conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

sunday's sermon

Sermon: Proper 10 (15) Year B
July 16, 2006
Community Church of Wilmette

David is celebrating. He is celebrating a great military victory and the success of his political aspirations. All the house of Israel dances with him. He had set out to unify the nation under his leadership. Until his reign, Israel was a collection of tribes, a confederation at best and hardly a kingdom. And as much as David was loved and though Jerusalem was known as the City of David, King David knew there could be more...more unity, more power, more wealth. As scripture says, “David became greater and greater because the Lord God was with him.ⁱ”

The Philistines had heard that David's power was growing and they feared him. So they rose up against David. And, as most of us can guess, the war did not go their way. David prevailed. Again, the Lord God was on David's side.

David went to Shiloh to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant. Shiloh, thanks to the presence of the Ark, was serving as the religious center of God's Chosen People. The Ark of the Covenant was the vessel that contained the tablets that Moses was handed on the mountaintop. Upon them were inscribed the Ten Commandments. David sought to bring the religious and political life of the nation into Jerusalem, under his jurisdiction. The symbol of God's presence to the northern tribes would now be the symbol of God's presence to the whole of Israel. Jerusalem's prestige would grow. No longer would it be the City of David, but the City of God.

Typical of David's career, he moved quickly. He knew an opportunity when presented with one, so he moved the Ark to Jerusalem. In the process a man died. Uzzah, seeking to steady what he believed to be a tumbling Ark, reached out and in touching it died. It was well known that the Ark of the Covenant was a powerful symbol. It was used as a weapon in the field of battle. None were to touch it. This is something Uzzah would likely have known. In a moment of panic, he forgot and was struck down.

I think you all should know that this part of the story is omitted from the lectionary reading for today. It is perhaps difficult and unpleasant for us to hear...and to preach. I agree. It is awful. But it is in the scriptures and we at least need to know what is in the book we cherish so. So for better or worse, I think we should wrestle with it as we are able.

David is angered. David is frightened. So he abandons the Ark at the home of Obed-edom for three months. He is angry that God “burst out” upon Uzzah...this is what Perez-uzzah means: “Bursting Out Against Uzzah.” Now David wonders how the Ark came into his possession at all. But after a while he hears that Obed-edom is doing well. In fact, it appears that the presence of the Ark is a blessing to the household. So David returns to claim it.

And here is where we have the dancing in the loin cloth. This is where we were back in the beginning, with David and all Israel turned out to sing and dance and praise God. David is met with joy and adulation...except for one person. Michal is not particularly impressed and will say as much to David. What is interesting to me in this is that her complaint is not really that David is scantily clad. It is that David may well not be celebrating God but celebrating his own rise to prominence. Certainly God had a hand in getting David there, but like many of us, he celebrated himselves and not God when he succeeds.

The story continues.

I cannot tell you exactly when it was that this story from scripture first came to my attention, but what I remember is that it was used to suggest that dancing and ecstatic worship should be permissible theologically and the issue at hand is one of taste and not theology. “Look, even King David danced before God...and in a loin cloth no less. What is so bad about drums or dancing in church?” Fortunately for all of us there are other passages that also state pretty clearly that such celebration is appropriate in the liturgy. We can save that particular conversation for another day.

But the fact that this is a passage about worship is undeniable. It is about worship and it is about politics...those two improbable bedfellows that keep cropping up in our lives lately. But what is it that brings these two things together? It is the identity of God that brings them together. It is God who brings victory to David. It is God who is present in the Ark of the Covenant. I think that is what troubles me so deeply about the death of Uzzah and the power understood to emanate from the Ark of the Covenant. It is God who does all of these things...even the reprehensible. God acts in politics. God is present in worship. God “bursts out upon Uzzah.”

Don Saliers, a professor at the Chandler School of Theology and father of an Indigo Girl, says this about worship. “worship is fundamentally the responsive gesture of the people of God.ⁱⁱ” It is a response of the People of God to God. It is not a response to what God does per se as much as it is to who God is. Thus, David liturgy is problematic for Michal not because he dances in a loin cloth, but perhaps because she believes he dances for himself and has missed the potential lesson to be found in Uzzah's death. As an aside, she could dislike him for many reasons. She was Saul's daughter. She was perhaps disgruntled to discover that David had taken many new wives in his travels. Her frustration may have had many reasons behind it.

