You the Man! (2 Sam 11:26-27; 12:1-14)

     In part one of our mini-series Bored of the King David rises to power, defeating all who comes before him – including Mad King Saul – and after defeating various “ites” – the Moabites, the Ammonites and the Amalekites, to name but a few – he’s taking a well-earned rest in his cedar-paneled house, when he gets the bright idea to build one for God, who has none of it, knowing that David wants to corral the Almighty for his own kingly agenda.  But then God turns right around and lays an unconditional covenant on him, a better covenant than anybody in Israel has ever seen, that promises that David’s house – get it?  House of cedar . . . house of David, as in dynasty? – that David’s house will be a sure one, that God won’t take it away from David like God did the aforementioned Saul.

     In part two, we see David – that sure-house prediction going to his head – lusting after Bathsheba, raping her and engaging in an hilariously inept cover-up, trying to get her husband Uriah to be with his wife, so they could plausibly claim that the baby – did I forget to mention there was a baby? – so they could plausibly claim that the baby was Uriah’s, at least to Israelites who couldn’t count.  But than, Uriah – foreigner though he is – is more obedient to the Torah than David, and he won’t go down to “wash his feet,” if you know what I mean, and so the King just has him killed.  And there’s another elaborate cover-up – this one involving code words and secret messages.

     And now we’re in a bare, cell-like room, and settles on Bathsheba, beautiful even in sackcloth and ashes, and the light from a window illuminates her tear-stained face, and we know she is in mourning, and after the mandatory number of mourning-days, David sends a henchman to gather her, and then the royal ceremony and bingo, it’s finished, we can see that it’s all over, that David has gotten his way, as, might I remind the audience, the king always does . . . the deed is done, the king is married, all legal-like, and nobody will be the wiser, nobody will question the king doing kingly deeds, especially since his army is winning, especially since he’s beaten all the neighbors.  And as the camera lingers on David’s smug face, we cut to a flashback where David tells his chief flunky Joab “the sword devours now one and now another . . . Do not let the matter trouble you . . .” And subtitles give a literal translation “Do not let it be evil in your eyes . . .”

     But there’s problem with all of this, one great big fly in the ointment . . . “but the thing that David did is evil in God’s eyes” . . . and it’s a turning point in the narrative, a hinge upon which the story hangs . . . up until now, it’s pretty-much been all David, all the time . . . David sent for Bathsheba and took her and lay with her, he sent for Joab who sent for Uriah and finally he sent for Bathsheba, who became his wife . . . David’s done the sending, and the taking, as kings are wont to do, but now all of a sudden the tables are turned . . . the thing David did was evil in God’s eyes, and now it’s God who’s doing the sending, and it’s God who will do the taking.

     Specifically, God sends for his mouthpiece, and we can see ol’ Nathan as he walks toward the camera, looking like he’s right out of Central Casting – which he probably is, he looks like the Una-bomber on the Adkins diet – and he tells the king a story . . . “There was this rich man and this poor man, see, and  the rich man had many sheep and many cattle, but the poor man had only one, measly, little lamb . . .”  And anyone hearing this can figure out who the measly little lamb is, and notice that she’s a commodity.  A possession.  A thing to be stolen from her husband.  Indeed, Bathsheba’s put on par with a sheep.

     Anyway, Nathan continues to lay it on thick – and here’s where it gets kind of funny.  “This lamb grew up with this poor guy’s children, it ate with them, drank with them, and lay in his bosom.  She was like a daughter to him.”  Get it?  Daughter?  Bath-sheba, daughter of sheba?  And the rich man, faced with an unexpected visitor, doesn’t want to slaughter one of his own multitude of sheep or cattle, so he takes the poor man’s only, beloved lamb.  And we can see the poor man, tears running down his cheek, as the lamb is torn, bleating weakly, from his arms.

     Immediately David is incensed – “As the lord lives,” he says, “This man must die,” and ironically pronounces the sentence prescribed by Torah – “he shall restore the lamb fourfold,  because he did this thing,  and because he had no pity.” And Nathan springs his trap: “You are the man!” and the full force of David’s guilt comes crashing down upon him. “You are the man.”

