View or print as a PDF

Sunday 23
6/9/2015

James 1:17-27
Psalm 125
Mark 7:24-37

---

James is a popular New Testament book among some Christians because it seems much more straightforward and practical than many of the others. On the one hand, for many the instruction of James when he says “care for widows and orphans in their distress” seems much simpler than the more obscure points of formal Christian theology. On the other hand, James himself warns: faith without works is dead; do as the law commands.

If only it were that simple. For the law has a double root – in God and in society. This causes, at least in our society, a significant problem for those whose Christian faith is all action and no words. Society knows that it does not need God in order to have laws – and usually very good laws at that. And so many rightly wonder – why bother with God here? What does God offer us that we could not discover for ourselves? Faith seems to many not only a refuge from the demand to do good which James attacks. Faith becomes quite simply superfluous when it comes to doing the good. The pathos of the modern church – conservative and liberal – is that it so often points to its good works as evidence of the importance of God, which is really no evidence at all for a world quite capable of good works without invoking God. A god who does for us what we could actually do for ourselves is not a god at all, but simply our aspiration: what we want to be when we grow up.

To the extent that James is concerned with doing the good, then, one of the questions he raises for us in our particular day is just this: Is it possible to do good works without God in the picture? Both the world and the uncertain church want to answer “Yes”. But James, at least, despite all of his direct and practical instructions, declares that it is not: Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights (1.17). So James calls his people to good works, and yet locates the source of the good works we do in God himself. If one cares for “widows and orphans”, if one seeks to rid oneself of “sordidness and wickedness”, if we work to control our tongue and our anger, if we run homework clubs and food programs, these efforts, as “generous acts of giving” or “perfect gifts” to those around us, are said to have “come down from the Father of lights”.

James, then, offers us the two things we need to hear if our actions are to be good, if they are truly to be “Christian” and not simply moral works which echo or even challenge the expectations of the society we happen to be living in. On the one hand, there is the direct command: do this. If you have plenty and another does not have enough, give. If you are strong and another is weak, serve. The commandments are plain and straightforward.

On the other hand, we hear the gospel: generosity and perfect giving come not from us but from God. But why is this the gospel? While our giving may be generous – at least in our own estimation – and our works a great aid to those around us, they will always be liable to criticism and questioning. The problem of general moral rules is that they are continually debated – this is the stuff of most of our newspaper reports and radio talk-back. Either the command to do the good creates an anxiety for righteousness in myself, such that I need always to be wondering whether I have done the right thing, or my reading of the right is contradicted by someone else’s. As I act or speak I am under the constant demand that I be able to justify myself – to link my actions to some demand in such a way that I can say not only that I was free to do as I did, but that I had to act in that way: this is what the situation and the command demanded.

And so I am either, on the one hand, reduced to a not-quite-sure “I did the best I could” in defence against my critics or, on the other hand, I declare that I had to act this way and I can prove it before you and before God. In the first case I am not free; in the second, God is not – and neither of these are satisfactory.

In the end the law of love and service makes its demands of us, but it cannot be relied upon to deliver justice. Justice, or rightness, is too slippery a fish for us to net. We fool ourselves if we think we ever really get it right. This is not permission not to try to get it right. If people are hungry, feed them. We must try to get it right, but our trying is no reason to speak too highly of what we achieve. Justice, or rightness – which is a profoundly relational reality – is declared and made effective by God and not by our own actions. God says: I will work with your best efforts, and even your much-less-than-best ones. What else is the meaning of salvation through one we crucified?

Strikingly, then, this God is placed between us and those to whom we relate: we are mediated to each other by God. God, so to speak, translates our words and actions to each other. What is different here from the normal understanding of moral work is that God is not invoked as a motivation for good works but as a reconciler of me to the person in need toward whom my good works were not good enough.

We are called to see and experience the other person not as she might appear in herself and her actions but “in Christ”– made whole not by her own goodness but because God declares her whole. Just as importantly, we are to understand ourselves as truly being good when we are seen in the same way.

Much more might be said about our need actually to move from places of comfort to assist those who are in need; the command to love each other stands, and is not well observed. We cannot let ourselves off the hook here. But the problem is, particularly in denominations like ours in times like these, that we tend to begin with the good works because we have lost confidence in faith. We either assume that the gospel has been heard and that we need now to act or that, in the end, there is nothing but action. And so, I suspect, we usually hear only the law – God’s divine imperative – calling us to good works. The world knows better than the church that this is not a lot of fun, and scarcely liberating. This is because we either know what to do and find it difficult or we are so unsure what to do that we are left anxious.

But James speaks strangely of a liberating law – the “law of liberty” (1.25, 2.12). This is a law which not does simply demand of us but also makes possible that our actions are just – despite our imperfect response. The perfection of our work is in God’s participation, in his declaration that what we have done is good, in his making it good apart from what we have achieved by ourselves. God “steps in”, as it were, to join his perfect work to ours. All that is asked of us is to respond to the commands of the law. This happens not from faith as the first thing which occurs and then leads to action, but in faith: believing not “in God” but that God will make good of what I do. In this way we are both called to act in helping and serving, and helped and served ourselves by God in that moment.

The good news is not that God helps us to act or because we have acted, but that he would be with us in our actions, if we would be willing to let go of self-righteousness and allow God’s righteousness be sufficient for us. The law of liberty is the freedom to do the very best we can, to allow that this “very best” will not be perfect and, in the grace of God, the freedom of being able to stand blameless before him, set free to do better next time.

By the grace of God, may this be the law ever increasingly found to be operating in the hearts, minds and actions of us all. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 22
23/8/2015

2 Samuel 23:1-7
Psalm 132
John 18:33-37

---

Some while back we bought for a friend a T-shirt which declared “Jesus loves you” and then, underneath and in slightly smaller text, “but I’m his favourite.” I know the man to whom we gave this well enough almost to be certain that he wears his T-shirt as a joke and for the response it gets, and not as statement of some eternal truth! For we all know that God doesn’t have favourites. Or, we know this, as long as we don’t read the Bible and discover that in fact it seems that God does.

We’ve heard from the second book of Samuel this morning what are purported to be the last words of David, which ran like this:

The oracle of David, son of Jesse,
the oracle of the man whom God exalted,
the anointed of the God of Jacob,
the favourite of the Strong One of Israel:
The spirit of the LORD speaks through me,
his word is upon my tongue.
The God of Israel has spoken,
the Rock of Israel has said to me…

What are we to make of such divine favouritism? For, while we might find ways of explaining away this particular text on account of its antiquity or cultural context or whatever, the theme of God’s favouritism won’t go away. How is it possible – to make the point most starkly – that the man Jesus can have attached to him such an extraordinary list of appellations as we hear, for example, in Revelation: the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth (e.g. Revelation 1.4b-8)? This declares what the rest of the New Testament also preaches: that this Jesus who stood “suffered under Pontius Pilate”, as you or I might also have done, is the particular point at which God touches the world. All that matters comes down to this one. Jesus is, we might say, God’s favourite.

Now this is, of course, patently ridiculous to much modern religious sensibility. If we do take an interest in religion, is it not clearly the case that the “one” which matters is “God”, who favours no particular place but in his omnipresence is also omni- and equi-gracious? Many of us need this to be so because we’ve seen that any hint of divine favouritism is extraordinarily dangerous in the hands of arrogant human beings. It is theories of divine favouritism which have fuelled so much destruction among us; “Gott mit uns”’, “In God we trust”, or that unholy trinity “God, King and Country” are but three slogans which particular peoples have wrapped around their sense that they are the chosen ones. What fuels the diatribe of modern popular atheism is not merely the alleged irrationality of religious belief but the sheer destruction which can spring from those who believe themselves to be God’s favourites. In the hands of the Church, Jesus as “special” has proven no less a danger in this respect. Favourites divide and division brings harm, which is why Grandma knows never to have favourites – or, at least, never to declare them!

It seems a good thing, of course, that we know better than all this these days. We’ve seen how human beings have claimed “God’s” favouritism for themselves, and employed the rhetoric of divine blessing as justification of all kinds of violence and destruction. And so there are, for us, no divine favourites – or, at least, if there are any favourites there is a bunch of them, the number of which happens to correspond to the number of different types of religious systems and affections we recognise. Everyone may have their favourites so long as they don’t impinge upon the favourites of others.

