Fourth Sunday of Advent
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Luke 1:26-38
December 21,2008

House Building

Over in the Preschool in the fours-and-fives classroom, there’s a big blue plastic tub full of odds and ends which, with a little ingenuity, can become all sorts of things: flying machines, x-ray goggles, moonscapes, and masterpieces so abstract that they would cause Picasso to scratch his head. It’s called the "Junk Art Tub." One Christmas a friend of the school contributed a whole crateful of cardboard toilet paper tubes, and a teacher added two new rolls of masking tape – one green and one red.

Have you any idea how many things you can make with two rolls of masking tape and a whole crateful of toilet paper tubes? The five-year-old mind boggles.

Now, the Preschool works hard to avoid gender stereotypes. I know one boy in that class who regularly dresses up in a cheerleader outfit accessorized by a diamond tiara. He gets on just fine with another boy who likes to bring his Spiderman suit to school – the one with the built-in muscles.

"See? I’m Spiderman. I’m strong. Want to feel my muscles?"

Gender equality notwithstanding, boys tend to build from the Junk Art Tub devices that fire projectiles, explode, or at the very least, blast off.

Apparently it’s been like that for quite a long time. King David was a boy, you will remember: a shepherd boy. He grew up to be the King of Israel, and in the process slew Goliath and a number of other enemies. David was both strong and brave. He felled Goliath with one smooth stone from his shepherd’s sling. That’s almost as impressive as making a disintegrator ray gun out of masking tape and toilet paper tubes.

God loved David, the scripture says, but not because he was strong or because he liked to build things. In some ways David was quite weak. There was, for instance, his affair with Bathsheba and the shameful way David arranged the death of her husband, Uriah. Why God continued to love David after that sordid business, I’ll never know, just as I’ll never know why God continues to love me.

God is like that. God loves us not because we deserve it but because – well because God is God.

Today’s first lesson says that after David had run out of enemies to defeat, he built himself a nice palace out of cedar and decided to do the same for God. He summoned the prophet Nathan and told him, "See now, I’m living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent."

At the time, the closest Israel had to a temple for their God was the Ark of the Covenant, which was just an old box they carried around with them and kept in a tent at night. In other words, their enemies had gods who lived in grand temples, while the God of Israel knocked around in a battered Winnebago. David wanted to do something about that.

I suspect that David’s motives were not entirely altruistic. A grand temple built of cedar would make a good centerpiece for Jerusalem, the capital city David was building. You can’t really be a first-class king without a temple in your capital. "Nathan, you’re on good terms with the Lord. Wouldn’t the Lord like a nice house to live in?"

At first Nathan gave David the nod to build, but that very night in a dream the Lord told Nathan otherwise. "Tell David I never asked him for a house," the Lord said. "If I’d wanted a house, I’d have told him so."

"Tell David I’ll pass on the house, but tell him, I love you just the same. I love you so much that I’ll continue to bless you, just as I have been doing all these years, ever since you were a shepherd boy with no more than five smooth stones and a sling to your name."

In other words, David would have what he longed for: a capital city, a stable kingdom, a place in history. But it wouldn’t be because he was strong or clever or good at building things. It would be because God loved him and had promised to be faithful to him.

"You want to make the Lord a house?" Nathan tells David. "The Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house" (2 Sam. 7:11).

That didn’t mean, of course, that the Lord put on a hardhat and carpenter’s apron to build a literal house for David. It meant that David’s descendants would sit on the throne of Israel. The house of David would endure, resting not on might or power, but on God’s hesed, God’s "steadfast love" that endures forever.

Of course we all know that David’s house did not stand forever in the political sense. His son Solomon did build that grand temple David had dreamed of, but even that didn’t last forever. Bad political decisions and lack of faith brought down the house of David, and Solomon’s grand temple with it. Now that temple lives only in sacred imagination.

But the prophets kept blowing on the embers. No matter how hard life got for Israel, even through years and years of exile, they remembered that promise the Lord made to David. "I will make you a house."

Luke tells us that in the fullness of time, the Lord decided to fulfill that promise, but not in the way most people expected. The Lord decided to build a kind of house. According to John, God’s Word "pitched a tent" among us, reminiscent of the tent that housed the Ark of the Covenant.

Galatians says it another way: ". . .when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law . . ." (Gal. 4:4).

I suppose you could say God built a house of flesh and blood.

Nobody expected God to do that. People thought God would fulfill his promise by sending a new king from the house of David, a king with lots of soldiers and artillery. A king, perhaps, with ray guns and anti-ballistic lasers and all the latest hardware for making peace by waging war.

Or if not a king, then perhaps a priest, whose perfect liturgy would put the world to rights. And if not a king or a priest, then an other-worldly figure from the heavens, backed up by a host of angels with attitudes.

Nobody expected that the way God would build that house would be to come to us as a little baby, tiny and helpless and suckling as his mother’s breast. To accomplish this, Luke says, God chose Mary, the betrothed wife of Joseph, a distant descendant of King David himself. God sent the angel Gabriel with the news:

"The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born to you will be holy; he will be called the Son of God" (Luke 2:35).

A miraculous promise indeed, and a frightening one for a teenage girl who hadn’t even left home or slept with a man. There’s much that’s miraculous in this story, and perhaps the most miraculous element of all is the fact that Mary said "Yes."

"Here am I, the servant of the Lord," she said. "Let it be with me according to your word."

The longer I live, and the more I see of the mess we men have made of the world, the more I marvel at this answer Mary gives the angel. It’s as though she has caught a vision not even the angel had grasped. This child of hers would be a different kind of man, and a different kind of king. His would be different kind of house.

He would put down the mighty from their thrones. He would scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He would fill the hungry with good things. He would show the rich their poverty. He would preach a way that’s narrow, and enflesh a love that reaches wide.

He would be mighty in his weakness, and awesome in his brokenness, and because of him, humanity would see the faithfulness of God, the God who loves us not because we are strong or mighty or worthy, but for the same reason a mother loves her child.

"Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."

The Eastern church knows Mary by an old Greek word, theotokos, It means "God-bearer." Whatever else the gospel of Jesus Christ tells us, it tells us that you and I can choose to be what Mary was, to be God-bearers in the world, to make a place for God in our own flesh and blood, and to bear God’s unexpected presence into a world that wants to be strong, but doesn’t know what true strength really is. We can be part of the house God is building in the flesh and blood of Mary’s boy.

Can the whole world live in this house built by God in flesh and blood? The answer comes from the angel’s own lips, the messenger of the God who keeps promises: "Nothing is impossible with God."

 

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