Pentecost 9B "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time"

 

2 Samuel 7:1–14a

Saint Mark 6:30–34 & 53–56

It seems that every bad idea can be summarized with the words: “Well. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

A company decides to update some software, and otherwise benign event, and before you know it computer screens at airports and other places all over the world are suddenly suffering from what is the called “the blue screen of death.”  Updating computer software? “Well.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

A cowboy decides to change horses in the middle of a raging river and winds up almost drowning. “Well. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

You say to yourself, I’ll just check out what’s happening in the world on my computer for a few minutes and after three hours surfing the web and several games of Candy Crush. “Well. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

You sit down and listen to a speech that is only supposed to last an hour and ninety grueling minutes – 5,520 seconds – fly by as if they were decades and when it is finally over you say to yourself. “Well. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Or, sometime during the All-Star break someone suggests that you invest in the half-season ticket package for both the Cubs and the Sox. Two days of baseball comes and goes and it looks like the same old same old.  And you tell yourself about the money wasted and dreams put on hold for another year. “Well.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.” 

Or, a king, resting in his beautiful house with its walls and floors covered in the most expensive wood available, looks out of window at a tent where the Ark of the Covenant, the very presence of God rests, and says to himself: “You know God should have a house as nice as mine.  After all God is God and I’m just a king. Just a king. Just a humble king. Wink. Wink. 

He shares his idea with his trusted advisor Nathan and Nathan, because he is only an advisor, says: “That’s a great idea, your majesty!  Build away!”

Nathan goes home, goes to bed, and hears from the Lord that what seemed like a good idea at the time, actually wasn’t.

Bishop Robert Barron wrote in his commentary 2nd Samuel.  

A person’s plan might be bold, beautiful, magnanimous, and popular, but still not be God’s plan. A person’s ambition might be admirable and selfless, but still not be congruent with God’s ambition… Our lives are not about us. God’s plans for us are always greater, more expansive, and more life-giving than our plans for ourselves.” 

Or as Anne Lamott famously said, “If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.”1

At this point God may have been laughing but Nathan wasn’t.

I imagine Nathan hearing this word of the Lord with his heart pounding and his head spinning as he realizes that the Lord is not in agreement with the desires of the king.  This is a tough spot. 

“Nathan’s quick affirmation of David’s ... plan puts Nathan in awkward situations with both God and David.  First, he has to listen to God explain why David building a temple is such a bad idea”2 which God does at length.

“Go and tell my servant David:  You’re going to build a ‘house’ for me to live in? Why, I haven’t lived in a ‘house’ from the time I brought the children of Israel up from Egypt till now. All that time I’ve moved about with nothing but a tent. And in all my travels with Israel, did I ever say to any of the leaders I commanded to shepherd Israel, ‘Why haven’t you built me a house of cedar?’”3

To put it mildly David is trying to give God something God doesn’t want.  Now Nathan “has to go to David and tell him that actually, God doesn’t want a house. Or at least, God doesn’t want you to build God’s house. Ouch.”4

It’s a dangerous mike drop, “seemed like a good idea at the time” moment because “David could easily come back at Nathan with: I’m a hero, I’m a general, and I am the King. Who else would be more qualified.”

Martha Spong, in an article in The Christian Century observed:

I find it fascinating that God puts both Nathan and David in this position from the beginning of their relationship. David receives deeply humbling news. Not only does God not want him to build a temple, not only does God revel in the freedom of living in a tent, not only does God make it clear that God is the one in charge of establishing David’s house, but someday, there will be a temple, and David will not be the one to build it.5

Nathan has to tell his king: “There is work to be done, David, but it is not yours to do.”

That’s my struggle and perhaps it's yours too.  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with grand plans for God and, probably more dangerous, grand plans for others.  It’s heady stuff because “you know what you should do” moments in life allow me to think that I know better and, if they are not bridled, they can result in “I only, only I, know what’s best” beliefs that can be damaging to everything from nations, to churches, and certainly to relationships.  These usually only turn out to be “good ideas at the time.”