And yet, the language of favourite is implied and used in the Scriptures for Israel-in-David-to-Jesus, without apology. More scandalously, this favouritism is not of the kind which allows us others at least to be left alone in our unfavoured ordinariness. God’s favouritism in David, and finally in Jesus, is something we must take heed of, for it is not only about them but about us on the “outside” also.

A community which confesses the Incarnation ought to know something about how God works in the world. For the point of the doctrine of the Incarnation is not only that God enters into the world but that God can do that thoroughly and still remain God. The “Word becomes flesh” – and is now both Word and flesh. Fleshly, fallen things – even “God-forsaken” things – are all potential means by which God might work in the world. Things marked by human disorder are ready and sufficient instruments for God’s healing works. Human favouritism is a divisive and deadly thing but it is precisely this deathly thing which God uses to heal. For divine favouritism reworks what brings division and death in human favouritism and makes it an enlivening thing.

The test of specifically Christian faith is not whether or not we can convince ourselves that God “exists”; there is nothing particularly Christian about that. The test is whether or not we believe that the instruments of death might yet prove to be useful to God to bring life, quite contrary to the intention or expectations of those of us who are so adept at applying such deathly devices.

None of this is to justify human weakness and failure; it is simply to speak of what might yet be done with us by such a God. For favouritism takes on a different guise in the hands of this God. Just as the church declares that Jesus bears the divine judgement so that nobody else has to; and just as we declare that Jesus bears the loss of God in abandonment to death so that no one else any longer has to bear that loss, so we can also say that Jesus is God’s favourite so that no one else has to be. That is, when this God takes a favourite, it is not in order relegate all others to a lower order. It is to free us from any need to be or, perhaps more importantly, to seek to be, God’s favourites. Jesus is “King” so that no other has to be. This is the character of his kingship: an exaltation which lifts up us all.

With us, favouritism implies division, and what divides only kills; for God what we divide with our favourites also kills – even God himself. But the gospel is that for God there is nothing which cannot be an instrument of healing unto life in his hands. To declare that Jesus is God’s favourite or, in different ways, David, or Israel, or even(God forbid?!) the Church are such favourites – is to declare not that we or anyone else outside those circles are not God’s favourites, but simply that we and they don’t need to be. When it comes to this particular God, I am blessed enough, in that he favours another.

Is there not good news in that for us who labour and are heavy laden by many burdens, whether the burden of our own dreams for our lives, or that of anxiety for the future of the church, or worry about the future of society and world? For these are, at root, worries about whether or not God favours us or, if we are “atheists”, that society or even the universe somehow favours us? Yet, whatever we might choose to do about those things, that Christ is God’s favourite – God’s king – means that we know that we are not responsible for building up a kingdom, for this has already been done. God has chosen a kingdom and a king, and it is not our kingdom or our crown.

This actually frees us to give, to love, to serve, to forgive, simply to be ourselves when that is the best we can manage, or to become something extraordinary when the Spirit falls. For our hope is that, in the end, all that will really matter is what God does with us and for us. In Christ, God’s favourite, God has favoured me. I am blessed in that God has blessed Jesus of Nazareth. And that is enough of a blessing.

For such a hope and the liberated lives it makes possible here and now, all thanks be to God, now and forever. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 21
23/8/2015

2 Samuel 18 Selected verses
Psalm 130
John 1:1-14

---

Over the last decade or so most people who like to take photographs have disposed of their old film-based cameras and replaced them with smaller and cheaper digital cameras, or simply with their telephone. These cameras can take thousands of photographs for almost nothing, so that no one needs to worry about waiting for the shot to be just right. All you need to do is just keep taking photographs in expectation that at least a few of them will be okay.

For the most part, however, most people tend to save not just good photographs but all of them. Again, this is because it is cheap and easy to do so. The result is computers loaded with more photographs that anyone is ever likely to want to look at, but this is no problem. For us today information is easy to obtain, to store and to share, and photographs are just a kind of information. We might not necessarily be any better than our predecessors at responding appropriately to all that information, but there is no question that we live in an information age. The detail we can record about the world around us is increasing exponentially, even if our capacity to process that information effectively is not.

By contrast, consider what it took to record information in Babylon in the sixth century before Jesus. This is when the Old Testament as we now know it was being pulled together and the stories of David and his successors were being edited into the form that we now have them. Whereas today I could replicate this sermon 1 million times with a few clicks of a mouse button, then it would have taken days or weeks to write out a scroll containing a single copy of the story of David.

This being the case, the question I want to reflect upon this morning is this: why bother with all the detail we have about the life of David? For the detail abounds.

We have skipped over a lot of the story in the space between our treatment of David and Bathsheba and the story we have heard today of the death of David’s son Absalom. Absalom’s sister Tamar was raped by their half-brother Amnon. Knowing this, David nevertheless refused to act against Amnon. Eventually, Absalom kills Amnon. As a result of this Absalom flees into exile, later to be reconciled to David. Absalom, however, has high political ambitions, and campaigns to replace David as king. David is forced to flee Jerusalem. Absalom pursues David but, despite David’s insistence that he not be hurt, the young man is killed by Joab, as we heard in our reading this morning. In the midst of all this there are defections and spies, emotions and suicide – all the makings of a great TV series.

Whatever judgement we might make about all that, I am more interested in the question, Why even tell the story? Why do we need to know the “days of our lives” of these 10th century BC Israelites? Of course, we can moralise happily about this or that event in the story. But if that was the intention of the writers themselves, then perhaps they might have given us a bit more of their own moralising because there isn’t very much of it.

Why, when it was so difficult to record and reproduce this information, risk leaving it to readers to work out the moral of the story for themselves?

The reason for the detail would seem to have something to do with the very humanity of the story. We might imagine those early editors looking at all the material they have in front of them, ranging from the innocence of David as a young shepherd and his courage in fronting up to Goliath, to his murder of Uriah and his loss of strength and sense in the face of Absalom – looking at all this and simply wondering how it could all be so.

And so they write it all down, or enough of it to make the point. Here is the breadth and length, the height and depth, of the life of any one of us. Even though the story has comparatively little detail compared to a story we might tell about ourselves today, in a context where recording and storing information was so expensive the story displays an extraordinary interest in the details of human relationships and the impact of those details upon those people themselves. That David is the king makes the story all the more compelling because, as we have noted a number of times before, David serves here not simply as one man among the billions of men and women who have lived before and since but as a representative sample. “Here is the human being,” to recall the words of Pilate we heard last week.

When we come then to speak of God’s dealings with us, we must remember that it is with this kind of humanity that God engages. When we declare with John’s gospel that “the Word became flesh” it is precisely this flesh, this complex ethical and political confusion which was the ancient, and is the modern, world.

For the most part, however, we prefer either to oversimplify the complexity of the problems which we are, or to distract from them. Comfort food, shopping till you drop or the extra-marital affair are all distractions from the unbearable heaviness of being – from being and living just where we actually are. “Stop the boats”, a woman’s “right to choose” or imagining that marriage can be whatever we define it to be in this particular moment are unthinking oversimplifications of deep and complex human realties.

In such things, not only do we misrepresent ourselves in whatever fudging of the details might suit us. God is also simplified as we seek to simplify ourselves. It should not surprise us that, if we do not take ourselves as we actually are very seriously then, in the end, we will also not take God very seriously.

But even if oversimplification serves us nicely in distracting us from those less than pleasant details which are our reality, this doesn’t work for God. God will consider us without reduction, without covering over. There are no fig leaves adequate to shielding us from the God who already knows what we look like uncovered.

This is not necessarily good news. We oversimplify and distract ourselves and others from the details of our personal and collective humanity for good reason: we would rather others did not know, often enough even that we ourselves did not know. The complex mess which we are – now right, now wrong, now strong, now weak, now sure, now unsure – makes the world more than we can bear without over-simplifying or letting ourselves be distracted. But we are not in this way brought to heaven. And the result is that we cease to be either properly of the world or of heaven.

Rather, we are strangely suspended, like the unfortunate Absalom: hanging between heaven and earth. This is where we live most of our lives. But if we prefer to simplify and be distracted, the gospel is that this is precisely the place that Jesus himself occupies: our actual place, if not our proper place – hanging on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, apparently devoid of humanity and of God.

Why does he take up this space – our space?

