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A Dangerous Presence
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 29, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Samuel 4:5-11; 5:6-12 Acts 5:27-39
This would be a curious and almost comical story from out of Israel’s legendary history were it not for the story’s subject: the dangerous presence of God. The God who has been with Israel since the beginning, borne across the wilderness in an elaborately designed portable dwelling, now is the God of a people at the crossroads. Since entering the land long ago promised, they have managed their common bloody life under the loose authority of judges. In a moment they will demand a king so that they may live as a nation among nations. But here in these few verses, with no mention of Samuel (the last judge of Israel) or Saul (the first king of Israel) God abandons them in battle without a word. The theologian in the story is a nameless woman, the daughter-in-law of Eli, the wife of Eli’s corrupt son Phinehas. Her question in tragedy and loss is our question: Where? Where is God? With her husband dead at the front and her father-in-law killed by the news of the capture of the ark, she bows and gives birth, naming her son Ichabod meaning “The glory has departed from Israel.” “The glory (kabod) has departed…” she says with her dying breath, “for the ark of God has been captured.” Captured! Taken! The God who was Israel’s trump in battle (“Let us bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord here from Shiloh,” the generals reason after their first devastating loss, “so that he may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies”) and the God who caused the uncultured, “uncircumcised, polluting Philistines” to tremble (“when they learned that the ark of the Lord had come to the camp, the Philistines were afraid; for they said, ‘Gods have come into the camp….Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods?’”) is now the God captured, taken, exiled and placed in the house of worship beside a senseless, voiceless, powerless idol. Why, we wonder, did God allow Israel’s defeat in the first place and then abandon her in the second? What had they done to deserve this? Again, it is our question in extremis. Surely their infidelity had become to God a matter of course over the years and miles…as has ours. Nevertheless, moral interpreters persist in reading these chapters with the kind of logic that lodges control in human rectitude: given the corruption of Eli’s family, God simply had had enough, had allowed the Philistines to capture the ark in battle so that Israel might repent and mend her ways. Yet this is the surmise of those who cannot abide the thought of a God vulnerable (albeit purposefully vulnerable) to the vagaries of human history. No doubt Job’s friends are the company they keep. Theirs is the explainable moral symmetry offered by voices unable to face “the dread depth of failure and absence” says Walter Brueggemann. The story, however, is silent concerning the cause of God’s departure. No longer interested “in justification or explanation [but] only the stark awareness that the loss has cut beneath the prophetic calculus to God’s own life, this is not any longer the vulnerable appealing to the reliable, but now all are vulnerable and bereft”: the relationship is over. Israel is alone in the world. More and more, we know the feeling! Brueggemann is saying, in other words, words we have just rehearsed with one another, it is Friday: “Friday is that day of the departure of glory and exile and absence, the day of breaking old certitudes and shattering old ways of control and privilege. Friday is the day of abandonment out of which we Christians regularly say ‘and him crucified.’” No doubt that Monday at Virginia Tech was just such a Friday, even as every day is Friday in Iraq, in Darfur, in Somalia, in the Gulf, in the Gaza, and most massively in the remembrance of the Shoah. But closer to home in the losses we suffer, the ridicule we bear, the decay that pursues us, the disappointments that haunt us, Friday dawns. We confess this absconded God to be our God, along with ancient Israel, on the occasion and in the depths of our anxious human existence. For we too have beheld God vulnerable and hanging on the cross, captured by death’s corruption, silenced and so deaf to the sound of our cries. Motherless children, one and all, we have beheld in the words of theologian Jurgen Moltmann, “the Fatherlessness of the Son…matched by the Sonlessness of the Father.” Yet in a second and unsettling sense, we dwell among the Philistines, among those who have captured God’s presence and parade it like a trophy. With prayers of thanksgiving that escalate the events of the day “from military combat to cosmic significance,” we watch as the priests of the present order locate the God of Israel in the temple next to the reigning national god…or is it the spiritual idol de jure? We listen as God’s name is invoked not to hold the nation accountable to God’s purposed justice or mercy or compassion, but to bless the activities and agendas of whoever happens to be in power. This, as we have noted before in this sanctuary, is the religion of those who believe in having a nice