     For the first time David realizes that all the time, and all the effort God put into him, all the good he’s done for the Lord, aren’t going to get him out of his punishment, and as if God had read his mind, God says through Nathan, “Look what I’ve done for you: I appointed you ruler and delivered you from Saul’s hand.  I gave you Saul’s house, and Saul’s wives, and the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  And look how you repay me – you’ve killed Uriah and taken his wife as your own!”

     And then, judgment: Because David betrayed Uriah by the sword, the sword would never leave his house.  Never would there be peace in David’s family.  Violence would mark all that they did.  Because David took Uriah’s wife, God would take David’s wives and give them to another, who will lie with them openly, for all to see.  And though David did his deeds in secret, probably for national security reasons, God would do his “before all Israel, before the sun.”

     At last, David acknowledges his actions: “I have sinned before the Lord.” And Nathan delivers one last judgment: “The Lord has put away your sin – you will not die.  But because you have scorned me, the child born to you shall surely die.” And the word we translate as “put away” is pass over, as in “pass over” the houses where the blood of the lamb is smeared, and so we immediately get the allusion to the freeing of the Israelites from Pharaoh’s clutches . . . we’re meant to associate the two, to see the Israelites’ freedom from slavery and David’s freedom from sin as cut from the same cloth . . .

     And everything happens as God says: David’s house is torn by strife and violence.  His son Amnon rapes his sister Tamar – rape ran in the family – and Absalom kills Amnon for it.  Absalom lay with his fathers wives – before all Israel, under the sun – before being killed himself.  But before it all, the first thing to come true was the death of Bathsheba’s child, the death of rape’s fruit.  And as the boy weakens, as he fights for life, David prostrates himself before the Lord.  He fasts and prays and pleads with God to save his son.  But to no avail – the child is doomed.  And as the closing credits roll, the camera pulls, back, back until David is revealed to be alone in the realization of the enormity of what he has done.

     The story of Nathan’s oracle, and its aftermath, highlights the bald, inescapable fact that what we do has consequences.  Walter Brueggemmann likens the story to Chappaquidick – one night of pleasure, a fleeting plunge over a bridge, and a career is broken.  After Ted Kennedy drove over that bridge, he never got near the presidency again.  And so it was for David – a fleeting night of lust spun things out of control, and led to more murder, more rape, and the deaths of innocents  within his own family.

    And so it is with our own sin – the more we try to forget it, the more we try to keep it secret, the easier it is to spin out of control, and affect lives beyond our own.  They don’t have to be spectacular sins, like adultery or murder, either.  Have you ever noticed how a single, little lie can branch out so that, pretty soon, you’re telling more and more, just to counteract the effect of the first?  Just so it seems like you never told a lie in the first place?   Pretty soon, you’re asking yourself  “Now, what did I tell Bob?  What did I tell Wanda – was it what I told Bob?”  And on and on and on.

     Sin has consequences, not just for the sinner but often for others innocent of the deed.  We are all enmeshed in a web of relationships – in a church, in a family, in a community – and what we do affects every other member of that group, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not.  In the West, where individualism has been taken to pathological heights, many of us have forgotten this.  We do what is good for us to do, and to heck with everyone else . . . and our culture, of course, creates this, it magnifies it and multiplies it thousands of times . . . people who think “me first” make the best consumers, they buy the most stuff, “You deserve a steak today,” “Be all that you can be” “You’ve got a life to live . . .”  Our selfishness is created in us – or at least greatly magnified and encouraged – by the society in which we are embedded.

     And this brings us back to our original question – what happened to David?  How did he get to be this way?  Why are many kings and presidents and CEOs corrupt?  Could it be – in part – the nature of the beast, the beast by which they find themselves embraced?  Look at all the Corporate scandals – Enron, Tyco, WorldCom – the people at the top, with the power, surrounded by lawyers and PR flacks and yes-men, you can almost interchange them, you can almost exchange Ken Lay with Sam Waskal, Bernie Ebbers with Dennis Kozlowski, it’s like each of them are cogs in the machine . . .  the CEO of Boeing or IBM or Intel lays off thousands of people, ships their jobs overseas, and they can’t put food on the table, and if the CEO didn’t do it the board would replace him, it’s the nature of the beast, the nature of the economic beast . . .

