Sermons
October 13, 2024 (Proper 23)
“Our house is a very, very, very fine house…”[1]
2 Samuel 7:1-17
Once again we’ve skipped forward many centuries between last week’s reading and today’s.
Israel has long been settled in the Promised Land, sometimes called Canaan in the Bible. They conquered the peoples who were already living there—although some historians nowadays say it’s more likely that they moved in and eventually everybody assimilated into one people, rather than a wholesale “Manifest Destiny”-type conquest. I don’t know that there’s any way to know for sure, and for our purposes today, it doesn’t matter.
Once they were in possession of the land, Israel lived under a series of “judges,” who were sort of a mashup of actual dispensers of justice and military heroes. The last of these judges was Samuel, and he was the one to whom the Israelites demanded God give them a king like other nations had a king.
He tried to tell them, “You’re not other nations, and there are great negatives to living under a king.”
But they wouldn’t listen. They stomped their feet and said, “No! We want a king!”[1]
So God sighed and told Samuel, “Give them a king.”
That first king was Saul, who was tall and good-looking, and was a passable king until he decided he would go it alone and not call on God during a battle with the Philistines, and not follow God’s instructions regarding how to act after conquering the Amalekites.[2]
Then God sends Samuel to Bethlehem to seek out a new king. As it often happens in the Bible, the chosen one turns out to be the youngest of Jesse’s eight sons, a boy named David.[3] David goes to live in Saul’s court, and helps bring him through bouts of increasing madness, until Saul’s jealousy becomes intolerable and David is forced to flee and eventually to fight against Saul. Samuel dies before David is finally crowned king,[4] and once David’s rule is secure, his court prophet is a man named Nathan, who first appears in our reading for today.
The first five chapters of 2 Samuel tell of the battles David had to fight in order to rule Israel in peace. In the sixth chapter, after David has conquered the city-state of Jerusalem, he brings the Ark of the Covenant into the city, appropriating this ancient symbol of God’s Presence to lend legitimacy to his reign and his choice of Jerusalem as his capital. King Hiram of Tyre,[5] a close ally to Israel during the reign of David and then of Solomon, sends materials and craftsmen to build David a palace.
So when we get to chapter 7, David is living comfortably in his own house, but God’s Presence is still housed in the Tabernacle, a portable dwelling, first built at Sinai, where the people could come to meet and worship God. David wonders whether it might be more appropriate for God also to have a house—in the Ancient Near East, it was normal for the king to have a palace, and the nation’s god also to have a palace, commonly known as a temple. So he tells the prophet Nathan what he wanted to do, and at first Nathan says he should go for it.
But that very night God speaks to Nathan and says, no, I don’t want a house right now. God says a lot more than that: he says that he will build David a house—and he’s not talking about walls and a roof.
The word house has two meanings—more than two, actually; but two of them are important in this passage. The text plays with these two meanings quite skillfully.
On the one hand we have house as a building—for David a palace, and for God a temple, or we Christians would call it a church. We tend to speak of our church as God’s house quite a bit more figuratively than folks of David’s time would have spoken of the structure built to be their god’s residence. For us God’s house means that this place is set apart as a—not the—place where we are able to meet God. In the Ancient Near East, when you built your god a house, it was considered to be quite literally the place where your god lived.
On the other hand, house has another meaning when talking about royalty. You’ve seen it in your western history classes, in high school or college, when you learned about the rulers of England (all kings until Mary Tudor and her sister Elizabeth I). You might remember the Wars of the Roses, in which the House of Lancaster fought against the House of York for the English throne; this conflict finally came to an end when Henry Tudor, Henry VII, took the throne and ushered in the House of Tudor.[6]
In this case, a house is a dynasty: a ruler and his (or her) descendants who successively rule a nation. God says he doesn’t want David to build him a house (a temple); but instead he will build David a house, a dynasty in which his descendants would sit on the throne in Jerusalem “for ever.”
When the kingdom of Israel splits in two after the death of David’s son Solomon, most of it is ruled by Jeroboam son of Nebat, of the half-tribe[7] of Ephraim; but God reserves one tribe, Judah, to be ruled by David’s successor from Jerusalem. (The tribe of Benjamin also becomes part of the nation of Judah.)
This promise is unconditional, as it’s presented here in 1 Samuel 7: even if David or his descendants should sin against God’s commandments, God promises never to take his steadfast love from the house of David.
This presented a problem, of course, when the last king from the House of David was deposed by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 587 bce. Never again did a descendant of David rule from Jerusalem, in spite of God’s promise to have the house of David on the throne there “for ever.” This led to the growing, and continued, expectation that one day another Son of David would arise, and would restore the kingdom of Israel. This Son of David was to be called Messiah, or “anointed one,” and his reign would inaugurate “the day of the Lord,” the age to come, the kingdom of God.
Then, in the time of the Roman Empire, when Jerusalem was part of the Roman province of Judea, a man descended from David’s line appeared, proclaiming that the kingdom of God had come near. Those who followed this man, Jesus of Nazareth, came to believe he was the Son of David, the Messiah (in Greek, the Christ) they had been awaiting. Others among his people did not believe this about Jesus, and they are still waiting.[8]
There is one detail in God’s message to David, given through Nathan, that I struggle with.
God says he does not want David to build him a house; he has been “moving about” in a tent and a tabernacle ever since he brought Israel up out of Egypt. Putting God in a house seems to be synonymous with denying God’s freedom to come and go as he chose, and God does not want that. God says, “Don’t fence me in.”
