First Baptist Church of Asheville Podcast
Sermon: No Domesticated God
After King David concludes his raucous dance party around the ark, and he's finally relaxing with the prophet Nathan and a cup of herbal tea in his house of cedar, a question arises in David's heart. Why am I living in the lap of luxury? Now the Lord God Almighty is living outside under a tarp. And after a pregnant Paul's, we can see the prophet Nathan across the couch, rolling his eyes and saying, "The Lord is with you, go on ahead with your plans." But as soon as the words leave his lips, Nathan's conscience begins to disturb him. He retires to his quarters with a feeling in the pit of his stomach, and that night he has a dream. The Lord comes to Nathan and says, "Now you go right back to David and you tell him the Lord wants to know since when have I ever needed a house? Did I need a house when I delivered Israel from Egypt? Did I need a house when I was moving you out in the wilderness?" This is sassy God, by the way, this is sort of sassy God tone. Did I need anything? Did I need a roof over my head when I was delivering you from in the wilderness? Have I ever taken any of the tribal leaders aside to say, "Hey, you see that nice overlook? Wouldn't it look even better with a house of cedar on it?" So you go give David a message from me. Tell him, "I took you out of the middle of nowhere and made you a prince. I will always be with you, and I will give you a place, and I will give you and your people rest from your enemies, and I will make you a house. But only after you're at rest with your ancestors. With your offspring after you, I will build a house in my name." Put more succinctly, God tells Nathan to tell David, "You can build me a house when you're dead." God with direct language resists David's impulse to build a house of cedar for the Lord. So again, we're left to wonder just how sincere David's motives are. Like last week, we wondered if David's dancing before the ark was a selfless outpouring, a worshipful heart, or a kind of power grab. Today we're faced with the question of why David's so concerned to build a special house for God. What's really going on here? We can identify with David's concern. David may be sensitive about a dwelling place for God because he loves God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength. Why would a mere creature, even if he is a royal creature, have a more comfortable house than his creator? What's more, we human beings carry within us a deep spiritual impulse to honor sacred places with cairns, memorial markers, tombstones, mausolems, moss, synagogues, chapels, cathedrals, we see it even in early in Genesis with Abram marking holy places with stacks of stones and naming them. I remember when I went to Israel many years ago, I was struck by and by the end of the trip worn out by how many churches there were, way too many churches. In my humble opinion, lots of churches. People built churches everywhere to mark the places where Jesus was said to have done this or that. Jesus was born here, build a church. Jesus ascended here, build a church. Jesus taught the Sermon on the mountain here, build a church. Jesus, in his sophomore year in high school, passed the ACTs here, build a church. Just a few years we'll celebrate a century of our own sanctuaries existence, an extraordinary building that has been a sacred site for thousands of baptisms and weddings and funerals and countless sermons, hymns, prayers, laments, praises and tears. More than 2,000 people attended its dedication service on March 6, 1927. E.Y. Mullins, president of Southern Seminary at the time, came, stood right here, preached a sermon titled "The Church of the Living God" and all the people in attendance sang to him, "The church is one foundation, good choice, on the nose." The service concluded with communion and this has been hallowed ground ever since. So why? Why not? Why shouldn't we build houses for God? When we call it faith to invite those with God-given gifts to design and construct holy the holy place, what's wrong with raising walls and roofs that are set apart for worship, where we can be more confident to meet the living God than we would perhaps in our living room or the town square or even on an inspiring hike? On the other hand, how can anyone build a house for the wind? How can you build a house to hold the spirit? We think it's a foolish endeavor to try to build a house for the Milky Way. One of the largest observable stars in the galaxy is called U.Y. Scooty, S-C-U-T-I, I don't know why they, whoever named it was clearly not in the same department that named that one other star, Beetlejuice, awesome name. Anyhow, this star is big enough to hold 5 billion suns. Try to build scaffolding around that. David's desire to build an impressive temple for God may reveal his ambitions for a royal dynasty, a temple with secure, extraordinary power for him and his descendants. Some of you may remember the Bible study I led earlier this year where scholar Walter Bruggemann criticizes what he calls the royal consciousness, to become a king like David does have an effect on a person, being given so much power can change how you act, what you believe, it can alter your imagination, it can corrupt your character, you begin to think with a different kind of consciousness. The royal consciousness, Bruggemann says, seeks to domesticate God and by that he means to make God safer, more accessible, more present, more comfortable, more predictable. So we have to ask, is David wanting to build God a house in order to make God more manageable, less wild and less free and less likely to critique David and his political agenda? If David can build a house for God, God can seem to be on David's side. It's more if David succeeds in building the temple, his military conquest and his increasing wealth may then appear to have been the recipient of God's stamp of approval. Israel's history of David is a complicated one to put it mildly. There are strands of David's story that show his genuine heart as a shepherd, his courage as a soldier, his selflessness as a leader and his love for God's people. There are also strands of his story that show him to be deceitful, calculating, selfish and downright cruel and inhumane. The passage we're given today doesn't lean hard in either direction. Rather, I believe it provides more of a window into the mind and the heart of God through God's conversation with Nathan and God's message to David through Nathan. We learned that the living God, whose spirit blows where it will, whose