Over the course of these reflections on David’s story we have noticed again and again that David is the blessed one, the anointed one – literally, “the messiah” – and yet he constantly falls short. The blessed one over-reaches and loses himself. This is the story of us all. In contrast to this messiah is another – Jesus himself. Our reflections have looked at what is happening “between the messiahs” – between ourselves and Christ. Because David cannot be the messiah, neither can Jesus; the Christ is “dragged down”, as it where – crucified, forced to occupy the no-man’s land and no-God’s land which is “the between” of the cross.

But in that space, at the between of the cross, is the revelation that the Christ is willingly dragged down because, by the power of God, it will be the means of lifting us up. The Word became flesh – our flesh in all its messy detail – in order that we might finally truly become ourselves. The detail which matters most about us is that we are known better than we know ourselves. The detail which matters most is God’s very knowledge of us, and its purpose: that we be loved as we are.

The details of the stories – David’s and ours – matter first because they are what make us us. This is us, for better or for worse. But the details matter also because they are known by a God who – sometimes in spite of the details, sometimes because of them – loves us and cherishes us in health and in sickness. This is not a simple God for a simple people. God is complex and variable because we are. And God is this, in order that we might simply be his. The scriptural writers invest so much in the detail of David’s life because it is the life of one of us, as we are; and it is a remarkable thing that such a one as this does not simply fall within God’s capacity to love, but is in fact the focus of that love.

This is a love which shines in our darkness and yet is not overcome by it.

For such an all-searching, all comprehending and all-embracing love, all thanks be to God. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 20
16/8/2015

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a
Psalm 51
John 19:1-7

---

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – our “internal narratives” – are the basis for how we live in the world around us. They place us, give us meaning, set an agenda for us, open up possibilities or close them off. The things we are likely to do or say are rooted in these stories. Because of this, we can also read something of a person’s internal narrative about themselves from the way they behave.

David can take – probably rape – Bathsheba, have her husband killed, and imagine that the matter is dealt with. What story is he telling himself, that he imagines that this all “works”?

David is king, probably at the height of his powers. The palace is established, the ark has come to Jerusalem, and the promise of an eternal throne has been heard. The security of the borders needs to be maintained but this no longer requires David’s oversight and can be entrusted to his generals. His life approaches one of leisure. He is then, on a number of levels, free. And in freedom he acts – an almost absolute freedom from the obligations of moral leadership and observance of custom: freedom with a woman’s chastity, freedom with a man’s life. His is a freedom to act with impunity, he apparently imagines. This is the story he tells himself. David acts as a king can: according to desire, almost without fear of contradiction. Yet, of course, there is some fear here. Uriah dies because David fears discovery; David knows that others will not affirm this degree of freedom. But Uriah does die and so the threat of discovery seems to be dealt with. This would all the more reinforce for David his freedom – not only to transgress against command and convention but seemingly to do so and to get away with it.

David acts as if the only story which matters is the one which he himself tells. And this would seem to be so until Nathan appears. What Nathan does, in effect, is re-story David. This applies both to the method and in its effect. The method is one of distraction. David is invited into another story, seemingly bearing no particular relation to his own. In his focus on the rich man’s theft of the poor man’s ewe David both forgets himself and becomes himself. His own actions are not even in view at the outset, and so he is free to act as a king should in response to Nathan’s tale, “becoming himself” and declaring right judgement on the rich man. The trick, of course, is that having forgotten himself, David has declared judgement on himself. Human judgement and divine judgement are in accord here: David is guilty. To recall our reflection from last week: the blessed one has over-reached, and knows it.

In our gospel reading this morning we heard a kind of echo of Nathan’s “You are the man” accusation in Pilate’s presentation of Jesus to the crowds: “Here is the man” (John 19.5). It doesn’t matter whether there is intended to be a link between the two stories in the mind of the gospel writer; David and Jesus are each playing the role of “the man” or, more helpfully, the human creature of this particular God.

On Pilate’s lips “Here is the man” is both a declaration and a question. For the gospel writer John this is a much stronger statement than “Here he is”. We are rather to hear: “This is the man, the human being”; here is the human story (we might recall here the parallels, or type, we have noted between David, Adam and Jesus here). The implied question in Pilate’s declaration is, then, “Do you agree? What is your judgement on this?” The judgement of the crowds, expressed in the call for crucifixion, is that Jesus is not the human being, and so not the sign of the presence of God in the world, not the “image of God” (Genesis 1.27f). David was judged because he was human – too human, in the negative sense of fallible. Jesus is judged here because if this is what humanity looks like, it is unbearable. The story the crowd tells itself does not include the kind of freedom which Jesus represents. For like David’s, Jesus’ own “internal story”, if we dare to try to reconstruct it from his actions, is also about freedom. But it is a different kind of freedom from that exercised by David. For Jesus freedom is in knowing what he is given to be, called to do, required to say, and what will “justify” what he does. It is the freedom of one who knows himself in relation to the one who commissioned him. It is the freedom of having received in such a way that he remains bound to the giver in order to receive more. By contrast, once David had received, he acted as if his own account of himself was the only one which now mattered: the gift separated him from the giver. Jesus’ story, of course, conflicts with others’ account of him and – more importantly – conflicts with their account of themselves. This is how he comes to be standing before the angry crowd. This conflict renders the judgement, “He is not the man; this is not what God requires”, and the sentence, Crucify.

From the perspective of the resurrection, which returns our attention to the crucified Jesus, in the judgement of Jesus we are at the Uriah level of the story. The crucifixion is out attempt to cover up what Jesus’ own story has exposed: the great gap between the kingdom of God as it was embodied in all that Jesus said and did, and our own orderings of the world. Uriah lies dead and the story is over until Nathan arrives to tell a different version of the story. Jesus lies dead until the resurrection comes. Jesus’ resurrection, then, is a kind of parable like Nathan’s story of the stolen sheep, doing the work of re-storying.

But now the problem is deeper, and so the story much more wide-reaching. In the case of David and Nathan, the re-storying “re-inserts” God. David has ignored God – we might even go so far as to say killed God – but specifically for David’s own sake. This is an important, but relatively low-level “moral” failure – living as if there were no God, knowing that in fact there is. God’s “being there” is a matter of inconvenience and so is conveniently overlooked. In the case of Jesus, however, the problem is much deeper. The crucifixion takes place not in order to deny God, but to honour God. Jesus is executed because he is thought to have misrepresented God; the crucifixion is an act of piety on the part of those who demand it. For their part, God requires the crucifixion. Whereas what was bad in David killed Uriah, what is “good” in his religious opponents requires that Jesus be killed.

And so the pressing question is: is there any hope for those whose attempts at good works even deny the presence and call of God? Here the whole summation of as Christian faith being about doing good is called into question: can we be sure that our assessment of what is good actually gets “Good” right? And is it enough simply to declare, “I did the best I could” when religious piety kills the Lord of life? It is not a brave person who declares his or her works good. It is an arrogant one, for such a judgement is God’s alone.

This is the re-storying done by Jesus’ resurrection. Here the crucifixion of Jesus by wrong-headed piety is not just forgiven but made a good thing, and so it is not forgotten. We remember the body and the blood because the body broken by us becomes the body broken for us. There can be no forgiving and forgetting, because it is the good the pious do which is the problem. The crucifixion of Jesus cannot be forgotten without allowing ourselves to imagine that we might still be “good enough”, that we’ve done well “enough”, that we’ve done “our best”, and that this is all that matters. For all our talk about justification by grace through faith, there are few of us who are not at heart quietly earning our standing before God, resting in a job well done rather than in the gift of God’s love.

We must, of course, “do,” act; only the dead are free of this obligation. And we must, to the best of our ability, do the right, seeking to align our actions with God’s call. But we are not our own judges. We can neither justify our sin, as David wanted to, nor guarantee the righteousness of our good works, as Jesus’ executioners imagined they could. We stand before God only because, in the bad and the good, God stands for us, not simply wanting that we be good, but making it that we are. This is the gospel, the free humanity of Jesus made our very own, no judgement to fear.

