Of Containers

Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, 

did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, 

whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying,

 "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"

-2 Samuel 7: 7

This is from one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for this Sunday.  It will probably be like the chubby kid when sides are picked for dodge ball and not get chosen.  I'm certainly not going to turn aside from Angels and Shepherds and Mary pondering things in her heart to preach about Nathan and David having a bad idea.  That's why I have this blog right?

For those of you not familiar with the context of this story, David has the bright idea, after he is all settled in his nice palace, to actually build a temple for God, where they will keep the Ark of the Covenant (yes that Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones movie) and where all the people can come and visit the courts of the Most High God.  David tells Nathan and Nathan thinks it's a super cool idea too, so they're about to go through with it, when God comes to Nathan in a dream and says essentially, "Boy, you two done lost your minds!" 

See, God never asked for a temple, he never really even needed a tent, people tend to feel better about their relationship with God if they have nice buildings where they can meet up.  Temples and tabernacles are like that coffee shop on Friends, where you can be sure that someone will be there.  If you think about it though, it's a silly idea at best, that God would somehow be that localized of a phenomenon.  It's also highly derivative of pagan practices where shrines were built and deities had tremendously specific powers, desires and locations.  The second scroll of Samuel records this story of David and Nathan having their minds changed, but it goes on to allow for the Temple anyway, just it has to be Solomon that builds the thing.  It's one of those places where the Bible is definitely shown to be very much a human document that reflects the understanding of a specific people who were very much culturally and geographically bound to their own way of seeing and understanding God.

A lot of the Hebrew Scriptures work under the presupposition that trying to contain God is a foolhardy enterprise.  From one of the oldest texts, Job, we find God speaking out of a whirlwind and challenging Job to man up and defend the idea that God should somehow justify God's actions to a regular mortal person. Job, confronted with the presence of God, realizes the arrogance of his presumption and repents in dust and ashes.  Moses deals with the reality that the presence of God often makes his life very, very difficult, likewise Elijah and most of the Prophets.  One of the most fundamental mistakes of human beings in these stories, from Abraham, to Moses, to David and pretty much everyone else is to try and make God in your own image, rather than the other way around.

God resists that impulse with the fire of thousand suns.

It doesn't matter how good and beautiful your container is, God will not fit inside of it.  Which is why I always get this sort of strange feeling around this time of year, like I'm a man without a country.  I can't really abide the sweet, sentimental visions of the Christmas story.  Partly because I'm well aware of the darkness that surrounds the light. The world that Jesus was born into was a hard place and his life was vulnerable and in danger before he was even born.  Herod, Caesar, even the respectability of Joseph and Mary's families, are all threats to Jesus ever even drawing breath.

But there is another reason as well, and that reason has to do with the very stories themselves.  It sort of starts with the fact that the Gospels of Mark and John don't really even talk about Jesus' birth at all, and it is at least partly informed by our remarkable talent for idolatry.  These stories open up the truth of the incarnation to attacks from those whose hermeneutics and epistemology seem aimed at proving the Christ to be just another mythological creation or a theological mirage.  There is something about the nature of these stories that is dangerous to us.  You can read all sorts of analyses that "prove" that these birth narratives are really just ripping off the cult of Mithras or something along those lines.  When I read this sort of thing, I understand why God told David and Nathan to cease and desist.  The container will not hold.

What I have come to realize though is that the stories are not the problem, it is our tendency to want them to be rigid and ironclad historical accounts that is the problem.  The birth of Jesus stories, like the Creation accounts in Genesis are really touching and beautiful things, full of mystery and wonder, full of human fragility and God's majesty intimately connected, one to the other.  Embracing this mystery and letting God be free to be wherever God is, rather than trying to lock God up in your special little temple, is the essence of the story.  Jesus is born in an unexpected place, to people who aren't important in any worldly sense.

It is actually our authoritarian and idolatrous impulses that create the very slippery slope that many folks decry.  The argument goes that if you start to pick and choose what parts of the Scripture you believe, sooner or later you won't believe any of it.  I would say that it is rather important to go beyond simply believing or disbelieving and actually get into a living relationship with Scripture.  The people who are least able to actually do this are people who insist on everything fitting neatly inside the lines of what they think they know. Life is messy.  Human life is profoundly messy.

At the end of Luke 2, after the good Doctor has given us all the stories about shepherds and angels and then told us about Simeon and Anna with their visions and oracles, then told of the time that the boy Jesus gave his parents a terrible fright by disappearing only to turn up the temple, in other words, most of the material that we know and celebrate during Advent and Christmas, and which is not well corroborated by history or even other Gospels, it says that "His Mother (Mary) treasured all of these things in her heart."

Some seize on that to mean that Mary was actually the source for Luke's accounts, and that very well might be, but it seems to me that the more important thing about these stories is that they are valued and loved (treasured) for all their mystery and their messiness.  Don't make that old mistake over and over again.  God does not need you to build him walls of cedar or anything else. The Scripture tells us that the goal is for the dwelling place of God to be with us and us with him, Jesus shows us how possible that is, it's a shame that we so easily forget it and try to build the stupid temple anyway.