presence we cannot control, is nevertheless interested in how and where and with whom we might worship. There is no evidence in the Old or New Testament that God turns up God's nose at our ambitions to build and preserve sacred structures. Today, 2 Samuel reveals a God who does not look condescendingly on us when we seek to make room for the divine. So here's the deal that God strikes with David. Now, you don't get to build a house that will house all of me, but I will enable your son, Solomon, as it will turn out, to build a house in my name. There's the rub. So you don't get to contain all of me. You don't get to circumscribe me. You don't get to build scaffolding around me and limit me. You don't get my stamp of approval on everything you do. You don't get to control me or make me comfortable. But I will let you have a place where you can come and be able to confidently depend that you will hear my name and be able to touch my road and receive my power and become better acquainted with me and befriend me. It's not altogether different from when God hides Moses in the cleft of the rock. I've got to hide you here so that I won't overpower you. So that when I pass by, you can't see my face because that will be too much for you. Years ago, scholars did a study, sociologists did a study on people, young people, this was back when I was young, teenager, and sorry, some of you are aggravated with me for just saying that, but anyhow, I have reached the age where I can pull a muscle when I sneeze, so okay, sociologists did a study on people, teenagers at the time and what they learned from teenagers' faith 20 or so years ago was what they recognized as their strongest spiritual pull had to do with wanting to learn how to be nice and that they felt close to God, closest to God when they were outside there, inspiring. We have a lot to learn and still do. And I'm all for learning to be nice, I'm all for meeting God in nature or even in the coke closet, a place that in my own memory was a divine encounter, a deep will of prayer, a extraordinary event in my life, just crouching down in my closet at home for an hour in the silence and similar experiences outside, not long ago on the crest of craggy pinnacle. We've all had these experiences, many of us, I don't want to speak for you, but many of us have had divine encounters of thin place experiences, places outside where we encountered something beyond ourselves that changed us, that we sensed God's presence. And yet I want to give a shout out to church buildings, sacred places, places where communities can depend on one another, come together, gather on a regular basis and be shaped again and again over time and become almost addicted in a divine way, a holy way, a sacred way, to being together. For example, I don't know what to do with my week without the passing of the peace. I need somebody to pass me the peace, how do I receive the peace if I don't go to a place where I can count on receiving someone passing it to me, I need it, I long for it, I'm starved for it when it doesn't happen. We need a place, not that conscripts God, not that limits God, but a place we can depend on to meet God. We need places where we can learn God's name, Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so, and for my parents told me so, and for my Sunday school teachers told me so. And for random strangers, I wouldn't know if I hadn't gathered with them in a sacred place told. We need places to be at one with God. We need places built out of love for God, to house a people who long for God. We need places to lie down inside along one another and with God and with the grain of the universe, we need places like this to make room for people like us so that we can hear God's name. I'm so thankful for a place like this, reminded especially this week, earlier this week gathered on the fourth floor, otherwise known as the youth room, or the closing celebration of the First Shine Learning Camp. I sat on the back row with a fellow church member, and we watched in awe of this extraordinary group of young people with special needs and extraordinary gifts. One mama struck me in particular, a young man named Bill when he was being introduced and given his award of the week, kept kicking his head back and kind of cackling and laughing. He exuded so much confidence and joy. I watched him as he danced with the rest of the group, and I watched him as he interacted with all the people gathered there, and every minute or two, he would kick his head back and laugh and look up to the sky. In that moment, in that hour, I relish sitting in this place, this sacred place, and being so close to God's name that I could survey the people around me and think, "This is what heaven is going to be like." This is a glimpse of eternity. A young man kicking his head back and joy, a people set apart dancing for no other reason than for the joy of it, for the friendship of it, for the thriving of it, for the love. Years ago, I watched for the first time one of my favorite movies, mentioned it before, Interstellar, a story about a group of people who have to escape planet Earth because of global warming, Matthew McConaughey saves the human race. His name in the movie is Cooper, and at one point near the end of the film, he becomes dangerously close to a black hole. It turns out he's intentionally moving towards the black hole, and the black hole, as you know, is so powerful, a force of gravity that even light cannot escape it, and so he gets pulled into the center of the black hole, and somehow he survives this journey, and he ends up in the center of it, which physicists, I think, call the singularity, and there he dwells, and he's able to communicate across time and space. I don't know how it works, but somehow spacetime and gravity all gets switched together in this one little place, and you can interact with spacetime in infinite directions, and so he's communicating with his daughter in love. He misses her. He adores her. He wants to reach out to her. He can't quite touch her, but he can see her through this strange phenomenon, and it's as if he's plucking the strands of spacetime, sitting in the seat of the center of creation and all of its power and density, and I remember thinking after the film, "Boy, I wish I could do that," I wish I could get sucked into a black hole into the center of the origins of creation and pluck the strands of space and time and reach out to my loved ones across spacetime, and then it dawned on me. I have a place and a people where I can go do that every Sunday. [BLANK_AUDIO]