     And David, caught in a full-court press of sycophants, people ready to tell him what he wants to hear, people completely willing to do whatever he wants, dependent on advisors with their own agendas, and with responsibilities, mouths to feed, embedded in a system that won’t let him go . . . and pretty soon you start believing the press, start thinking you can do anything.  You do something bad – you commit a little adultery, take a little graft, bilk the people out of their retirement money – and you cover it up, you can’t do anything else, you’re trapped . . .

     But there’s another character in this morality play, another actor, and it’s Nathan, a godly, prophetic man who literally flies in the face of the system.  Because if David was in a sense created by court, created by the powers-that-be, he also embodied them.  He was the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the President, all rolled into one.  He was the man! And when Nathan said that, when he said to David “You the Man!” he walked on dangerous ground.  He was telling a king he’d acted disgracefully.  He was telling a king he’d dishonored his God.

     And look how he does it . . .he doesn’t do it directly, he doesn’t confront him directly . . . he tells a story, a parable, not unlike that other prophet that we sing about every Sunday.  He tells him a story, a fable if you like, and it’s powerful, it convicts David of his sin . . . words, thin and fragile, lost on the wind as soon as they are uttered, yet strong enough to bring the powerful to their knees . . . and Nathan is a model for us.  What we have to offer is the Word, in all its ephemeral beauty . . . what we have to stand up to fallen creation with is the Good News, the Word confronting the world.  The Word spoken, the Word heard, the Word lived by the Word incarnate himself, Jesus Christ.

     And that’s the grace here, folks – you remember last week I promised you grace – the grace is the Word of God, incarnate in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We have the words of eternal life, and they are words that can shake us out of our enthrallment to the world, our enslavement to the powers of death.   Look what happened to David . . . he was confronted by the Word, and he repented . . . he was able, for the first time in a long time, to admit his bondage to sin.  The word of God freed him from bondage to evil, it gave him the means to throw off the yoke.  And of course, it gives us that power as well . . . we have the words of eternal life, life that starts right now, right here, not some pie-in-the-sky by-and-by.  We may not believe it, we may not feel it, it may not look like it, but we have the means to resist the world and its death-giving ways.  And if that ain’t grace, I don’t know what is.  Amen.

David Meets the Daughter of Perfect (2 Samuel 11:1-18)

     Last week, we saw King David’s attempt to build a temple for God, to tie God to his regime and to his agenda by building for God a house of cedar just like the one David himself enjoyed.  God would have none of it, and then proceeded to make an unconditional covenant with him, complete with promises that had were not contingent on anything David had ever done or ever will do, and topping it all off with a promise to make David a house, a sure house that would not be withdrawn.  And the two halves of that story – David’s wanting tie God down and God’s making the covenant with the King – oddly complement each other, and they tell a lot about the house of David, born from the grace of God in spite of David’s less than admirable need for control.

     That need is a characteristic of kings, perhaps even all leaders – perhaps even pastors . . . that’s why God had warned the Israelites about kings, although probably not about pastors . . . Samuel, the last of the judges, who’d be out of a job if there was a king, reported a conversation he’d had with the Almighty, and it went something like this: “These’ll be the ways of the king: he’ll take your sons and take your daughters . . . he’ll take the best of your fields and one-tenth of your grain.  He’ll take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys . . .  he’ll take and take and take, and you’ll end up his slaves.”  But the people wouldn’t listen, they said “we gotta have a king, so he can go out and fight our battles, and we’ll be just like all the other nations next door.”  So God gave in and after a misfire with Saul, put David in his place – and the people were overjoyed at their shining king, their handsome, ruddy-faced king, and he went out and smote all of Israel’s enemies, and unified the twelve tribes for the first time in history, and ruled over them all for forty years.

     And everything was going swimmingly until one year, at the turn of the year – when kings go out to battle – David stayed home.   And it wasn’t militarily disastrous or anything, he sent his best general Joab, and they still smote the Ammonites and laid siege the city of Rabbah, but it was troubling, because wasn’t that specifically in the kingly job-description?  Didn’t they want a king to lead them gloriously into battle like all the other nations?  And now there’s a cloud on the horizon, because it was the time when kings went out to war, but David didn’t go!

