Before I tell you what this passage means - and how it applies to
your daily life (!) - I thought I'd tell more of the story. As often happens,
we've come into the middle of a story few of us know well. But a warning:
I'm telling the story as we have it in scripture, not necessarily the way it
happened three thousand years ago.
First, King David. Everyone knows how the story of David begins.
A shepherd boy, armed only with a stone and a sling, kills the giant
Goliath of the Philistines, arch-enemies of Israel. But not everyone
knows that David beheaded Goliath and brought the head
to Jerusalem, where he then came to the attention of Saul, first King of Israel.
Or maybe David's story begins when God sends the prophet Samuel to anoint
one of the sons of Jesse of Bethlehem: to everyone's surprise, the youngest
one, David, who was tending sheep. The story of how David went from shepherd
to king is a long one. It's full of battles and plunder, friendship and betrayals,
a ghost and a seance - to make it short, David killed a lot of people. Sometimes
he killed in self-defense, sometimes to protect widows and orphans, and sometimes he
refrained from killing. So he became King of Israel, a small, weak, kingdom compared
to its neighbors, but a kingdom nonetheless. David marched into Jerusalem, kicked out
the Jesubites who lived there, and made it the City of David. Then a neighboring King,
from Tyre in Lebanon, sent messengers to David, along with cedar trees and carpenters
and masons to build David a house ... It's a funny thing about real estate.
David had been anointed. He had captured Jerusalem and routed the Philistines.
But is was after this house had been built, says the Bible, it was then that
David perceived the Lord had established him King over Israel. It must have been
a large house - a palace - for by then David had a big family. Sixteen sons and
many daughters. (We don't know how many; they were girls so it wasn't important
to name or number them). One of his sons, a middle child named Solomon,
will become King after David. That's the offspring who will build a house
for the ark of God, the first temple. And if you're wondering about that poor
woman who had to bear all those children,
don't worry. David had many wives and concubines. He was King.
Second: Nathan. Nathan is a prophet in royal service. These prophets had a job:
to listen for the Word of the Lord and relay it to the King. Nathan was a highly
competent prophet.
Third: the ark of God. The ark was a box. The Lord told Moses to build it when
the Hebrews left Egypt. Make it of acacia wood, God said. Overlay it with pure
gold, inside and out, make a cover of pure gold, carve two cherubim of pure gold
with outstretched wings on top, and place the covenant that I am giving you inside.
This passage in Exodus was written centuries after Moses and David, and described the
ark as it looked at that later time. During David's time it was simpler.
It was simpler, and it was also more than a holy place for the tablets from Sinai.
It was a mysterious and powerful object; God was somehow present in the ark and acted
in baffling and frightening ways.
The Philistines learned this. Around the time David was born, they had mustered for
war against Israel. Israel lost, there was a great slaughter, and the Philistines
captured the ark. Naturally, they were gleeful; they took it to the city of
Ashdod, and placed it in the house of Dagon their God, right next to Dagon's statue.
When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his
face to the ground before the ark of the Lord. So they took him and put him back
in his place. But when they rose early on the next morning, Dagon had again fallen
on his face to the ground, but this time the head of Dagon and both his hands were
lying cut off upon the threshold; only the trunk of Dagon was left to him. The hand
of the Lord was also heavy upon the people of Ashdod; God terrified them and struck
them with tumors. The people of Ashdod decided they had to get rid of this thing.
The people of Gath, also Philistines, offered to take it off their hands.
But in Gath, too, the Lord caused a great panic and struck both young and old.
So they sent the ark to the city of Ekron. But the Ekronites were no fools.
"Why have they brought around to us the ark of the God of Israel to kill us
and our people?" they asked. So all the priests and diviners of the Philistines
planned a way to get the ark back to Israel. They built a new cart, and tied it
to two milch cows. They placed the ark on it, and also loaded it with figures of
gold: figures of tumors and mice. Then they stood back and watched, and the cart
went straight in the direction of Beth-Shemesh of Israel, the cows lowing as they went.
Now when the people of Beth-Shemesh saw the ark of the Lord wander into town,
they rejoiced, but for some reason their neighbors, the people of Jeconiah did not,
so the Lord killed 70 of them. When the people of Beth-Shemesh saw that they no longer
wanted anything to do with the ark, so they asked the people of Kiriath-jearim to take it.
