Son of David

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
 Canticle 15
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1: 26-38

Twenty years ago I made my first and only trip to Europe.  I spent about a month-and-a-half in Germany, but on the way there my girlfriend and I laid over for about five days in London.  We stayed with a friend of hers in a council flat in Camden Town and I walked for miles all over central London taking in the sights.  On one of these excursions I went along The Strand to Westminster to see the houses of Parliament and the Abbey church where the English monarchs have been married and buried and crowned since the Norman Conquest.

My parents had a coffee-table book about Westminster Abbey that I had loved as a child, so I it was one of the few tourist attractions in the city that I actually tried to go into, and not just admire from outside.  But when I entered the great West Doors of the church I found there was a large barrier across the nave, and you couldn’t go any further without paying an expensive admission fee.  So I remained near the entrance, with the other casual tourists, gazing over the barrier at what I could see of the high vaulted ceiling and the clerestory windows and the great rows of columns marching into the distance. 

And as I stood there contemplating, something stirred in my heart.  Maybe it was some kind of racial memory passed down to me from my English ancestors on my father’s father’s side.   Because I’m not one to go gaga for royal weddings or Diamond Jubilees, or to care one bit for what the Duchess of Cambridge was wearing on her recent visit to New York.  But in that church in that moment twenty years ago I understood the awe and reverence of my ancestors for their King.  Not as a celebrity, but as a symbol of the soul of the nation, of the land and the people, bound together in unity of blood, history and religion.  In England the sacred power of that symbol has a house, a shrine where it peculiarly dwells, and there I was, in that house. 

In the Second Book of Samuel, David decides that it is time to build a house like that.  He has defeated his enemies and consolidated his power in his new capital of Jerusalem.  So it is only natural that now he should want to build a temple for the God who chose him to be shepherd of Israel, who favored him, and granted him victory.   And at first David’s spiritual counselor, the prophet Nathan, sees nothing wrong with the proposal.  But that same night the word of the Lord comes to Nathan that it is not David’s place to do this.  Because this is still the God of the Exodus, a God of wandering and wilderness who is not ready to settle down to live in a house.

Here the Bible uses a play on words that works as well in English as it does in Hebrew—a “house” can be a building, a palace or a temple, a dwelling place for a king, or for a god.  But “house” can also mean dynasty, royal lineage, a great and noble family.  David wants to build for God the first kind of house, a house of cedar to take the place of the portable tent tabernacle where the Israelites have worshipped and made their sacrifices since the days of Moses.  But God’s promise to David is to make him a house of the second kind, a line of descendants who will rule his kingdom for ever.   

In the context of Biblical history, this promise carries a certain freight of irony, because David’s throne turned out to be a little shakier than that.  Due to the disobedience of his descendents, their infidelity and arrogance, injustice and pride, the power of the house of David peaked in the second generation, with David’s own son Solomon.  After that the history quickly becomes one of rebellions, civil wars, and divided kingdoms, one that drags on with only a few bright moments, until it comes to what seems like a final end with the last king of Judah marched away to Babylon in chains.

But in the Babylonian exile God’s promise to David became more important, not less.  In prophecies like the ones recorded in the book of Isaiah, it became a cherished symbol of the people’s survival and hope.  The prophets told them that their Lord had not abandoned them, but was still on the move with them, and that before long he would bring them back to the land of their ancestors, where Jerusalem would be restored, and the temple rebuilt.  There a descendant of the royal line of David, God’s anointed, the Messiah, would take his place upon the throne of a new and greater kingdom, a rule of perpetual peace, prosperity, and justice.  

The New Testament is not shy about taking these prophetic promises of the Messiah and applying them to Jesus.  So in the Gospel of Luke when God sends the angel Gabriel to the one chosen to be his mother, she is the fiancée of Joseph, a man of the house of David.  And after he has spoken to her of God’s great favor for her, the angel makes a promise about the child she will conceive: “the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 

But this is not simply a national myth, about the restoration of a ruling dynasty.  Like that other story about Nathan and the building of the temple, the principal actor in this story is God.  As Mary immediately perceives, her child will not be born for the satisfaction of human ambitions and desires, no matter how natural or noble they might be.  His purpose will not be to furnish her husband with an heir, or the nation with the founder of a new royal line, but to establish a throne and a kingdom that belongs to God alone.

What kind of kingdom that will be becomes a little clearer in the subsequent scene.  Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who does her honor as the mother of her Lord.  And this is when Mary, that lowly handmaid, unexpectedly bursts into triumphant song.  The words of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, are not the words of prophecy about the messianic king.  Instead they hearken back to an even more ancient genre of biblical literature—those songs of women who give thanks to God, the liberator of the oppressed. 

