David and Uzzah

Church of the Incarnation

Oct. 24, 2010

Text: II Sam 6:1-9, 16

Gospel text: Matthew 22:22-24

The kids take turns praying before we eat dinner.  Oliver prayed Wednesday evening.  Granted, Yankees were down 3-1 to the Rangers, and we had the game on muted.  He thanked God for our food.  He prayed for the homeless people in our neighborhood.  And then, with the same level of earnestness, he asked God to help the Yankees win their series.  Now, in his defense - we had the game on.  But still, I was thinking to myself - I’m a theologian, and a pastor, and he just prayed for the Yankees to win?!!  I must be doing a terrible job of teaching my children how to pray.  But I didn’t respond immediately.  I let the meal unfold a bit and came back round to it later.  Then I asked, Oliver, do you think God is a Yankees fan?  Completely serious, Oliver said: Well, I don’t know.  Do you think he lives closer to New York or Texas? 

I’m picking on Oliver.  But we’re all idolaters.  We want a God who is useful.  We want God to fix our lives.  What God wants is our full attention.

There are two ways to pack your bags for a trip.  Some people are meticulously prepared and organized, their bag is perfectly packed, and they have what they need, and it all fits nicely into a bag that is not only stylish in appearance but is easily carried as well.  Some people pack like they’ve been trained in folding shirts over a board at the Gap!  How many of you travel like that?

There is another kind of traveler.  Ten minutes after you were supposed to already be in a cab to the airport, you are grabbing an armload of clothes, throwing it into a suitcase in which it won’t fit.  When you close the bag there are clothes hanging out all over the place -- a shirtsleeve here, a pair of pants there, a sock.  And you wind up with stuff you don’t need, and missing a bunch of stuff you really do need.  The bag is unappealing to look at.  It’s cumbersome to carry.  How many of you travel like that?

Behold, I speak in parables.  Let those with ears to hear listen.  Most of us lead lives that are messier than we’d like.  We get from day to day but it’s not always pretty.  We often feel like we’re travelers who forgot some of the stuff we need.   And what makes it worse is that we wish we had a different kind of life.  We wish we were the other kind of traveler.  That might seem innocuous - but it can fester over time.  So here’s the real rub - down beneath our desire to fix our lives can grow a frustration, hard to articulate, that might be put this way: God I’m not going to give myself fully to you until you tidy things up in my life.  We bargain with God,  God I’ll love and serve you IF . . . And until then, well . . . 

The ark

In II Samuel 5 David’s difficult life begins to come together.  What had been a life of hardship began to move towards success.  David not only became King, he united the Northern and Southern tribes of Israel.  He captured Jerusalem and made it the new capital city.  And he defeated the Philistines one last time.  David became an effective and powerful King.  The narrator of the Samuel material then adds two more details.  David was rich and sexually powerful.  David opened commercial trading relationships with the King of Tyre who provided Israel with cypress wood.  So we get a picture of Israel as a rising economic power in the region.  And then this line: “In Jerusalem . . . David took more concubines and wives” (v. 13).  This doesn’t go well with David’s wife Michal.  And the story ends ends with a really nasty husband/wife argument on David’s front porch.  Something you might see on the Ancient Near Easter Royalty Edition of “Cops” or “Jerry Springer.”

Riding high, David gathers 30,000 Israelites to bring the ark of God’s presence from an unimportant town into the new capital of Jerusalem.  This “ark” was the most sacred object in Israel’s religious life.  It was to be guarded.  No one could touch it.  It should be carried on poles.  Anyone having to do with it should be ritually clean.  The ark focused the glorious presence of God in Israel’s life like no other object.

The “ark” was a smallish wooden box, 2x2x4, covered in gold.  On its lid were two angelic creatures (cherub/im).  Don’t think fat little porcelain angels you see in gift shops.  Think ferocious and bizarre animal/angel hybrids.  And this was the ark of God’s glorious presence.  We might think it a little silly that the only true God, the Creator of all reality, would live on top of a box.  But I suppose it’s no sillier than the claims Christians make that God was present in a special way in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  Or that Christ is present to us in the holy meal of bread and wine.  Or that we hear God’s voice in the words of Scripture.  Though we live in a culture that wants to flatten everything, the Christian tradition has always affirmed that there are holy places, holy objects, and holy people.

The ark was a box that contained a few objects, really storytelling prompts: Aaron’s budding rod, ten commandments, manna,.  Relics, reminders, symbols, markers of this community’s traveling life: Egypt, sinai, wilderness.  This ark was a portable icon for a wandering, decentralized federation of tribes.  They couldn’t very well describe or define their God, but they carried from place to place reminders of their story - who they used to be, what happened, and who they are now.  So vulnerable it seems, out in the dangerous world with nothing but an unknowable God and a few stories.

So David leads the multitudes to Baale-Judah and they prepare a new cart, one ritually clean, to transport the ark to Jerusalem.  “David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs, lyres, harps, tambourines, castanets, and cymbals” (v. 5).  What - no tubas? Trombones? Xylophones?  Two sons of Priest Abinadab - Uzzah and Ahio - were responsible for guarding the ark during the journey.  A team of oxen was yoked to the cart carrying the ark.  At one point, the oxen stumble and Uzzah reaches out to steady the ark, and he happens to touch the ark itself.  “And God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God” (v. 7).

Uzzah touches the ark.  And God kills him.  (This is the word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God . . wait, what?!!!)  I don’t know what to say.  There isn’t any explanation in the text.  And I refuse to make one up to make us more comfortable.  Believe me, I don’t want a God who is terrifying and capricious, and yet we have here a story that grabs us by the shirt and shakes us awake and warns us: don’t play with God.  There is something dangerous going on here.  Like David, we usually haul God into our lives when we need him.  When we need something from him.  We bring him in because he is useful.  That is a very dangerous thing to do.  God isn’t the kind of reality you use.  God isn’t useful.  We want to get our lives in order.  And God wants our attention.