weekend. Philistines whose minds are immured against life’s depths! The litany goes like this, according to Brueggemann: “Now we have won…have a nice weekend; Now Dagon is victorious…have a nice weekend; Now YHWH is subjugated…have a nice weekend; Now the Israelites are routed…have a nice weekend; Dagon be with you…and also with you; Have a nice weekend.” Victory won, a way of life secured by the gods, this is the community that lives as though nothing were at stake in the public square where prophets are ridiculed as unpatriotic and contrary opinions are considered traitorous and Kitche is mistaken for art. The point of the common life is simply to escape tribulation…personally. But the narrative we, along with Israel, have been given tells a vastly different story. For in the third place, the God whose vulnerability on Friday has led us to despair is the same God who has gone into hiding to do battle with the powers of death. We, of course, do not know this for sure in the darkness. We know only “grief, hurt, sickness, anxiety, isolation [and] death unrelieved….In the night,” says Brueggemann, “all the great words of faith tremble and fail; we go over and over them; they are negated by the dark. We are free to believe that the tense, sleepless reckoning of Israel in the night is also what went on in YHWH’s own life through those two nights in Ashdod.” Early the next day—the day being Saturday—the Philistines rise to find Dagon’s face down as though prostrate before the Lord. Indeed, with the living God on their hands, all the things the people loved more than they loved the living God fall down in God’s presence. To wit, the very god credited with getting them prosperity, possessions, prominence, power and victory lies face down in the dust. Of course being uncritical keepers of the common order, the priests simply prop the idol back up again. A good weekend with you, say the priests; and also with you, say the people turning to the chores at hand, the games about to commence, the vacations homes to open! It is Saturday. But early on the morning of the third day, the Philistines rise to see Dagon dis-armed, de-capitated, broken before the inscrutable presence of the living God. Now with the apparently dangerous power of Israel’s God in their possession, the Philistines are not having a nice weekend. So they devise an elaborate scheme to rid themselves of the ark that has turned from trophy to terror, to get God’s glory gone. Loading the ark with gold and hitching it to two milch cows, they set God’s presence loose saying “if it goes up on the way to its own land, then it is he who has done us this great harm; but if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that struck us; it happened to us by chance,” chance being the last great hope of those who are holding out for a nice weekend. So too Israel will wake by some amazing grace on the third day from their despair, wake to the astounding reversal of every expectation. Having been eyewitnesses to God’s capture by the powers of death, what appeared on Friday as God’s vulnerability and abandonment is revealed on the third day to be the God who is Victor over death and despair. Israel looks up to see on the horizon the ark heading home, God’s glory returned. Their joy cannot be contained. “At its most eloquent” notes Brueggemann, “Israel stutters to say and name the nighttime work of YHWH. Nobody sees that work. Everyone sees its outcome; but Israel knows, knows that this God, unlike any other power in heaven or on earth [now is not] moved but moving….” This is what we know too. On the third day, rising early in the morning, we see what God has done in the night and the darkness while we doubted and did our Saturday chores: death itself is defeated by the God who raised Jesus from the dead. God’s dangerous presence is among us to uphold, chasten, heal, help! But two millennia later, the disconcerting fact is this: it is hard to tell Christ’s self-proclaimed followers from the Philistines. Worshipping the gods who bless our present power arrangements, who would assure us of a nice weekend, a secure weekend, an undisturbed weekend, we blithely add the God who raised Jesus from the dead to the line-up of powerless gods as though the God of Israel were ours to domesticate. The gospel, of course, is that we cannot! For when our alliance with the powers of death has done its worst, as seems the case these days, Sunday dawns; and, early in the morning, we are gathered by the God whose Word is alive and has been loosed upon world. Under strict and unspoken orders not to teach in this name, a dangerous name to both church and state, we read also this morning of those who obeyed God rather than human authority. Witnesses to what God had done in the darkness, they proclaimed in the light that Christ lives and reigns over every death-dealing lie in the land. May those ordained this day dare that same witness in times such as these, when it seems that the glory has departed. And may we follow where they rightly lead: for if their leading is of human origin, it will fail and chance will rule our common life, our nice weekends; but if their witness is of God, strap on your seatbelts! For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! Thanks be to God. Amen. |