At the shore of the Red Sea Miriam, the sister of Moses, leads the women of Israel with timbrels and dancing, singing: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”  In the book of Judges the prophetess Deborah sings a victory song to God after the peasantry of Israel defeats the Canaanites and their kings.   In the First Book of Samuel, God answers the prayer of Hannah, a childless woman, with the birth of a son.  He is Samuel, the prophet who will anoint first Saul, and then David, as Israel’s king. 

But before any of that, Hannah prays a poem that is the model for Mary’s song: “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in the Lord…The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength…The Lord raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.”

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it is because Hannah’s son is consecrated to the service of the same God that Mary’s son will be.  This is a God who works through prophets and nations and kings, but his purposes are not identical with theirs.  The story that begins with the Gabriel’s greeting to Mary is about a God who also works through shepherds and fishermen, tax collectors and lepers and criminals.  This is a God who dwells in cathedrals, but also wanders through deserts, whose kingdom is found in palaces, but also turns up unexpectedly in shantytowns and hospitals, in prisons and fields of wheat, in kitchens, and tombs, and even in mangers.   On this fourth and final Sunday of Advent we look in heightened expectation for the birth of the Son of David, who will establish that kingdom, and rule it in peace for ever.

Positively-charged

Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8

In the season of Lent 1987, I joined a group of pilgrims walking across Massachusetts, from Pittsfield in the West, to Boston in the East.  The purpose of our two-week journey was to make visible the human cost of our government’s involvement in the civil wars in Central America.   We were hosted along the way by churches, temples, and monasteries of many different traditions, who fed us, or let us stop in to use the bathroom and have a drink, or invited us for worship, or gave us a place to sleep.  The name that had been given to the pilgrimage was Via Crucis, the Way of the Cross, and as we walked we carried white wooden crosses, painted with the names of victims of the violence.

The entire experience was a momentous one for me, and I’ve been mining it for sermons as long as I’ve been preaching.  This morning I’m thinking about the first warm day of spring, when we had come down into the Connecticut River Valley after close to a week of cold, wet walking through the highlands of Western Massachusetts.  We arrived that evening at the Episcopal Church in Amherst, where we entered a spacious fellowship hall full of friendly people.  There were red and white checked tablecloths laid with real salad (the kind that doesn’t contain jello, or pasta, or Miracle Whip™), and spaghetti marinara and red wine.  After supper we went across the square to the Congregational Church, which was full to overflowing, for one of the most powerful, spirit-filled worship services I can remember, and then, finally, we made our way to the Presbyterian Church where we would spend the night.

And when we got there, it was announced that a team of massage therapists had arrived, who had volunteered to rub our feet.  They were people I knew, friends and neighbors of the intentional spiritual community east of Amherst where I was living at the time.  I got my foot-massage from a French woman named Brigitte, who lived with some other folks in a house across the road from our commune.  She was several years older than me, sophisticated, vivacious, and attractive, and while I’d met her several times, I’m not sure that we had exchanged more than a dozen words.  But as Brigitte was rubbing my feet we got to talking, and I was surprised by the sudden warmth and interest I felt coming from a person I’d thought existed on a different plane.   It seemed that my participation in the Via Crucis pilgrimage had caused her see me in a different light.  Or maybe it had made me see myself differently, and Brigitte recognized the change.

An event like the Via Crucis creates a field of energy that is positively charged.  When people undertake something out of love and concern for others, something that requires some risk and effort and privation from the participants and that makes them rely on the generosity and hospitality of others who share their love and concern, it has a multiplying effect.  In walking across Massachusetts, I could do something for the people of Central America that Brigitte could not, but she could do something for them, too, by doing something for me.  And our relationship of mutual indifference changed in a moment, to one infused with something more like love. 

The gospel lesson today teaches us about the transcendent power of this kind of positive energy field.  It is John’s version of a story that appears in different forms in all four gospels.  But while the others never tell us the name of the woman who anoints Jesus on the eve of his final journey to Jerusalem, John identifies her as Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus.  She is part of a family with whom Jesus has an especially close and loving relationship, and she has more reason than most to be devoted to him, even to the point of lavishing a gift on him worth a whole year’s pay—in the chapter before this one, he brought her brother Lazarus back to life, after four days in his tomb. 