For such a story, exposing and re-working the untruths in the stories we tell ourselves, all thanks be to God. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 19
9/8/2015

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Matthew 16:13-23

---

The story of David and Bathsheba and that of David and Goliath are perhaps the best known of all the recorded events of David’s life. And, for that reason, we will not dwell on the details of the obvious: that one should not do as David did: adultery (or here, perhaps, even a rape) is contrary to the law of God, and murder is as well. There is not much to be said for harping on this particular point in a sermon because it’s not that hard: if you are contemplating either adultery or murder, stop it. Enough said. There are more interesting things to consider there.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is this: David has been anointed king. This means that he is a “messiah” (from the Hebrew) or a “christ” (from the Greek), for this is what those words mean both mean: “anointed one.” Jesus is not the first christ; he is the last. Our story today, then, presents us with a strange coming-together: unlike another well-known “religious” figure, not only is David a “very naughty boy”, he is also “the Messiah”. How can this be so?

Up until now we have seen a steady building up of blessing upon blessing for David. There is a sense in which, until this point, God has been setting David in place. Now God waits to see what David will do, and the results are underwhelming. David is set over the people for the people. In his being blessed is Israel promised security and peace from its enemies (2 Samuel 7.10). This is his role: to be a god-like enabler of what is true and gives life.

David’s failure, then, is not simply a personal moral offence. Much more, his failure affects the whole community. Rather than being one who brings life, David takes it. First, of course, is Bathsheba, either encouraged or forced out of her life with Uriah; then comes Uriah himself and then, unintended, Bathsheba’s baby.

More generally, however, there is also the matter of the curse which we will hear God speak next week on the house he has just blessed.

Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbour, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this very sun. For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.”

This curse affects not just David and his family but, through them, on the whole community. It cannot be hidden but will spill out into the open for all to see. The sword which will cut through David’s sons, in doing so, cuts through the security and identity of Israel as a whole.

Instead of being the one who preserves life, David becomes now the one who causes blood to flow. In a way, he has always been this – whether it was the blood of those wild animals which threatened his flock, or the blood of Philistines who were a threat to Israel. But, as we have noted in reflecting on the Goliath story, this is the blood of rather one-dimensional characters in the story. They are, in a sense, outside of what really matters for those who tell this story. They represent disorder and chaos, but specifically from without. What David does to repel these threats is done to protect the sphere of Israel, a kind of bringing of order to the disordered void, to recall the creation narrative (Genesis 1.1).

But what happens within the sphere of the chosen and blessed Israel is a different matter for reflection altogether. And this comes now to its sharpest focus in the person of David himself. For here is Israel – represented in the king – secured by God’s hand, blessed, as a son to God as a father, called to faithfulness, called to be a son. And here also is Israel fallen. And the effect is devastating: the loss of the first and beloved son – God’s and David’s – and the loss of many more to come.

When the blessèd one over-reaches, death is what results. But this is not an occasional failure; it goes to the heart of human being. As we have already noticed a number of times: here is repeated the story of Eden:

And the Lord God commanded [Adam], ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ (Genesis 2.16f NRSV)

In effect God says there, “Everything but this”. That story ends with the question to Eve: “What is this that you have done?”, whereupon follows the curse upon the serpent and the man and the woman.

In our story today, Bathsheba is David’s “apple”. The death of Uriah is David’s fig leaf. And the death of the child and the curse of the sword which follow are David’s expulsion from Eden and from all the possibilities of the brotherhood of Cain and Abel. It is a troubled and grey existence David lives from now on – the existence of the children of Adam and Eve.

If the story of Adam and Eve resonates with that of David, the stark scriptural contrast to David’s story is that of Jesus. In response to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am,” (Matthew 16.13) comes Peter’s bold affirmation, “You are the Messiah” or, we might paraphrase, “You are the anointed one, the son of David,.” But then, just because he recognises this link, Peter goes on to reveal that he expects the kind of kingship which David had exercised. As Jesus describes his approaching persecution and death, Peter rebukes him: “This shall never happen to you!” What shall never happen? The kind of exposure which David tried to avoid: being known or seen to have failed in righteousness, to have been unimaginably wrong – David, of all people; Jesus, of all people. David is going to be publically exposed as a sinner – we still read the story even today; Jesus, he says, will be exposed in the same way on the cross.

Or, at least, whereas David is wrong; Jesus looks wrong, to the extent that the cross is interpreted by his executioners as God’s judgement on his proclamation. Peter knows that in every respect Jesus is great David’s greater son, that no prophet Nathan will finger Jesus with the charge, “You are the man” (to anticipate next week’s reading [2 Samuel 12]; consider, however, Pilate’s presentation of Jesus: “Behold the man” [John 19.5]). But the similarities are important.

We have noted many times that David and Adam “refer” to each other, the one (re­)enacting the other’s possibilities and shortcomings. They each embody the story of blessing and over-reaching. Jesus as a figure in the story also “refers” to David and Adam – he invokes them for us and embodies them. This he does, first, in a positive sense as a representative figure who is blessed with life in God’s kingdom. Adam is blessed, David is blessed, Jesus is blessed. But Jesus also invokes and embodies Adam and David in a second, negative sense: as the bearer of the curse of death.

Technically, scholars call Adam and David “types” of each other – and of Jesus. This means that Adam and David lay down a pattern which is seen in Jesus: they are “typical” of each other; it happens to each of them according to the pattern. (The notion comes from Paul, who speaks of Adam as “a type [Greek “tupos” = pattern, model] of one who was to come” (Romans 5. 14).). In this way they are all seen, in their different ways, to be sharing in the same kind of reality, seen to be the same kind of thing.

This way of thinking helps us to see the threads which are woven through the whole of fabric of the biblical story, now above it and visible, now below and hidden, but always the source of its colour and contrast and cohesion.

The crucifixion of Jesus is the rejection of the humanity he embodies, the rejection of his peculiar freedom before God and others. But here is the crucial point: to the extent that Jesus shares in the pattern of blessèd opportunity which is where Adam and David begin, the crucifixion of the innocent Jesus reveals a kind of self-contempt on the part of his executioners – a covering over of what we do not want to see as a possibility for ourselves. The crucifixion is another fig leaf mistaken for the finest of coverings. The humanity of Jesus is a kind of nakedness – an openness before God and those around him – which is found to be unbearable. In a strange kind of way, the murdered Uriah can be reclaimed here as a “type” of Jesus. He dies that the sin of David might be covered – a fig leaf to cover David’s nakedness before the people, if not before God. The days of David happily dancing naked before God and the people are now past (Recalling the under-dressed dancing David of 2 Samuel 6.1-23, especially vv.20ff); a modesty borne of sin is now required.

Jesus dies in order that his remarkable humanity might be covered over – blotted out. But if David’s shame brought modesty, the shame inflicted upon Jesus on the cross becomes by God’s grace the basis of a strange immodesty: the freedom of the forgiven children of God. Now revealed sin brings not the shame of exposure and the darkened existence which comes with that, but rather celebration: God can overcome even this.

I began by suggesting the real question arising from the Bathsheba affair is the question about why David continues to enjoy God’s favour: how the messiah – the anointed one – and the “naughty boy” might be one and the same. There is no good reason for this, so far as most of us are concerned. This is not least because we are, most of us most of the time, interested mainly in ourselves, our mores, our morals. When the failure is of sufficient magnitude the one who failed becomes irredeemable, cast “outside the city gate” (as is said of Jesus: Hebrews 13.12.). These ones cease to matter. Our modern correlates are our fallen idols – celebrities, politicians, sporting heroes – who offend public decency in some way.

But, mercifully, it is not we but God who judges and pronounces sentence where it really matters. God wants this to work – this project we call “life”. This is the point of the promise to David: “Always”; you are mine, always. God so much wants this to work that he sends his Son as the son of one of us, that we might see, and believe, and so have hope, in whatever illicit embrace we might find ourselves, willing or unwilling.

There is no justifying David in his taking of Bathsheba, his murder of Uriah or any other excess we might find in his history, but can be no self-righteous judging of him either. For his story is ours. It is beyond none of us to want more than is given, to cover up what we’ve had to do to get it, and to be in need of being shown that there is a God who sees.

That is the Law. It is the gospel, however, that to know ourselves truly seen by God is to know ourselves forgiven.

Mine. You are mine. Always.

For such a gospel of grace and the love which is its guarantee, all thanks and praise be to God. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 18
2/8/2015

2 Samuel 7:1-17
Psalm 89
John 12:12-19

---

A couple of months back I sat in on a short course in the city. It was a philosophy subject: “Free Will and Morality”. I was interested to see what a philosopher would do with those topics, and also whether something constructive could be said (and heard) in such a space from a gospel perspective, which I wanted to bring! I hope that the answer to the latter was found to be “Yes”, because the philosophical treatment of the topic was a little exasperating!

