The Revised Common Lectionary, the schedule of worship readings shared by many Mainline Protestant churches, can be a valuable tool. Preaching resources are often aligned with the text, and many clergy groups use it for discussion and prayer. Worshippers can reasonably expect that friends in other Mainline churches, Presbyterians and ELCA Lutherans and Episcopalians and so on, probably heard some of the same readings on Sunday morning, if anyone actually heard a sermon worth remembering. More than anything, the Lectionary keeps us from getting into a rut and forces us to take in the whole story, making it harder to preach only what we want to believe or congregants want to hear. After all, as much as folks want every sermon to end with “You’re just swell,” that isn’t exactly faithful or reality-based. Sometimes, we are not just swell…
But the Lectionary is not perfect. There are more readings on any given Sunday than most of us are willing to read, so there is still a bit of pick-and-choose going on. Because readings tend to be short, they often rip incidents and teachings out of important context. And sometimes, the team that put together the schedule of readings simply didn’t like part of the text, so they skipped over it, as happens with today’s portion from the Second Book of Samuel. If you have ever heard the story of David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, you most certainly did not hear the portion where Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark when the oxen stumble. You would not have heard that Uzzah’s reward for coming to the rescue was to be struck down, killed by an irrational and violent God.
Pastors don’t like preaching that part of the text, for it is a reminder that Man made God in his own image, masculine intentional here. That is not to deny the reality of that divine mystery we name as God. It is an insistence that we always remember and name that our experience of the holy, of the sacred, is mediated through our own experience of the world, as upright primates and creative miracles, fearfully and wonderfully made. God, in order to be God, must be beyond our capacity.
Even reading the skipped parts, as we did today, deprives us of context and perspective, for we need to know why moving the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem is a thing David would want to do, and given David’s importance in the Christian understanding of Jesus, the ancient king’s every move is interpreted as a part of a holy plan, from the possible defeat of Goliath to the murder of Uriah.
So let’s take a minute to look at the story on its own merits.
For approximately two centuries after a small group escaped slavery in Egypt, the Hebrew people in Canaan operated as a loose confederation of tribes. Legend has it that the Ark of the Covenant contained artifacts from that escape. Following Hebrew numerology, we are told that there were Twelve Tribes, all equal in importance, and the Ark rotated between those tribes.
About three thousand years ago, the Hebrew people, worried about the growing threat of Philistines on the coast, and envying their powerful neighbors to the southwest and northeast, chose a warlord named Saul to be their king. Despite the story of divine choosing, the reality on the ground is that the crown should go to Saul’s son, David’s dear friend Jonathan. It does not. David engages in rebellion against Saul, and eventually takes the crown for himself.
David, that great king that is so important to the Christian understanding of Jesus, is a usurper. Many of his actions are about consolidating power and proving his legitimacy. Much of the story we receive in scripture is royal propaganda in the exact same way Shakespeare’s history plays are Tudor propaganda.
Claiming the Ark is the second step in consolidating his power. The first is conquering and claiming a city that does not belong to any tribe to insure that he is not beholden to any single tribe. He chooses a Canaanite city dedicated to the Canaanite god of dusk, Shalim, which becomes Jerusalem. Once he has established his new capitol, he seizes the Ark.
It might well confer some sort of blessing, as the text informs us it has done for Obed-edom. What it certainly does is confer power, for the Ark is sacred to the Hebrew Yahweh cult, so the whole of that cult turns toward the king’s new capitol, to the new mount where a Temple will eventually stand. The Ark of the Covenant will be placed in the innermost chamber of the Temple of Solomon, the “Holy of Holies” where the high priest can communicate with God. Whether the Ark was a sort of divine location or more like a holy walkie talkie is unclear.
The sacred object creates a sacred place, and David, in claiming it, is shaping a sacred story. The object, the place, the story, are all bigger than this one man and his schemes.
We can experience a sort of transcendent moment when we connect with something bigger than ourselves, when we stand amidst sequoias or in the cavernous space of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, when Britten’s War Requiem reaches a crescendo, or Simone Biles stands at the top of the medal platform. We can experience being part of something bigger than ourselves when we understand ourselves as part of an unfolding story, of this odd little progressive branch of Protestant Christianity, of this particular story of Park and Elmira and antiracism, when we honor our obligation to do not what we like and we want, but to do what is right, what honors our past by building our future.
But the sacred is more than transcendence. Germans experienced transcendence at the Nuremberg Rallies. Being part of a bigger story, being drawn out of ourselves and into something bigger, is only good if we are drawn out of our fear and all of the things that spring from our fear, greed and power. Being connected to something bigger than ourselves, a place, a story, is only good if it is good, which means thriving for both us and those things with which we are entangled, family, community, creation… well, everything really… Except mosquitos. There should be no thriving for mosquitos.
The sacred is not some box containing some tablets, a staff, and some magic bread. It is not some room filled with gold and incense wafting up towards a ceiling ever so far above.
The sacred is whatever aligns with God’s good purpose, which is continuous divine artistry, is the cycle of life, is this one bright gem of a world circling on sparkler of a son in the grand fireworks display that is creation.
Holiness is not deadly. The sacred is not deadly despite today’s text, despite the screenplay of the first Indiana Jones film, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which is a great film, just wrong about what it means to touch the holy. That gold box didn’t have any mysterious magic that would have helped Hitler or the Allies. God is not an irrational and violent abuser. God never was, despite thousands of years of bad press. God is good. The holy is here, if we choose it, if we align ourselves with all that is beautiful, is living, is yes.
There is nothing inherently wrong with taking care of yourself, your family. But love has to go beyond what serves you. It is only really love if it is selfless. There is nothing inherently wrong with precious objects and precious places, but they are not ours.
So what of that Ark? That sacred object?
It never appears in scripture again after the First Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians. Some claim it was hidden, eventually transported to Ethiopia. If we are to believe Dr. Jones, it has been lost in some U.S. Government warehouse. Seems just as well…
Let you soul swim in the sacred, in living stories and amazing places and in life, in creativity, in next…
Amen.