But getting back...

I hesitate to make an object lesson of God killing Uzzah. I think that cheapens the man's death somehow. And I have not settled for myself what I think about the death. But that the ancient Hebrew thought that Uzzah was struck down by the power of God is undeniable. And though David understands this in the beginning, his fear and anger abate when he thinks that perhaps God is no longer angry with him. The awesome and uncontrolled power of God shrinks in David's imagination. Once he feels God is again controllable, he carries the Ark to Jerusalem.

This is where David misses his opportunity to learn. And he will do so again and again throughout his career. As C.S. Lewis said, this is no tame lion. It is not that God is the God of Caprice and struck down Uzzah for no reason whatsoever. For the ancients it was not so arbitrary as that. This is a story about how uncontrollable God is, how vast God is, and how small we all are, even David, when compared to God. And, if we can see what it will take David a great while to finally understand, that we worship not a set of ideas or tablets but Someone completely Other.

I think that this is where David misses the mark. He thinks he understands God, truly grasps Him...literally can carry God to Jerusalem. In the scripture that follows, David and God will debate about whether God needs a temple. David's logic is that he himself has a palace. God should have a temple. Earlier in the history of Israel, God tried to convince the Chosen People that they did not really want a King either. For better or worse God was just as successful in the debate with David as God was in His earlier debate.

What David does well, what we can admire in him is that David does have a relationship with God. David understands that there is a Will and a Person there. David debates with God. You don't debate with a creed a or a philosophical system. David, in his own way, does love God. There are reasons why the Psalms are ascribed to David. David is famed for this relationship. There is much that is positive that we can learn from David about how to rightly worship God.

• We are to come in joy. Dance!

• We can bring our grief, our sorrow, and even our rage to God. As the psalms suggest, there is no limit to the range of emotion that we can express in our worship of God.

• The virtue of sacrifice is that it feeds another. The sacrifice that David offers God in our passage today is a grand example of that virtue. And it serves as a potential way we can understand our own celebration of the Lord's Supper.

As a baptist I understand the lesson about worship found here to be expressed in the baptist virtue “soul liberty.” Simply put, we believe God to be so powerful and Other and our own salvation to be so essential to our relationship with God that we cannot imagine a faithful life without the responsibility of such individual freedom. We must “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” There is something desperate and hopeful in this. The God who strikes down Uzzah, this untamed God, is the God who later dies for us as Christ...the same God that has been since the beginning as Creator and Word and Holy Spirit. This is terrible and wondrous in the same moment. God loves us enough to allow us to come before Her on our own, to be in relationship with the Holy as individual members of the People of God. This is the nature or worship.

“Christian liturgy,” says Saliers, “in its whole economy (rites of initiation, eucharist, the daily prayer, the cycles of time, and the range of sacramental life) is response to God in Creation, in time and history, in prophecy and precept, in care for neighbor and for the very created order itself.”

I have been thinking about the nature of our worship together here at the Community Church. I like what we are doing, but since it is the summer, I thought I might experiment a little here and there with the order of service. I would very much like your help and feedback with this. Keep in mind the hard scriptures that we encountered this morning. Keep in mind the responsibility we share as individual believers.

Many of you have likely heard this quotation from Annie Dillard. “Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up batches of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.ⁱⁱⁱ”

Brothers and Sisters, this is a church. It is a place where we are to be community as our name suggests. But, as is often the case, it is more complicated than that. The People of God is a worshiping community. We gather together not only to enjoy one another's company, but to invoke God, the Lion of Judah. It is no small task. It should not be taken lightly. We can dance. We can rejoice with timbrel and lyre and drums and electric guitar if we so choose. But we rejoice in God...the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, of Sarah, Ruth and Tamar. She is God: wholly Other, in love with Her Creation, and all that we will ever need.

Amen