Everyone’s got a skunk story

October 5, 2025 • Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Lessons: Hebrews 11:32-40 (NRSVUE)
Rev. Paul Fleck, Guest Preacher

[You can view the full worship video recording at: https://youtu.be/TKetIL0Dkcg]

It was Monday, November 1, 2010 at 5:00 a.m. when my dog Lucky, an 85 lb. black lab bundle of love, woke me up in a startling way.

You might ask how I remember this particular morning so vividly.

Well, it started with a crash.  A sound like the world collapsing around me.

So I raced downstairs in our little townhome to find that the coffee table had collapsed.

This, you see, was because Lucky was chained to the coffee table.

We had a fairly solid massive wood coffee table, and it was our family’s practice to chain our 85 lb. dog to this coffee table when we let him out to attend to his morning business.

This, of course, was a mistake on this particular morning, because no sooner had the back patio door been opened then Lucky dashed out  the door.

He took one of the four supporting legs of the coffee table with him. 

This was all distressing enough, but it turned out that Lucky wasn’t just in the hurry of a dog who has to go to the bathroom badly.

He was chasing something. 

And, to my great regret, he caught it. 

He caught it full in the face.

Yes, brothers and sisters, he’d caught himself a skunk.

That is why at 6:00 a.m. I found myself drowsily searching the aisles of the local Stop-n-Shop for eight cans of tomato juice.

Let me be one of the first to tell you that whoever has been spreading the myth that tomato juice removes the stench of skunk must work for the tomato juice industry.

Because it’s just downright wrong. 

You can understand then that for at least two weeks following the incident, our loveable dog just didn’t get a lot of love.

But after nearly two weeks of walking into our home and gagging at the smell, my wife and I found a miraculous product.

Skunk-B-Gone.

Through a special formula of enzymes and what can only be described as tender mercy it either covered up or eliminated the interminable smell that had plagued us for weeks. 

And our loveable dog reemerged from the smell.

You may be wondering what my story has to do with the scripture from Hebrews today.

Whoever wrote Hebrews—and Dean Attridge has assured me it wasn’t the apostle Paul—has listed a set of heroes of the faith.

Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephtha, David, and Samuel and the prophets.

He has listed their great deeds in overcoming kingdoms, producing justice, obtaining promises, shutting lions’ mouths, quenching fire’s power, escaping sword blades.

They were made powerful out of weakness, became mighty in war, routed foreigners’ armies.

Pretty cool, huh. 

You’d think so.

But—and this is where my story comes in—more than one of these characters listed by the author of Hebrews has got some skunk on them.

In the interests of time, let’s talk about three of them:  Samson, Jephthah, David.

Samson, that overgrown larger than life Arnold Schwarzenegger of a man?  Skunk all over him. 

He was ornery.  Consorted with Phillistine women on a pretext.  Then turned around and killed hundreds, even thousands of the Phillistines. 

I can remember a Sunday school coloring book of Samson tying torches to pairs of foxes’ tails and setting them free among the Phillistines’ fields. 

And then there was Delilah, his downfall.  He lied to her time and time again; she was, after all, trying to trick him. 

Eventually, though, he betrayed his own Nazirite vow by telling the secret that shaving his head would sap his strength.  

So that skunky old Samson got his head shaved and his eyes put out. 

But the wonder of it all is that he turned his life back over to God, his hair began to grow again, and he overcame his enemies in the end. 

Jephthah—an illegitimate son who was driven into exile and the life of an outlaw.  But when the Ammonites were threatening Israel, he was called back into the fold to defeat them. 

The only problem was this:  He promised to sacrifice to the Lord the first thing that came out of his tent when he returned victorious.  And that first thing was his daughter.  Skunky.

David.  Well, we know David was mercenary enough to flee Saul and fight with the Phillistines against his own people.

And we know how he behaved when he became king.  We know the story of how David put Uriah the Hittite on the front lines to be killed so that he could steal the man’s wife, Bathsheba.    

And we know of Samuel’s accusation against David:  You are the man!  It was like getting sprayed in the face full-force by the stink of it all. 

If there is any common theme that runs through the Bible and in our own lives it is that we’ve all come face to face with the temptation of chasing after skunks. 

And if you do that you can’t expect to come out smelling like a rose.

Because God works through imperfect people we engage in skunky behavior—and I’m not about to justify those things we do that are imperfect in our own sight and in the sight of God.

But these heroes of the faith were imperfect people.  Yet God worked through them in some way.

God intervened and they responded to that intervention. 

God takes skunky people, people with skunky behavior, and uses us in whatever state we are, and can eventually make us heroes of the faith as well. 

I find it heartening because I am a broken and imperfect person.

I’ve been skunky.  I’ve been an imperfect son, an imperfect husband, an imperfect father, even an imperfect pet owner, as you are already well-aware. 

But God loves skunky people because God knows we’re worth redeeming. 

That underneath all the smell of sin and brokenness there is a hero of the faith waiting to be called.

Amidst that imperfection, God can still use me, just as he used heroes of the faith like Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David and Samuel. 

God takes that which is oh so wrong and sets it aright. 

Our action in accepting God is as simple as applying Skunk-B-Gone; God’s free grace extended to us is as complicated as the formula that makes up Skunk-B-Gone. 

God takes all the skunkiness away, washes away my sin and imperfection like a big old bottle of Skunk-B-Gone. 

Thanks be to God.

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