A Sermon I Wish A Christian Had Preached
Hugh Hewitt
Sun, Sep 20, 2026
By Hugh Hewitt, Townhall.com
Residing in East Tennessee as I do, notes of Dolly Parton’s passing still ring around me, and they will for sometime to come. I ran into a fun one on Facebook earlier this week, so fun I shared it there. It is a video of the Cantor in a New York Synagogue singing the “Hayom T’amtzeinu” to the tune of “9 to 5,” complete with English subtitles. The reactions I received were, let’s say, “interesting.” I just thought it was fun and illustrated how widely loved and revered Dolly Parton is, but for some people everything is about theology. But even those of other religions get things very right sometimes.
The Sunday edition of the Jerusalem Post often contains religious reflections, what we Christians might call “sermons” or “homilies;” needless to say, they are Jewish. Yet I encountered one this morning that carried a message that I wish I heard in more Christian churches. It reflects upon the story of Nabal and Abigail and David. Most Christians that have bothered to crack open the Old Testament know this story – won’t bother to retell it, I just linked to the retelling in the piece and to the scripture reading. The key phrase is; however, that “Nabal’s heart turned like stone” and they God took him only a few days thereafter.
Here is what writer of the JP piece draws from that:
Could he acknowledge that his wife had done the right thing? Could he let go of his pride, his resentment, and his anger? Could he simply say in his heart, “She was right, and I was wrong?”
Had Nabal reached that conclusion, nothing more would have been required. No dramatic public gesture. No heroic sacrifice. Just an honest decision that his better self – not his angry, arrogant self – was the real Nabal….
Am I defined by my failures? Or by the moments of kindness, integrity, generosity, and faith that also filled my year?
Teshuva, repentance, is not pretending that my sins never happened. It is deciding that they are not the truest expression of who I am. It is resolving that the good that I have done defines the person I genuinely aspire to be, and that my mistakes belong to a self that I am leaving behind.
Nabal’s tragedy was not merely that he refused to give David’s soldiers bread. It was that, during those precious 10 days, he apparently never embraced the goodness that Abigail had revealed. He never allowed that better possibility to become his own.
A Christian would talk about that lesson quite differently, but the lesson would be the same. Jesus is not about altering our ethics or changing our behavior – He was about making us into new people, better people – making goodness a natural expression of ourselves. But we must open our hearts to that change and let it happen.
Last Sunday I wrote about holding the Old and New Testaments in tension with each other. It is not as hard as you might think – the tension is not that great.