One thing we spent a lot of time on was “determinism” – whether or not our lives and worlds have been determined for us before we make decisions about them. Another key consideration was moral objectivism: whether there are basic moral rules which must be observed, and where these come from. Fundamentally, these are questions about human freedom in relation to “the big picture”: the awareness that some things are not free to be changed, and yet that this awareness is in tension with our thinking ourselves to be free, or thinking that we ought to be free.

Inevitably, God gets invoked in all this. Or, at least, a kind of god is invoked. This god is just enough to serve as a possible basis of an already unsupportable proposition. And because the proposition is already unsupportable, its little god is becomes representative of the uselessness of gods in general when it comes to talking about anything which matters!

An empty idea of god, however, doesn’t make the problem go away. Fundamentally the question remains: are there “set” things about how the world works, which we must observe if we are to prosper in every sense of the word? If there are such set things, are we free to choose them? And what if we don’t? Whenever we wonder What is the “right” thing to do?, whenever we pray for guidance, whenever we encourage each other in one direction and admonish for a choice in the “wrong” direction, we imply that something is set – pre-determined – for us. And happiness is a matter of discovering what that is. In all of this, if we are believers, we imagine God to be a kind of still-point – the thing which does not move or change. God does not change, the Good is fixed, and we are to conform to that changelessness by discovering the Good.

To my mind, the philosophy got us nowhere, and Scripture does it all better.

Our reading this morning is about a “deal” struck between David and God. It is an unexpected deal. David has proposed that he will build for God at a temple. God’s response is No; this will be the responsibility of another. Rather, God proposes that he will build a house for David. David’s name will be made great and the people of Israel will be planted securely in their own place and find peace from their enemies. David is promised that when his days are fulfilled he will lie with his ancestors, having left behind offspring whose own reign will also be established by God. David will be as a son to God as a father, and God’s steadfast love will be never taken from David: his throne “shall be established forever” (v.16). This “deal” or, in biblical language “covenant”, is one of the central turning points of the Old Testament’s account of God’s dealing with the people of Israel. (Strictly speaking, the word “covenant” doesn’t appear in this passage, but later scriptural expositions of it – 2 Samuel 23.5; Psalm 89.35; Psalm 132.12 – see this event as establishment of a covenant with David and his line.)

Deals are generally if-then arrangements: if you do this, I’ll do that. Yet the most striking characteristic of this covenant is that it is unconditional. One commentator likens what God offers here to the writing of a “blank cheque” (W. Brueggemann). God here promises David a future which is not dependent upon what David or his descendants do. It is an extraordinary promise, particularly given the way in which previous covenants between God and the people have been set up in such a way that the fulfilment of the promises are conditional upon what the people do in response to the covenant. We will see as the story unfolds further that the demands of the law of God still cannot be overlooked. But what is now implicit in the relationship between God and his people – the people being signified by the King – is that where failure occurs it becomes the responsibility of God to overcome the failure, if it is truly to be the case that God’s promise to David and his line can be kept.

This is rather a dangerous proposal. It is easy to imagine the onset of a moral complacency in a covenant like this, the abandonment of any moral objectivity. And yet such complacency is not part of what is promised here, nor part of what actually unfolds.

We should also keep in mind that these stories have been pulled together into their current form by religious leaders of Israel during the time of the Babylonian exile. That is, they are written from the perspective of the punishment of Israel and its kings for long-term failure before God. The significance of any punishment, then, is not diminished. But it is the very context of punishment in exile which makes so important the promise to David of an eternal kingship. For this becomes the basis of hope for Israel in exile. The promise of God to the house of David could become the basis of hope for Israel-in-exile in a way in which the covenant from Sinai could not. What David hears is the promise of faithfulness on God’s part regardless of what happens on the part of David and the house of Israel – even that which, in the end, resulted in the loss of the land and the temple.

Unfaithfulness on the part of David and his descendants will meet with the personal or individual loss of the benefits of the kingship, but the long-term promise to the line as a whole, and to Israel through it, will remain in place.

Though they will be punished for extreme failures, they will turn to the promises which are made to David and look towards the fulfilment of those promises in a re-establishment of the line of Davidic Kings. And so, for example, the prophet Isaiah speaks of a “shoot from the stump of Jesse”,[1] or the prophet Jeremiah speaks of God’s raising up for David a righteous Branch, who “shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”[2] The relationship is retained – which is the work of God’s faithfulness – but it will now have a new shape – as a work of forgiveness, the restoration of those who were in exile.

The important thing here is not the risk that we might get it all wrong but the way in which God is, in a sense, intensifying his investment in the world, his association with the world. “Whatever you do, I will stick by you”, is basically what God offers here. There can now be no backing away from the world, if indeed it is the case that God will remain faithful to his promise to David.

This also means, perhaps surprisingly, that there enters here the possibility of “change” in God. For if it is the case that David is trusted by God – by which we mean that he is given his freedom – then there is a sense in which David and the community he represents take the lead in determining what actual shape the relationship will take. That the relationship stays in place is God’s work; what shape it takes, is the work of God’s human creatures.

This dynamic takes final takes definitive form in what happens when, more than 500 years after the exile and 950 years after David, Jesus arrives in an Israel which labours under foreign rule. Here, again – precisely because the world is not as it should be, in that there is no “David” to be seen – the royal language of “Christ” and “son of God” is part of the political and religious atmosphere. Israel continues to look to the promised faithfulness of God expressed in the covenant with David, awaiting the restoration of the throne of David. And so when Jesus begins to look like somebody very special in their midst, he is quite naturally interpreted in those terms, as the words of the people on Palm Sunday show:

‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord— the King of Israel!’… ‘Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming…!’ (John 12.13,15)

For indeed, in his own way, Jesus can be interpreted as God’s faithfulness to what was promised to David. Here the identity of Israel is focussed once more in the figure of a “king” although not sufficiently like the kings before, which is why Jesus ends up dying on the cross. The crucifixion is God’s people missing the point, once again. Once more we set an agenda, reshape the basis of the relationship between ourselves and God. And God’s response is both to honour that reshaping – to take seriously our free hand, even if it slays God’s Christ – and at the same time to turn such misguided work into its opposite: the basis not of a reciprocated rejection but of a renewed relationship with God. And so, as we symbolise in our gathering around the communion table today, our disastrous efforts in the world are made the basis of our relationship to God: we have determined the shape of the relationship in the breaking of a body and the spilling of blood, and God makes sure that it remains a relationship.

Last week the readings suggested the metaphor of a dance as a way of speaking about both human existence and divine existence. It is a metaphor which can be extended also to the relationship between God and his human creatures. In the promises to Israel through David God has chosen his partner, and intends to stick with her, for all her left-footedness. For this God, his people’s being unable to dance doesn’t make the relationship impossible. It just changes what the dance actually is, God falling into step with us, always keeping his feet out from under ours, correcting for rhythm and direction, leading as he follows our lead.

The good news of the gospel is that even the disaster of the crucifixion of Jesus cannot stand between God and his people. Here our lead is one of rebellion and rejection. God’s lead is to take our very rejection of his faithfulness to what was promised to David and hoped for ever after, and to make of that rejection the sign of just how far he will go to be faithful.

The shape we give to our relationship to God has its sign in those marks of our rejection of God – the body and blood of Jesus. In his unfathomable faithfulness, God makes of those marks a sign of his inexhaustible grace, returning them to us as that by which we are to be nourished and bound together: here are the signs of your poverty, returned to you as signs of my grace. God can promise to David what he does not because David, his descendants and his people are necessarily capable of getting their part right, but because God intends to set their part right, whatever happens, whatever it takes.

This places us, and God, beyond the simplistic realms of free will and ethics. In the promise to Israel in David, fulfilled in Israel in Jesus, we are promised that we will be his forever, because God is free – free to be God not merely of what we ought to have been but of what we become.

And so the church prays now as it always has:

‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord — the King of Israel!’

For to bless this one is, in all times, places and circumstances, to be blessed ourselves.

[1] Isaiah 11.1.

[2] Jeremiah 23:5-6.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 17
26/7/2015

2 Samuel 6:1-23
Psalm 24
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

---

Our reading from 2 Samuel this morning is a drama in two acts, both revolving around the ark of the covenant, but also having at their centre the theme of humility.

