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Davidson College Presbyterian Church Davidson College Presbyterian Church Davidson, North Carolina Lib McGregor Simmons, Pastor John 1:1-5, 14; II Samuel 6:1-19 The Ark of God Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time July 15, 2012 Ever since that patron saint of archeologists Indiana Jones appeared on the cinematic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the ark of God has loomed large in the popular imagination. Who can forget that climactic scene where Indy’s archrival opened the lid of the ark and unleashed the pyrotechnics which melted faces and exploded heads and gave some moviegoers nightmares for months? Today we move from the ark of God as presented by Steven Spielberg on the silver screen to the ark of God as presented in the biblical book of II Samuel. Reviewing some background on the ark will be helpful as we seek to hear God’s Word in II Samuel 6. The Ark of the Covenant had been crafted by the Israelite artisan Bezalel to house the 10 Commandments after Moses, acting on God’s instruction, commanded that it be built so that it might travel along with the tabernacle as a movable sanctuary as the people of Israel made their way from Sinai through the wilderness into the Promised Land. The ark was a lead actor more than it was a stage prop when Joshua fought the battle of Jericho. From that point, the ark is virtually unmentioned until we read in I Samuel 3 of how the young boy Samuel who had been dedicated to the service of the Lord by his mother Hannah slept “where the ark of God was.” The ark then moves to center stage in I Samuel 4-6 when the ark is captured by Israel’s enemy the Philistines. It subsequently caused so much pain and suffering among the Philistines that they gave it back. So then, as today’s reading opens, the ark, the locus of God’s presence, is once again in the possession of Israel. (1) Anyone who has taken more than a casual saunter through the Old Testament knows that there are some sketchy neighborhoods through which modern-day readers tend to tiptoe uneasily. It can be bumpy terrain, the Old Testament can… people getting their heads chopped off (I Samuel 17: 51), 42 kids getting mauled by bears for calling the prophet Elisha “Old Baldhead” (II Kings 2: 23-24), that sort of thing. The story in today’s Scripture lesson about Uzzah and the ark is a case in point. As the story goes, King David, having just captured Jerusalem and made it his capital, wished to make the city a religious symbol as well as a political and military one. So he decided to bring into Jerusalem the ark of the covenant, the holy residence of God’s holy presence and power, from Abinadab’s house where it had been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for some time. David and his troops loaded the ark onto an ox cart and set off down the road toward the city. On the way, however, the oxen stumbled, the cart tipped, Uzzah, earnest and attentive, reflexively reached out to steady the ark, and right there and then before he could say OMG, Uzzah was DOA! It’s no wonder that the lectionary makes a wide berth around this part of the story, prescribing as the Old Testament lesson for today only II Samuel 6: 6: 1-5, 12b-19, that is, skipping the Uzzah part of the story all together. The story seems seriously out of sync with our New Testament understanding of a loving God, although if the truth be told, there is a story in Acts 5 in the New Testament about the Christian believers Ananias and Sapphira who lied to the other members of their church about how much profit they had made on the sale of some property and were rewarded with some fresh real estate in the cemetery for their subterfuge. (A good reminder to check and see whether I’m caught up this summer on my pledge to the church!) The story of Uzzah is primitive to be sure. We may wonder what it in the world it can contribute to our present-day understanding of God. However, I believe that we would be in error to put this story in a donut hole as the lectionary does, failing to view it as offering some insight into God and our relationship to the Holy One in whom we live and move and have our being. Tom Long has written that the place to begin wrestling with this story is to ask the question, “What did Uzzah do that was so bad?” (2) Some might say that it is as simple as saying that Uzzah was being disobedient. Moses had given explicit instructions (Exodus 25: 13- 14 and I Chronicles 15: 14-15) on how the ark was to be transported: it was not to be touched by human hands, but reverently carried by Levites on poles inserted through rings attached to the ark. Uzzah and Ahio, the priests assigned to care for the Ark, simply ignored the Mosaic instructions. Instead of carrying the ark on poles, they substituted advanced Philistine technology, an oxcart. (3) The ark was not to be touched by human hands; Uzzah touched it, and he was punished. It is simple as that, some would say. I believe that it goes deeper than this, however. I believe that in Uzzah we see our constant human temptation to reach out and take matters into our own hands and tame the mighty power of God which is always at work in the world. In Uzzah, we see the ways that we are tempted to tame God into a vague spirituality that demands next to nothing in terms of our hearts, our time, and our bank accounts. In Uzzah, we see every Christian for whom God is a nice, friendly companion who is supposed to reward us for our good moral behavior and regular attendance at church. 2 In Uzzah, we see churches who ascribe to a tame gospel of self-help because deep down we believe our God to be a weak God who isn’t up to the task of keeping the church from falling off the cart. The author Annie Dillard nails it when she famously writes in her book Teaching A Stone to Talk, “Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? … It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.” (4) The waking God, resistant to being tamed by Uzzah, was drawing David to a new place. When Uzzah was struck dead, David got the message, exclaiming, “This ark is too hot to handle!” He set the ark aside for the next three months. Maybe it took that long for David to pray away his urge to tame God, to use God for his own ends. And finally, when the ark was removed from the shelf once again, it was with music and dancing and gratitude and praise that David worshipped not a tame God, but a God powerful enough to bring people together and unite a kingdom. As David brought the Ark of God and set it in the middle of the tent pavilion that he had pitched for it he was a picture of the second century bishop Irenaeus’ famous line, “The glory of God is the human person alive.” (5) For Christians, however, as grand and glorious as David’s procession for God is, it is not where the story ultimately culminates. For the culmination, we must go to John 1, today’s New Testament lesson where we read, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us (literally, “pitched a tent among us”). The same powerful God whom Uzzah could not tame, the same powerful God who dwelt in holiness in an ark in a tent that had been pitched for a holy purpose, is the same powerful God who pitched a tent among humanity, who even now is pitching a tent in us, in the person of Jesus. And perhaps it is the children among us who best grasp how it is that we are the ark of God, the body of Christ who is the Word made flesh, and who are the greatest corrective to our adult-honed temptation to tame the Holy. We have had a great Vacation Bible School week in so many ways. My joyful responsibility was to tell the daily Bible story to the elementary-age children. On Wednesday, 7-year-old Boone Michael lingered after the rest of his group had left the room. He said, “Lib, how much money would it take to really help the poor?” After asking him if he was referring to the offering which was to be received the next day at VBS for the purpose of funding wells in the Kenyan community of Kikuyu where our partner church Sigona is, I told him, “Any amount of money that you can give will help someone who is poor.” He said, “I have $51.” 3 Do you know what my first impulse was? Yes.
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