Sunday, October 22, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (readings start around 26:30; children’s sermon starts around 29:05; sermon starts around 34:49)
Readings: 2 Samuel 5:1-5; 6:1-5; Psalm 150
For the children’s sermon today, I brought a box of spaghetti and told them the story about the first time I tried making spaghetti on my own. We talked about how we don’t always listen very well to our parents, or we think we know better than they do, but it rarely turns out well for us. Our readings today are a short snippet out of the longer story of David. David is eager and excited about what God is doing and wants to help – kind of like me with the spaghetti – but he doesn’t take the time to make sure that he’s doing what God wants him to do; and it doesn’t go very well for him either. But even though David messes things up – sometimes in really bad ways that end up hurting other people – God still loves him. God loves David’s big, enthusiastic heart and keeps guiding him toward what’s right. And David comes to realize that God really does know what is best for him.
Hospitality has always been a really important value for me. I love getting to host friends at my home, to invite them over and cook for them. And just in general, it matters a lot to me that people feel welcome – for whatever reason, this is just something that really fills my cup. And I have been this way for as long as I can remember.
The folks in the Gather bible study heard me tell this story a few weeks ago, but when I was quite young, maybe six or seven, I remember being really, really excited by the idea of people coming over to our house. I don’t even remember for sure if we actually had plans at the time to have anyone at the house. I mean, my mom’s side of the family would come over from Iowa fairly often to stay with us, so it would make sense that maybe they were coming.
But I just remember being so excited to welcome people and make them feel at home. And I was so disappointed that we didn’t have any kind of like big welcome banner out in front of our house to let people know that they were welcome. So I decided to take it upon myself to make one! I went rooting around in our stash of craft supplies, but just couldn’t find any paper quite big enough to reflect my grandiose vision for this banner.
Eventually, I realized that the perfect canvas had been right in front of me the whole time. I took my box of crayons, marched outside, and proceeded to scrawl the word WELCOME! in big block letters – as big as I could make them – directly across the front of our porch. I was very pleased with my handiwork. My parents… were a little less thrilled.
I thought of this story when reading through our bible readings for this week. There is a similar spirit of joy in both of them – a spirit of wild, unrestrained, and occasionally misguided enthusiasm.
David is kind of a complicated figure as biblical characters go — but there is absolutely no denying the deep sense of joy and zeal that he felt toward God. In our reading from 2 Samuel, David is overseeing the return of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem – it had been captured by the Philistines, then ended up in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin for a while, and now David has decided that the Ark should finally be returned to Jerusalem.
This was a huge deal for David and his people. The Ark of the Covenant contained the stone tablets given to Moses with the Ten Commandments inscribed on them. It was one of the central symbols of their faith; and even more than this, the Ark itself was associated with the very presence of God. So as the procession makes its way toward Jerusalem with the Ark, you see the people furiously dancing and singing with all their might, playing instruments, and making all kinds of holy racket as they go along. They are literally celebrating God’s return to Jerusalem.
Here’s the thing, though. This was all David’s doing. It wasn’t one of these things where God spoke to David by a dream or a vision or a burning bush or anything like that. David prepared a special tent and made the choice on his own to bring the Ark to Jerusalem. The Ark wasn’t even in enemy hands anymore – it was just somewhere else within Israel.
And if you read more of the story, you kind of get the sense that God maybe isn’t totally thrilled that David has decided to do this. Literally in the next couple of verses, a guy named Uzzah – one of the guys helping transport the Ark – reaches out his hand to steady the Ark as the oxen pulling it stumble over rough territory. And God is instantly like “Smite.”
And seeing what happens to Uzzah kinda freaks David out. It freaks him out enough that, for a while, he actually leaves the Ark at someone else’s house on the way to Jerusalm. He realizes he may not have adequately thought through all the details of his plan. But after David sees how the Ark’s presence blesses this family that he left it with, he finally manages to bring it all the way to Jerusalem – woo hoo!
David gets the Ark all nice and settled in this tent that he has set up for it. And immediately, almost as soon as he finishes doing this, David has another brilliant idea. He says to himself, “Hey, I live in this really cool palace, but meanwhile God’s been living in a tent this whole entire time. I should build God the most expensive, elaborate temple that anyone has ever seen! It’ll be awesome!”
It’s at this point that God is finally like, “Okay, first of all, you need to calm down. Second of all, at what point have I ever given any indication that I want y’all to build me a temple? Have you even read the book of Exodus?? I gave explicit instructions for building a tabernacle – AKA a big fancy tent. I’m a pitch-my-tent-among-my-people kind of God, not a big-stone-monument-that-only-stays-in-one-place kind of God. I meet my people where they are; I don’t just plant myself in one place and make them come to me.”
David feels motivated to build God a temple not because it’s what God wants to do, but because it’s what David wants to do. Building a temple was how everyone else around them honored their gods – and obviously, the bigger your temple, the more important your god! David convinces himself that his agenda is really God’s agenda. But in truth, a temple isn’t at all what God has in mind.
In a way, David’s struggle really reflects the way that the whole people of Israel struggled with God. Their ideas of how God should be and what God should do were often out of sync with the ways that God actually chose to act. A prime example of this is the fact that David himself is king. It was never God’s intention to make Israel into a kingdom. God had sent prophets and judges to rule the people, to keep order and ensure justice.
But Israel was surrounded by a number of other nations, nearly all of which had some form of monarchy. So the Israelites complained to God that they should have one too – because, you know, all the cool kids have kings. And God tries to talk them out of it. God points out how terribly some of the kings of these neighboring nations have treated their people – imposing harsh taxes on them or forcing them to do hard labor. Rather than having wise community elders make decisions, they’d be giving one person the power to do whatever they pleased. And God says to them, “Listen, I have something so much better in mind for you. I know you are impatient with the way things have gone; but I am trying to lead you into a way of life where you can flourish.”
This conflict between what God wants and what God’s people want is one that we humans have played out again and again and again over the whole course of our history. I can imagine it’s one that most of us here can relate to. We still want to have what the cool kids have. But God’s ways are not our ways, and that can be so frustrating sometimes. It’s especially frustrating when our intentions are good, when – like David – we think we understand God’s agenda, when we’re so certain that what we’re trying to do is what God would want us to do. We convince ourselves we need to build a temple or crown a king or make a giant welcome banner.
It’s hard for us to let go of our own agendas, our own ideas about what God should do and about how the church should be. And it’s all too easy for us to get impatient with God – and for us to get trapped in thinking that we have to take it all on ourselves, that it’s all up to us to keep things going. Especially when it comes to the church. Again and again, we find ourselves trying to push our way upstream, fighting against the current, instead of pausing to wonder whether maybe God is inviting us to consider something different – something better.
And it’s when we reach this point that God says to us, “Okay, first of all, calm down. Second of all, at what point did I ever give you any indication that I meant for you to take all of this on by yourselves? This is my mission in the world, and we are in it together. Let go of this idea that it’s up to you to figure out how to keep the church going – that’s not your job; it’s mine. Your job is to trust me.
So let go of this pressure you put on yourselves and on your ministry to conform to a certain standard. You may want to be like the cool kids, but you’re not the cool kids. You are my kids. And there is so much more that I have planned for you. Just wait and see.”
This is the Day 