Strangely Familiar: Decorum (2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12-19)
Ordinary Time
David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel,
thirty thousand. 2 David and all the people with
him set out and went from Baale-judah, to bring up from there the ark of God,
which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who is enthroned on
the cherubim. 3 They carried the ark of God on a
new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill.
Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart 4 with
the ark of God;[[1]] and
Ahio went in front of the ark. 5 David and all
the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their
might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and
cymbals.
12 It was told King
David, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-edom and all that
belongs to him, because of the ark of God.” So David went and brought up the
ark of God from the house of Obed-edom to the city of David with
rejoicing; 13 and when those who bore the ark of
the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling. 14 David
danced before the Lord with all his might; David was girded with a
linen ephod. 15 So David and all the house of
Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the
sound of the trumpet.
16 As the ark of
the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter
of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before
the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.
17 They brought in the
ark of the Lord, and set it in its place, inside the tent that David had
pitched for it; and David offered burnt offerings and offerings of well-being
before the Lord. 18 When David had finished
offering the burnt offerings and the offerings of well-being, he blessed the
people in the name of the Lord of hosts, 19 and
distributed food among all the people, the whole multitude of Israel, both men
and women, to each a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of
raisins. Then all the people went back to their homes. (NRSV)
King David dances with joy at the
return of the ark to Jerusalem—what a lovely image. Peace restored, a kingdom healed; the bad
king Saul has died and left wide open the way for cherub-faced David to come
and bring the Israelites into an age of prosperity that will reflect so well on
the king that David will become the benchmark by which even Jesus is measured
among the Hebrew people.
The ark—the
chest in which the plaques of the Ten Commandments are stored, a design made
and specified by God directly in Exodus 37—had been stolen by the Philistines
and it made their lives completely terrible; there’s some interesting reading
of how many minor wraths of God got pulled down when they possessed the ark in 1
Samuel 5, if you’re curious. It
sufficiently worried everyone such that they gave it back—and then the ark sat in
someone’s storage closet for about twenty years. And now?
David is
bringing it home.[2]
How lovely.
Some of you
may know and many of you may have guessed that I’m rather a cynic of a person. I tend not to trust scenes that seem fluffy
and worthy of the end credit scroll of a film with upbeat music. So let’s dig a bit; what’s going on with
David here?
Yes, David is
now king of Israel, but that was a hard ascension. Saul, the previous king, could not handle
God’s new favorite and slowly descended into paranoia and violence before
killing himself on the battlefield. He
took Jonathan, his son and David’s best friend, with him. Michal, the wife that looks so disapprovingly
at David’s dancing? She was Saul’s
daughter, the last of the line, and we have no idea if she didn’t have children
because she couldn’t or if David was deliberately not sleeping with her to make
a point about who was really in charge now. David, dancing through the whole of Jerusalem
in nothing but a linen ephod—basically the undergarment that wasn’t meant to be
worn on its own—is flaunting the young body that isn’t giving her children.[3] And he’s doing it with the ark, the symbol of
God’s very Presence among the people, that God never told him to move.
If you want to
read this cynically, this is all one big publicity stunt.
See, God told
David to conquer the Philistines in the chapter just before this, but we don’t
have anything that says God told him to go get the ark. In fact, there’s a hole in the verses for
today’s lectionary reading and in that hole, Uzzah—mentioned in verse
three—actually dies when he touches the ark to stabilize it as it slides
around in the cart.
Which it
shouldn’t be doing, by the way, since God told the original builder that the
ark should only ever be carried on poles, not tossed in a cart like a piece of
luggage. And Uzzah gets caught treating
the ark like furniture and dies for it.
Not really the
best thing to happen before a big, celebratory parade. That’s why Obed-Edom comes in; David,
understandably, freaks out a big at Uzzah’s death and stashes the ark for a
while to rethink things. Publicity stunt
postponed.
So this story
is both beautiful and deeply frustrating, which is actually a pretty good descriptor
for David himself. David is a mess; he
and his family are a whole daytime soap opera with deep, deep flaws and loves
and betrayals and victories. But he goes
down in history because of his closeness to God, his status as a beloved
creation; most of the psalms are attributed to him and that is the whole range
of human emotion in one book, to be sure.
Both are true: this story of David’s dancing is beautiful
as David throws away the idea that a king has to be a certain kind of regal and
respectable and he simply delights in this moment of being in the
presence of God. Professor Samuel Giere
writes that, “The ark is the locus of the LORD’s presence with the
people, often quite specifically identified with the place between the
cherubim upon the lid of the ark, the mercy seat. The formula employed in
today’s text, ‘the ark of God, which is called by the name of the LORD of hosts
who is enthroned on the cherubim,’ is not unfamiliar to the larger
biblical narrative. The ark serves as the LORD’s throne and place of
self-revelation, such that Moses would hear the voice of the LORD coming ‘from
between the two cherubim.’”[4] David is dancing in the Presence,
wholeheartedly and truly in love with the God Who called him to the kingship.
