Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10B), July 14, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
2 Samuel 6:1-15, 12b-19
Psalm 24
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:14-29
St. John the Baptist in Prison, Visited by Salomé, possibly by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.
She despised him in her heart.
Girl, preach.
Michal is a bystander, not meriting much more than a brief afterthought in the story of King David’s accession. But there she remains, in the story. If we don’t include Michal, we won’t have all the story we need.
I have often come back to Michal over the years, in my reflections. She is an aging member of the new king’s growing harem of wives, a has-been daughter of the deposed king, a bit player in a colorful royal drama that still shapes our worldview about leadership, government, humanity, and God.
King David is still leaping and dancing before the Lord, even now. King Charles the Third – consciously or not – borrows ideas and imagery from King David’s world-changing reign. And our own presidential contests carry many of the same dramatic themes forward in our own nation, as we all, like Michal, look out of our windows at our political leaders, and at all their friends and foes, with deepening dismay.
Yes, King David and Michal are still very much among us.
What is a king, or queen? What is any human authority figure? Is a human leader divinely ordained, if not actually divine? Maybe they take on, at the very least, a few attributes of the divine, as long as they manage to look the part, to have the requisite charisma, to be able to pull off an elegant, vigorous dance around the Ark of the Covenant.
But no matter how attractive and alluring our human leaders might be, I wonder if you, like me, are drawn more powerfully to Michal the bystander, Michal the skeptic, Michal the disillusioned observer. She sees through David, and the intrigue of his court. She can predict the trouble that’s coming. She is nobody’s fool.
David claims to be God’s anointed one, God’s favorite, God’s choice; and in his dance around the Ark, David claims God’s power as his own. His dance is a political move, a bold claim, a striking and daring assertion. The Ark of the Covenant is a particular, tangible location of God’s cosmic presence and power. As such, the Ark is a lethally dangerous object, not a toy or a trifle. It represents for God’s people the ineffable, ultimate, beyond-the-universe power of the Holy One. Therefore, if you place the Ark in the center of your new royal palace, you are claiming to be God’s chosen one to reign over all the people of the land: the strongest warrior, the indestructible sovereign, the God-ordained human who reigns at the center of your world.
That’s a shocking thing to say about yourself, even if the personal world you claim to control is as small as your own little household, or your own little parish, or workplace, or neighborhood. And we can hear echoes of this shocking claim of ultimate power whenever our own political leaders say things like, “Only I can do this. I alone am the one who can do this.”
Naturally, given his many triumphs and successes, everyone assumes that David must be God’s favorite, God’s chosen. But David’s people are forgetting something important in this thrilling moment of his accession to the throne. The people are forgetting that God did not want the Israelites to have a human king. God reminded Samuel that God is their sovereign, and furthermore that human rulers do nothing but deprive the people of their crops and livestock and money, and even their spouses and children.
Human rulers impoverish the people and damage the land. God is faithful.
Human rulers level forests. God nourishes and waters the land.
Human rulers degrade their subjects. God lifts up God’s people.
And so, though David seems invincible now, though David seems to be God’s chosen one, though David seems to be the answer, the only choice, the One, this is an illusion. The people, in elevating a human king, will come to grief.
Michal the bystander, perhaps knowing all of this (or at the very least, reminding us readers of all of this) – Michal despises David as he dances around God’s ark. She sees David for who he is: a fallible human being who claims ultimate power as his own.
And then, much, much later in the story of God’s people, there are a few more bystanders who attract our attention. These are the disciples of John the Baptist, looking on helplessly as their leader is executed by another foolish king as part of an evening’s entertainment. Don’t overlook the bystanders in this story of corrupt human authority: after John is beheaded, they quietly come to fetch his body for burial. This is a bold move. Coming forward is risky. It lets Herod’s stooges know that you’re an ally of the executed criminal. You could lose your head, too.
But these disciples share something with Michal, who looks knowingly out her window at the hubris of a new king. The bystanders in both stories have much to teach us.
How often do we find ourselves looking out windows, with growing dismay, as terrible events unfold? We want a ceasefire in Gaza; we want the Russian army to retreat; we want one political candidate or another to do this, or stop doing that; to step up, or step aside. We want massive corporations to stop devastating the face of the earth when we’re already worrying that our planet will become uninhabitable in our children’s lifetimes. We long for an end to factory farming, an end to white supremacist public policy, an end to misogyny and transphobia and — God save us! — an end to the slaughtering of children in wars abroad and shootings close to home.
And of course the shootings don’t just endanger children. They endanger our own King Davids, and King David aspirants, as we saw just yesterday; and they endanger all whose job it is to protect them. When we look out our window, we have many disturbing scenes to contemplate.
We look out our window and despise in our hearts the forces of madness and violence. We look out our window as goodness seems to lose its head under the guillotine of human wickedness and human folly.
And so today we once again proclaim the Good News of resurrection — we truly do proclaim this Good News! — but we proclaim the Good News from Michal’s window. We proclaim the Good News from the shadows of Herod’s court, where John’s followers are lurking in fear, but also summoning courage.
We keep these bystanders in the story, as we catalog the long saga of human folly. The ancient Israelite scribes remembered Michal; the ancient Christian evangelists remembered John’s disciples. They handed these memories down to us. These savvy, brave, nonviolent bystanders have much to teach us.
First, they teach us to pay attention. Michal watches David with keen intelligence, foreshadowing the prophet Nathan, who later confronts the king in his wrongdoing, and sparks authentic remorse in David, who is rightly mortified by his own murderous misbehavior. Michal is the conscience of her people, tapped into the very wisdom of God, silently watching, skillfully observing. Pay attention, Michal teaches us.
Second, the bystanders teach us to remain faithful. John’s followers risk their own necks — quite literally. Their claim of his body is a courageous, prophetic act: they are defiant in the face of casual evil. No, they couldn’t save John from his fate, but their witness inspired generations of the faithful, and teaches us even today — living through our own time of madness and cruelty — to summon courage, to keep the faith, to work together for all that we know is good and right and true.
Additional biblical bystanders — the disciples of Jesus — attend to his remains when he suffers his own state-sponsored execution. They come to his tomb bearing spices: these are the myrrh-bearing women, the original Spice Girls. They are — like Michal, like John’s disciples — exasperated bystanders in a world gone mad. But they watch, pay attention, and remain faithful.
And finally they witness resurrection.
We are God’s people; we are the Body of Christ; as such, we are, often enough, exasperated bystanders. We are, often enough, despising in our hearts so much human wrongdoing. But when we stay, and stay together, and pay attention, and remain faithful, and encourage one another, we then witness resurrection. We see God’s power rising up and defeating the terrible worldly powers of Sin and Death.
So come forward, I invite you, to this Table, this Table laden with nourishment for God’s faithful bystanders. Come with your prayers of lament; come with your rage prayers; come with your fears about all that seems to be falling apart around us. Come and take sustenance, take heart, take courage: we bystanders are here together. And together, led by the Risen One, we will overcome.