It was brought to the house of Abinadab, where it stayed, uneventfully, for 20 years.
At the end of those 20 years David was King, newly settled into his house of cedar,
and he decided it was time to bring the ark up to Jerusalem. They took it out of the
house of Abinadab, and put it on a new cart. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, drove
it. David and all the house of Israel danced before the Lord with all their might,
with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. But then
something went wron; the oxen shook the cart, perhaps it began to tip, so Uzzah
reached out his hand and took hold of it. Well, scripture says, the anger of the
Lord was kindled against Uzzah. God struck him there because he reached out his
hand to the ark, and he died. David was angry: angry that the Lord had burst forth
with an outburst upon Uzzah. David was also afraid, so he did the same thing those
Philistines in Ashdod and Gath had done, the same thing those Israelites in Beth-Shemesh
had done - he said: I don't want anything to do with that blankety-blank ark (actually,
he used more biblical language) and dumped it on someone else. The ark stayed in the
house of a man named Obed-edom for 3 months --------- and the Lord blessed the man and
his household. When David heard, he decided to bring the ark to Jerusalem after all.
So he did: with a large procession, with dancing and shouting and trumpets, and with
meat, bread and raisin cakes for everyone in the city. David pitched a tent for the ark,
and that's where it was when David spoke to Nathan.
When I first read this passage I thought: poor David. He was only trying to help,
to be respectful and pious, to make sure the ark had a house that reflected its status.
A house for God that would be comparable to his house of cedar. But God was not a needy
relative; our brief history of the ark showed that. God makes it clear to David who's in
charge, and who's going to be doing the house-building around here. And God makes a promise:
a promise that David's house, his dynasty, his throne will last forever. Not only will last
forever, but God will never withdraw God's steadfast love, no matter how many iniquities David
and his offspring pile up.
The book of Samuel was first written, as we know it, hundreds of years after David lived.
When these words was written, the house of David had already crumbled. The Babylonians
had conquered the remnant of Israel's kingdom and exiled all her leaders. When the exiles
remembered this promise, when they wrote the book of Samuel, they still hoped the house of
David, literally, would be restored: that the exile was a phase, the punishment God talked
about. It was restored, eventually, and Kings who claimed Davidic lineage did rule
Israel from time to time, but with much less freedom and power and autonomy than David and
Solomon had.
Is it important to us? Those people of ancient Israel seem so far away. Those strange
folk who believed that God rode around in a box - kind of - and killed people willy-nilly.
Those people who lived in palaces or fought giants, just like in the fairy tales we heard
as children. We sing "Once in Royal David's City" and "Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming"
at Christmas, but does David and his throne really mean anything to us?
I think it does. We are connected to those people so far from us in space and time and
theology. And we're not so different. Our world is just as violent. Our tendency to
see God in that violence is just as strong. We too fall into the error of thinking that
God has blessed our human thrones - the Bush dynasty, in our case. And we've been piling
up those iniquities just as quickly as David. In addition to any personal iniquities you
all may have been committing, we've been committing many as a nation. I know that Dr.
Shafer gave a list of those iniquities in last week's sermon, so I won't repeat, just
second them. Surely, we are in just as much need of God's steadfast love.
We live in a culture where we think of "long ago" as the time before personal computers.
The time before electricity is the ancient world. Global warming, or the possibility
of a nuclear Armageddon, started by us, makes it hard to imagine the future.
This promise to David is testimony that we are part of a much longer arc of history
and a much longer arc of God's love then we often remember. God's promise to David
that we know through Christ may not be the only promise God has made; God's free
to bestow steadfast love on anyone and everyone God chooses. And although we believe
God has continued this promise to us through Christ, God has not revoked his promise
to Israel or the Jewish people. But how wonderful that God's steadfast love remains,
calling us to love in return. I'd like to end by reading the beginning of Psalm 89,
the Psalm we read this morning that praised David and also recounted God's promises to him.
Please join me in prayer:
I will sing of your steadfast love, O Lord, forever;
With my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations.
I declare that your steadfast love is established forever;
You faithfulness is as firm as the heavens. Amen.