Speaker 1: Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: That was amazing. How did that How did that even happen? Hello. Welcome. I did not plan that, but I loved it.
I think I could make an entrance like that every time. It would be so great. Thank you, sound people. Welcome here. It is so incredibly good to be in the room together.
In fact, I just kinda wanna take you in. Woo hoo. Like, there you are. It feels so good. So thank you so much for braving a new and an old space together.
My name is Bobby. Some of you know me, maybe some of you don't. It's all good. And it's really good to be back in person, albeit in a bit of a measured and quieter, though, not a moment ago, a quieter time. I mean, one service sure isn't five services across two parishes, but we are adjusting, aren't we?
And really, this is a season of adjusting. I mean, let's take all these reunion questions we're fielding right now. When you haven't seen someone in, oh, I don't know, a year and you reach for a question and what comes out is like, ah, how's life? And what's your year been like? And you know that awkward one too?
Anything new? And if it's your turn to answer, it can be really hard to find the words. You reply like, not much, but really, like, everything kinda feels like it's shifted or doing fine considering, but really you had weeks of disorienting fog in this past year. Or you say, we're good. We're good.
When you speak about your family, but really your kid or your partner went through a really rough patch, and you're only now just finding the words for what went down. It's a weird time, and it's pretty hard to sum it up. All of this is anything but simple. Well, today, we start one of our summer series called both slash and, and I really think it's perfect for this moment. Of course, our reunion questions are what they are.
We are trying our best to reconnect, so I welcome all of it, even the awkward parts. But when it comes to faith, interacting with this complex world, we need more than basic answers for life's big questions. We need more than either or. What do I mean by either or? Well, let's think about some either or categories that you have likely used and needed in your life.
Like his choice is either right or it's wrong. Or their politics are either righteous or evil. And this relationship is either flourishing or it's floundering. My sexuality is either pure or it's impure. She's either too loud or too quiet.
Now imagine these realities going beyond either or. Imagine them stretching out across a great continuum. On one end, you have wrong, and on the other, you have right. And someone's truth is somewhere in between. It seems simple enough to include the gray, but it can be harder to do.
And just a quick little story to illustrate this. Last week, Jonathan and I, my partner, we were driving in our neighborhood and we passed a yard that's like, let's say how shall we say? It's like there's a lot going on. It's like a car with a lot of bumper stickers kind of in your face making a lot of points. And I said something, and this is why I do not look good in this story.
I was really snarky about it and kind of disdainful. And Jonathan made a quick point that we don't live, and I'll use my language here, in an either or country. Like, live in a country where people can put signs on their lawns if they want to, and they can express opinions that are different from my own. And for the record, there was no hate there. I was just being a punk.
So it's both and. And today, we are reading second Samuel chapter six through the lens of both and. And our actual theme is loud quiet. We're gonna talk about loud entrances, retrieved relics, a room with a view, and quiet conversations. And you'll see that outline if you're in the room on the screen, so don't sweat it.
But before we dive in, let's take a breath and pray together. Loving God. All of these great thinkers and contemplatives have affirmed through the centuries that you are being itself. You are being itself. In you, we find both light and holy darkness.
In you, we find both love and righteous anger. In you, we find the fullness of compassion and the coarseness of correction. Jesus, will you help us to befriend the other side of arguments and differences? To be peacemakers who seek shalom everywhere. To spirit of the living God present with us now.
Enter the places of our self importance and our reckless opinions and sometimes our narrow mindedness and heal us of all that harms us. Amen. So second Samuel chapter six verses one, two, and five. David again brought together all the able-bodied young men of Israel, 30,000. He and all his men went to Baalah in Judah to bring up the ark of God, which is called by the name, the name of the Lord Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim on the ark.
David and all Israel were celebrating with all their might before the Lord with castanets, harps, lyres, timbrels, cisterns and cymbals. Okay. So we are looking at David on his rise as king of Judah and Israel after Saul's demise. And we've got this portable shrine on the move from one place to another after David conquers Jerusalem and makes that city his new political and religious center. But then, when the procession comes to the threshing floor of Nakan, a man named Uzzah reaches out to stabilize the ark after oxen stumbles.
