2 Samuel 6:16-23 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: David and Michal Ordinary 12 J. Shannon Webster Summer Sermon Series June 19, 2016

We’re on our third week of a sermon series where we are thinking about some familiar Biblical stories from the point of view not of the protagonist, but the other character, in some cases the antagonist. This is what author Gregory Maguire does with his books like Wicked – telling the Wizard of Oz tale through the viewpoint of the “wicked witch.” The long-running musical is in Birmingham now; if you haven’t seen it, it is fun.

David is our protagonist in today’s story, and indeed is the giant figure of the Old Testament, for many good reasons. We know him as David the Shepherd Boy who would someday become King, who slew the giant Goliath (from the other point of view, it wasn’t a very fair fight. Goliath had a sword and David had a missile – a slingshot, superior technology). David is the attributed author of so many of the Psalms, and the archetypal king and innovator of what became a true Kingdom of Israel. To be sure, scripture is honest about David. He could be duplicitous, he was a womanizer, even having Uriah killed so he could take his wife Bathsheba. His relationship with his sons resulted in warfare. So let’s go back to near the beginning, and look at David through the eyes of his first wife, Michal.

In the first text for today, from 1 Samuel, the Biblical witness is that Michal has an obvious love for David. By this point of the story, David had become a well-known military guerilla fighter against the Philistines – enough of a folk hero to make King Saul jealous. On the one hand, David was trying to woo away Saul’s followers, even to unite his house with Saul’s through Saul’s daughters. Michal wasn’t the first daughter Saul used tried to try and coopt. Saul was crazy, but no fool, and saw a way to exploit Michal’s love for David by demanding an exorbitant bride price. We didn’t read that part of the text, but its what you get you circumcise 200 dead enemy warriors, let’s say. A bride price David actually showed up with! Israelite marriage was usually an arrangement between two families. (That carried over for 2500 years – think Fiddler on the Roof). Michal was a different case than her sister; she is serious business. As the story unfolds, she is not just David’s wife, but in a way a competitor, of the Saulide family. Old Testament scholar Phyllis Byrd points out that “in some texts we see that the woman is not totally passive or without volition. Michal makes demands of her own.”1

So…. David and Michal were married. But sometimes love isn’t enough. Both of these characters were larger-than-life, strong-willed people. The text is clear that the aging and mentally “off” King Saul was jealous of David, and had mixed emotions about his best commander. But when we look deeper we see there were policy differences at issue as well. Professor George Mendenhall pointed out that before David, Israel’s early wars were mostly fought as defensive conflicts, to guarantee independence from Philistine domination. David was a different strategist. In his early reign, once he was King, wars were not only fought to a successful completion; David didn’t stop there. They were immediately followed up by aggression against, often conquering, nearly all border states of Israel.2

David’s policy in religious matters was… “to give the state legitimacy in the eyes of Israel as the true successor of Israel’s ancient order.”3 No separation of church and state under David! So in our second text for today, in 2 Samuel 6, we might first think – “no one has thought of the Ark of the Covenant, which went ahead of the people on the Exodus, in a very, very long time. Why now?” Indeed, David went to bring the Ark of the Covenant into the newly-conquered and new capitol city. The Ark was a central symbol of God’s saving presence. His point was to bring the shrine into Jerusalem, to house this religious icon as an official institution of the state. So far so good. Michal may not have thought much of his foreign policy, but she was holding her peace for the time being.

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Then David brought the Ark - a chest or wooden contained holding the two tablets of the Law from Sinai, into the city. It had been captured b the Philistines and regained. Fresh from a military campaign, David brought it into his new capital with great fanfare, leading the way himself, stripped down to his skivvies, leaping and dancing. That, as they say, is when the fight started.

Michal sarcastically noted that he had sure been dignified, hopping around half-naked before the servants and maids. David snapped back that God had chosen him in place of her father, that he’d dance before the Lord and humiliate her a lot worse before he was done, because that was what the maids and common people would respect. The rift became permanent, and Michal remained childless until her death (not a good thing in that culture).

The usual impression drawn from the text is that Michal was a humorless prude, to the manor born and with a sense of entitlement but without a sense of what really mattered. A sampling of commentaries will find these remarks: - “Michal is dismissed in the narrative as barren and hopeless.” - “The demanding, relentless voice of old Saul sounds in the midst of celebration.” - “David is utterly God’s man, a fact Michal cannot or refuses to acknowledge.” - “Michal has rejected not David, but God.” But what if there is another side to this story?

