felt. They want you to understand what this experience meant to them, and what it means now.

 

Taking this back to the Bible, you can note that the author of 1 Samuel really only told us a very small amount about Abigail despite her being one of the wives of David, one of the most important characters of the Hebrew Scriptures. Matt Cutler and Rafi Spitzer, two of our local rabbis who had so much to say last week about Miriam and the stories about her in the midrash chuckled when they heard I was preaching about Abigail. She doesn’t do very much at all, what is there to even say about her? But here’s the point I want y’all to understand and remember: the author of 1 Samuel didn’t have to say anything about Abigail at all. He could have just left her right out, and we wouldn’t know the difference because it’s not like we were there. There are no throw away names or details in these stories, they all matter. And as for Abigail, though her role is very small she teaches us a huge lesson within it about grace, forgiveness, and the courage of a good woman.

 

So, about Abigail herself. The setting is the Southern Kingdom of Israel, the time is 1,000 years before Jesus’ birth. Though we’re in the Holy Land, and David’s home country, we’re in a remote part of it. David has covered a lot of ground throughout his story, and now he is in Maon, a tiny hill town. David has been a good man, kind, honest, and generous. He has shown hospitality to the stranger and protected those around him from harm even though he has been defending his life from Saul after succeeding him as King. The richest man in town, Nabal, is clearly getting ready to have a party at his place, and David and his servants are tired and hungry. David protected Nabal’s servants when they were out his way, and really hopes Nabal will return the favor, and let David and his men come eat and drink at his soiree. But Nabal is a jerk. His name in Hebrew literally means “fool”, and he lives up to it. Even though David is the King, Nabal acts like he doesn’t know who he is, suggests David might just be some runaway servant, and refuses to help him. Despite being a generally altruistic character David is also a proud dude with a lot of testosterone and a temper. So when he finds out Nabal won’t have him over for dinner he tells all his homeboys to strap on their swords and kill everyone at Nabal’s house.

 

The word gets back to a character we haven’t heard from yet: Abigail, Nabal’s wife. She knows that when the King says he’s sending his army to your house you should take him seriously. She makes a plan to solve a problem she did nothing to create. She packs up a feast—meat, bread, desserts, and wine—loads them on a donkey, and meets David on the road with all this food. Max Lucado, a minister and prolific author of Bible Study materials, describes what David saw when Abigail showed up like this:

 

Four hundred men rein in their rides. Some gape at the food; others gawk at the female. She’s good lookin’ with good cookin’, a combination that stops any army. Picture a neck-snapping blonde showing up at boot camp with a truck full of burgers and ice cream.[1]

 

When two angry men threatened the lives of hundreds, a woman that many are likely to overlook and forget saved them all, using nothing but the ordinary things that were part of her daily life: cooking, hospitality, gentleness, and grace. She intervened like only a quick-thinking, strong woman could.

 

After she gets off her donkey, Abigail apologizes for Nabal’s actions, begs for David’s forgiveness, and prays for his success as King. She goes home to a life that is relatively privileged but not great. Nabal, her rich brute of a husband, went ahead and had that big party and got so drunk he couldn’t string more than a few words together before stumbling into bed. The next morning Abigail tells Nabal “I saved your life, you’re welcome,” and he has a heart attack and dies. Some people just can’t understand kindness, and will literally die before they say “thank you”. We can’t always help that. But Abigail gets a happy ending, at least as far as happy endings went for women in her era: David comes back and marries her. And that’s it. We never hear from her again.

 

So, sure, we can look at Abigail as a minor biblical character and really not be wrong. She has a short and simple story and then fades into the biblical background. She was neither David’s first nor last wife, and we really can’t look at her as if she’s a great love of his life. David had seven wives that the scripture names, plus a number of unnamed concubines, and he unromantically acquired Abigail and then went on to do what Kings do. Natalie the MegaFeminist needs to step back in here for a moment and remind you, just in case you forgot, how awful it was to be a woman in the ancient near east.

 

But despite going from being the property of one man to being the property of another, like so many women throughout all of time, Abigail makes a difference. And since she really was chattel in the eyes of a powerful man like David, it tells us so much more about how incredibly brave, even fierce, she was. She saw a crisis headed her way and rather than meekly looking upon her doom she saved her life, she saved countless lives of people who likely didn’t deserve that kind of mercy, and she created peace. A millennium later Jesus taught us that peace makers like Abigail are the children of God.

 

On this weekend, as we celebrate Juneteenth, now finally recognized as a Federal Holiday, we can look at people like our sister Abigail and ask ourselves—who are the children of God that we’ve overlooked? Who are these hidden figures, these heroes of our people that we shunted to the sidelines simply because society doesn’t recognize their full humanity? Who are the children of God that we’ve forgotten about? Who do we need to lift up and celebrate? Juneteenth invites us in to the history of such a people, enslaved peoples living in Galveston, Texas, the very last to be freed in the Confederacy on June 19, 1865. It can be odd for such an overwhelmingly White church to lift up a holiday like Juneteenth, but that discomfort we struggle with in doing so is the whole point. Black history is American history, and we need to lift it out of obscurity and into the light. It’s our history. Women’s rights are human rights. In the words of Dr. King, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and only when we lift up all of our stories as worthy of our time will we know freedom and peace.

 

Amen.

 

I invite you to receive the benediction:

Put obstacles in no one’s way,
but rejoice in purity, knowledge, patience, kindness,
holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech,
and the power of God.
Go in peace.

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[1] Lucado, Max. Cast of Characters: Common People in the Hands of an Uncommon God. (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2008), 70.