So you could say that Mary’s extravagance is her attempt to make a gesture that in some small measure, proportionate to the immensity of Jesus’ gift to her.  But perhaps because she is a woman, and he is a man, her action is charged with something more than just gratitude and humble service.  In that part of the world, then as now, a woman’s hair was a potent symbol of her erotic power.  For her to uncover her head before a man not her husband, and let it down and wipe his feet with it, was an act of unseemly intimacy.  Yet the love that she quite literally pours out is not for him alone.  The fragrance of the oil, the gospel says, filled the whole house.  And the ministry of Jesus, which began at a wedding feast, in an embarrassing superfluity of wine, approaches its climax a house transformed into a bridal chamber, and the pleasure of love is shared by all.   

This shows how well Mary understands Jesus’ ministry.  For it was, and is, a project driven by love—not love in the abstract, but real physical pleasure in the presence of other people.  To befriend Jesus is to open one’s heart to the desire to connect.  It is to enter a positive feedback loop where my generosity inspires yours, where your compassion evokes mine, where we draw strength from one another’s touch, and give solace to each other’s pain.  To follow Jesus is to act on the faith that love is a power that really can, and really will, transform the world.  And it will do this by continually widening the circle of our mutual belonging.  Mary loves Jesus, body and soul, but she does not seek to possess him.  Maybe that’s why she anoints his feet and not his head.  She takes her precious bottle of pure nard and pours it on the feet that have carried the good news of God’s all-embracing love along the roads of Galilee, and through the villages of Samaria and Judea, and are about to make one last trip to Jerusalem.

Judas doesn’t understand, because for him love is an abstraction.  He is like all of us who talk about “the poor” as if we know that they need better than they do, we who are always ready to make public policy proposals and set up programs, and are always anxious about the efficient delivery of services, and the avoidance of moral hazards, and it is all ultimately self-serving and humorless and cold.  Because there is something the poor need even more than money and the rich need it, too.  It is to be in a field of energy charged with love that seeks the flourishing of all.  All of us, poor and rich, need a story that connects us, and gives us a context for coming together.  We all need permission and encouragement to touch the lives of others in a way that brings pleasure and lessens pain.  We all need to know that the service we give and receive flows through us and through others in a positive feedback loop of faith, hope, and love.  And we need these things because the powers of cynicism, and selfishness, and discord are so strong.  

Love demands more than clever ideas and the dutiful allocation of funds.  It demands daily acts of courage and faithfulness.  If I ever spoke to Brigitte again after the night of my foot-rub, I don’t remember it.  A moment of warmth ends, and the cold returns.  We do what we can for each other, but the lasting gifts—peace, justice, eternal life—are the ones that only God can give.  Yet what other assurance do we have of God’s promises than the gifts we give, and the risks we take, and the pain we suffer, and the sorrows we bear for each other?  I imagine that when Jesus set off for Jerusalem in the morning, the fragrance of nard still rose from his feet with the dust, and the memory of Mary was a comfort to him.  So, in a way, was the knowledge that she had kept back some of the oil to anoint his body for burial.   His tomb would be filled with the fragrance of the bridal chamber through the long darkness, when there was not yet even the faintest scent of the garden in the morning on the first day of the week.

The way through

Proverbs 1:20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38

I’m not sure exactly how old I was, maybe seven or eight, and I was on summer vacation at my grandparents’ cabin in the Sierras.  I went for a morning hike with my mother and younger brother on the old stagecoach road that runs along behind the cabin.  After a half –hour or so of walking, we had to scramble down a steep bank onto a wide, freshly-graded road that cut into the old one.   Going on a little further we came around a shoulder of the mountain and out from under the forest cover onto a hot, naked hillside.  It was dotted with stumps of trees and large heaps of bark, branches, and bulldozed earth.  My mother began to cry out in grief and fury.  She started shouting words that I recognized from my father and his carpentry projects, but that I’d never heard her use before.  This was a place she knew, a place she had visited from her childhood, a place she remembered as a cool, green, magical forest.

That day made a strong impression on me, and it wasn’t long after that I created a new imaginary self.  This was not the first time that I’d daydreamed a fantasy life.  As children do, I used to create scenarios in my mind and return to them again and again, making them more and more elaborate until finally it took more energy to reimagine them than the pleasure that they gave, and I moved on to something new.  But this particular fantasy was one of the most vivid I ever had. 

I was the leader of a band of merry outlaws who roamed the Sierra Nevada.  Relying on swiftness, stealth, woodcraft, and cunning, we would appear as if out of nowhere to fire our arrows into the tires of logging trucks, before melting away into the forest without a trace.  Our enemy, The County Sherriff, would use every trick in his book to capture us, but in spite of all his dogs and radios, deputies and helicopters, his stratagems were in vain--we always were one step ahead.

