July 12, 2009

Sixth Sunday of Pentecost
July 12, 2009

Who ever said worship is boring? Today we’re invited to witness unadulterated, boisterous spiritual joy in the person of King David as he dances the Ark of the Covenant into his new capital city of Jerusalem.

Of course we’re not talking about a boat like Noah’s “ark.” The Ark of the Covenant, for those of you who haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was a very large chest or trunk. It carried Israel’s greatest treasure, the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
Remember that the Israelites at this point in their history were nomads, wandering the desert. So God ordered their craftspeople to build a portable shrine, large enough to hold the tablets, but small enough to be carried moved from place to place.
For nearly 40 years, the Ark with its precious cargo of the ten commandments led the people as they traveled through the desert on their way to the promised land.
Once the Israelites settled into Canaan/Palestine the Ark was placed in a position of honor in one of the main cities.
Many years later, the Philistines invaded Israel. They were eager to get their hands on the Ark because they believed it held the divine power of Yahweh, Israel’s God.
But the Israelites hid it away for 20 years until David defeated the Philistines (remember Goliath?) and was declared King of Israel.
David then took the Ark out of hiding and marched it in ceremonial procession to his new capital city, Jerusalem.

For the people of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant not only held the stone tablets but in some sense was the presence of God among them.
They had good reason for this. The ten commandments confirmed and expressed God’s unfailing care for the chosen people, what in Hebrew is called ‘heset,’ or “steadfast love” because they showed that God cared enough about them to give them rules for living.
So David’s dance that day in Jerusalem expressed pure spiritual joy at the coming of God’s presence into Jerusalem.

Or—maybe not.
There’s that peculiar little scene of Michal, one of David’s wives, observing from the palace window. As everyone else in Jerusalem was partying outside, his wife chose to stay inside and watch the spectacle from there: “Michal, daughter of Saul, looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”
What’s going on with her? Is she nursing a private grudge? Why can’t she share David’s spiritual fervor? Doesn’t she believe God’s presence is in the Ark of the Covenant?
When she looks out the window and sees David dancing, she doesn’t see joyous spirituality, David ecstatic in the presence of God. She sees a raw (and very effective) display of political power.
Michal is the daughter of the former king, Saul, whom God deposed in favor of David. For Michal, the Ark of the Covenant rolling into Jerusalem cemented David’s claim to the throne. Religious awe?—no way. Political cynicism—that’s all she could feel.

I see Michal as the patron saint of many people today.
People who love spirituality, but distrust religion.
How often have you heard someone say, “I like the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I just can’t bring myself to belong to a church.” And then they may go on to cite, as many recent books have done, sins of the churches over the two millennia since Jesus lived on earth
We all know the scandalous history of Christianity: Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants murdering Catholics. Executions of so-called witches. Suppression, imprisonment, silencing, or even executions of the scientists of the Renaissance.
Many churches in the United States condoning slavery. Silencing and exclusion of women, people with handicaps, people of differing sexual orientations from worship and certainly from positions of authority. Churches in many nations supporting cruel and repressive regimes.
Even you, even I, may occasionally step back and look at Church from behind a curtain and think, “So what does God have to do with this?” It’s no accident that the fastest growing faith group in the United States right now is “spiritual but not religious.”

This past week and in the week ahead, you might feel a bit like Michal as the drama of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA unfolds.
You might think—all this wrangling, especially about sexuality, it’s just embarrassing.
You might feel like shouting, Church shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or social issues—why don’t we all just worship together? What does all this have to do with God and spirituality?

David’s fervor and Michal’s cynicism both have something to teach us about the reality of church.
Yes, God is present in our worship. God continues to love us with hesed, with steadfast love. Jesus Christ continues to show up in the Eucharist.
But Michal’s clear-eyed appreciation that religion and politics are thoroughly intertwined is also necessary. As soon as you get more than two people gathered together, Christ may be in the midst of them, but so will politics.
In any church, from CHS right up to national and international church bodies, the question is how do we do the necessary politics of the church?
In our vestry recently, we’ve been working hard practicing “spirit-filled listening,” in which we all try to respect the integrity of people we disagree with, and realizing that we individually may not have the truth nailed down. It’s really hard—we all love our own opinions and our own voices, but we’re working at it.
At General Convention this week, the House of Delegates declared an unprecedented one hour pause in Roberts Rules of Order for strangers in pairs to talk to one another about their personal histories around sexuality and spirituality, days before they will all vote on those issues.

A religious organization, a church, is people getting it wrong, struggling over and over to get it at least righter, returning to the well of both personal and communal spirituality, —to what David danced for that long ago day in Jerusalem—God’s unfailing, steadfast love.