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Joy In The Morning
2 Samuel 6:1-16, Mark 6:6-13
July 23, 2006
Rev. Marcia J. Hauer

As often happens, we came in on the middle of the story today. We came in after all of David’s trials and tribulations had come to an end. He has become the king of all the tribes of Israel. To recap the story: Samuel anointed Saul as the first king of the Israelites. He did it because the people had demanded it and he warned the people that they would be sorry. When Saul fell away, God asked Samuel to anoint another person to be the king. David, the youngest of Jesse’s 12 sons was the one that God wanted. David went to live with Saul following his slaying of the Philistine giant, Goliath. David had a way with the lyre and could sooth the rages and storms in Saul’s mind with it.

Soon David became a favorite of Saul’s but that changed rapidly. David led the troops against the Philistines and won time after time. He rose in the ranks of the army and the people would chant, “David has slain his 10,000 and Saul has slain his 1,000� whenever David was around. Saul was jealous of this attention and began plotting to kill David. As part of the plot, Saul gave his second daughter, Michal, to be David’s wife. Saul thought that if he set her bride price as 100 Philistine foreskins, David would be killed in battle and he would be rid of him. However, David brought the foreskins to Saul and took Michal as his wife. Soon, it became evident that Saul’s campaign to eliminate David was escalating. Michal and her brother, Jonathon (both of whom are described as loving David) helped him to escape. David then fought the Philistines on his own, and made an alliance with them. Saul and Jonathon were killed and Saul’s other son, Ishbaal, claimed the throne. Following some more battles with the Philistines, which David won, Ishbaal lost his nerve and gave up his claims. David then became king of all the tribes of Israel.

As we come to our story today, the Ark of the Covenant had been taken into battle as a symbol that God was in the midst of Israel and the Philistines captured it. It had been with the Philistines for some time when David, at the height of his power, decided to go get it. So he called all the chosen men of Israel to go with him to Baale=Judah and bring it back to Jerusalem. In the process, one of the men, Uzzah, touched the Ark because it was insecure on the cart and God struck him dead. David, then, was afraid to have anything to do with the Ark and left it at Obed-Edom where he and the 30,000 men went to get it. It’s a complex and convoluted story which I commend to your own reading. It begins in 1Samuel 8 and goes on from there.

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PRESENT, EVEN IN THE DARK
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; Psalm 23; Romans 8: 35, 37-39
July 16, 2006
By Rev. Dr. Jeanne Knepper

We’ve received some hard news this week, hard news, and also news of life renewed. It has been a week to tie opposites, sorrow and joy, hope and despair, life and death, together, together is ways that we mostly avoid.

It was not always so. When I was doing research in the Methodist Magazine, looking at the stories of the lives of Methodist women in the early years of the church, I learned that young women, upon learning that they were with child for the first time, often began to sew their grace clothes. In a time before knowledge of sanitation, ultra sound, nutrition, forceps and monitors, the beginnings of life too often walked hand in hand with the ends of life, for mother or baby or both. In fact, for most of human history, life and death have been threads woven all through the human fabric. And religion has been a force to hold them together, reminding us always that the movement from life to death to life beyond death is part of the natural flow of being.

Now, we’ve mostly moved death off stage, to the edges of the fabric, away from us, to nursing homes, hospices, hospitals—or highways and battlefields. We’ve created a different script, a flashier movie to distract ourselves from the realities of death, pain, loss and grief—and we’ve also woven religion into a brighter cloth, bringing the threads of life and wholeness to the front side, and leaving people kind of alone when they find themselves on the dark side of the cloth, feeling alone and unprepared and inadequate when the cloth flips over and wraps them in threads of loss and pain.

Today, we are turning the fabric over, looking directly at the darker side of life:
Hard things happen. Relationships break down. People make foolish and irreparable choices. Tired people say cruel words that can never be recalled. Cancers grow silently until they threaten life. Minds shrink under the attack of strokes and tangle in the knots of dementia. Every life ends. Every relationship ends. Nothing is permanent. We will all experience loss, pain, grief, and death. And our faith will not keep us from this hard reality.

So what difference does it make then, to be people of faith?

All the difference in the world.

All my experience tells me that God—that deepest love that centers and calls all being, that wondrous mystery that calms all fear, the source of all life and peace and joy and hope—God will not end when I die, nor will God be crushed by my times of despair. When I don’t know what comes next, I can trust that God is still there, holding me, preparing me for a future I don’t—can’t—understand, holding me close in the dark. This is a great comfort. Held in the arms of God, we are not afraid.

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