All Souls Church, Tulsa, OK

1 February 2026

Giants Get Got. For those of you unfamiliar with African-American Vernacular English – though a whole lot of folks seem to be helping themselves to it, nevertheless, if you are unfamiliar, let me put it this way: Girl, did you hear? Somebody got Goliath. Got him. Got to him and got him out of this world. Goliath got got. So you see, giants get got.

Giants get got but if you are going to come for a giant, there are three things I suggest you bear in mind: the first I submit is, “Forget the Fairytale.”  The second is, “The Front Man Is Only a Front.” The third is, “The Frontier is Not Final.”

Forget the Fairytale

Look here! I have seen the son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, he knows how to play (the lyre) – a man of noble valor and, a man of war, who knows when to say a word and, a well-shaped man; and the Holy One of Sinai is with him. 1 Samuel 16:19

That description of David in our story comes just before our readings today. Not a little shepherd boy – although he was at one time and, continued to keep sheep but also, not a little boy. In this story David was a hard bodied man of war with the maturity to know when to speak and when not to speak. A man of valor, noble courage. Isn’t it interesting that when the word חַיִל, which also means army, signifying valor in that expression, indicating a principled warrior, not a dirty street fighter is applied to a woman, the best the overwhelmingly male body of translators could come up with was, “who can find a virtuous or worthy woman.” But that is another sermon.

And in our lesson, Saul tells and David he is just a boy, as you have it in your version; in mine, a man child with three hairs in his mustache. Compared to Goliath who was a warrior from his youth and a single combat fighter who killed his way to his champion status – no matter the lions and bears that David had killed – was not, as Saul saw it, ready to face this full grown man who was years or even decades beyond counting the hairs in his mustache.

It’s difficult to get a clear grasp on how old David was supposed to be just as it is difficult to get a clear grasp on how old Jeremiah was when God called him. The same word is used to articulate their youthful status in both of their stories. This descriptor is used for a girls at the threshold of womanhood and boys at the threshold of manhood – what we call teenagers who can drive and make babies but are not yet adult adults. In ancient Israel David and Jeremiah would have been at the beginning of their teens while in our world this stage of life would be closer to the end of their teens. The word נַעַר has all the semantic range of the word boy: That’s my boy over there. Boy! I haven’t seen you in a long time, when neither of those men have seen actual boyhood in three decades. It can be used to demean, “you can’t take me on boy.” Or, like calling a full grown Black man, “boy” or an Asian man a house boy. This term for youth is used in all of these ways, and a few more, but is not used for children. Thus, when David started beating his chest and running his mouth at Goliath, David is, in the words of Sabrina Carpenter, a man child – in more ways than one.

Now, picture David, half past gangly teenager. A boy growing into his young man’s body. A strapping young man who has the breadth of shoulder and length of limb that will provide a foundation for his eventual grown man’s body, but he is not there just yet. His Adam’s apple has yet to find its nest in the corded muscles of his neck. He is like a Friday night lights football player in Texas or Oklahoma, in tiptop shape but, still not yet a man. And so it is not surprising David has the fearlessness of youth that worries so many parents when their child thinks they are immortal and indestructible.

But there is more to this David. Even earlier in the preceding chapter when the prophet Samuel comes to visit, David is described as …ruddy but I prefer bronzed as it is a play on words that David’s skin is the same red-brown as the soil beneath his feet – the same pun that is in Genesis when God creates red-brown earthlings from the red-brown earth. But the fairytale David, whose lineage runs through what is now Jordan and, all the way back to what is now Iraq, in dominant cultural imagination, is, a peculiar shade of white for an Afro-Asian person who speaks an Afro-Asian language and lives at the confluence of Africa and Asia.

And there is more, in the proceeding chapter (1 Samuel 16:12), we are told that David had beautiful eyes, and was a feast for the eyes himself. I don’t know what David’s mama, Mother Nizbet – her name according to the rabbis – and Father Jesse were working with but each of their sons was better looking than the last. David had pretty privilege. And he knew it. Ain’t nothing like a man boy who knows he’s fine.

And on top of all of this, David is God’s messiah, God’s anointed – a title not restricted to a divine deliverer, a sanctified savior or a even crucified Christ; that is another fairytale. That makes some of my students itchy. מְשִׁיחַ, messiah, anointed one, is a title, a description, that is bestowed upon priests and warlords and kings and the occasional ruling queen and even poor rejected Saul along with Cyrus of Persia. The messiah of God in the Greek version of this testament is the christ of God; the exact same title that would later be applied to Mary’s boy, Jesus.

When we meet David in the Goliath story, he has charisma and a healthy dose of ego and, has, She Who Is, the Holy Spirit, heavy and hard upon him. Soon he will be known as a giant killer. But here, David is neither the boy he once was nor the man he will become. Neither little shepherd boy nor murdering, raping king whose blood soaked path to the throne was filled with atrocity, including slaughter and plunder in service to Goliath’s king to whom he would later sell himself. But don’t nobody want to talk about that.

