Hilton Head Island, SC – May 10, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
II Samuel 6:6-15; II Samuel 6:16-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor.” – II Sam. 6:22
The King And We: 3) Love And Hate – A Fine Line
This is the third in a series of six sermons called The King and We. It is about King David of Israel, and how the events in his life have echoes in our own lives. However, you shall not hear six sermons in a row, but two sections of three sermons each. In June we are going to be traveling to Canada to see two elderly cousins of mine who are in declining health, and from there on to the Midwest to see family and friends. With Adrienne O’Neill’s schedule and ours, I won’t get back to David till July. That may be a good thing, however, because six straight weeks of David’s trials and tribulations might be more than anyone could be expected to bear.
Two weeks ago we encountered David in his first appearance in I Samuel as the boy warrior who killed Goliath, the Philistine giant. Last week we learned that David became a favored member of King Saul’s court when he was still a boy, playing the harp to soothe the tortured psyche of the increasingly erratic first monarch of Israel. Then, over time, Saul came to be jealous of David, who was more popular with the people than Saul. Saul tried several times to kill David. Nevertheless, even though David had a few easy opportunities to kill Saul in self defense, he refused to do so, on the grounds that Saul was the Lord’s anointed, and it would be politically, ethically and religiously unacceptable to commit regicide. As it turned out, Saul was killed in a battle with the Philistines, and thus did David become the next king.
Several years prior to Saul’s death, when Saul still looked favorably upon David, Saul allowed David to marry his daughter Michal. Understand that David already had at least six other wives when he acquired Michal. At that time, polygamy was acceptable for males, particularly royal males, but not for females. We’re not going into the social justice of such a situation; we have more than enough other fish to fry here.
A while after David and Michal were married, the story says that Saul gave Michal to another man in marriage. This is very strange. In that male-dominated society, that was a strict no-no. So why did Saul do that? And did he really do it? Maybe he did it to spite David; it doesn’t say. Anyway, after Saul died, Michal came back to David as his wife, and all was well --- for a while.
Are you following this? I have strongly urged you to read all of I Samuel 16 through I Kings 2. You still have time. Do it, and you’ll be glad you did. Don’t do it, and you may be hopelessly befuddled by what is happening, because you will not have enough of the connecting links in the story, and I can’t take time to give you every historical connection.
So this morning you heard that David had brought the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, which would be its permanent home. The ark was a beautifully carved box which contained the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses had received from God on Mt. Sinai two and a half centuries before. The ark of the covenant was the most important religious artifact in what eventually evolved into four thousand years of Jewish history. It was lost or stolen 2000 years ago, and that has been a source of immense sorrow to Jews ever since.
The first part of our two scripture passages from II Samuel 6 describes a curious, even a bizarre, incident regarding the ark. It was being carried up a steep hillside on an ox cart, and the oxen stumbled. A man named Uzzah reached out to steady the ark so it wouldn’t fall off the cart. For that God struck him dead on the spot. No one was to touch the ark other than the high priest. David was dismayed that God would do that, and I must admit that I am with David on that one, and not with God. Uzzah instantly tried to do what he thought was right in a very tense situation, and for that he received the divine zap. But again, we might question the veracity of this detail in the story. Surely God is not like that. But also just as surely, some people think He is, and they may be some of the ones who inserted this odd account into the narrative.
Skipping ahead a bit, we learn that when the ark finally did get to Jerusalem, David did an ecstatic dance before God as it was carried to its next-to-final resting place. Later it would be placed in the center of Solomon’s temple, but we’re not going to get to Solomon until July. In any case, David’s wife Michal looked out the window of the royal palace, and the text tells us that she “saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, and she despised him in her heart.”
What on earth could have brought on such a strong reaction in Michal? We are not told anywhere in earlier chapters that there was any trouble between David and Michal, but now, suddenly it seems, she despised her husband. However, there had to have been a growing distance between Michal and David, or she never would have reacted as strongly as she did.
We are given a bit more of an explanation for why Michal was so angry. She sarcastically snapped at her husband, “How the king of Israel honored himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!” (6:21) In other words, without our having previously been told this, Michal informs us that David was dancing in his birthday suit, and she was mightily put off by it.
For whatever it’s worth, I’m with Michal, not David, on this one. There is no question that in every moment of his life David was devoted to God, but he allowed himself to be far too easily sidetracked. He could become excessive in his behavior. I said last week that Saul may have been a schizophrenic paranoid. This week, as part of my free and unsolicited analysis of the first two kings of Israel, I will suggest, as I have on other occasions through the years, that David may have been bipolar. When he was high, he was higher than a kite, and when he was low he was lower than a cave. You need only read the Psalms of David in the Book of Psalms to find corroboration for that amateur psychological diagnosis.
The Bible tells us more about the personal life of David than anyone else. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take time to tell everything, either because the biblical writers didn’t know everything or because they didn’t want to dilute the main thrust of their narrative for what they perhaps considered extraneous details. In the relationship of David and his wife Michal, however, we may truthfully assume that a lot of animosity had been building up over the years. For both Michal and David, the dancing-naked-before-the-Lord episode was the circumstantial straw which apparently broke the back of the marriage.
In a shameful comeback to what Michal had said to David, David snarled at his wife, “(I danced) before the Lord, who chose me above your father, …to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the Lord --- and I will make merry before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor” (6:21-22). Then whoever wrote this story puts a terrible, excruciating, heart-wrenching footnote on it: “And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death.” The furious David refused to give Michal a divorce, but he also saw to it that she would never have a child to comfort her in her loneliness and isolation. She became a virtual palace prisoner. This is an incredibly sad story with an awful ending, especially on Mother’s Day. Michal was prevented from ever becoming a mother.