The ark stems from the time of Moses, perhaps 250 years or so prior to David’s reign, and was built to contain the stone tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments, and a few other holy mementos. It had an appearance in story of David in the time of Eli, the mentor of Samuel, when it was captured by the Philistines and carted away. Eli died at hearing the news of its capture, and one of his daughters-in-law gave premature birth to a son whom she named “Ichabod”, meaning “the glory has departed from Israel”. The story goes, however, that presence of the ark among its captors caused such havoc among them that they finally sent it back to Israel with gold offerings to Israel’s God (1 Samuel 4.10-7.1).

It reappears now in the story at the time when David is seeking to consolidate his position as king, and so reappears with somewhat ambiguous purpose. On the one hand, there is clearly what we might call a “religious” motivation in bringing the ark to Jerusalem. This is seen in the elaborate liturgy which surrounds its arrival, with sacrifice, music, and ecstatic dancing even by the king himself. The celebrations surrounding the ark are a celebration of the presence of God to Israel. In this sense, the focus is upon God and his faithfulness.

On the other hand, the presence of the ark in Jerusalem is a very important thing for David politically. In this way he brings the ancient and common religious heritage of the scattered tribes to the place where the now equally common but quite new political unity of the tribes in David as king. Although the division between the religious and the political was not as strong in David’s time as it is in our time, it is still the case that the bringing of the ark to Jerusalem was likely a part of a political strategy for David. Rule over the tribes will be easier when the political centre and the centre of religious devotion coincide. Kings do not need “meddlesome priests” (To recall the conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket) in some distant centre, a kind of second government or court of appeal. It is smarter to symbolise and secure the unity of the religious and the secular orders by having them in the same place.

This double-edged – and so compromised – intention in David’s moving of the ark is, however, met in the fate of the unfortunate Uzzah, who was struck dead when he touched it. (Cf. 1 Sam 6.19 on the fate of the “men of Bethshemeth” who did rejoice at the return of the ark from the Philistines.) It’s a troubling story to modern ears, and not only modern ones: David himself was unimpressed with Uzzah’s death at God’s hand. Yet the important point for the story is not that Uzzah dies but that, as a result, David “was afraid of the Lord that day”. For God is shown here to be dangerous. Whatever David’s actions were intended to achieve, this God will not be a political instrument. “How can the ark of the Lord come into my care?” David asks; and the answer is that it cannot. The ark, or rather the God whose dangerous presence it symbolises, will take care of itself. David’s plans for the ark are challenged; he has been humbled by God.

So the ark is left at the home of one Obed-edom. And things go very well for him, which brings us to the second act. Hearing how Obed-edom has been blessed, David returns to collect the ark again. But now things are different. God has claimed for himself what David’s actions in bringing the ark to Jerusalem might have contradicted: that God is his own “man”, so to speak. God will come to Jerusalem, the “city of David”, and make it God’s own city.

This is grounds for celebration, and celebrate David does. The politics has now receded, and the focus is starkly on the approach of God in the symbol of the ark. And so we see David again as the one whose orientation – at its best – is to and from God. In ecstatic abandon David – apparently not even sufficiently dressed for decent public appearance – dances before God and before the people.

And then enters the unhappy figure of Michal. The daughter of Saul and David’s first wife, she was once deeply in love with David but ended up being tossed around as a political football by both her father and by David. Yet the role she takes here is not that of the unjustly-dealt-with. Here Michal is the accuser of David who has found himself in losing himself before God. She stands, at one level, as representative of the old order – perhaps contrasting David’s exuberance with the more staid character of her father’s kingship. So a contrast between Saul and David might be being drawn again here. But more important is the general moral offence against the propriety of office. She observes sarcastically, “How the king of Israel honoured himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself” (v.20). This is not how things are done.

David’s response, however, is remarkable:

“It was before the Lord, who chose me in place of your father … to appoint me as prince of Israel…that I have danced… I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honour” (v.21f).

First, he sets the voice of the old order in its place – it was God who appointed me in place of Saul. This much is more or less undeniable in the story, and probably recognised by Michal herself even if she’s not actually reconciled to the fact. More importantly, it was before God and not according to anyone else’s requirements that David has danced. But then David goes a step further to borrow Michal’s contempt and make of it a badge of honour:

I will become yet more contemptible, even contemptible in my own eyes, but the lowly maids of the servants will hold me in honour.

Perhaps the most notable thing here is that David does not seek to elevate or justify himself before God or before his accuser. This is because God has already elevated David; David’s self-abandon before the ark and the people is his response to this gift, and apparently one acceptable to God. Rather than justify himself before God, David allows that he might actually be further humbled – even to the extent of his own self-contempt. And the humble themselves – the maids of the servants – will honour David for it.

In our (off RCL) gospel reading today (Matthew 11.16-30.), there is a very suggestive parallel to what has happened here. Jesus gives an account of the charges made against him:

^{Matthew 11.18} ‘For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; ¹⁹the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” (and, we might add, the maids of the servants).

Here, in the role of Michal, the accuser is “this generation”, which cries out:

¹⁷ “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.”

That is, it is supposed that there is already a rhythm in place according which Jesus ought to be “dancing”, and yet he does not. And because he does not, he seemingly shames himself before God and the people as a “drunkard” and a “glutton”.

But more than this accusation as a correspondence to the story of David there is also present the theme of humility. Reflecting David’s acknowledgement that he might yet be humbled further, Jesus speaks of a revelation not to the wise and the intelligent – not to cultured despisers, the accusing Michals of this world – but to infants. And he issues the invitation:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

This is not an invitation to a life of quietude. The “rest for your souls” Jesus speaks of here is the freedom to dance as David did, or the freedom not to dance. What is spoken here is not a prescription for what to do, but simply – and most crucially – a contradiction of the voice of judgement spoken over those who know themselves as the children of God. That judgement Jesus notes in the comments made over his and the Baptist’s ministries:

‘For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!”

This is, in effect, to say that it is impossible not to be wrong, it is impossible not to offend someone, it is impossible not to transgress in the eyes of even those we imagine are on our side.

The danger in this kind of talk is that it might be heard as implying that therefore we might just as well claim free reign to do as we wish. The death of Uzzah as a sign to David and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead as a sign to his executioners are enough to show that this is not the case. There is a “too far” which is a true transgression of the limits God sets. This extreme is imagining that we can manipulate God, whether bringing God alongside our plans for the world or excluding God by crucifixion.

But the good news to be heard here is about a freedom to stand before God as we are, to do as we do, to offer what we can – to “dance”, so to speak.

There is an old Shaker song, “Simple Gifts”, which gives us the tune we sing to “The Lord of the Dance”:

When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend – we shan’t be asham’d, [think David dancing!]
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

(The Shaker song was most likely a dance piece: “turn, turn… come ‘round right”.)

Simplicity – “rest for your souls”, David’s abandon in God – brings the freedom of humility, to dance through life before God, turning from presumptions to know God and judge each other and, in this turning, coming around right.

By the gift of his liberating Spirit, may God’s people respond once more with joy to the invitation to join with him, the Lord of the dance, fearing not the accusations of those who despise the freedom of God’s children, but presenting before them the fuller humanity to which we are all called.

Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 16
19/7/2015

2 Samuel 5:1-10
Psalm 48
Matthew 22:41-46

---

The idol has a special place in our culture – perhaps in all cultures. We seem to need them, whether they be political, intellectual, fashion or music idols, or whatever. Idols image for us something we think to be central, most important or most support to us. To borrow the language of 1 Samuel, we desire that a “king” be appointed over us, to govern, to lead, to protect, to define (recalling the request for a king in 1 Samuel 8).

With this fascination comes the phenomenon of the fallen idol – the great one upon whom we projected our own images and expectations but who turns out to be less than we thought. This is not a desirable roll to play: no one wants to be held up as the warning to others about looking like one thing but being another, whether or not you’ve actually encouraged others to idolise you.

Many of our idols – the smart ones, or the lucky ones – will avoid public exposure in this way but all idols, human or divine, will finally prove less than we need or want them to be.

The dynamic of idols – our need for them and their inevitable failure – is central to the Scriptural story.