The child, becoming painfully aware of the injustice in the world, imagines himself a hero who can set things right.  He draws on stories like the legend of Robin Hood and retells them to himself in a way that makes meaning of things that are troubling, things that he doesn’t understand.  And something kind of like that seems to be happening in Galilee when we pick up the story of Jesus in today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark.  Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and they say, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."

For the common people of Galilee, the words and deeds of Jesus evoke the prophets, who destroyed foreign idols and faced down corrupt rulers, who healed and worked wonders and spoke the words of God.  Jesus awakens the imaginations of people sinking deeper and deeper into debt, people becoming landless laborers or slaves on the land of their ancestors, people crushed by the greed and ambition and violence of vainglorious overlords.  His words and his deeds remind them of the legends of their heroes, and these legends are the memory of hope.  Perhaps Jesus is a prophet like them, perhaps he is one of them, come back to life to deliver his people in their hour of great need. 

But Jesus wants to dig a little deeper.  He wants to know if his disciples have a different idea, and Peter does.  At the time of Jesus’ life Jewish ideas about the Messiah were various and somewhat vague.  And Peter doesn’t say exactly what he thinks he means when he says that Jesus is the Messiah.  But I think we can assume that one thing Peter means is that his master is more than the return of a legend.   He is someone unique.  He is the One we’ve all been waiting for, the one the prophets themselves were waiting for.   He will not just cry out against injustice, he will do something about it.  He will not just predict God’s deliverance of Israel, he will bring the plan to fulfillment.  Jesus is the hero of Peter’s ultimate fantasy. 

So it’s understandable that Peter balks when Jesus starts talking about the fate that awaits him in Jerusalem.  The hero of Peter’s fantasy is not supposed to be rejected by the leaders of the people—he’s supposed to be acclaimed by them, to lead them to put aside their petty quarrels and rivalries and unite under his authority.  He’s not supposed to be killed—he’s supposed to subjugate the enemies of Israel, bringing any who oppose him to their knees, begging for mercy.  And as for rising from the dead; well, fantasy is all well and good, but let’s not get carried away.

Part of the power of this story is that Jesus recognizes the temptation that Peter is putting in his path.  When he says “Get behind me, Satan!” he’s not being insulting.  He’s acknowledging that Peter’s fantasy has crossed his own mind.  He’s remembering a certain encounter he had in the desert, fasting there for forty days after his baptism.  He’s acknowledging a voice that’s always lying in wait for him, always flattering, cajoling, provoking him: “you have a special gift.  Don’t throw it away.  You see how desperate they are—how they only want to follow you, to do anything you ask.  Give them what they want.  You say the first will be last, and the last will be first, so how long do you want them to wait?  Just imagine how much good you could do.” 

But Jesus turns his back on that voice, and turns toward his disciples.  And I like to imagine that in that turning he is turning towards us.  He turns away from the fantasy of power and virtue, and looks to the truth of our experience, and his eyes are the eyes of compassion.  Jesus turns away from the myths of redemptive violence, and toward the reality of weakness and suffering.  And he opens his mouth, and he speaks words of hope.   They are hard words, but that is because sin has made a hard world, and he knows that we don’t need yet another fantasy of escape.  We need a way through, a real way, a way that doesn’t ask us to be superheroes, or to submit to a “great leader” and his cult of personality.   He knows we need a way to go that takes into account who we really are, and how the world really is, and what it is actually going to take to make it all the way to a new world of universal peace and perfect justice.

And we know that way is real because Jesus walks it.  That is his unique, divine mission.  That’s what makes him the Messiah.  The only truly free person in the whole world freely chooses to die as a prisoner.  Only in that way, can he show the prisoners they are captives of a daydream.  Only in that way, can he show the rulers that they are rulers of a lie.  Changing the nameplate on the door of the corner office, changing the pattern on the White House china, these things do not make change.  Change happens when people like you and me wake up from our fantasies of hero-worship, and start taking the slow, simple, sometimes costly steps in the direction of real life. 

Life—in the bodies God gave us.  Life— with the people God gives us.  Life— in solidarity with the poor, the outcast, the unloved, and the afflicted.  Life—that accepts illness, and old age, and death as part of the plan.  Life—in dogged resistance to organized selfishness and the needless suffering it causes.   Life—trusting in the basic goodness of the world and of human beings, and in God’s wisdom to turn even the worst disasters of human folly toward the good.  Life—in daily celebration of the glory of God in the work of creation.  Life, in short, in the footsteps of Jesus.