The distance between passionate love and pervasive hatred is sometimes a very fine line. Things can go well in a relationship, and then, slowly, or perhaps with little warning at all, it can utterly fall apart, never to be resurrected again.
I am familiar with a man whose wife was dying for a long time from a deteriorating heart. She became more and more of an invalid. Her husband was still young and virile, and he became involved with a younger woman in an adjoining state. There were four children in the family, a grown son who had left home, two teenage daughters, and a 10-year-old son. Before their mother died, the children, especially the two daughters, suspected their father was seeing someone somewhere. When their mother died, their love for their father was severely tested, especially when fairly quickly he married the other woman. Then, their respect turned to disrespect, although fortunately not outright hatred, but it was almost impossible for them either to love or respect their new step-mother. When he was killed in a farm accident, it got very tense.
When spouses seek God’s blessing in their marriage, they take vows at their wedding. When parents have their children baptized, they also take vows. A vow is a promise made in the presence of and also to God. A husband and wife do not simply make promises to one another; they also make them to God. And when their children are baptized, they do not merely promise one another to raise the children in the knowledge and worship of God, but they also make that promise to God.
It is not an easy assignment to be a loving and faithful husband or wife or father or mother. Love makes heavy demands on us. There are times when it tests us to the limits of our patience and forbearance. Did David and Michal give it their all before their story ended so sadly? We don’t really know, because we aren’t told. But I am sure that Michal did not suddenly become irate with her husband; resentment had been smoldering for some time. And David did not make his wife a prisoner in his palace for no reason; perhaps he had been drawing apart from her for years. The four lads from Liverpool sang, “All you need is love/ All you need is love, All you need is love, love, love/ Love is all you need.” But then again the Righteous Brothers also sang, “You had that loving feeling/ Now it’s gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.”
I know a couple who have been married for well over fifty years. Hers is a life of continuous, consuming, quiet desperation, and his is a life of not-so-quiet desperation. They tolerate one another, but just barely. They rarely speak to one another, unless he barks at her. They live in the same house, often sitting together in the same room, but they are worlds apart, together.
Our responsive reading this morning was from the prophecy of Hosea. I explained something of the background of that particular passage. But let me say more. The prophecy of Hosea is one of the strangest books in the Bible, in which there is no shortness of strangeness. It begins by God telling Hosea to marry a woman named Gomer who was a temple prostitute of Baal, the god of the Canaanites. God wanted Hosea, and thus Israel, to know how difficult it was for God to observe His people Israel giving themselves to Baal rather than to God, and thus God ordered Hosea into this totally baffling marriage.
The scholars do not agree whether this is meant to be an historical story or a symbolic story. Did this really happen, or was it a way the prophet Hosea fancifully chose to describe the problem that the divine husband (God) was having with His bride (Israel)? I tend to think it was intended to be understood as a made-up story to depict the fleeting and faltering love we have for God as compared to the boundless, unconditional, infinite love that God has for us. There is nothing we can do that puts us outside God’s love. But the first chapter of Hosea strange story suggests quite the opposite. Hosea’s harlot wife gave birth to a daughter, and God told Hosea to name the baby – quote – “Not-Pitied, for I will no more have pity on the house of Israel, to pity them at all” (1:6). Then Gomer gave birth to a son, and God said Hosea should name the baby – again quoting – “Not-My-People, for you are not my people and I am not your God” 1:9).
David and Michal once had that loving feeling, but then it was gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. In one sense it is true that all we need is love, and that love is all we need, but it was hard for Hosea to love Gomer (if there really was a Gomer) and for God to love Israel (and there definitely was an Israel). Again and again the Israelites, as it says in the colorful King James Version, “went whoring after other gods.” But later, Hosea says of God, ”My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not again destroy Ephraim, for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy” (11:9).
Love divine, all loves excelling demands the forgiveness of the beloved whenever that person engages in thoughtless or hurtful behavior. God forgives us for our sins and shortcomings, and we also must forgive one another. It is inevitably lethal to relationships when we allow love to degenerate into hate. David displayed sinful and utter indifference by isolating Michal for the rest of her life. No matter what she may have done to displease him, she did not deserve that.
The ability of humans genuinely to love one another is perhaps the most salient test of our humanity. To maintain love is really difficult; impatience or irritation or downright hatred is really easy. We are called by God to forgive one another for our sins and mistakes, and not to be spiteful because of them. In Latin, one of the words for “love” is caritas, from which comes our English word “charity.” Christian charity demands that we forgive and not hold grudges. The greatest of the Israelite kings was unwilling to do that, and for that he stood under the judgment of God. If we refuse to forgive, love can all too quickly turn into hate.
In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, Julie Jordan is a pure and innocent New England young woman who falls in love with a dashing but dubious drifter named Billy Bigelow. Despite warnings from her family and friends, she married Billy. Then, to her best friend on the evening in which Billy is killed in a failed robbery attempt, she sings to her friend, “Common sense may tell you that the ending will be sad/ And now’s the time to break and run away/ But what’s the use of wondering if the ending will be sad?/ He’s your feller and you love him/ There’s nothing more to say.”
Did Michal love David more than David loved Michal? Did either of them love the other enough? Can anyone love anyone enough? But is less than enough ever enough? God’s plan is for marriage and the family and all human life to be lived in community. None of us is intended by God to be totally an individual apart from all other individuals. God wants us to live together, which means He wants us to live in and with and for love.
There is no question that David loved God, but sometimes he didn’t love others with sufficient devotion or commitment, especially his wife Michal. However, beloved, let us love one another.