     And sure enough, idle hands are the Devil’s play-things – or something like that – ‘cause David is as bored as you can get, and he’s napping on his couch in the middle of the afternoon, and Oprah’s over and Ellen hasn’t begun, and it’s too early for the nightly news, and he’s pacing the parapet when he looks down from the roof, and there she is – a vision of loveliness, washing herself in the twilight, and she looks good to his eyes – the evening light shining in her hair lights up her golden skin – and he’s instantly smitten with love, or a reasonable facsimile thereof . . . so he calls his messengers and he sends them down to find out who she is, and they come back and tell him “It’s Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam, wife of Uriah the Hittite.”  And that name . . . that name . . . it seems to fit her.  In Hebrew, Bath means daughter, sheba means seven, which is the perfect number . . . and O my gosh!  She’s Bath-sheba, the daughter of perfect!  He has to have her!

     And he does what kings can do, he sends for her and takes her – our translation inexplicably renders the Hebrew “took” as “get” – he sends for her and takes her and she comes to him and he lays with her.  And was Samuel rolling in his grave?  Did God not tell him a king would take their women and anything else they had?  David takes her though she’s someone else’s wife, though she’s purifying herself from her period . . . and he doesn’t stop to consider another meaning of her name, Bath-sheba means as well daughter of an-oath, daughter of a-promise . . . and David has made a promise to the Hebrew people, and a promise to God as well, to live by the Torah, to live by the law, and he’s broken several laws at once, and one of the biggies, one of the main laws, is good old commandment number ten:  “Thou shalt not desire thy neighbors wife.”  He’d promised, he’d sworn an oath to obey the law as the King of Israel, and here he is, breaking it with the Daughter of a-promise, daughter-of-an-oath herself . . . is that symbolic, or what?

     Well.  When he’s done with her, she goes back to her house, and the wars rage on, and by-and-by she becomes pregnant – you just knew she would, it always happens on As Jerusalem Turns – and she sends word to David saying “I’m pregnant” and now he’s in a panic, flailing around, trying to figure out how to cover it up, so he sends word to General Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” and Joab sends Uriah to David.  And you may have noticed there’s a whole lot of sending going on, and it all hinges on Bathsheba’s – for once in those male-dominated times, where women were little more than slaves, a woman has power over a man . . . she’s sends, she does what powerful men usually do, and a chain-reaction of sending is the result, like dominoes falling.  She sends. then David sends – twice! – and Joab sends, and at the end of all this sending is poor old Uriah.

     And now the story turns morbidly funny . . . when Uriah comes to the king, David hems and haws, circling the point like a hawk over a chicken . . .  He makes small talk, beating around the bush, trying to come up with an excuse for bringing him in.  “How’s it going?  Is it going all right?  How’s about my man Joab?  He OK?  How about the people . . . and the war?  All quiet on the Ammonite front?”  But he finally gets down to it, and I can almost see him slapping Uriah on the back in manly comradery “Go on down to your house, now, see that pretty little wife of yours . . . and wash your feet.”  And he’s winking at him, and nudging him, because what he’s telling Uriah to do is to have sex with his wife, that’s what “washing your feet” means, it’s a Hebrew euphemism for sexual intercourse . . . and now we can see David’s plot, he’s trying to get Uriah to go down to the house and have sex with Bathsheba, so it’ll look like the baby’s his.

     But Uriah – the Hittite, the foreigner – is loyal, and he very properly sleeps at the king’s door with the servants, and when David hears about it – nothing in a palace can be kept secret for very long – he’s dumbfounded, he can’t understand why a big strong healthy guy like Uriah wouldn’t go down to be with his wife – and doesn’t that say something about the king?   When asked about it, Uriah says: “Everybody else is camping in the field, everybody else is at war – Israel and the ark and Judah, Joab and the servants of Joab, and shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife?  I will do no such thing.”

     And . . . does David get it?  Does he understand the terrible irony, the incredible contrast between Uriah and himself?  Uriah the Hittite, Uriah the foreigner.  He’s under no covenant to the Hebrew God, but he’s more loyal to that God than David, he’s more loyal to the Hebrew people and his fellow soldiers.  On the one hand, there’s Uriah, who won’t eat or drink or take pleasure with his wife, and on the other?  There’s David, who stayed home when Kings went out to war, and dallied with another man’s wife while he was at it.  Does David get the irony?   Is he chastened by it?  Does he feel remorse?  Our passage doesn’t say, but if he does, he hides it well . . . he tries one more time to get Uriah to go to his wife, this time the old-fashioned way – he gets him drunk . . . but even that doesn’t work, and in the end, he resorts to violence, and orders Joab to make sure Uriah is killed.

