|
Steadfast Love and Faithfulness: The Fourth Covenant
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 16, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Samuel 7:1-7 Matthew 21:1-11
As we continue to trace the story of our salvation through the lens of God’s covenants, we come to what one Old Testament scholar has called the most crucial theological statement in the whole of the Old Testament. We come to the promise made by God to David’s line. If you and I are to understand the significance of this promise and its import for our own faith, we again would do well to know the story that has immediately preceded it. Therefore we join the biblical narrative this morning as the Israelites enter the land God has promised. From the crossing of the Jordan with the ark of the Covenant--God’s holy, dangerous, free presence dwelling in a tent with God’s people in the wilderness—until the anointing of Saul to be king over Israel, the identity of these twelve tribes is shaped by the story they tell one another: of the God who brought them up out of the land of Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Led now by Joshua, who ‘fit’ the battle of Jericho, they proceed to conquer “all the land God had spoken to Moses” until we read, halfway through the bloody book of Joshua, that “the land had rest from war.” That this should be so in the same land today is unimaginable! Then almost as if he knew the dangers ahead for a people that would grow too comfortable and self-assured in the land and before his death, Joshua gathers the tribes at Shechem to renew the covenant. He tells them again the story of their life with this God…from the promise made to Abraham…through Moses’ leading in the wilderness…to their conquest of the Canaanites and occupation of the land: “a land on which you had not labored,” said Joshua, “and towns that you had not built…and fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.” “If you are unwilling to serve the Lord,” he says throwing down the gauntlet before the gift of it all, “choose this day whom you will serve.” “We will serve the Lord,” they answer, “for he is our God.” Of course they do not. Once landed and settled, they turn from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to worship other gods. Landed and settled ourselves, we know how this goes. And while the parenthesis of God’s promise to Abraham--the unconditional promise of land and lineage--is not withdrawn, the terms of God’s conditional covenant interpret the events of their common life: “If you do not serve the Lord your God joyfully and with gladness of heart for the abundance of everything,” Moses had warned them in the wilderness, “then you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and lack of everything.” So the people of God were ruled by foreign powers in the land God had promised, even as they were defended by warriors and governed by judges whom God continued to send: Deborah and Barak, Gideon and Abimelech, Jephthah, Samson, on and on until Eli and his corrupt sons are condemned by Samuel, the prophet of God and last judge of Israel. But when Samuel had grown old and his sons corrupt, the elders of Israel come to Samuel at Ramah and say to him, “You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.” “Listen to the voice of the people,” the Lord says to Samuel, revealing in these words the incredible vulnerability of the God who has chosen to love the likes of us, “for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods….” Samuel returns to the people intent on changed their mind, warning them that a king “will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots…he will appoint himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties…He will take your daughters…the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards…the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work…and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” “We are determined to have a king over us,” the people still insist, “so that we may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” Again, hear the pathos and resignation in God’s reply: “Listen to their voice and set a king over them.” Now all of this is to say, as preface to the covenant before us, that kings represent God’s judgment against Israel. Kings are the persons Israel chooses to trust instead of trusting God. From this point on, God no longer deals with the people of Israel but rather does business with the king. Saul is the first and sorriest of the lot. In many ways, he simply sets the stage for David. By the time we meet David in the 7th of Second Samuel, says Walter Brueggemann, we meet him poised “at the balance point of glad yielding and manipulative utility.” On one hand, the hand of glad yielding, David brings the Ark of the Covenant out of mothballs, evoking the memory of God’s freedom and dangerous presence in the wilderness, playing on old sentiments and a bygone unity, parading the ark through the streets of David’s city, that is, Jerusalem, as though this is now where God is to be found. On the other hand, the other powerful hand, the hand of manipulative utility, David uses this evocative symbol of God’s presence in order to legitimate his dynasty. Again, the story has shifted from God’s dealings with the tribes of Israel to God’s dealings with a king, which is to say God’s dealings with a state, with “social power [that rests] in the hands of a ruling elite.” But notice also that so does the story-telling…the so-called truth telling…rest in the hands of those who are in control. “Whereas the tribe believed its narrative and took it uncritically,” ventures Brueggemann, inviting a childlike retelling on our part of Noah and the ark, of Abraham and Sarah, of Joseph and his coat of many colors, the stories in I/II Samuel and I/II Kings are reports “written to justify the state’s case for the execution of war. If some details of facticity must be disregarded or slanted or covered over,” Brueggemann notes, (writing, by the way, a few decades ago) “this trust must have priority. In the move from tribe to state,” he says “we are moving into ideology, into justification of present forms of power and social organization and into propaganda in which truth is what is advantageous.” Nevertheless, he contends, this story that tells the truth, “distorted as it is,” is foundational for the faith of Israel and the faith that has been handed on to us. So David proposes to build a temple that would guarantee God’s presence in the capital even though it would compromise God’s freedom in the public square. Nathan, David’s royal ideological advisor, sees no problem at first. “Go, do all that you have in mind, for the Lord is with you.” But immediately God’s voice intrudes that night into Nathan’s dream with a protest: “I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.” The God who is God will not be held in place by priest or politician! So then how shall this be spun? I must confess to you that what I have always read in complete trust--the promise of God to David never to withdraw God’s steadfast love from him…God’s promise to establish his kingdom forever—I now read also with an ear for the partisan politics of ancient Israel! So the spin begins! In a play on the word house, Nathan informs David that though God will not permit David to build a temple, God has something greater in mind. First Nathan reminds David that, as for the past, this is the God who took him from the pasture to be prince of God’s people, this is the God who has been with him in battle to cut off his enemies; as for the future, this is the God, echoing the promise made to Abraham, who will make a name for you…will appoint a place for my people…will raise up your offspring after you.” But now a further and theologically daring word is added: this is the God who will build a house for you, that is to say, will underwrite the Davidic dynasty forever! The people whose desire for a king is idolatry have now been promised a king forever by the God from whom they have turned! “In one grand literary gesture,” says Brueggemann, “…in one dream dreamed by a royal prophet while he slept in the royal palace, the old truth is overcome by this new truth. The old truth against kingship in deference to the kingship of Yahweh is nullified…a dynasty is now authorized and guaranteed by a God who will live in a tent.” Moreover, the “if” of God’s conditional promise to the tribes in the wilderness is erased as regards David’s dynasty: “When [your son] commits iniquity, I will punish him…but I will not take my steadfast love from him…your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.” My friends, the inescapable vulnerability of biblical faith, a vulnerability that is being played out in every corner of the world today including ours, is a vulnerability to being used by power politics. That is because those who gave us this text believed God to be a God intimately involved in the most significant of human realities: “power and justice, economics and politics.” But this very belief has kept and “keeps biblical faith always open to ideological usurpation, so that the gospel of grace and of messiah is readily available for and vulnerable to all sorts of subsequent ideological use,” says Brueggemann. And yet, in the same breath, we are not left by this free and dangerous God, with only a word steeped in cynical power politics. The gospel is that what human beings have purposed for evil or even for the highest merely human ends, God will spin for good. The cross is the supreme witness to this truth. The God who will not be contained by any house we might built, be it with stone and mortar or with ideological certitude, is still the God who can take a promise co-opted by a king’s deathly ways and use the same word to underwrite human hope against hope in the God who has pitched a tent with us in Jesus Christ. So Matthew rings the changes on the dynasty God will establish forever and the king who will reign: “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” That is to say: “…I will establish his throne forever I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. I will not take my steadfast love from him…but I will confirm him in my house and my kingdom forever, and his throne shall be established forever.” Thanks be to God! |