Fourth Advent                                                                               Luke 1:26-38
December 21, 2008                                                                      2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16-17
Duane Shank                                                                                 Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26

The Freedom of God

Advent always creates a problem for me. The texts, year after year, are essentially the same. And I struggle to find something to say that hasn’t already been said thousands of times.

I know the lectionary wants us to focus on the Annunciation – the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary and telling her she would conceive and bear a son. The readings from the Hebrew Bible are to create the context. 2 Samuel tells of God’s promise to David that his house, his kingdom, will be established forever. The Psalm is David’s hymn of thanks and praise to God for that covenant promise. Then in Luke, the angel tells Mary that God will give the throne of David to her son, who will reign forever.

It’s a neat little package to establish that Jesus is the heir to his ancestor David. A package that shows he is the promised Messiah. A package that helped establish his legitimacy to the first century Jewish readers of the gospel. We could do an entire reflection on that.

Or, given the political leanings of this Community, we could reflect as we have done before, on the significance of God choosing an unmarried young woman in an occupied and oppressed country to be the bearer of his son. That is indeed worth remembering.

But last week, sitting at Celeste and Josiah’s kitchen table on a fourteen degree day in Chicago, my thoughts took a different direction. I was reading and pondering the texts, re-reading Hayley’s sermon from the first Sunday of Advent on the “season of waiting,” and reading Yonce’s from the second Sunday probing the significance of time. And, I was struck by the passage from Samuel. So, I thought I’d take another step down that road.

Let’s first look at the context.

Second Samuel begins with the death of Saul and David settling in Hebron, but with a continuing war between the House of Saul and the House of David. After ruling from Hebron for seven years, David marched on Jerusalem and took the city, consolidating his kingdom. The king of Tyre sent cedar and carpenters to build a house – a palace – for David. With his house, David perceived that “the LORD had established him king over Israel.” He brought the ark of the LORD into the city and set it in a tent, followed by a huge celebration with food, trumpets and dancing. Then comes the text from chapter seven.

After he’s settled in his house, David feels guilty – I have this grand house and God is still in a tent. That can’t be right. Nathan the prophet seems to agree. But that night, God gives Nathan a message for David – since I brought you out of Egypt, I have never lived in a house, I have been “moving about … among all the people of Israel.” Why do you want to build me a house? Did I ever ask for a house?

Reflecting on this story brought to mind two points that continue our Advent conversation.

First, don’t try to put God in a place, to capture him and tame him.

Walter Brueggemann, in The Prophetic Imagination, explores the meaning of “the freedom of God.” In countering the gods of Egypt, he writes, Moses led the way in developing an “alternative religion of the freedom of God.” But he continues, by the time of David and Solomon, a contradictory social vision was established

“…a controlled, static religion in which the God and his temple have become part of the royal landscape, in which the sovereignty of God is fully subordinated to the purpose of the king. … God is now ‘on call,’ and access to him is controlled by the royal court.” (34, 35)

The building of the temple, a house for God, was the royal attempt to limit God’s ability to move about among the people, to control God’s freedom by controlling the people’s access to God. It is the natural urge of every religion that becomes an institution with a priesthood, a hierarchy, a prescribed set of rules and rituals. The demands of preserving the institution take precedence over the free wind of God’s spirit.

And I suspect for each one of us there is the reverse - the temptation to want to control God’s access to us. Rather than being open to the God who moves about among us, our human tendency is to want control, to do things our way; rather than waiting to allow a free God to speak to us.

But especially in Advent, as Hayley reminded us – “What happens if you give yourself the space to breathe, not act, to wait and see what the will of God is? … In the dark of the waiting season, I urge you to wait, watchfully – be witness to what is happening among us and around us …”

And in that watchful waiting when we give up control and listen, we will feel the presence of God moving about among us. Speaking to us in new ways.

Second, in the busyness of our lives, we need to create sacred time for the presence of God. It’s the alternative to trying to control God in a place.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in The Sabbath of “holy time.” He notes that the first use of the word “holy” in the Bible comes in the story of creation: “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” He says:

“This is a radical departure from accustomed religious thinking. The mythical mind would expect that, after heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy place – a holy mountain or a holy spring – whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first. ... The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called to share in what is eternal in time …” (9)

Yonce spoke about being aware of the past, the time until now; and the time to come, and noted that “God is present at the same time in both history and moment; in both revelation and relationship.”

The last time I shared with you, I mentioned the joy of having time on vacation to read and reflect. One of the books I read this summer was a gift from a Rabbi friend with whom I am in a continuing dialogue. He sent a copy of The Lonely Man of Faith, by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, and implored me to drop whatever else I was doing and read it. I didn’t quite accomplish that, but did read and re-read it several times a few weeks later. It’s a short book, only 106 pages, but one of the most profound I’ve read. He writes about the inherent paradox between our mandate from God to live in creation, and our mandate to live with him in covenantal community. It is that paradox, in which we can never be fully at home in either, that creates the existential loneliness of faith.

In his reflection on the covenantal community, he writes about the experience of time, of prayerfully waiting for God to speak. And in that time,

“… all boundaries establishing “before,” “now,” and “after” disappear when God the Eternal speaks. Within the covenantal community not only contemporary individuals but generations are engaged in a colloquy, and each single experience of time is three-dimensional, manifesting itself in memory, actuality, and anticipatory tension. This experiential triad, translated into moral categories, results in an awesome awareness of responsibility to a great past which handed down the divine imperative to the future generation in trust and confidence and to a mute future expecting this generation to discharge its covenantal duty conscientiously and honorably. … Thus, the individual member of the covenantal faith community feels rooted in the past and related to the future.” (68-69)

It is an awareness of the generations who came before us. I think of my parents and grandparents and even further back - the faithfulness they lived and handed down; the present with its challenges and opportunities; and the future when we will live in the fullness of God’s kingdom. And the awareness of the ever-faithful God who allows us to live in the continuum of time, this now but not yet. The Advent season, when we wait for the coming of the Christ and for the ultimate reign of God.

As we give up our attempts to control God and wait in that sacred time for God to move about and speak to us; as we reflect on the past, present and future movement of God; we may find that God will take us in new and unexpected directions. Thanks be to God.