David was angry because of what happened to Uzzah.  And he was afraid of God.  And he asks, “How can the ark of God come into my care?”  So he decides to leave the ark with Obed-Edom the Gittite.  He had only planned on the political benefits of bringing the god symbol to Jerusalem - hadn’t planned on God being holy, and dangerous.

David’s Dancing

Three months later, David hears that God is blessing Obed-Edom’s household, and so he brings the ark up to Jerusalem.  And they bring the ark into the city with music, singing, dancing, and the offering of many sacrifices.  And David is the lead dancer in this exuberant religious festival.

To “dance with all your might” is to be completely absorbed in the dancing.  It is to become so enamored of God that you loose track of yourself.  In the experience of ecstasy, you become completely unaware of yourself because the largeness of the celebration makes thinking about yourself, well, silly.  When we use our bodies at the outer edges of their limits, we can experience, in an intense way, and at least for a short time, the loss of ourselves.  Think of the artisan or craftsperson completely absorbed in her work.  Think of a peak athletic performance that requires complete bodily and psychological presence.  Think of a delicate surgery that requires the uninterrupted presence of the surgeon and his/her hands to the task.  

I had a black Pearl drumset growing up.  Because Neil Peart, the drummer for Rush, had a Pearl drumset.  Only his had about five times the amount of drums mine did.  I have seen 16 or 17 Rush shows, and my favorite part is the 20 minute drum solo by Peart.  You know it’s coming, you just don’t know where in the show.  Surrounded by drums, cymbals, bells, chimes, electronic gadgets, and gongs, he flails away in a way that looks chaotic yet what you hear is rhythmic and mesmerizing.  It dawns on you after about ten minutes that he’s still going at the same speed.  And that if he were to loose his focus for even a split second, the whole thing would be ruined.  The only way I can imagine him pulling it off is that he goes into a kind of trance, where all else falls away, and he is completely present to the task at hand.

Kids do this well.  Remy loves to get his groove on.  He loves to shake his body to music, to jump, clap, spin around -- he loves all this and can get lost in it -- until he notices that someone is watching him, and that reminds him of himself.  And then he sheepishly smiles, and then stops.  Perhaps this dynamic is not just true of Remy or children, but of all of us.  To lose ourselves in something large and beautiful is a kind of ecstasy.

When we gather here for worship on Sundays, it is primarily to practice this knack, this skill of inhabiting and deploying our bodies and minds in the fullest way so that we can give to God our fullest attention.  Now don’t worry too much about your level of expertise - that kind of defeats the point.  We are learning to forget ourselves and loose ourselves in something larger.  And this is a skill set that takes a lifetime to develop.  We greet one another with hands and faces.  We stand and sit.  We speak in chorus back and forth to one another.  We at times kneel to confess, mark ourselves with the cross of God’s triune name, bow at the gloria to embody our reverence.  We listen and we sing.  And we eat a meal together.  It’s all a kind of bodily offering of ourselves as a community to the God who deserves all that we can muster.  Now, don’t loose heart that you don’t fall into a yogic trance every week during worship.  There is, of course, the occasional cell phone buzz, or a crash or scream from the kids area, or a car horn outside, or your growling stomach -- that reminds us that we are not angelic, but incarnate in bodies and history.  This is all to be gladly received.

As an example of this embodied faith, consider our midweek gathering Tuesday night at the Storms’ apartment: Susan will be leading us in a practice that will seem odd at first.  Because the practice of healing prayer involves laying our hands on one another, yes, touching one another in a healthy and safe and affirming way, and in silence, focusing our energies on the blessing of this other person.  Now, the only reason this will seem odd is that we have inherited the Enlightenment falsehood that religion is an intellectual puzzle.  That faith has little to do with our dancing bodies.  No, faith in God is something you DO, not something you BELIEVE.  It is a commitment to God together with a community of people, a set of habits and practices you do with others, a set of skills you work at that, over time, shape who you are and how you see the world.  Faith is trust in and commitment to Jesus Christ and his way of life before God - a life of humility, selflessness, service to others, forgiveness, generosity, and truth-telling, and worship practices of praying, singing, listening, and giving.  

Conclusion:

Why do work so hard to win?  To get our act together?  To get everything figured out?  What makes us think that’s what’s best for us?   We want God to be useful to our self-fulfillment projects.  God wants our attention.

God does not offer us clarity or closure.  God offers us the chance to be alive.  The chance to love, and be loved, the chance to suffer with others, the chance for both friendship and betrayal, both intimacy with family and friends and periods of crushing loneliness.  But in all this, we have been invited to feel something, to connect to the buzz of energy that is the song of life and love as God’s fragile and beautiful creatures.  Once in awhile, we will feel like dancing.

We have inherited a story in which Uzzah touches the ark of God and dies.  But we have also inherited a larger story in which this God of holy darkness and terrifying power takes on flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, makes himself humble and meek and freely chooses to forego all the power and privileges of being Creator so that he can share our creaturely lives.  And in this fragile, human life he submits to the experience of suffering and death as an act of love.  No, of course we cannot approach him on high.  No, we cannot see his face.  But he can come low, he can come down to where we live.  This one who can destroy life comes into our predicament of loneliness, pain, meaninglessness, struggle, sin, and death - he comes as one who brings life.  And Jesus, crucified and raised, says to his followers: “Be not afraid.”