So far as the story of David’s rise to the kingship goes, it is so far so good. Our reading this morning is something of a climax in David’s story, towards which the whole thrust of the narrative has been leading and which now is achieved as the last resistance from Saul’s supporters is overcome and David establishes himself in the city of Jerusalem. It has been a remarkable story, with David effectively becoming king through no real effort on his own part other than simply staying alive: Saul died at the hands of the Philistines, Saul’s only successor was killed by two of his captains, Saul’s general was killed by David’s own – all of this against David’s wishes – and finally the northern part of the kingdom has come to acknowledge that David is the only realistic option for king. Our reading this morning ends with the declaration that “David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts, was with him.”

For David and for the kingship, then, all is going very well. In fact, it will be found in the end to have gone so well that David and the kingship will come to take on unprecedented significance for Israel. The heritage of Moses and Mount Sinai is now complemented by David and Mount Zion, so that when the early church comes to reflect on the ministry of Jesus, Moses and the law are somewhat overshadowed by the kingship of God and the promise of a new Jerusalem.

And yet we know the story, and so we know that for David personally things will slowly unravel. The story of trust and faithfulness which has been David’s story to this point will become complicated by the effect which being king has on the man himself. With the freedoms of being king comes the temptation to arrogance – claiming more for oneself than is appropriate. Perhaps we have seen a foreshadow of that in the treatment of the blind and the lame in our reading this morning; we will see in more detail what this looks like in the weeks to come.

For now, however, we will focus on what David “stands for” as king. In many respects the life of David reflects that of Adam (with Eve) in the garden creation myth – and many Old Testament scholars think that the story of Adam is told with the experiences of David in mind. For in David we see a figure to whom all is given, and who first revels before God in what he has received but then reaches out to take more than was offered. At the same time, David is not destroyed. He continues as king, and so do his successors for 400 years – long enough for Israel to imagine that he and his line were indeed favoured by God.

But David’s failures are not forgotten. And so the question has to be asked why his failures do not see him also cast aside. What is happening, that David and his kingship is not rejected? The answer is also given in the story of Adam and Eve. In the creation myth Adam and Eve, in the same way as David, are given dominion over all the world and live in direct relationship to God before overreaching and being cast down. And yet, even though God’s judgement is then spoken and hardship now becomes a dominant mark of their existence, still they stand – clothed now by garments of leather given by God to replace their own flimsy fig leaves. As we will hear in a few weeks, this corresponds very closely to the judgement on David following his taking of Bathsheba and the murder of her husband – the sword will ever be active in David’s house and, yet, he will remain king. David is not rejected, but his existence takes a different shape and style on account of the failures which are to come. It is perhaps this historical memory of David which colours the pre-history account of Adam in the Garden.

But, in the broader context of the Scripture’s reflection on the nature of the human being, David’s moral failings ought not to bother us, and neither should we be distracted by the form of the story as a story about a monarchy. It is, of course, about a kingship. But it is also something of a parable about every one of us. For the question is not the seemingly obvious one as to whether David is fit to be king, but whether any one of us would be. The answer of the Scripture writers, reflecting David’s own story in the legend of the Fall in the Garden, is No – the favoured one(s) will overreach. As it was for Adam, so it was for David. Or, as it was for David, so it must have been for Adam – and so also for us, for we are the same as they, before the same God.

And so wondering about the quality of David’s kingship, and whether David or we deserve God’s favour is to ask the wrong question. For the story of David’s failure as king, and the story of the failure in the Garden, is written not from the perspective of failure itself but from the inexplicable experience that the fallen, favoured one is still favoured. (How this can be so when, for example, it didn’t apply in the case of Saul, we will see in more detail in a couple of weeks when we come to God’s covenant with David). The amazing thing about the story of Eden – taking it at face value – is that the Scriptures do not end with the sad departure of Adam and Eve. And the reason is that it is that Adam and Eve still stand after exiting Eden, and David’s line continues in the kingship despite the fact that he and his descendants continuing to failure before God.

This is the critical thing, and the key to making sense of these stories: David is untrustworthy, and yet trusted to carry on. It is this situation which provides the answer to what is perhaps the question motivating the writers of Scripture, put so succinctly by the prophet Ezekiel: can such dry bones as these live (Ezekiel 37.3)? Can life come out of what is deathly? Can human fear and loathing and arrogance be overcome? Can divine faithfulness endure human unfaithfulness? The answer is, Yes: we who created are after God’s image and so are now all “literally” fallen images – fallen idols – nevertheless are raised again to our feet.

And here are the first intimations of the gospel. Although the story of David is the story of any one of us, it echoes another story which is strangely like ours, and yet is not. This is the story of Jesus, who comes after David and yet who finally defines David – as Jesus teases in his game of words with the Pharisees in our gospel reading this morning (off RCL: Matthew 22.41-46). If the story of David or Adam in their failure to stand properly before God might be said to be our story, the gospel is about Jesus who perfects what it means to stand before God. He also receives the life of the favoured one. As the true image – or idol – he suffers the fall into the death of the rejected and godless. He encapsulates David’s story and Adam’s story, and ours. Yet his new existence as the risen Lord is not the qualified and always potentially miserable existence under judgement which becomes the lot of Adam and David. Rather, he exceeds them, for in him is death and judgement put behind, no longer colouring and limiting his future.

We are Davids and Bathshebas, Adams and Eves, called and gifted, fallen and tarnished images. And yet – the most important and surprising thing – we are not discarded. In Jesus is the both act and the promise of perfection. What he suffers is our failure, and that God restores him would only be good news for him were it not that Christ himself returns to those who sacrificed him with the healing words: “peace be with you”.

This offer of peace to those who persecuted him is the beginning of our restoration. In this way we meet ourselves as we are – falling very short of God’s glory – and yet also overcome, forgiven, embraced. In this way we meet for the first time the God who created us in his image, and restores that image when we fall.

For the story of Jesus which meets, embraces and sets right our story, all thanks be to God, now and always. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 15
12/7/2015

Galatians 2:15-21
Psalm 30
Mark 5:13-20

---

[Notes in lieu of a sermon, in response to an article by Lorraine Parkinson in Crosslight, July 2015]

In her response to Randall Prior in July Crosslight, Lorraine Parkinson takes issue not only with the ecumenical impetus which saw the birth of the Uniting Church but more generally with Christian faith and its reading of the significance of the person of Jesus. Her intention is to propose a better basis upon which to build human unity. Yet her dismissal of the church’s traditional christological understanding of the possibility of such unity in favour of an ethical basis for it – even an ethic purportedly from the lips of Jesus – misses the point of the kind of focus on Jesus the church has taken since the beginning.

This is indicated in her summation of the “greatest challenge” St Paul faces in his evangelical work as the death of the Messiah. This is not Paul’s greatest challenge, nor the New Testament’s as a whole. The theological problem – the surprise – of the New Testament is not that the Good dies, but that it dies at the hands of the good, the people of God. In this the elect act in a way expected of the Gentiles.

But this is no mere irony. The crucial Christological key here is that the crucifixion of Jesus was an act of piety on the part of the religious leadership, a gift to God which totally misread what Jesus represented. The fact of such an error is the reason even something like the Sermon on the Mount provides no basis for human unity. The hearing of the Sermon leads to the death of the preacher: precisely the kind of sectarian human division Lorraine seeks to avoid. This being the case for Jesus, how is it conceivable that a return to the Sermon will now work? Only wishful thinking, tinged with not a little critique of the ethical failures of others, could imagine it possible.

While Lorraine proposes discovering a general ethical basis for creating human unity, at the heart of the Christian story is a critique of such bases: the failure of ethical systems to give us certainty that we have acted righteously. The resurrection was a judgement on the ethical judgement of those who crucified Jesus. The problem of human dividedness – of which Jesus’ death is the epitome – is not religious sectarianism but the general human malaise: the presumption that we are able to judge ourselves as having acted righteously, the catastrophe of Eden’s apple.

Paul’s genius was not dreaming up the sacrificial theory for the death of Jesus but the realisation that our sense for what is right or wrong is unreliable: it is not possible to justify ourselves before God by keeping our understanding of religious or moral the law. We cannot know ourselves to be right before God, apart God declaring us so.

Thus Lorraine’s dismissal of the prayer for unity in John’s gospel as mere church theology much after the fact also misses the point. Whether or not Jesus actually spoke these words they are important because the church knew – and occasionally still remembers – that human unity is a gift of God, not an ethical achievement of Christians or people of any other faith or no-faith.