Giants get got. But if you want to fight a giant, first you have to forget the fairy tale that would have you out there facing a behemoth and getting battered and bloody and beat down and bullet ridden and blamed for your own execution because, facing giants today is nothing like the fairy tale that has been built around the David and Goliath story. “David and Goliath.” That’s how the story has been presented. And that is the fairytale. Goliath is a giant but Goliath is not the giant in the story.

The story spilling out of scripture into the streets of our cities, but only some of them, is about which non-indigenous folk will be able to successfully claim and hold the land. None of the fairytales about David and Goliath are asking, whose land is it anyway? Nobody is talking to the original inhabitants of the land while they use the carnage of the front lines to draw new frontiers, new borders around them and over them and across them, in blood.

These Israelites and those Philistines are both sending out their militarized forces to create the nation to which they feel entitled. So forget about the front men. They, their threats, their public performances and, their buffoonery, are not the story. The unnamed and unaccounted for people in whose blood these new front lines and frontier borders will be drawn are the story in the story. Particularly as I read in this century and the present moment. The front men are not the giants, even with their golden chariots and golden thrones, golden toilets, ballrooms and banquet halls. They are just a front. A front trying to distract us from the front line of their wars to create new frontiers over which to go to war and kill other parents’ children and, to claim resources that belong to all the peoples of the land, of Abya Yala, the rich, ripe, luscious Earth.

The front man is a front for nationalistic violence, for ethnic violence and, when they invent the category, racial violence. The front man is a front for gender based violence and patriarchy that does not protect, for dispossession and, for a deification of those complicit and enabling theologies and the violence they sanction, that shovel bodies and labor and food production and wealth and health and the health of this planet into the ravening maw of those giants for a bottomless greed that can never be satisfied, not even with all the lakes drained by AI data mining facilities.

Forget the fairytale and focus on the fact that the front man is just a front for the real giant in the story, who the fairytale and the front man magicked us into not seeing because that is what empire does. Empire writes a whole new reality in our faces and tells us to believe in fairytales and a giant even children can kill. Because otherwise we might start asking if, in spite of the fairytale that has been built around this story, is it true, is it still true that giants get got?

Giants get got but outside the world of fairytales, it takes  time on an epic scale, all the while taking lives, taking children, taking families, taking land. These giants of empire in which the front man changed on a regular basis while nothing really changed, while one dictator replaced another and one invader replaced the other, each helping themselves to the resources of a land they only held in their grasp because they stole it – these ancient imperial giants stood for centuries and millennia while people on the front lines and at the frontier borders threw their five smooth stones and sometimes threw rocks. So many tried and died. So many waited their entire lives and watched the next generations born into the world at the feet of a towering giant without one single crack in its armor in spite all the stones cast in its direction.

But these giants did fall and the ones that rise up after them will fall. We fight against not as cocky teenagers with a God sized chip on our shoulders, but as people willing to risk the ire of a giant by loving our neighbor and by protecting our neighbors – though it cost us our lives because, the front lines drawn by empire are not a final frontier. We are not stuck with the world they create, their stories, their justifications or their biblical translations and interpretations.

On this Sunday I celebrate the wisdom of my ancestors through the ages. They showed me that giants get got whether you live to see it or not. The work we do to collapse these structures of iniquity and inequity, like a fairytale giant, is not for us alone and maybe not even for us.

On this Sunday on which many congregations and schools will celebrate Black History Month along with more than a few corporations seeking to cash out on the coins of folk they stopped supporting when the giant of wanton police violence and state sanctioned execution of black folk didn’t just collapse like a fairytale giant.

Empires traffic in fear and death, trying to convince us that that the giants are too big and that we are too small and if we top the giants they will fall on us and crush us. Empires warn us that if the giants fall and crash then the markets will crash along with them, but that is the wrong currency to women separated from their nursing babies, fathers pulled apart from their children sent to concentration camps in their little blue hats with bunny ears. Their currency is worthless to a woman baited with her own child by modern day slave catchers. Empires traffic in fear and death to keep us in our place, believing in fairytales because those are the only weapons it has. But I’m here to tell you, death is not the weapon it once was.

When a womb expansive enough to contain all the worlds that ever were and all the worlds that ever would be, poured itself into the untested womb of a young woman just steps past the threshold between girlhood and womanhood, giants trembled at the birth of a holy Child whose coming heralded the rise of a people who would not fear death. And even when the giant’s call is coming from inside the house and there are more giants than giant killers in the Church, there is still a Love that transcends death and the works of fear and death.

There is a love that shatters the power of empire and sends its giants crumbling to the ground. There is a love that the empire couldn’t whip to death. There was a love that the empire could not keep on its cross. There is a love that spoke words of forgiveness, healing and love from the bloody monument of the empire’s power. There is a love that tasted death and spat it out. There is love that lay down with death and woke the dead when it got up. There is a love that death could not hold. There is a love that rose up from the best the empire had to give.

Jesus, the love of God incarnate, shook the empires and their front men down to their bones; because not even death could silence him and not even his death could terrorize the people he loved and who loved him into believing empires could not fall like giants because they knew that giants get got.

In the name of the One who waded in the waters of Miryam’s womb, walked the way of suffering as one of the woman-born, and woke from the grasp of death in the deep darkness of the morning. Amen.