David was trying to do something great for God.  He knew what God needed. God needed a house.  A localized place where God could be found.  “You know where you can find God?” He and his people could say.  “God is over there in the temple that we built, just for God.”

At this point I am reminded of a joke that is so old it is about an Irish cab driver.

You might remember it as soon as I start but, even if you do, I’m going to tell it to you anyway.

It’s about this Irish cab driver who picks up a passenger at LaGuardia Airport in New York who says to him, “I want you to take me somewhere I can meet God.”  Without blinking an eye or thinking the request strange that cabbie takes off, wends his was through New York traffic, finally pulling up to a stop at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.  The guy says, “Wait!  I thought you were going to take me to see God!” The Irish Cab driver replies: “If he’s in town, that’s where he’ll be.”

We need to have places where we can find God like a temple or a church but Jesus, following his Heavenly Father’s example, invites us to broaden our vision.  It’s okay to build buildings but God’s presence isn’t assured in the building but in the promise. 

The disciples come back all excited.  They are just starting out and it looks like that they are already doing some majestic things for the ministry. 

At this Nadia Bolz-Weber wonders: “I wonder if the apostles have started to think that Jesus' ministry is about them. They've just come off their first healing and casting-out-demons campaign. Surely it's tempting to let the whole thing go to their heads. It would go to mine.”6  she says.  Mine too, I would add.

But, as Marlyn MacIntire reminds us: “Jesus doesn’t praise them for their diligence—at least not in such a way as to make the editorial cut when the encounter was recorded. He tells them to come away to a deserted place where they can be all by themselves. No admiring crowd. No record keepers. No trainees.”7

And, as Jennifer Moland-Kovaish said of the moment: “Jesus listens patiently to all of them.  Then he tucks them in for a nap, saying, ‘Come away and rest a while.’”8

It seemed like a good idea at the time until the crowds showed up and it was then that the disciples and all of us find out, once again what Jesus was all about for, even when their rest was interrupted by the great crowd that followed them, when he saw that crowd “he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”9  Other translations make this even stronger: “his heart broke.”

King David’s heart probably wasn’t breaking when he got the idea that he should build a temple for God.  He just had this desire to not only give God something that God didn’t want but sure prove to all his loyal subjects he was a great leader.  Then Nathan showed up and reminded him that what seemed like a good idea at the time, wasn’t such a good idea after all because it wasn’t God’s idea.  

Nathan reminded him of what a modern-day prophet Tim Alberta said in his book, The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, “People love building houses, they don’t like pay for the housing inspector.”9

Sometimes, what we want to do for God, what seems like a good idea at the time, isn’t.

We need a housing inspector like Nathan to come along and remind us of what Jesus was trying to tell us has the be at the centre of any project we undertake for God – compassion.  

“When our hearts are broken by the things that break the heart of God,” it will always seem to be a good idea, at the time, all the time.

________________

1. James  C Howell, “What Are We to Say? July 21 9th after Pentecost,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2024, http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

2. Joanna Harader, “Doing Things For God.”  The Christian Century Newsletter. 15 July 2024.

3   2 Samuel 7:4–7. (MESSAGE)   [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, with Topical Concordance (NavPress, 2005).]

4.    Harader, loc.cit.

5. Martha Spong, “December 24, Advent 4B (2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Luke 1:26-38),” The Christian Century, November 17, 2017, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/december-24-advent-4b-2-samuel-71-11-16-luke-126-38?

6. Nadia Bolz-Weber, “With or without US,” The Christian Century, July 13, 2009, https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2009-07/or-without-us

7.      Marlyn McTyre, “July 19, Ordinary 16B: Mark 6:30-34, 53-56,” The Christian Century, July 8, 2015, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2015-06/july-19-16th-sunday-ordinary-time?code=hSHfTbDDjiLRbiqgcnzI&utm_source=Christian%2BCentury%2BNewsletter&

8. Marlyn  Moland Kovash, “Sunday, July 22, 2012: Mark 6:30-34, 53-56,” The Christian Century, July 11, 2012, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-06/sunday-july-22-2012

9. St. Mark 6:34. (NRSVUE) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

10. Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2023), 393.