July 9, 2006
Proper 9, Year B
Christ Church Cathedral
The Very Rev. Mark B. Pendleton

David and Jesus: Two Kings with Different Kingdoms

Summer worship can be a bit sporadic in the non-air-conditioned churches of New England, as many take advantage of the long days and school vacations to get away to the beach if they can or simply take some time off and putter around the house. It is truly a gift to slow down a bit from regular patterns of work and errands and deadlines and truly appreciate these days.

If, by chance, one does miss a Sunday here and there this particular summer, what you would miss is an installment in the rise and fall of King David. As I’ve mentioned before, one of my reasons for challenging us to learn a Bible verse each week over the summer is to make up for something I did not experience as a child growing up. My family were not regular churchgoers, so I did not learn Bible stories at the feet of a beloved grandmother. My grandmother did teach me how to play gin runny in cards and how to make excellent potato pancakes, but no Bible stories. Yet, as a young child I had heard of King David.

The story of David begins with his meteoric rise from a simple shepherd, the youngest and eighth son of Jesse of Bethlehem, to the anointed king and leader of the united Israel. He truly casts a spell throughout the books of Samuel. He is described in surprising detail as “ruddy, with beautiful eyes and handsome.” David is what I would consider a Biblical version of Cary Grant, George Clooney or the Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady – a man desired by women, but one who other men can equally admire and desire to be in his company. David is a war hero, starring in his own David and Goliath story for the ages. In that vivid story that I do remember hearing of as a child, we read how David “put his hand in his bag, took out a stone, slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead, and fell face down on the ground.” (2 Samuel 17:49) Any underdog, whether it be in baseball, soccer, or anyone playing golf against Tiger Woods – or even a well-financed upstart Greenwich millionaire running against a seasoned veteran senator -- will claim the mantle of David, giant slayer. We watch David grow up in these passages.

In the passage we read this morning, David has succeeded in bringing both the southern and northern kingdoms together in the aftermath of the death of King Saul. David would rule for 33 more years from Jerusalem and we read how David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of Hosts, was with him. (2 Samuel 5:10) What we see in this collection of David stories is a society very much in transition, moving from a loose collection of tribes and families vying for power and struggling to survive to a united, organized nation. It is a process not dissimilar from what we are witnessing today in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where there are daily struggles between warring factions, alliances made and broken, where tribal boundaries remain and where any centralized authority is tenuous. As we find ourselves in the third year of the war in Iraq and the fourth in Afghanistan, our customary American need for instant results and measured outcomes often collides in the parts of the world we find ourselves. Historians will argue for generations about the wisdom and the execution of the current war, but what we have come to learn in a very hard and real way is that it takes time, even generations, to build a nation. It took over 200 years after the Exodus for the Israelites to even consider a king. To build a nation takes longer than we can know, and costs more than we can ever imagine.

We ourselves were not always a strong nation. On my reading list this summer is David McCullough’s bestseller 1776, who writes about the early years of the war of independence from England. As we celebrated another 4th of July celebration this past week with fireworks and picnics in relative comfort and peace at home, it is easy to forget how unstable our own society was 230 years ago. We consider ourselves today the world’s only superpower and the richest nation on earth, yet we know it wasn’t always so. Among the points McCollough makes is that at many points in the conflict, the war could have gone either way. George Washington in his private letters was more concerned about the American chances for victory than he let on publicly. But with victory, came a transition from being a colony ruled from afar to being an independent nation.

These many stories of David are well suited to read alongside Mark’s gospel, which uses the term ‘Son of David’ a number of times as another way of saying Christ. Mark is connecting King David with Jesus. The blind Bartimaeus, for example, calls out twice from the side of the road saying “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” From the gospel we read this morning, it is interesting that in Jesus’ mind his hometown is Nazareth, up north in Galilee. It was the people of Nazareth who knew Jesus as a carpenter, not as a healer or a teacher and certainly not as a king, who knew him when he was a young boy, who knew his mother Mary, and his brothers and sisters. It was there where Jesus felt so rejected and discounted. These Nazareth roots make it even more interesting each Christmas how the gospels find it is so important to record the pregnant Mary and Joseph traveling for miles so that the birth of Jesus could take place in Bethlehem. The reason is David. We read how “Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. (LK 2:4)

When Jesus entered Jerusalem and was greeted by the crowds waving palm branches, they shouted, “Hosanna, blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David.” For those who longed for a king in the likeness of David to return Jerusalem to glory and power, they had to be disappointed with Jesus, for though the two men share a family lineage, Jesus rejected the kind of king that his followers wanted him to be. Just as Jesus was rejected in his hometown, and warned the twelve disciples that they too would be turned away on occasion, I think it is important to point to how and why Jesus did not fit in very well with what others were expecting of him.

I think we should be cautious about pushing too far the notion that we know what Jesus would do in every situation. We ask WWJD, “What would Jesus do?” and to a point it is a good and right question. Jesus cared for the poor and so should we. Jesus would forgive, and so should we. But we of course, don’t stop there. We ask: What would Jesus drive? The answer put forth by those who ask: a hybrid car of course and definitely not an S.U.V. What music would he listen to and how would Jesus vote? We have to be careful, because just as in his own day, what people wanted of him did not always match with what God intended for him to be or the message he came to proclaim.

We know that Jesus would never sit on the throne in Jerusalem, that the crown he wore would be made of thorns and not gold. He would not take up arms in battle to defeat foreign powers and make Israel strong again; his idea of being a king meant suffering, dying and rising to new life. Again and again he called for ways of living that would cost any worldly king his throne: a way of living where foolishness is wisdom, poverty is wealth, and forgiveness and loving of one’s enemies is the only form of diplomacy. The Apostle Paul wrote to the people of Corinth in the section we read today, how he is content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ, for whenever I am weak I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:10) That Jesus was a king meant a new kind of kingdom. A kingdom, as described by Stephen Mitchel (The Gospel According to Jesus, pg. 13) that when we find it we “find ourselves, rich beyond all dreams, and we realize that we can afford to lose everything else in the world. That is our hope and our promise.