Imagine GOLIATH Slaying David

Chapter 17 of I Samuel in The Hebrew Bible tells the account of David’s killing GOLIATH. The story has it that David as a shepherd boy volunteered to meet the Philistine giant in a valley between Socoh and Azekah. David is armed with five smooth stones and a powerful slingshot. Everyone knows what I Samuel 17:48-50 reports: “As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet him. Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine on the forehead, and he fell facedown on the ground.”

The story continues with David’s using Goliath’s sword to decapitate the nine foot giant. The shepherd then raises the dead head in a gesture of gleeful victory. Imagine if you will a different version with a completely different ending.

David gathers five smooth stones from the brook and places one of them in his powerful slingshot. The shepherd boy approaches the battle line to meet the champion. Suddenly to David’s right, a spear-carrying Israelite soldier runs toward him at top speed. It’s Jonathan, David’s closest and most trusted friend. Jonathan shouts, “I’ve come to help.” David thinks, “What courage, what a man, what a friend!” Jonathan lifts his spear and thrusts it through David’s heart. The loaded slingshot and the shepherd’s bag in minutes become drenched in David’s blood. Not unlike Pontius Pilate and Lady Macbeth, Jonathan for the rest of his days cannot wash David’s blood from his hands.

It is learned immediately that someone, somehow from GOLIATH’S army had gotten to Jonathan with threats that he could not withstand. The Jonathan version above did not occur in the Hebrew Bible. However, this sorry saga is business as usual in the real world where “friends” are no strangers to treason and where sometime friends know well the craft of betrayal. Others in David’s camp believed that Jonathan for unknown reasons simply had taken leave of his senses.

James Wilson Beaty
Jeremiah 22:16
January 28, 2014

Rector Hoare Remembered Every Super Bowl Sunday

Next Sunday, February 2, 2014, Super Bowl XLVIII (48) will be played at the Metlife Stadium in the Meadowlands of New Jersey. This stadium is the home field of the New York Giants. Some people believe that the late Teamster Jimmy Hoffa is buried in concrete in one of the end zones. This playing field is not too far from the much talked about George Washington Bridge that spans the mighty Hudson River. Weather vultures are speaking of a blizzard for that day; other media goons are talking traffic snarls.

Residents of the Peachtree Pine Community watch with great interest all Super Bowls. Some 300 plus homeless African American men at Peachtree Pine watched Super Bowl XLV (45) played on Sunday, February 6, 2011. Few of those men remember who won that game or where it was played. However, many of them remember a sermon preached that day at All Saints Episcopal Church at the corner of North Avenue and West Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia. The sermon was delivered on Super Bowl Sunday, February 6, 2011. It carries the title, “Doing Justice,” and it was delivered by All Saints’ CEO, Rector Geoffrey Hoare, that’s Hoare with an “H.” All Saints Episcopal Church’s website published Rector Hoare’s diatribe. I assume the sermon can be read still. It may have been removed.

My blog drjimbeaty.wordpress.com posted a response to some of the Hoare lies about Peachtree-Pine Community on March 23, 2011. The men who live now at the Peachtree-Pine Community watch like Jeremiah’s almond tree in chapter one to see if Rector Hoare might give a repeat performance next Sunday, Super Bowl XLVIII (48). The men who polish the floors and clean the toilets and showers and scrub the sinks and empty the trash and case manage hundreds of women and children weekly want to know if he will say again that we live there in squalor and that their living quarters are filthy and unkempt. Hoare stated that the place is unsafe and dangerous. He’s right about that: that’s true some of the time of the outside, not inside, where drug dealers and pimps and whores, (that’s whores with a “W”) operate most of the time without any police interference. Our security volunteers say that for every Atlanta Police arrest there are fifteen drug deals in the open broad light of the day.

But one long block away, down the street at Renaissance Park there are no such shenanigans now because the neighbors around that park have DEMANDED that all drug users and dealers and prostitutes and pimps be arrested. The Community at Peachtree Pine has no such protection. I’ll bet a six pack of RC Cola that Woodruff Park and The Hurt, home of Central Atlanta Progress and ADID IT has that protection. Another six pack says that CEO Hoare’s business has police protection, business community protection, Peachtree Corridor Churches’ protection, Chamber of Commerce protection, United Way protection, Atlanta Regional Council protection, Atlanta City Council Protection, the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team protection and Farmers’ Insurance protection. One must ponder if Rector Hoare has the protection of THE EVERLASTING ARMS.

Read my March 23, 2011 piece and Hoare’s February 6, 2011, sermon preached from a Christian pulpit in an Episcopal church. Then wait for Super Bowl sermon next Sunday to see if Cicero delivers again.

James Wilson Beaty
January 25, 2014
Jeremiah 22:16
Rector

And Justice For All, UNLESS

In our great homeland there is justice for all unless…. You finish the sentence. The Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, Inc. learned on January 23, 2014, that its lawsuit against conspirators Central Atlanta Progress (CAP), Atlanta Downtown Improvement District (ADID) and developer Emanuel (God with us) Fialkow set for February 17 has been postponed, indefinitely. No reason was given for the postponement. It is not known who needs more time.

Charles Dickens’ knowledge of the system of law gives “a certain slant of light” in the direction of understanding such mischief. At age 32 Dickens wrote to a friend, “It is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law.” Dickens slams the door on any hope of justice in the law.

Father Daniel Berrigan opens that door but only slightly. On page 12 of his NO GOD BUT ONE, he writes, “The God of the oppressed is nearly in eclipse in favor of a god of the oppressor. All however is not lost. Indeed, the worst times beget breakthrough.”

Our hope must be in the Rock of Ages and not in any system locked into the principalities and powers.

James Wilson Beaty
Jeremiah 22:16
January 24, 2014