Transcript
Through the written word, and the spoken word, may we know your Living Word, Jesus, Christ our Savior. Amen.
Last night, I intended to launch right into my prepared sermon and give no mention of certain violent events which occurred at a political rally in our state yesterday. But this morning after I woke, I realized that even if we all came together today determined to put tragic news headlines out of our minds, the images we find in today’s story of King David celebrating in a crowd might inevitably send our thoughts toward these disturbing recent events. And so I preface today’s sermon with these words from first Peter to the church: “You are … a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were no people but now you are God’s people.”
King David was a priest king. Jesus Christ is the ultimate priest king. And we–Christ’s church—we are priests in this world, which means in a nation divided, we are uniquely qualified to bless our neighbors. To bring light and life. To speak words of healing and hope. And to make peace. May it be so.
Good morning, church. In our reading today from the second book of Samuel, we see David—like a priest king—bringing the Ark home again. It is an occasion of joy and celebration. There is singing and music-making and dancing. There is also blessing–we read that like a priest David offers sacrifices, and he blesses the people in the name of the Lord and gives them gifts of good food. It really isn’t all that different from how we celebrate today—on July 4 we had parades with music and dancing. We might have cooked meat and other feasting foods. The ancient practice of animal sacrifice might seem strange to us, but if we remember that it is simply a meal shared with one’s god, then it seems much less strange. Don’t we also say a blessing and thank God before we eat?
There is an ancient association between this story of the Ark’s return–which is a story about God’s presence, about a God who dwells with his people–and Psalm 24, the psalm appointed for today. Perhaps King David composed this psalm on the day of the Ark’s return or perhaps for later commemorations of that memorable day. In second Samuel we read the story of what happened, how: “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.”—And then Psalm 24 gives us their song so that we can sing it too. We aren’t simply told about an event that happened long ago. We are invited into that event, and it becomes present to us, as we pray the words of this psalm. As I read this Psalm now, consider how it gives us a kind of sacred geography for the kingdom of God:
1 The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, *the world and all who dwell therein.
2 For it is he who founded it upon the seas *and made it firm upon the rivers of the deep.
3 "Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? *and who can stand in his holy place?"
4 "Those who have clean hands and a pure heart, *who have not pledged themselves to falsehood,nor sworn by what is a fraud.
5 They shall receive a blessing from the Lord *and a just reward from the God of their salvation."
6 Such is the generation of those who seek him, *of those who seek your face, O God of Jacob.
7 Lift up your heads, O gates;lift them high, O everlasting doors; *and the King of glory shall come in.
8 "Who is this King of glory?" *"The Lord, strong and mighty,the Lord, mighty in battle."
9 Lift up your heads, O gates;lift them high, O everlasting doors; *and the King of glory shall come in.
10 "Who is he, this King of glory?" *"The Lord of hosts,he is the King of glory."
When I read or pray the 24th Psalm, I sometimes imagine one of those early maps where familiar land gives way to dangerous waters populated by mysterious sea monsters. Ancient people—from David’s time to the time of Renaissance cartographers—understood a truth that we are prone to forget: there is order, and there is chaos, but God is master of both. He makes our earth firm upon those chaos waters–those rivers of the deep—, and sea monsters (of all kinds) are nothing to him. Do you remember God’s words to Job: “Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook?”
And so on the day when God’s people carry the Ark into the city, they sing first of a Creator God who holds all the earth in his hands. There is no place and there is no person who does not already belong to God. The Ark is special but not because it contains God or limits him. Sacred geography works a little differently than the geography we are used to. To sing Psalm 24 is to testify that every place belongs to God, yet still there is a particular, a special place called in this psalm “the hill of the Lord,” and God’s “holy place.” If we are familiar with the Bible then we are likely familiar with the notion of the mountain of God, though we might also have noticed that it goes by different names and seems to move around a bit. The mountain of our God may be Mount Zion, Mount Sinai, or the Mount of Olives, but wherever exactly it is in terms of actual geography the sacred geography remains the same: this is the holy place of God, and it is removed from us. No one goes there casually or accidentally. The mountain of God is for the seekers of God, for those, as Psalm 24 puts it, “who seek your face, O God of Jacob,” and that mention of Jacob puts me in mind of a certain dream about a ladder connecting a spot on earth with the high places of heaven. More sacred geography.