It is indeed true that the church continues to get its message and its unity wrong but we ought to take this failure with utter seriousness. Given that a community with a message of reconciliation at its very heart has failed to achieve human unity, what confidence can we possibly have that simply alighting upon some ethical system – even the lauded Sermon on the Mount (or, at least, bits of it) – will get us any further? A proponent for any such system is no better placed for success than Jesus, and in fact much less so.

For this reason the gospel is not an ethical program. It is a word of ethical realism. While we are constantly called to love mercy and live humbly before God – and must heed this call – even our obedient response does not finally create human unity, for things are too broken. Rather, in the face of the same kind of rejection Jesus himself met, such an ethic testifies to a unity which does not yet exist but which we wait for God to call into being – in spite of us, but for us.

In this way, the gospel wrapped up in the church’s traditional confession is beyond ethics. It is no mere call to be good, but the promise of a goodness made out of human ethical failure: This is my body broken by you, given now that you might be healed.

The “authentic role” of the Uniting Church, with all Christian communities, is not merely issuing the call to love, or even being loving. It is to point to a source of unity and reconciliation which has comprehended us, and yet still loves us. In this the church has something not simply to say to the world but to celebrate in spite of the fact that the world can be as deaf to the news as we are ourselves.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 14
5/7/2015

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
Mark 6:1-13

---

As I was growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, one of our household institutions was to pause soon after lunch before the television to hear the (almost?) immortal lines: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives”, and then to sit through the next engrossing episode of the classic soapy. (Or, I assume that they were engrossing, because I don’t think we missed many when we were home!) As much as those opening lines have been parodied, in fact they reflect a deeply-rooted philosophy about life. It’s not a very good philosophy – and its outworking is seen in the worst manifestations of soap opera – but it has a strong hold on us: the times of our lives are sand upon sand upon sand.

As we follow the story of the kings of Israel, we might ask: Is this another soap opera? With our reading this morning we come almost to the end of the story of Israel’s first king – Saul. We have skipped over a large section of the narrative, most of which has had to do with the pursuit of David by the increasingly envious and threatened Saul. If you have read the skipped material in the last week you might have a question about the sincerity of the passion and sorrow which fills David’s song of lament as we have heard it today, as David has spent most of the last 14 chapters or so trying not to get killed by Saul.

And yet, David is not being inconsistent here. Despite that fact that he knows himself to have been anointed by Samuel as the one to succeed the king, David has continued to honour Saul as Israel’s king. Twice David has had Saul in hand – a sitting duck, as it were – and both times he chose to use the opportunity as a means of illustrating to Saul that he constituted no threat to the king and that the king was pursuing him unjustly (1 Samuel 24 and 26). When his own men castigate David for not taking advantage of having Saul at his mercy, his response is that he would not presume to kill the Lord’s anointed (1 Samuel 26.9). Our reading this morning has also conveniently skipped over the ghastly story in which the messenger who brings the news of Saul’s death falsely claims to have killed the king at the request of the mortally wounded king himself; David has the messenger himself executed for having presumed to do what David himself refused to, even if Saul did request it (See 1 Samuel 31.1-2 Samuel 1.16). All of this is simply to say that, whatever we make of David’s song of lament, he is not being two-faced here; he has honoured, perhaps even loved Saul as king, even though David himself has been promised that the kingship will be given to him.

But at the same time we should be wary of any impression that Saul is exalted as a fallen hero here, given the wider context of the narrative. He has been rejected as king by God on account of disobedience and told that another will take his place. “Historically”, we might say that Saul dies at the hands of the Philistines in a military miscalculation. At that level his death is tragic, and perhaps even heroic and certainly a devastating blow to Israel. Theologically, however, Saul dies because he was destined no longer to be king. Saul, then, is supposed to removed from the picture, and God has presumably been in the process of painting him out ever since Samuel delivered the bad news to the rejected king. Saul falling on his own sword is God’s final stroke across that part of the canvas. In making sense of David’s lament, then, we have to reject any thought that here we are dealing with a lament over a fallen hero. This would be to read the Scriptures as confirming that common habit we have of telling none of the bad stories about the deceased at his or her funeral, as if having died in particular way – or even just having died – constitutes a righteousness which obviates everything that has gone before. The Scriptures are not so disingenuous: Saul reaps what he has sown. He dies not because the Philistines had a stroke of good luck but because God abandoned him.

But what, then, is the meaning of David’s magnificent song of lament? With its three-times repeated refrain “how the mighty have fallen”, the lament lends itself to all kinds of borrowings to express grief in response to the demise or decline of any of our great ones, but this is not to use the lament in a way true to its use in the story. Central to a proper understanding of the lament is the meaning of the kingship itself in Israel, and in the ancient near East more generally. Whereas in our more individualistic age we are likely to hear David’s song as a eulogy for Saul himself, in its context it is much more than this. The relationship between the king and the people over whom he reigns is such that what happens to the king happens to the nation. Thus David sings of Saul as the slain “glory of Israel”. This is not about Saul in himself but about Saul as the king – as that which for which the people had asked, in which it sought to find it security and strength. What is lost here is not only the man Saul but the hope of Israel – that in which it chose to trust. The death of the king is the end of the dream. But, as we have seen, neither is this simply an accidental thing, as if Saul might have survived to die of old age if perhaps he hadn’t ventured out that day. If the king has failed so also has Israel who trusted in the kingship. There is a judgement here which is executed not only upon Saul but also upon Israel. And so we have here not simply a loyal man mourning the death of his king, but rather a lament over Israel itself – both glorious as chosen and blessed by its God, and yet also rejected in judgement as it itself has rejected God (1 Samuel 8). David’s song for Saul is God’s own song for Israel: How the mighty have fallen.

Most importantly, however, this song is sung not just by anyone, but by God’s own solution for the problem of the kingship – David himself. The lament rises in response to an executed judgement. Yet, the overcoming of the judgement is as close as the lips which sing this very song.

And this brings us to something much more important than the mere historical details of who was king and when. Here we encounter the particularly Hebrew-Christian conception of sin and judgement: that sin named and judgement enacted are sin forgiven and judgement overcome. History is written by the winners – so the saying goes – and the Hebrews had come to understand themselves as the winners, in that God had found a way to turn their grief into gladness, their death into life. The request for a king was a failure on Israel’s part, and yet God would turn the kingship into a means of grace. This is not because of the possibilities of the situations themselves, but because of who God is.

Here the way in which God related to Israel through Saul and David becomes relevant to God’s relating to us here today. We don’t worry much about kings these days, but we have a strong sense of “better” and “worse” in our personal and community lives. We might imagine it better to repair a broken church and tower, but our confession must be that if God blesses us subsequently in will be as much in spite of the tower as because of it. We might imagine it better to sell up and travel “light” in terms of property, but the same caveat will apply. In our personal lives, achieving the dream job, finally reaching retirement, having the family, emptying the nest – whatever: these are never the self-justifying ends we imagine them to be. As much despite what we think we have achieved, God will bless us, or others through us.

While we have noted a number of times lately that there are no true beginnings in history, it is also the case that there are no endings. There is no end with God but God himself – God as faithful, as keeping to the covenantal promise to remain with his people, despite where they might wander. This “end” is not a completion. The end, the thing we meet at our various conclusions, is the faithfulness of God. This meeting is always a new beginning which casts new light on who we are and what we have done. A judgement is made as God makes good of what we have done: God’s promises to David are the making good of the request for a king; Saul’s departure was the judgement on that request. When the word of judgement was spoken – the death of Saul – the shape of salvation from the judgement is already at hand – the promises to David.

These promises found a kind of fulfilment 1000 years later in the person of Jesus, but the dynamic of judgement and salvation remained the same. The judgement on the crucifixion of Jesus is the resurrection, the vindication of Jesus. Yet Jesus is raised not to condemn but to invite to understanding and healing: look, see, understand, believe, repent, follow. To eat and drink in Holy Communion is to receive human failure as a source of healing, in the hands of this God.

The days of our lives are no mere passing story – sand upon sand, risings and fallings, cycles of history. Saul and David are not just a characters in stories which happen to be found in our holy book. Here, as if through a glass darkly, we see God dealing with us all in judgement and grace, the grace meeting the judgement head on, and overcoming it.

May this grace – known in its perfection in Jesus the Son – meet us, and overcome us, and set us free. In that may we know the peace which passes all understanding, our hearts and minds kept in the knowledge of God’s love for his fallen creatures and of his refusal to do anything but work for their salvation. Amen.