     And that’s kind of the way of the world, isn’t it?  In the end, the world resorts to violence.  It’s always the last resort . . . didn’t want to do it, you understand, but I had to . . . there was no other choice.  David wiggles and squirms, he goes to laughable, comic ends to avoid it, but he does it in the end, he kills Uriah just for having a pretty wife.

     And what about that wife?  What about ol’ daughter-of-perfect, daughter-of-an-oath?  She’s often pictured as a temptress, as a Jezebel, putting on some kind of erotic show, enticing David into sin, but if you look at the passage carefully, you’ll see that there’s none of that in it . . . it says he saw from the roof a woman bathing, it doesn’t say she was on a roof in plain sight, he could just as well have seen her through an open window, or in a courtyard . . . the palace was the highest roof around – one of the prerogatives of being king, y’know  . . .and the string of Hebrew verbs – he sent for her, took her, she came, and he lay with her – all have a coercive sense to them, they’re all things that the person in power gets to do.  All except one, that is . . . it says she came to him, but how could she not?  How could any woman – alone, without her husband – say no to a king, the ultimate ruler of her life?

     But movies, TV-shows and countless sermons have all slandered Bathsheba, and with no evidence in the scripture that I can see . . . it’s like the courts, which still blame the woman for the rape . . . I know, it’s better now, it doesn’t happen in the courts as much, now it happens on the internet and on talking-head TV.  Case in point, a nineteen-year-old girl who accused a certain basketball star of sexual misconduct – a.k.a. rape – and there were internet sites calling her a slut, there were reports in the mainstream media of an “emotional breakdown” in her past – all inadmissable in a court of law, but what does an emotional breakdown have to do with man-in-the-moon marigolds, anyhow?  . . . and the well-funded Kobe Bryan media machine did its job, and there was Kobe’s beautiful wife – on national TV!  – forgiving him for adultery, but it wasn’t rape, she consented to it all, but she was only 19 – two years younger than my daughter was at the time – and her reputation was destroyed.  And you shouldn’t have worn that mini-skirt, young lady, it was just too provocative, he just couldn’t help himself.

     And so David – far from being lured into it by a beautiful woman, bent on seduction – commits an act of rape.  That’s what we call it when a powerful man – who commands and sends and takes – that’s what we call it when a powerful man coerces a woman into sex.

     You know, I had a preaching professor one time, who said “always end your sermons on an up-note, always end ‘em on grace, because that’s the gospel, that’s what we preach, but you know?  I think that would not be faithful to this passage, because in the end, there’s not a lot of grace in it.  In the end, it’s about sin, plain and simple . . . good-old-fashioned, personal sin, the kind your mama warned you about . . . it’s about sin and hubris, the feeling that you’re so powerful, so important, that God won’t let anything bad happen to you . . . it’s the sin of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, blubbering on TV . . . it’s the sin of Bill Clinton, of anyone – male or female – who abuses power, who uses his or her power over another to coerce them to do something they don’t want to do.

     And if you think about it, it happens a lot – it happens in marriages, it happens in business – where it’s often called good business sense – and it happens in the church.     Preachers have used the pulpit to brow-beat congregations for millennia – of course, I wouldn’t do such a thing – but they don’t call it a bully pulpit for nothing.

     Paul has laundry-lists of sins, things that are of the flesh, that tear communities apart . . . things like slander, gossip, and strife, envy, quarrels, dissensions, and factions, and if you think about them, they’re all the result of somebody trying to get power, or abusing that power once they have it . . . the Sunday-school teacher who threatens to resign if he doesn’t get his way, the gossip at the fellowship hour that gets back at his subject . . . the big-offering-giver who uses money as a weapon . . . all these things pick at a church, at a community, all of them erode its unity, and damage its effectiveness.  All of them do violence to God’s order.

          So my preaching professor notwithstanding, today we end here, with the violence of rape and murder.  In the case of David, it came from the top, just as Samuel had warned.  You give somebody – or a group of somebodies – ultimate power, and it often ends up that way.  And even though there is grace in this story, it’ll have to wait until next week when we talk about Nathan, the prophet who dared to tell the truth to a king, the man whose duty to God transcended even his own life, who risked it all to be faithful to a forgiving God.  Amen.

