Sermon, Independence Day 2021: "The Royalty of Christ is His Weakness"

 

Ben Miller

“The Royalty of Christ is His Weakness”

A Sermon for St. Andrews Episcopal Church (Rapid, SD)

VI Sunday After Pentecost, 2021.7.4

Season After Pentecost: Proper IX (Track 1), Year B

II Sam 5.1-5, 9-10 · Ps 48 · II Cor 12.2-10 · Mk 6.1-13

I want to talk this 4th of July about politics. 

Now that I have your attention, I want to explain what I mean: today’s readings are all about authority and kingship, divine and human, and all the messy ways they interact in this fallen world of ours. This is an unavoidable part of reading the Bible, and thus is it an unavoidable part of being a disciple. I must reiterate: this is an unavoidable part of being a disciple. It is unavoidable because you cannot talk about being a disciple without talking about where your loyalty lies. 

We live in a world that demands loyalty. The means by which we make money demands loyalty. Your culture and its productions demands loyalty. 

Your nation demands loyalty. 

Sometimes this loyalty is demanded loudly with pomp and circumstance. And sometimes it is demanded invisibly, like a would-be lover whispering in your ear as you sleep, that their words may guide you sleeping and waking unawares. And make no mistake that when it comes to politics, our nation desires our love and our loyalty. Our nation is our would-be lover. And it desires more than simple loyalty the way the task of mopping a floor needs our loyalty. It wants love. 

Our nation wants to be like God, creating a covenant with us that we may be, first and foremost, a people who belong to the nation, looking to it adoringly like a kind of Lord and Savior. From childhood, we are told: “If you pledge allegiance that this land, the land we have brutally taken, is the land of the free and the home of the brave, then I promise you I, this nation, will make you a free people and a brave people.” 

That is the covenant this nation wishes to make with us.

It might not feel like a covenant, but that absolute agreement, that absolute, collective identity-defining promise, is just what a covenant is. And of course, there is now a problem. Who reserves the right to make covenants? The God of Israel, who is the only Lord. It is His sovereign right. Because unlike anything else on this planet, and unlike any other human scheme. The God of Israel keeps His promises. He loves us with an everlasting love. 

The strength of this nation, or any entity, that would make covenants in the name of freedom, pales in comparison. 

And this is Scripture’s lesson today: what looks like power in this world is so fragile and subject to human sinfulness.

And what looks like weakness is divine strength. 

Today, on a day of patriotism, we see the temptation of worldly power in the covenant made in II Samuel 5:

(5.3) So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the LORD, and they anointed David king over Israel.

You see, King Saul has just been murdered (you know this because last week, in II Samuel 1, David lamented his death). And now the throne of Israel is vacant. But there are obstacles in David’s way. The former sheep-boy has some cleaning up to do. There will be a slaughtering of the sheep in the house of Saul.  

A war has broken out between the house of Saul and the house of David. David was growing stronger, but not without a fight. 

First David captures the tribe of Judah, but the house of Saul, led by Saul’s heir Ish-bo’sheth and the general Abner, ascends to reign over the other tribes of Israel.

Then the brother of Joab, David’s chief commander, is killed by Abner of the house of Saul. And this establishes a blood feud between the house of Saul and the house of David. 

Then David conspires with that murderer, Abner, to acquire one of Saul’s daughters in marriage so that David could become an in-law claimant to the throne and potentially reign with Abner and establish peace between the warring houses. But Abner is then murdered by David’s general Joab—remember the blood feud!—and then so is Ish-bo’sheth, the other claimant to the throne. Now both rulers over Israel from the house of Saul are dead.

But David still needs to consolidate his position. He thus makes an important political decision: he mourns Abner and Ish-bo’sheth. He thus shows respect for the house of Saul, and even orchestrates the execution of the murderers of Ish-bo’sheth. 

The pasture is clear, and now David the shepherd can take it. And what happens, after this bloodshed, and the political optics on David’s part? The tribes of Israel acquiesce. 

Behold, they say, 

we are your bone and flesh. (5.1)

Do you hear the messiness in this? The blood? The murder? The scheming? The feuds? 

All this in the name of that covenant David makes with Israel at Hebron when he comes to rule at Jerusalem. Imagine Israel’s excitement after this civil war of sorts. “Our nation,” they might say, “is finally at peace!” They can rest easy, can’t they? 

David is now on top of the world! Perhaps literally, according to Psalm 48 today: 

The hill of Zion

the very center of the world

and the city of the great King.