But here’s my struggle: while David does not get to build the temple to be God’s dwelling place, his son Solomon does.[9]
What’s interesting is that, when David wants to build God a house, he runs it by Nathan the prophet, to make sure it’s God’s will. And God, through Nathan, says no.
When Solomon decides to build the temple, he doesn’t talk to any prophet. He doesn’t seek God’s will. He only talks to King Hiram of Tyre, who seems to like building things in Jerusalem.
I’m not sure we can chalk this up as a sign of the wisdom Solomon is supposed to have received from God.[10]
After the Temple was built, there was a concerted effort that went on for years to discredit all other places where people had historically gone to worship God—like Shiloh, where Samuel grew up in service of God;[11] and Bethel, where Jacob had encountered God in a dream when he was running away from Esau.[12] Everybody who wanted to come into God’s presence had to go to Jerusalem. And that was fine, if perhaps a bit inconvenient, as long as the Temple stood and the people lived in the land God had given them.[13]
But the same crisis that ended the House of David ruling from Jerusalem brought the Temple crashing into ruins, and the upper classes of the people were taken into exile in Babylon. No longer could they go to Jerusalem to call on God at God’s house. God was as homeless as the exiles were, and who knows where he went?
I think a case could be made that the crisis of faith that went along with the Babylonian conquest and exile would have been unnecessary if all religious activity hadn’t been concentrated at the Jerusalem Temple.
In the Ancient Near East, when one people conquered another, as Babylon conquered Judah in 587 bce, it was believed that the conquerors’ god (or gods) also prevailed over the conquered people’s god. And so the Babylonians taunted the Jewish exiles, calling on them to sing some of their cute little religious songs, and asking, “Where’s your God now?”…a question that could not be answered; without the Temple to live in, where had God gone?
The story of the Exodus is the formative story of the Jewish people—and, by extension, it’s our formative story, too. But the event that formed the Jewish people was the exile.
Before the exile, the people’s identity derived entirely from a place. They were Israelites, and they lived in the Promised Land and worshiped God on the holy hill of Zion, in Jerusalem.
When that was all taken away from them, something very interesting happened: Their identity became derived not from a piece of land, but from the One who had given it to them. For in exile, the Jews rediscovered what had been a given in the days of King David: The God who brought them up out of Egypt still couldn’t be fenced in. There might have been a Temple—and when the exiles returned to Jerusalem they rebuild the Temple and began again to worship God there—but it was a place to meet God, never again the only place where the people could meet God.[14]
The answer to the taunting question the Babylonians asked, “Where is your God?” was, “In the same place God has always been: wherever we are.”
[1] Hat tip to Graham Nash.
[2] See 1 Samuel 8. Samuel warns Israel that a king “will take…he will take…he will take…”; but Israel’s response, which is sanitized a bit by the NRSV, is rendered in the NIV as, “No! We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:19-20). It was when David, the second king of Israel, decided not to “go out before us and fight our battles,” instead staying in his palace while his army fought, that he was in a position to mistreat Bathsheba and have her husband killed to cover it up.
[3] 1 Samuel 13—15 tell about how Saul lost favor with God.
[4] 1 Samuel 16:1-13
[5] 1 Samuel 25:1
[6] Tyre is a city in present-day Lebanon and has been in the news recently.
[7] The House of Tudor ended with the death of Elizabeth I, since she had no children; in her place her cousin, James VI of Scotland, ascended to the throne as the head of the House of Stuart, later replaced by the House of Hanover, starting with George I, the “German lairdie” held in great contempt by the Scots. His great-grandson, George III, was the ruler whose mistreatment of the American colonies is laid out in great detail in our Declaration of Independence. The House of Hanover ruled Britain until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
[8] Israel was made up of tribes bearing the names of the sons of Jacob (also called Israel); but instead of there being one tribe bearing the name of Joseph, there were two half-tribes named for his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh.
[9] We are not to assume that because the majority of Jews did not recognize Jesus as Messiah, God has rejected the Jews from being his people. Paul in Romans 9—11 indicates that God has not broken his promise to the Jews that he is their God and they are his people. Christians do not replace the Jews; we are instead grafted into God’s people, as we are.
[10] 1 Kings 5—6 tell of the building of Solomon’s Temple, which took seven years.
[11] In the opening chapters of 1 Kings, Solomon asks God for wisdom, and his request is granted; but as we read the stories about Solomon’s life, we have to wonder if he exercised that wisdom very often. He had a vast number of foreign wives, all of whom worshiped their own foreign gods and tempted him away from the Lord. He also conscripted his own people into forced labor for his grand building projects, including the Temple, and it was this conscripted labor that ultimately resulted in the division of the kingdom under Solomon’s son Rehoboam.
[12] 1 Samuel 1—3
[13] Genesis 28:10-22; Bethel is actually in Israel’s territory after the division and is one of the places Jeroboam sets up as a place for Israel to go to worship God instead of Jerusalem. But King Josiah of Judah actually goes to Bethel and defiles the altar there, as a prophet had predicted in the early days of Jeroboam’s reign; see 1 Kings 13:1-2; 2 Kings 23:1-20.
[14] After the kingdom divided, Jeroboam, king of Israel, fearing that the people would still go to Jerusalem to worship and might thus eventually return to Rehoboam, set up other places of worship so the people would no longer need to travel to Jerusalem to meet God.
[15] Jerusalem is, of course, still a holy place not just to Jews but to Christians and Muslims as well; but identification with a place is not the prime source of identity for any of these groups.