City of David

Midweek Worship

The Seventh Week After the Pentecost

Semicontinuous Reading: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Thus is the Kingdom of David established.

We have a particularly interesting reading this evening. A lot occurs within a relatively brief passage. David is the second King of Israel, anointed by Samuel to replace Saul, the first and failed king—this, at least, according to David’s own scribes. David as we have him is an original rags-to-riches story: the shepherd who became a warrior who became a king. It was his destiny, his vision, to unite the Twelve Tribes of Israel and Judah, and to rule not only over them but over a number of their neighbors as well. David was looking to have his own little empire.

The land of Israel has always been of geopolitical importance. As the ancient crossroads linking Europe, Asia, and Africa, it is even today a crucial borderland between the West and Middle East. If David can unite the Tribes, wealth and power follow. But how can he do this? First he needs a center, a throne from which to rule. And he finds it in Jerusalem, the ancient holy city of Melchizedek, which is not possessed by any of the Twelve Tribes, but by the Jebusites, a non-Israelite people.

When David takes the city—as he does through brilliance and through subterfuge—it is neutral territory, loyal only to him; thus the sobriquet, “the City of David.” The American Founders followed the same logic when they made Washington D.C. a Federal city, belonging to no one given State. Timeless wisdom here.

So now that David has an administrative and military center, next he needs religion. Every Ancient Near Eastern king requires a god on his side—that’s simply how things are done—and David has the best of all: Yahweh, the God of Abraham, the God of Moses; the God who is in fact the One God, the Creator God; even if it takes a while for the concept of monotheism to really sink in.

King David wants religion to unify his people and to solidify his throne. So he takes the holiest thing he can find, the Ark of the Covenant, and brings it to the holiest city he has, Jerusalem.

The Ark itself is a box of wood layered in precious gold and carried on long poles. It actually resembles similar religious and ritual boxes used in Egyptian processions. But for the Israelite people, the Twelve Tribes of Jacob, that Ark of the Covenant is nothing less than the visible symbol of God’s presence on this earth. It’s how they know that God is with them, protecting them, shepherding them. It contains the Ten Commandments given to Moses, the rod of Aaron with its miraculous fruit, and a pot of manna, the bread of heaven, which sustained the Hebrews throughout their 40 years in the wilderness. It’s the whole Covenant in a nutshell.

These items are the signs of God’s love and provision, the guarantors of His relationship to His people. How do we know that God is for us? Why, just look to the Ark, the visible footstool of God’s throne invisible in the heavens.

Jerusalem, meanwhile, has a bit of interesting history itself. Back in the time of Abraham, some thousand years before David, the city of Salem—early Jerusalem—was ruled by a priest-king, Melchizedek by name, a man who not only claimed to worship the same One God as Abraham, but to whom Abraham paid homage. Tradition holds that the “unsacrifice” of Isaac took place on one of the mountain peaks of Salem. And now here sits David as conquering successor to the man to whom Abraham bowed.

So up comes the Ark to Jerusalem. Up comes the Ark to the city of Melchizedek and David. And a vast crowd is assembled, 30,000 people representing the clans and the Tribes. And we have music and dancing and sacrifice, for that is how peoples of old would please the gods. David himself dances with abandon, dances in a frenzy, to the point of indecency, to the point that one of his wives, the princess Michal, is ashamed of his base behavior, unfit for the dignity of a daughter of a king.

Interestingly, David here also dons a linen ephod, that is, a priestly garment. And this is very strange: in the first place, because he is neither priest nor Levite, and thus forbidden from serving before the Ark of the Lord; and in the second, because his predecessor Saul fell from grace for just such a royal encroachment on priestly duties. Why can David get away with what Saul could not? Is it because David is now priest-king of Jerusalem? “A priest forever,” sings the Psalmist, “according to the order of Melchizedek”—a separate royal priesthood.

Yet there is a price to be paid for this all. Part of the story we skip, which is not included in the assigned lectionary reading for this evening, is when a man named Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark, after the oxen pulling it to Jerusalem had stumbled, and Uzzah is immediately struck dead by contact with so holy an object. He touches the Ark and boom! No more Uzzah. Naturally David is deeply disturbed by this, as are we, reading this story a few millennia later.

It doesn’t seem fair that Uzzah should die simply for trying to brace the Ark. He didn’t do anything wrong, did he? Perhaps we should borrow a page from Hinduism and teach that any character killed by God in the Scriptures is taken straight to heaven. Or perhaps we should look to the Church Fathers, who would surely read this metaphorically, since God simply cannot do what is evil or immoral. If He could, He wouldn’t be God.

But the storyteller’s concern here isn’t ethics. Rather, I think it a warning not to toy with sacred things, not to brandish holiness as a prop in your own political pageantry. David’s piety may be genuine, yet ultimately he is using religion, using God, to further his own dynastic ends. And this perhaps reminds us that God is no pawn in the games that we play. Yahweh is not to be trifled with; the Lion of Judah has never been tamed. Holiness remains wild, and we each encounter God at our peril.

What then are we to make of this, 3000 years after the fact? Well, the arrival of the Ark at Jerusalem reminds us of what it is to be in the presence of God. There stands the Ark, the concrete symbol of His presence, the physical sign of His promise. And we have such signs ourselves: we have the Word of God and the Sacraments; we have the holy Cross.

Like David in the story, we have our own embodied rituals, our own liturgies that transcend the individual, that make of us one body, and which open us to the experience of the presence of God among us, beyond us, within us. Thus we worship with all of our senses, all of our wits, and all of our bones. Finally, we have our response to God’s presence: not frenzy and dancing necessarily, though some churches certainly go for such things, but the deep bliss, the deep peace, the absolution of Emmanuel, God-With-Us, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Because He’s what all this has been getting at, isn’t He? All of this always points us to Jesus. There’s no other reason for us as Christians to read the Old Testament.

David is a flawed yet fascinating figure, full of virtue, full of vice. I do not pretend that he is some perfect moral exemplar, nor that stories of him are not deeply problematic if not outright propagandistic. And yet—it is a descendant of David’s blood who will claim his royal throne, who will serve in truth as Priest and King, according to the order of Melchizedek. This Son of David, Son of God, will make the holy holier, consecrating Jerusalem by His own innocent Blood.

It is to Jerusalem that the New Ark of the New Covenant will come: the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, to consecrate the Christchild to the service of His Father; so that for us the presence of God is no longer bound to a box, but to an empty Cross and open Tomb. Here at Jerusalem, where all holiness collides; here at Jerusalem, where prophets come to die; here shall the sacrifice no longer be to God, but it shall be God’s own sacrifice for us, His own life poured out for the world from the Cross, that even His murderers may see and be saved.

It all begins with David, who took a city, a cult, and a kingdom: David, without whom there would be no unified Israel, and thus no Hebrew Bible; David, for all of his flaws, all of his hopes, and all of his sins; David, who like all of us shall rise anew in Christ.

The presence of God has come to the city, and thus has a kingdom been born. What was true in the days of David is true in Christ today.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.