But here’s the rub: the Psalm isn’t talking about David. The king of Zion isn’t David in the Psalm. It’s the Lord GOD. 

This is our clue to understanding the deep ambivalence the Bible has about human rulers. And this biblical ambivalence is squarely centered on David’s kingship. If the LORD, the God of hosts, was with him, as the reading concludes today (5.10), it is in spite of this messiness and bloodshed that the house of David engenders in the war with the house of Saul and in the rest of David’s kingship, not because of it.

It looks like David is secure in his kingship in today’s reading from II Samuel. But he’s not. Because at the end of the day, David’s strength is actually great weakness. It should be gravy for him from here on out. 

But David believes he is living in a fairy tale where the schemes of the politics in which he participated cannot touch him, where he will reign happily ever after. 

And we know what is to happen soon: he will be confronted by this world when he sees Bathsheba, and decides to take her, and then orchestrate the murder of Bathsheba’s husband, and then David’s house will be set against itself. David the shepherd, leading and orchestrating Israel into national covenant with his own power, will become a sheep: he will become a victim of his own sins in a pasture of blood that is the sorry legacy of Israel’s kingship in the Bible. 

I say this because although we are privileged to know this future of Israel’s dynasty and learn from it, David does not. And in reality, we are the David of our own story. We often live as if we can control our futures, as if we are David seated at the throne of our own Jerusalem: comfortable, at home, powerful, anointed, special. But this is foolishness. Our future is so fragile. One day we are enthroned, and another day we weep because with a cruel stroke our house has swept into ruin. 

So I say today, in a day of patriotism: we cannot look to David for examples of divine strength. We cannot look to national pomp and circumstance. We cannot look to the covenant of nationalism. We must refuse such temptations that will lead us into evil.

No, the hard truth is that we must look to Jesus, our true King.

But where are we to look in Mark 6 today? Jesus is just… so unlike David here. 

In II Samuel today, David has come home. a grand homecoming and anointing in Jerusalem. He is comfortable and seated. This looks like power, doesn’t it? And what could contrast more than what it says about Jesus in his own home,

… and he could do no deed of power there… And he was amazed at their unbelief. 

(6.5–6)

No deed of power. Jesus has come into his home, like David, but is powerless and weak. Jesus Christ, the Anointed Son of God, is not enthroned. Not at all! Instead he is forced to wander among the villages! The anointed king David is seated; the anointed Jesus of Nazareth itinerant, a wanderer. Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (Matt 8.20). “A prophet is not without honor except in his home country” indeed. (Mk 6.4)

So. What could we possibly look for in Mark 6 today? The answer is right there: 

And he called to him the twelve… and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 

(6.7)

This is the divine power. 

If it weren’t for the rejection at home and the weak position in which Christ was set forth, he could not have sent the Twelve. And without the Apostles’ own lack, in the midst of Christ’s own lack, the Apostles would not have had the greatest authority this world has seen: the authority to preach repentance, to cast out demons, to heal the sick. 

This is power! This is a royalty of which that David cannot dream. And it has been revealed by weakness. 

My power is made perfect in weakness. (II Cor 12.9)

 

So the Lord tells the apostle Paul today.

It is by God’s royal wisdom that divine power, the power of God by which we live and move and have our being, is displayed most gloriously in our weakness rather than in our strength. In another letter, I Corinthians, the apostle Paul says, 

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. (I Cor 1.27) 

This is glory. This is rejoicing. This is what the Apostles lived and demonstrated today when Jesus sent them out. 

And this is your glory too. Christ’s kingship, his royal power, isn’t just something that corrects the — it empowers us. By the Holy Spirit we are empowered to say with Paul, 

I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. 

(12.9b–10)

And by the Holy Spirit, that same glorious royal power of Christ, we are sent out in the midst of our weakness to achieve the unbelievable. 

We travel and we teach. We discover hospitality and love in the midst of our own lack of possessions and security. We proclaim repentance. We demonstrate and live repentance. We visit the sick. We seek the marginalized and the forgotten. We are commissioned and empowered to do these things in the midst of our weakness. 

And in the wisdom of God, this is how we are anointed as true royalty. In the midst of our own weakness, we are being anointed with the power of God, to become a royal people David could never imagine. And it is all because of Christ our true King, who loves us with everlasting love, reigning from an eternal throne at the right hand of the Father.

Are there thorns in your side that you have struggled with? Rejoice. The power of Christ is waiting to reveal itself in you. And you will look glorious. You will be made fit for a Kingdom not of this world.

Word count: 1951