Sermon

We know that the Ark of the Covenant was possessed of an unspeakable power, the Nazis even believing it held the key to human existence. Only Indiana Jones himself could keep the Nazis from using it to conquer the world, and his mission was to bring it safely into the sphere of Allied power. More intrigue and swashbuckling ensued back in 1936, and if we’re to believe the movie, the Ark is, even today, safely locked up in a warehouse somewhere in a Great Plains state, lost to bureaucratic anonymity.

Or maybe Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t a documentary. Where were you when you first saw that movie? It took me a long time to decide to go see it, because I thought it was about finding Noah’s boat, and I thought, “What’s so big about finding Noah’s boat?” If you Google Raiders of the Lost Ark, the plot synopsis sounds preposterous, but at the time, it seemed incredibly exciting. Do you remember?

The movie exaggerated the powers of the Ark, but they got a couple of things right. The Ark, and what it represented, was both powerful and dangerous, but not weirdly as the movie portrays it. For one thing, ancient Israel experienced the Ark’s unearthly power—to lead them through the 40 years of Exodus wandering, to represent God’s presence in the battles to conquer the Promised Land. For David in today’s story, the power of the Ark lay in what it represented, in its power to unite his people into one kingdom, worshiping in one centralized place.

I’ve got some questions, though, the first being, What made God so mad someone had to die? The oxen only stumbled; it wasn’t catastrophic. Reaching out was probably more like a reflex on Uzzah’s part. Like when your toast falls at breakfast, and you clamp your knees together. That reflex saves the toast from falling butter side down. But Uzzah has to die for his reflex. Did God perceive that as irreverence? The Philistines had moved the Ark around in carts. This was a brand-new, kosher cart. Yes, there was the law that said Levites had to carry it on poles, but the Ark must have been incredibly heavy, covered as it was in gold; a cart made sense. But Holy is also powerful. Residents of one custodial town died because they looked inside. Uzzah was just trying to be helpful, but he was also a priest, so he knew the law about how the Ark was to be transported, and he ought to have known how to manage the riskiness of encountering Holy. The God who strikes Uzzah is as capricious and moody as a certain U.S. politician. Maybe his death was simply the luck of the draw. If you attempt to remove a downed 35,000-volt power line with your bare hands, even to save the life of a child, you’re going to be electrocuted. Electricity is both powerful AND dangerous. And so, apparently, is the Ark.

But I’m still troubled about David. If the problem was transporting it in the cart, why not strike David, who ordered it? Was it sheer exuberance that he danced at the head of the Ark parade? Like Swifties (Taylor Swift fans) who dance in the streets by the thousands, even when the concert gets canceled. Or like fans of the Minnesota Twins who, the year they won the World Series, left their houses and filled the streets to walk miles to the stadium at the end of the game, laughing and partying the whole way (previously prophets and judges had exercised that power). As a literary event, this story signals that God’s power in relation to public power shifts to the monarchy. Is David’s dance gratitude, recognition of the power God has given him, OR is it sheer manipulation, like the extravaganzas we stage at major party conventions nominating presidential candidates?

Consequences are neutral. The power line is down, and your motivation doesn’t matter when it comes to electricity doing what electricity does. Maybe Uzzah’s death is the collateral damage inherent in bringing together religion and politics too closely. What I’m seeing is the complicated interplay between power and the Holy. Israel has been dancing around the edges of using the Ark as a “good luck charm,” a concrete statement of “God is with us,” in the same way the U.S. dances around the notion of, “We are a Christian nation.” David’s own intrigue and conniving have consolidated his power, something God had promised when he was still a shepherd in his father’s household. Carrying into Jerusalem the defining artifacts of Israel’s faith is as political as it is religious.

We often rationalize political shenanigans by saying, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” New York Times columnist David French doesn’t leave our dismissive comment at that. He says that people find it easy to rationalize their quest for power by talking about the good things they will do with power. “I want to bring justice to underserved populations,” they’ll say. And soon enough, justice is reduced to “a thing we do,” and power is the precondition for doing it, rather than the tool by which we do good things. It’s a slippery slope from desiring power to possessing it to hanging onto it. In short, French says, power becomes an idol.