And we read in verse seven that the Lord's anger burns against Uzzah's irreverent act, and God strikes him down. And Uzzah dies there beside the ark he tried to save. In verse eight, David is angry. In verse nine, David is afraid. And he asks, how can the ark of the Lord ever come to me?
So David hatches a new plan. Some other guy, Obed Edom the Gittite, a non Israelite will take the ark home rather than have the ark go to the city of David. And I imagine this guy Obed Edom being pretty shocked when David calls his name, but kind of shrugging and saying like, alright, dude, I'll take your fancy trunk home with me and take it home he does. And for three months, he receives the blessing of God on his entire household. And when David hears about this blessing, he considers it, ah, a good omen.
And he plans to bring that ark back to Jerusalem. Now from where we sit, let's be honest, the Lord in this text seems pretty fickle. The procession of the ark is interrupted by tragedy all because an animal stumbles. The ark, the people had basically forgotten about for twenty years, is somehow more important than the human who tried to keep it out of the dirt? Come on now.
But what if the point is just harder to contain? David appears to be doing something holy, dusting off a sacred symbol that goes all the way back to Moses. But along with being a masterful warrior and a singer of psalms, David is an expert at making a moment count for himself. The slaying of Goliath, the friendship with king Saul's son Jonathan, sparing Saul's life in a cave twice, making a show of his lament over dead Saul and his dead sons just before going to war against that family, and now bringing the ark to Jerusalem in this raucous procession. And as we shift focus from David's successes to show God's strength, the story reminds us that the Lord is not to be manipulated, controlled, or used.
This is God who is uncontainable. Who out in a field in the middle of pageantry reminds David, hey, remember who I am. You don't make me, I make you. Now, I am not at all interested in a God who is fickle, who is erratic, or who plays favorites. But I am interested in a God who is uncontainable, who stretches past my imagination, sees through my show of goodness.
Remember, these texts, they are ancient. They come to us from a long time ago. And Hebrew scholar Robert Alter says that this show of archaic anger against Uzzah defies our ethical categories. But let me say the point I think is still valid. When you justify yourself with the name of God, with your interpretation of what is right, with the sureness of your opinion, you just need to slow down a little and check yourself.
For David, this is a moment to see his mastery for what it is, a shrine to himself. And something in a man falling to his death near the ark of the Lord terrifies David. It humbles him. And after years and years of fighting, David is forced to pause and reflect. There are moments in life.
You know them. Moments that bring you to your knees, fill you with dread and anger and fear. What if the point isn't to blame whoever you think is your enemy? What if the point isn't to tag where you feel like God's presence is or isn't? What if the point isn't to use the things that you think are holy to prop up your own story, but instead to find blessing where you thought there was none?
Awe at just how small you are in the story of the expanding universe, reverence for life in every unfair death. So take a breath with that. Just pause. Be comforted by a god who is both uncontainable and present in the center of a crowd. So a few months later, David, our guy, he tries again and we pick up partway through verse 12.
David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed Edom to the city of David with rejoicing. When those who were carrying the ark of the Lord had taken just six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. Seems a little overboard but that's what he did. Wearing a linen ephod, David was dancing before the Lord with all his might. While he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets.
So here is David's do over, but honestly, I am not so sure much has changed. He's still this masterful politician. He's moving the ark and he's making sacrifices as a sign to the people that he's a king who has God on his side. And even though no one falls dead this time, there's still this mix of motivations. David is putting on a show.
He's working it up. He's kind of unstoppable. With these symbolic sacrifices and sacred music and the shrine of God, David is uniting a broken kingdom. He's setting up a new capital. He's entirely in charge.
Now, we humans, we have a complicated story with symbols, images that signify more than what's on the surface. Take iconoclasm. Icono what now, Bobby? Iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is the controversy that pops up in church history where people, often men, in powerful positions, pop, pop, pop, theologians, emperors, all these dudes, they came out against the production and use of images in private or public worship.
So, iconoclasm got super super organized in the mid seven hundreds when emperor Constantine the fifth ordered the destruction of all religious art throughout the East. And later in the century, some VIP councils also full of men made a course correction and shaped a more measured theology of images. But iconoclasm came back in force during the reformation in the sixteenth century. Paintings, sculptures, and relics were destroyed all over the West. I mean, can you imagine this kind of policing?