And this
story is frustrating in the way David manipulates everyone around him to make
himself look good and, it could be argued, to rub his success in the face of
anyone who defies him. Professor Amy
Oden points out that, “David could have received the ark in private, within the
sanctum of his tent or a circle of trusted advisors. Given the profound
holiness of the ark itself, that would be an understandable strategy in order
to not risk polluting the ark or risk dishonoring Yahweh inadvertently.”[5]
But he
doesn’t. Oden continues, “[T]he
presentation of the ark is a public event in the midst of the people. The ark
then makes a ritual entrance that enacts the inauguration of a new era. Not
just David, but also ‘all the people with him’ go to bring in the ark together
(verse 2). Their pilgrimage to the ark embodies this new journey with God
toward a newly united kingdom in a new royal city, Jerusalem.”[6] David invites others to the Presence, to the
dance, to the real joy of the moment—to the stunt.
At the turn of
the 5th century, there was a group of folks who decided that baptisms
were invalid if they were performed by priests who had capitulated to Roman
persecution instead of allowing themselves to be martyred. It was later declared a heresy and named
Donatism, but the central idea was that if the person doing the sacrament was
impure, then the sacrament itself was impure.
One of its proponents, Petilian, said that, "What we look for is
the conscience of the giver to cleanse that of the recipient."[7]
The reason we
know about this heresy is that Augustine, the later-sainted bishop of Hippo,
wrote several treatises against it and those survived. “How, again,” he wrote, “shall they have any
certainty about the good who are to give them faith, if what we look to is the
conscience of the giver, which is unseen by the eyes of the proposed recipient?...they
remove the hope of those who are to be baptized from the Lord their God, and
persuade them that it should be placed in man; the practical result of which
is, that their salvation becomes not merely uncertain, but actually null and
void. For ‘salvation belongeth unto the
lord’”.[8]
Augustine’s
anger was that the Donatists were excluding God’s ability to be God from the
equation. They were claiming that God
could not make pure what came from impure hands, and Augustine said y’all, you
need to read your Bibles. God is never
limited by our consciences or our actions—or our inactions, thanks be to Jesus. We’re invited to the work, but if we fail
then God goes a different direction.
Whatever
David’s motivations were for bringing the ark to Jerusalem and dancing with his
whole scantily-clad self through the streets, he brought the ark to
Jerusalem and danced. David unified
the nation in the literal presence of God with this ritual of joy and
celebration, inviting people to rejoice in the wondrous mystery of the God they
could not directly see Who had nevertheless not abandoned them through all
their history.
This is, in fact, the one thing that
God repeatedly asks of us throughout Scripture—that we worship. It’s why we continue to gather here, whether
in the physical sanctuary or around various kinds of screens, so many thousands
of years later. We don’t do church
worship because we really like the music or because we get to see our friends
or it gets us out of the house or we have a new hat that really needs to be
appreciated. Those might all be byproducts
of worship; I, for one, really do like hymns, although I don’t have
a new hat to show off. But those aren’t
the point; the point is that we come together as a community to say to
the God Who made us and loves us and calls us by name to the work that yes, we
will work toward building a just Kingdom amidst the injustice of our world;
that yes, we recognize God’s Presence.
We delight in the nearness of the Spirit, in the ways that we trust the
promise of God’s care even on the days when it doesn’t feel real at all. We gather to be the holy witnesses to each
other of this faith we claim, reminding each other that God is both holy and
merciful, that Christ’s death was followed by resurrection, that the Spirit is
at work right now and here, here are the ways we see that and help make
it happen.
Professor Oden names the reality that
“People are hungry for ways to pray together, to lament together, to celebrate
together and to serve together. Spiritual practices and communal embodiments
help make God’s Presence real in everyday life.”[9] We don’t come to church—whether coming to
church involves getting in the car or nesting on the couch—because we have all
our life in order. We don’t come because
we have all the right intentions every Sunday and have never manipulated
anything in our lives. We don’t come
because we have never given up on our faith in a moment of crisis and have
always been perfectly in tune with Jesus.
We come precisely because none of
those things are true—because we have failed and gotten back up, because we
have schemes upon schemes as we try to figure out how to be people in a very
weird world, because we are pulled back to a God Who says “I see you, all of
you, and I can work with that. Give me a
willing heart to start with and I will change the world, because if I can take
a scheming king flailing about in his underthings and make a powerful nation;
if I can take a bunch of frightened bishops who quailed under the threat of
violence and betrayed their siblings in the faith and make a Church; honey, I
can do a whole lot with you.”
This faith has never once been about
being respectable enough. I would
encourage you not to dance down Center in your underwear, of course, but no
matter what you bring here, today, to this moment of God’s presence, God is not
ashamed of you. Decorum isn’t the point;
respectability isn’t the point; pushing down our deep-seated joy in case it
makes someone else think less of us isn’t the point.
God is. So we turn again to the One Who taught us to
dance, to delight, to align our motives with the Holy until it changes us
completely, making us not decorous but divine, one breath at a time, living
into the image in which we are made.
Yeah, I can organize a dance party
for that.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
[1]
2 Samuel 6:4 Compare Gk: Heb and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which
was on the hill with the ark of God
[3]
Ephod - Biblical
Meaning and Significance (biblestudytools.com); Ministry
Matters™ | Weekly Preaching: July 11, 2021
[6]
Ibid.
[7]
From “In Answer to the Letters of Petilian, the Donatist” by Augustine in Readings
in the History of Christian Theology, Vol. 1, eds. William C. Placher and
Derek R. Nelson (Westminster John Knox Press:
Louisville, KY, 2015), 95.
[8]
Ibid, 96.
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