For Christians, French says, our job is to remember the Micah 6:8 command to “do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God.” There’s nothing about the pursuit of power to accomplish this. Post Christendom, the Church has had to face the reality of shrinking political power. The MAGA crowd wants to reverse that trend, but David French points us back to Micah 6:8. The people of God are not called to exerting power over others, nor are we even (he says) called to be influencers. Our call is to DO justice (humbly, mercifully). Humbly, as in “I don’t have all the answers, but I can do the next loving thing.”

What does this power talk and the call to do justice have to do with the Holy? I thought we were talking about Uzzah and King David. By transporting the Ark to Jerusalem as the visible representation of his power, David is prostituting Holy. The role of Holy (I do not speak of its “usefulness”), the role of the Ark as the concrete realization of Holy is as a reminder that personal power isn’t the precondition to doing what we are called to do. During the children’s time, I told the children that Holy refers to the goodness and righteousness of God. When we can recognize Holy, this helps us recognize our place in God’s scheme of things.

This week, my inbox included the offer of a download from one of the Christian Century editors, John Pavlovitz. The title really tickled me: The Kind Humans Survival Guide. I’ve just started to dip into it and found myself delighting to read that story is at the heart of how we become who we are, how we relate to each other in the world, and how we live together peaceably and humanely. I’m not going to do the cynical thing about, “We’ve sunk so low, we need a guide to being kind?” I’ve had “nice” and “kind” on my mind pretty continuously ever since I learned that a Minnesotan (again) was nominated for high public office. Minnesota Nice is a real thing. I think that, as a culture, we are longing for nice and kind and we’re sick of the manipulative emotionalism and shouting that has come to characterize the “national discourse.” Paying attention to where and when Holy impinges on our lives is an essential practice for people of faith.

We don’t have an Ark of the Covenant available to us, Indiana Jones notwithstanding. But we do have visible reminders of Holy all around us. Think of the stained glass window depicting a Black crucified Christ, located in the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Memphis. A gift from the people of Wales, it commemorates the four little girls killed in the 1963 bombing by the KKK. The stained glass asserts, on behalf of the people of Wales, a belief in the unity of the human family, even (and perhaps especially) in times of trial. It is a testimony to the incontrovertible holiness of holy things. There is that of terror in the holiness of things, says Annie Dillard, who writes:

“Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. . . we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”

Maybe humans have a need to experience holiness. To help us remember who we are and whose we are. Royal personages are purported to be holy, which explains the elaborate etiquette with which they are protected. The closest we Americans come to that sense of holy personage is in times of grief. When I officiated my first funeral at Springwater, invoking Holy with ritual and tradition expressed our grief more eloquently than anything else. After the church service, we formed a procession to the cemetery as ceremonious as John Kennedy’s state funeral. The ashes of the departed placed in his horse-drawn buggy, his riderless horse, the grave dug by family, the placement of symbolic tokens in the grave before closing it. The Holy was so grievous.

My husband, Scott, served at Grace Presbyterian years ago. One of the communion service sets used by that congregation was a gift to him from John MacDonald, who had served as an Army chaplain during World War II. The set was Army-issue brass, intended for use in wartime conditions, so not much to look at. It was with him as his company entered the first death camp in Europe to be liberated. After taking stock of the horrors there, the only thing he knew to do was to offer communion to the service personnel who had liberated that place. Men who had seen unspeakable things. He offered the body and blood of Christ in the open air, on the hood of his Jeep, using that nondescript dish and cup and cross. Plain, Scott says, as plain could ever possibly be. And yet, there was, even after 80 years, that of the Holy in it. Not power in the conventional sense and yet, after all that time, still an eloquent expression of humility and human kindness. Eloquent testimony to Holy and its power to bring us to our Maker and ourselves.