2 Samuel 6 {Selected Verses}
One of my goals in life, mostly unrealized, but needed now more than ever, is to make the church rival Disneyland and Disney World as one of the happiest places on earth.
I honestly don’t know what comes over people when they enter a church, or sit down for a bible study, or do anything else church related, that causes them to loose their sense of joy.
Maybe it is because, from childhood on, we have been told that this is God’s house and there is to be no running, or chasing, and we are to always use our inside voices. {If you think this is, or should be, true come visit our summer camp where the unchanged and sometimes unhinged voices of children can be heard the moment you step out of your car even if they are inside.
But for adults, especially adults who have been raised in any kind of formal church tradition, it is not so. We like our worship to be carefully crafted, filled with decorum and, most of all, restraint. And so some of the joy just slowly drifts away.
I remember my preaching professor, Dr. Donald Chatfield, who earned his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, talking about the time he was asked to preach in a Presbyterian church in Scotland as a student. Dr. Chatfield was a lot of fun and this came though, not only in his life but in his preaching. So, he was having a great time one Sunday morning and coming out of church one woman said while shaking his hand. “Oh, Dr. Chatfield, that sermon was so funny I could barely keep myself from smiling.”
Anybody who has ever preached before an African American congregation knows what a different and high energy experience it can be. It startled me the first time. I would say something and the congregation would say, “Amen.” I’d say something else and they would respond, “preach it.” And, if the sermon went on too long, someone could be heard to say, “Bring it home now, Reverend, bring it home.” In Anglo congregations the biggest response I ever get to the most profound, or even funniest lines, is....
Dignity and good order is the way we like things. We stand up. We sit down. It is a slow waltz, a minuet, minus the powdered wigs and lace.
Contrast this to the story we have before us from the Good Book this morning of David dancing before the Lord. It is my favourite story in almost all of scripture for its unbridled enthusiasm and overflowing joy. Truth be told, this story is the reason we have been following an alternate lectionary this summer. I just wanted to talk about it. And after the events of yesterday, and as on the eve of who knows what the next week the weeks ahead will bring us, I thought we needed a little joy. But it is joy tempered with a warning.
This is a moment King David has been waiting a very long time for. Bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem would not only consolidate his power but make Jerusalem its centre. The Ark is revered in the history of Israel so it not only has religious but political significance. It was believed to contain, the tablets on which God’s law was written – the Ten Commandments, a chalice containing a piece of manna, and the staff of Aaron from which a sprig was said to sprout. David had wrested the Ark from the control of the Philistines and he was not going to let this moment of glory, his glory pass.
He builds a new cart to carry it on. He gathers a massive crowd and then, we are told, “David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals.”1
It was a parade to surpass all parades. It was a cacophony of song and sound. It was Professor Harold Hill’s vision of a big brass band led by seventy-six trombones on steroids. And there, at the very head of the parade, putting on a show, dancing with all his might, whirling like a dervish, was non-other than the King himself, David having the time of his life. Until he is confronted by one of his wives, Michal.
Yvette Schock, writing in The Christian Century, reminds us:
After a cursory read, you might think Michal is just a wet blanket—a buzzkill foil to David’s golden-boy warrior/king/musician/party animal. It’s a day of extravagant ritual and celebration, and everyone else is singing, dancing, shouting, and rejoicing, with David dancing more wildly and singing more loudly than anyone. But here is Michal, sitting above it all with a scowl on her face. And she’s not just mildly displeased or in a temporry funk—the text tells us she sees David’s dancing and she despises him in her heart.2
She despises him for a very good reason. To say he has mistreated her would be an understatement. She has been called the first member of the “Me-too” movement because she calls beloved King David, still perspiring from his dance, a lout. This is exactly what he has been toward her.
She was the daughter of Saul and was even willing to break with her father to save David’s skin when Saul, in a “seal team six” moment, used his unbridled kingly powers to try to assassinate a political rival. She loved David even if he was ice cold toward her leaving her behind as he goes chasing after other women, other wives, other conquests.
If anyone wants to talk to you about “Biblical Family Values” you might want to point them to this story.
Michal is the conscious in this story. She doesn’t allow us to whitewash our image of David. She reminds us that while David may be a biblical hero he is also a control freak with a cruel streak. She reminds us that he is not always what we want from our biblical characters or personal heros. She is even making us wonder whether all David’s dancing is not pointing to anything but himself. She is not allowing us to fantasize about him. She is the one who makes David real.
At this point in his life he is the leader we must watch out for. He is a leader who is pretending to be spiritual.
At this point I had a wonderful riff in this sermon about leaders who are pretending to be spiritual but about 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon this sermon and my thinking took a radical turn because we saw what anger at someone we may not like can do. It is dangerous. It can lead to the injury and death of innocents.3
What we know for certain is violence begets violence. Sometimes those who incite the the mob become its targets. What happened yesterday was unacceptable. It is not who we are as a people and, most of all, it is not who we want to be.
To his credit, when King David had a rally it was a celebration filled with joy and the only mayhem that may have occurred involved dancing in the streets. Maybe someday our lives can be about that when cooler heads prevail, and rabble rousers can begin to think again about the good of the republic rather than how many re-tweets their angry posts on a website can get.
Liz Cheney, (revered by some vilified by others) said once at the Ronald Regan Presidential Library:
One of my democratic colleagues said to me recently that he looked forward to the day when he and I could disagree again. And believe me, I share that sentiment, because when we can disagree again about substance and policy, that will mean that our politics have righted themselves. That will mean that we have made the decision that we are going to reject anti-democratic forces, that we are going to reject toxicity, that we are going to reject some of the worst kinds of racism and bigotry and antisemitism, that characterize far too much of our politics today.4
When we reject the hate that rolls our stomach, boils our brains, and keeps us up at night maybe we’ll be able to dance together again.
King David is redeemable and so are we. He is both “sinner and saint” and so are we. He is not perfect and neither are we.
Notice please that any mention of God is conspicuously absent from not only the story of David or today’s gospel reading. They are both about dances but dances that lead to recrimination, and in the case of John the Baptist, death.
But there is another dance. It is the dance the Jesus offers. It is the dance of grace. It can be a waltz, or a minuet, or a tarantella. It can be any dance at all because it is the dance of grace that comes to us in Jesus Christ.
It is a dance we can do at our best moments and in our worse moments. It can be a dance of sadness or a dance of joy. It can be a dance of lament but never of despair.
It is a dance that holds the hope that no matter what is going on around us, “Christ is still Lord of Heaven and earth!” So, we just have to keep on singing, and maybe even dancing.
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1. 2 Samuel 6:5. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
2. Yvette Schock, “Wondering about Michal (15b) (2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12B-19),” The Christian Century, July 9, 2021, https://www.christiancentury.org/blog-post/sundays-coming/wondering-about-michal-15b-2-samuel-61-5-12b-19
3. Michael Levenson, “What We Know about the Assassination Attempt against Trump,” The New York Times, July 14, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/article/shooting-trump-rally.html.
4. Hugh Allen, “Liz Cheney Delivers Address at Reagan Institute 6/29/22 Transcript,” Rev (Rev, June 30, 2022), https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/liz-cheney-delivers-address-at-reagan-i nstitute-6-29-22-transcript
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