Berít Olám (2 Samuel 7:1-17)

     King David is a central figure in Judaism . . . he was the ruler over the last undivided house of Israel, who unified the twelve tribes, and whose reign has never been equaled since.  Jewish messianic expectations revolve around him, around a Messiah in the Davidic line who will restore the monarchy to its former glory.  Christians, of course, believe that Jesus Christ was that Messiah, and that his glorious reign is of a different nature than earthly glory or military might.  Be that as it may, David is important in both of our traditions, so it behooves us to spend a little time with him.

     But first a little background.  David, you will recall, was not the first King of Israel . . . that honor belonged to Saul.  Not that God really wanted a king, you understand . . . God warned the people through Samuel – the last of the judges, who (coincidentally, I’m sure) would lose his high-paying job if a king were to arise – God warned the people of all the bad things that would happen if they got themselves a king, but they didn’t listen, and so God had Samuel pick Saul who – holy self-fulfilling prophecy – turned out to be a less than stellar ruler, and the Spirit of God left him and an evil spirit sent from God took its place and drove him nuts, and he chased David all over Palestine before getting cornered and falling on his own sword.  So much for Saul.

     And now David is king, and he’s the best thing anybody’s ever seen, the best thing since sliced way-bread, and he defeats all his enemies – with God’s help, of course – and he’s living in a cedar house in Jerusalem – that’s a sure mark of kingliness, if you’ve developed a taste for cedar – and he gets to ruminating about how here he’s living in the lap of luxury and God’s ark is living in a tent, and there’s this prophet named Nathan who would no doubt like to serve God in a shiny new cedar temple, and son of a gun if he doesn’t say “Go, do what you have in mind; for the Lord is with you.”  But the Lord has other ideas, and that very night God tells Nathan “Go and tell my servant David:  Thus says the Lord:  Are you the one to build me a house of cedar?”  Uh, oh . . . sarcasm.  It’s never good when the Lord gets sarcastic.  God goes on “I haven’t lived in a house since the day I brought y’all up out of the land of Egypt” – not-so-subtly reminding them of who did what for whom – “but I’ve been going around in a tent and tabernacle.”

     And can you see that this speech is a remarkably understated piece of prose?  At once it conveys God’s disdain for the idea of living in cedar, and at the same time subtly rebukes David for doing the same.  I mean, if a tent is good enough for God – ruler of all rulers, monarch of all monarchs – shouldn’t a tent, or even a moth-eaten bedroll, for Moses’ sake – be good enough for David who, lest he forget, serves at God’s pleasure? God is mobile, on the move, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, like David . . .  or like David used to be, before he settled into his fancy-schmancy house of cedar.

     And God reminds David about his forebears, the ones God didn’t want replaced by a king, and he says “Did I ever once speak any word to any of your predecessors, any of the tribal leaders of Israel – whom, by the way, I commanded to shepherd my people Israel – did I ever once say “Gee.  I’d really love a house of cedar.  Why haven’t you built me a house of cedar?”  And this whole line of thought, of David getting a little fat and happy in his wooden house, will come to a head in next week’s passage, where David stays at home while others go to war . . .

     But here the God of the highways and hedges, of the tents and tabernacles, takes out after David and his request to build him a place to stay . . . this God is free, not to be confined to anyone’s box, not to be molded into anyone’s shape.  And that’s what David is trying to do . . . he’s trying to build God a place of his own choosing, to use God to legitimate his own regime, his own living-in-cedar-clad luxury . . . David wants to remake God in his own image, so he can justify the way he himself wants to live . . . and of course there’s always a lot of that going around, isn’t there?  There’s always a lot of cedar thinking to be had in organized religion . . . the most obvious being the purveyors of prosperity doctrine, the sellers of “God wants you to be happy or rich or insert-your-own-good-thing-here.”  They’re most obvious on Trinity Broadcast Network with their golden-throned sets and their “Something good is going to happen to you” message.  But those targets are only the most obvious, they’re low-hanging fruit, almost too easy . . . and they’re so egregious, so over-the-top that they obscure the fact that even mainline churches have their own air-conditioned houses of cedar built for God to occupy in a way that’s suits them just so . . .