You probably can. That there are these right ways to reflect on God and there are these wrong ways to reflect on God. That a picture or a symbol, an image is worth rioting over. And for the record, Martin Luther was like, this is nuts. Images can be tools in worship and aids in devotion, so cool your jets.
It's like something like a direct quote. So knowing this history, it cautions us to be careful with our symbols. We tend to take things too far. When we elevate ideas over people, stuff gets very broken. Now, we have adopted new symbols in this pandemic and even in recent memory.
Artifacts like masks, plexiglass barriers, proof of vaccines, all of which I'm for, and I spent like a year of my life in my house, and it was hard. I'm an extrovert. I was very sad about it. But we've also got BLM signs. I made two of them.
We have orange t shirts. We have oil and gas truck decals. I mean, you could probably add to the list, and it's all welcome. But here's the thing with our secular symbols. We are as devoted to them or opposed to them as the church, the historical church, has been with its symbolic art.
These symbols, they speak. Right? Sometimes it feels like they're screaming. But you know what? The louder we use these symbols to shout, the less that we hear.
And when all we do is yell, we are a part of breaking our world, not healing it. We divide communities. We shut down conversations before they have a chance to wind their way into spaces of unforeseen transformation. There is this creative tension when you say this thing, this thing, it matters so much to me, but also I can see that thing, it matters so much to you. So tell me about it.
As my partner would say, tell me everything, leave nothing out. He is that good. And as you listen, you learn. You learn of someone else's pain and their worry. You learn about a complicated history.
You learn a story that you could not perceive across a divide. David David's actions are so loud. Right? He's wearing priest clothes and he's carrying a nearly forgotten ark and he parades. David is larger than life here, but it turns out being so sure of yourself can stop you from seeing how what is so right for you is actually really wrong for someone else.
Someone in a room with a view. So as the ark of the Lord was entering the city of David, Michael, daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart. Come on with this verse. Did you see that coming?
Just as David is like twirling about, and by the way, like his tunic flies up and people get more than they thought they were gonna get. We cut to a scene, A woman just had a window looking down at the king and the crowd despising him with her whole heart. And the Hebrew word for despise is and it means scorn, to show contempt for, to ridicule. So who is Michael? And what do we make of this hushed scene?
Well, Michael is introduced in this verse not as one of David's wives, which she is, but as Saul's daughter. This patriarchal introduction is here to make a point. Michael is the only living member of Saul's immediate family. Saul, the king that David has ousted. Then it was Saul who gave Michael to David.
Fun fact, nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible are we told that a woman loves a man. In first Samuel eighteen twenty eight, we're told that Michael loves David. And maybe that's where her sadness starts. Because the text never says that David loves her back. Saul hopes that by making David his son-in-law through Michael, Saul's enemies will see David as the more significant threat and kill him instead.
But with the help of Michael, David slips from that trap and as a result, Saul marries Michael off to another man. And sometime later in a political move, David demands Michael be brought back to him, so Michael is taken away from the other husband, and this part kills me. In second Samuel three sixteen, we read her husband went with her weeping behind her all the way to Baarim. Then Abner, Saul's cousin said to him, go home. So he went back home.
This is a field of heartbreak. Michael loved a man who probably didn't love her back. And we're not even sure of her feelings for the man who did. This woman at a window is a scene that for weeks I cannot shake. Do you ever have that?
It just follows you around. You're still thinking about this thing. And I have mulled over and meditated on this scene at the window for weeks. For me, Michael is something of an icon herself. And theologian and historian Robin Jensen defines an icon as a visible image or representation of something existing or imagined, divine or created.
And Jensen points out that God made humanity in the divine image, Genesis one. And Colossians one fifteen refers to Jesus as the visible icon, icon of the invisible God. Therefore, in its broadest definition, the term icon can be applied to Christ, to human persons, to sacramental elements, to painted portraits, to photographs, and even buildings. You probably have loads of icons you didn't even know you had. An icon can certainly be a character in a bible story or a painting of a saint with gold leaf, but an icon can also be just that tree outside your window that grounds you in every season with its quiet presence.