A friend of mine, Rev. Judith Todd. It was her doctoral dissertation at San Francisco Theological Seminary. She determined that every so many chapters throughout these books, a wise and unexpected person, appears to correct some error being perpetrated, and move the action forward. That person calls Israel back to faith. Hannah, Abigail, the medium at Endor, Tamar, Nathan, the wise woman of Tekoah, the wise woman of Abel, Rizpah. With one exception (Nathan) they are women. They say things like: “Such things are not done in Israel,” and “In the old days there was a saying,” and “How could it enter your head to do the same to God’s people?” One section went very long without such intervention – the first part of 2 Samuel. Judith calculated where that woman should appear, did the math, turned to the chapter where she ought to be, and who did she find, big as life? Michal.4

Curious, she began to study the words and language in this incident with the Ark and David dancing. describing a ,(רֵּכְ רַכ) ”The word for David’s activity is not the usual one for dancing. It is “karker particular rotating, circular movement. Its use in other ancient literature of the period shows that it is the victory dance of the Amalekite priests. Amalek was the first nation to attack Israel, on their journey between Egypt and Canaan. It is possible, even likely, that David was using their own dance, gloating over a conquered enemy. Another way to look at it is that David was carrying out a priestly function, but as the pagans did. Walter Brueggemann, a Davidic apologist, says that David is seen as the “theological innovator who functions effectively in terms of tradition and liturgy.”5 That is certainly true, but Brueggemann says it in relation to this text, and I don’t think so. David influenced far more people, down through the ages, by his worship than by his politics. The Psalms, yes. The Philistine Macarena, maybe not.

There is another side to the story. Michal was the King’s daughter long enough to know what is really going on. She scorned David not for being half-naked in the street, but for behaving as an Amalekite priest. And in her way said, “Not in Israel do we do such things.”

2 What was happening was a gradual assimilation to the old paganism of pre-Israelite ideology in the region, the concept of God granting individual success over enemies finally traveled full circle to the idea that God gives to the King totality of power over enemies. The point of the covenant at Sinai and the issuing of the commandments was that there is no king but Yahweh God.

So perhaps Michal was the wise woman calling Israel back to faith, saying how things are done in Israel is not by force but by faith, and certainly not where naked power dances in the street, bending religion for its own uses. There are strident voices today, calling for our country to be declared a “Christian Nation” – which it is not, and has never intended to be. Any pretense we had of being a “Christian Nation” was lost in church support of slavery and in the massacres of native people’s at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, and so on. In our time, and in this election year, the danger lies in understanding God’s rule in terms of voter polls. We probably better not try to put God in service of the world’s politics; we probably should not ask if God is on our side. We probably should not find ourselves so arrogant as to issue blanket condemnations of other faiths.

That temptation to violence has been crassly indulged all over our television screens, before we even knew details of the mass shooting in Orlando that killed so many this last week. Information coming in is still confusing, and I have few thoughts to share about this, I feel so helpless. And we who are Christian, before who indulge our revenge-fantasies, or try to find who to blow up, might do well to ask if that is a Jesus sort of thing to do. Or ask Michal’s question – “Is this who we are?” This morning’s paper had an article, literally asking and answering the question, “Can we constitutionally pass a law making an entire religion, a particular faith, in this case Islam, illegal?” Seriously? Has it come to this, that here, of all places, we would prohibit the free exercise of religion? Not in America do we do such things! For we who are Christian, the cross, the place where one suffers for others, is what we are about or we are about nothing. Jesus shows us how things are done in Israel. King David’s life was ambiguous at best. So was Michal’s. As are our own. We are mixtures of conflicted motives, inconstant temperaments and confused hopes. No one knows this better than the One who made us, and sent us the Word made flesh, Jesus from Nazareth, so that in the end – the best thing we can do - we look to him to see and say “Ah! That is the Way. That is how we do things here.”

1 Byrd, Phyllis. Images of Women in the Old Testament, The Bible and Liberation, Gottwald, ed. Orbis Press, Maryknoll, NY, 1984, p. 271. 2 Mendenhall, George. 3 Bright, John. A History of Israel, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1962, p. 202. 4 Todd, Judith. Doctoral dissertation, San Francisco Theological Seminary. 5 Brueggemann, Walter. In Man We Trust, John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1972, p. 32

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