     Rick Warren, author of the Purpose-Driven Life, built a huge Southern Baptist church in California called Saddleback.  And he did it in a wholly unconventional way – he didn’t build a church building, at least at first.  He began by going out into the community, propagating small groups in homes, house-churches, if you will.  By the time they got around to building a cedar house, they had ten-thousand members.  And he did it in part to avoid cedar thinking, to avoid the comfortable, this-is-where-God-lives mentality that afflicts so many congregations . . . he did it to avoid the worship-of-the-church building and carpet and stained-glass-rose-window that plagues the mission of so many congregations, which after all is to spread the gospel in deed, thought and word . . .

     Warren did build a church, there’s value to be had in corporate worship and program development, but only after he’d established the moving-about-the-community, moving-out-into-the-community ethos of Saddleback.  He knew that our God is a mobile God, an outward facing God, who won’t be confined to a brick-and-mortar building any more than to a house clad in cedar.

     The God of David and Rick Warren and you and me and Christians everywhere is a God that’s unpredictable, a God who’s in-motion who will go wherever God wants, will be whomever God wants.  And in the second part of our passage that freedom is demonstrated in a breath-taking pact with David.  First God reviews what has been done for David, summarized in a succinct triplet of verbs:  I took you from the pasture; I have been with you wherever you went; I have cut off all your enemies.  One, two, three.  God took him up, out of obscurity, out of drudgery as the runt of Jesse’s litter.  God has been with him in all his trials, all his battles, all his running and hiding from mad kings and enemies.  God took him, was with him, and cut off his foes. One, two three.

     And it’s followed immediately by another triplet, powered by another three verbs, only this time it’s about what God will do in the future.  I will make you a great name.  I will appoint a place for my people Israel.  I will give you rest from all your enemies.  God will make, appoint, and give-rest.  God’s gracious action in the past is followed by gracious actions in the future . . . and note that none of this is conditioned on anything David has done.  As a matter of fact, unlike his offer to build God a cedar house, it is entirely out of David’s hands.

     And speaking of that, over and above all of this, or as God says, moreover, God will make David a house, and here we’re playing with multiple meanings of bet, the Hebrew word for house . . . earlier, in David’s promise and desire, it had meant temple, as in a sanctuary for the Lord.  Now, God has rejected house as a temple but promised house as a dynasty . . . this passage is the birthplace, the taproot of the house of David, over which wars have been fought and around which Messianic expectations swirl.  Surprisingly, David cannot build a house for God, but God can and will build a house for David.  In God’s utter freedom – irrational as it may seem to us – God will extend the favor shown to David in the past into the future as well.

     Unlike previous covenants with the state of Israel, the covenant with David is unconditional –God’s faithful keeping of it does not depend upon anything David or his heirs might do.  In that respect, it’s akin to the covenant with Abraham, whose heirs will be as numerous as stars in the sky.  And in fact, David’s house will be made sure, it will be a sure house, in Hebrew literally an amen bet, a house of amen . . . no matter what David or his heirs do, no matter how badly they behave, their house will be secure, their dynasty will survive . . . it will be an eternal covenant, a Berít Olám . . .

     And of course this blows out of the water the oft-expressed belief that in the Old Testament, God is angry and punishing, but in the New, God is gracious and loving and therefore our God is better than yours . . . here is clear proof otherwise.  In fact, according to Walter Brueggemann, this is the “root of evangelical faith in the Bible: that is, faith that relies on the free promise of the gospel.”[1]  Indeed, if the gospel is that God’s steadfast love is not dependent on anything we do or do not do, if it’s that God will not withdraw his love no matter what, if it’s timeless and without end, then this eternal covenant with King David, this Berít Olám, seems like gospel, like mighty good news, to me.

     For of course that’s how it is with us, isn’t it?  Even though Christians build houses of cedar and worship them, at times, instead of God, even though we stay in our boxes and try to keep God in there with us, even though we co-opt the God for all kinds of national and social agendas, God will not withdraw the favor granted to us through Jesus Christ.  Like God, grace is totally free, totally without cost to us, so gratis we don't even have to accept it.  And because covenant, our Berít Olám is so much like David’s, taking a closer look at it seems like the thing to do.  And so next week, and the week after, we’ll do just that.  Be there or be square.  Amen.

---

[1]                         Brueggemann, W., First and Second Samuel (Louisville: John Knox Press), p 257.