And an icon can be a song that you play loud enough for your neighbors to hear, and you play it on repeat because you are not ashamed. An icon can be the face of your niece who elevates joy in every FaceTime conversation. Come on. Sorry for those of you on the livestream, you might not see that. And one more thing about our icon, Michael.
Her name. Michael is three small Hebrew words jammed together. Me meaning who, key meaning like, and l a word for God. So who is like God? This quiet scene of Michael at a window offers up something of the nature of God.
If Michael shows up in the story of king David's rise and 17 verses speak her name, and she is allowed to be a woman who loves a man who does not love her back, a daughter whose father was killed and mutilated in battle, a sister whose siblings were assassinated, a wife who didn't know what to do with love when it was given. If Michael can be brokenhearted and contempt filled and later in life alone, then without a doubt, Michael is an icon for us of someone whose real story is at home in the pages of scripture and at home with God. Not all stories have happy endings, but they belong. And when we share them without cleaning them up, they offer a strange sort of comfort. And still, Michael's story, it is not over.
She still has something to say. So after David parks the ark in a tent, makes offerings to the Lord and blesses the people, the crowds go home, and David goes home too. To all these people, David is this good guy, but to Michael, he's not a good guy. As Michael greets David, she says, how could you, the king of Israel, make such a fool of yourself with such a show, going around half naked, flashing yourself to the servants. You are empty, she says.
And David fires back. I live my life before the Lord. Remember that. I am chosen to be the king of Israel now, not your father. I will become even more undignified than this.
I'm so loved that humiliation can't touch me. And I imagine that these two people, they aren't yelling. They speak to each other with tones knowing exactly which words will hurt the most. In second Samuel six twenty three ends the story like this, and Michael, daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death. What do we do with sacred stories with such sad endings?
Well, we realize that they aren't alone. You know, right, that David's dynasty falls too. In just five chapters, he will take a woman who is not his wife, get her pregnant without her consent, and kill her husband to avoid getting caught. Two chapters later, David's sons do horrible things in their family and terrorize their family. And here's what I think we do with that.
We look to our sermon series title as if it were a creed, Both and. Both and is what contemplative teacher Cynthia Bourgeois calls seeing with wholeness. It's what father Richard Ware calls developing the kind of thinking where you can live with paradox and contradictions and where you don't run away from mystery. Mystery. And both and befriends the fullness of who you are.
You are loud and you can be quiet. You are kind and you can be cruel. You can be open new to new ideas and you can be so quick to judge. You can have both a really great year and the worst year of your life. You can be happy.
You know this. And you can be sad. You can feel grateful, and you can be full of longing. None of that is sin. All of that is human.
Put yourself in the places where you are allowed to be all of who you are and that includes this place, that includes church, and create around you places where people can be all of who they are too. Meet them with compassion and curiosity and care and yes, it is more complicated than it seems. It's risky to be both and, but these are the places, these are the places where we learn how to love. David is both devoted to God and loudly showing off to advance his image. Michael is both a woman who loves fiercely and one whose story ends in a quiet loneliness.
The point is to assume that God is present to all of it. I imagine David having a moment where he does see the motives of his heart for what they are, greedy, lustful, conspiratorial, and he marches on. And I imagine Michael having a moment as she walks down a corridor alone in this palace, and she catches her reflection, and she quietly says to herself, I know you. We've been through a lot, haven't we? And she lifts her head a little higher for no one else but herself.
And she walks on. The point is to be people. Loud people, quiet people, people who dance, people who stand off to the side, people who rise in power, and people who see through the facade. And what is true through all of it is this, God can work in both the loud and the quiet. And as far as I can tell, God loves to.
Loves to. Please join me in prayer. Loving God. We begin this both and series with people of the scriptures who do not fit into neat and tidy, easy to handle categories. We thank you for that.
We thank you for their mess, their might, their sadness, their victory through all of it. May we sense your welcome to keep being human and to try our very best to do it with love and to always go back to Christ, the one who clothed in flesh shows us a self giving, love your enemy, try again tomorrow, face down death, come back more alive than ever way. The spirit of a living God who is present with each of us now and to the places of our own fear and our anger and our joy, our resolve, and heal us. Won't you heal us of all that harms us? Amen.