So which is it then? God everywhere and God’s presence—like the Ark—with us and in our midst or God on an inaccessible mountaintop? The notion of mountains being the home of the gods—think Mount Olympus—was common in the ancient world, and ancient pagans solved the riddle by building their own mountaintops. They built pyramids and ziggurats, they built the tower we remember as Babel, and they did this in order to control the high place and control their gods. They said, god–you live here on the mountain we have built for you and that we are able to climb. No wonder God scattered them at Babel, for that is the definition of idolatry: to say that we control God that we can master the chaos of our lives and our world by manipulating spiritual power, forgetting who it is who holds the whole earth and ourselves in the palm of his hand.
We might find this reality of a very holy, very separate God frightening, and David, in a portion of second Samuel that we did not read aloud today, becomes afraid of the Lord when the oxen carrying the Ark stumble and Uzzah, reaching out his hand to steady it, is struck down. I don’t know why that happened, I don’t claim to understand it, but I know that David and his men saw something of the holy, sacred separateness of God that all those tower-building pagans would have been wise to recognize.
You and I might suspect that this sacred geography only had meaning in the ancient world—we don’t go to the top of our skyscrapers looking for God, after all—so it is helpful to ask how Christians over the years have read Psalm 24. If we were to travel together to a museum in France, we could study the illuminated pages of a prayer book that was created around 1412 for a French prince. This manuscript includes a painting to illustrate Psalm 24, and at first glance, it looks completely anachronistic. It shows the Ark of the Covenant being carried in procession into Jerusalem, and it is being carried into a building that looks just like a Gothic church. It has a rose window and carved stonework and flying buttresses, seeming to confuse Temple with cathedral. The Ark itself looks like a gold reliquary and is also shaped like a Gothic style church. A little church is being carried into a larger church in this illustration of the Ark.
But why should this painting seem strange? What happened when we came to church today? Don’t we believe that by the power of God we have been healed of the disease of sin, our hands have been made clean, and our bodies can now be Temples for the Spirit of God, as we read in 1 Corinthians? We are like little churches entering the larger church. Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? And who can stand in his holy place? The incredible answer is you. And me. So why are we wasting time down in the valleys of worry, of distraction, of shame. Lift up your heads, lift them high, and the King of Glory shall come in.
The sacred geography of Psalm 24 is almost too much for us to take in. Our rational minds struggle to conceive of a God who is everywhere but also in some places in particular. A God who would dwell in us but also invites us higher and higher so that at the very same time that we walk through valleys with a Good Shepherd at our side, we also bask in reflected glory on mountaintops. Both are true pictures of our spiritual reality, our life with God. As well, we are not alone; we journey together. Psalm 24 is a “we” psalm, a communal song, a call-and-response psalm like portions of our own Sunday morning liturgy. To walk the sacred landscapes with others means that when we find ourselves on the far side of a closed door, when all we see are impassable gates, and we do not know where God is or who he is or whether he is—when we cry “Who is this King of glory?”—it is all right if we do not always have the answer. When we walk together, there are companions to answer us with the faith given to them; so they respond, “The Lord strong and mighty. The Lord of hosts.”
In the Old Testament another name for the mountain of God is the mountain of assembly. That word assembly becomes in Greek ekklesia, which is carried forward in the New Testament as the word for church. Who are we? As Christians and as the church? We are God’s people gathered together. We are the assembled of God. Our identity comes from our communion–with God and with one another. Outside the church, our culture is almost entirely focused on individuals. We idolize heroes, celebrate the lone wolves, admire independence, but that’s not how it is in the kingdom of God. If you need other people–if you are unable to take care of yourself–then you fulfill a necessary role in the church. We are are an assembly of self-sufficient people then we have ceased to be the church. David may have been the king, but he danced unrobed in the midst of the people. Our spiritual journeys are personal and inward, but they are also outward and relational. We are a part of the assembly of God’s people across all generations. We belong on the mountain of God.
Yet even as we do our faithful best to seek those high places, to seek the face of God, God comes to us. God joins us in the procession. It is as if God takes off his royal robe and dances with us. Sometimes the veil between heaven and earth thins enough that we can see how even our drive to this church building on a Sunday morning is a pilgrimage. We think we are standing on ordinary ground right now, but if we held a sacred map in our hands, we would see this spot marked with an X and labeled “mountain of God.” So “Lift up your heads, O gates; lift them high, O everlasting doors; for the King of glory has come in.” Amen.
