When the Ark Got Parked
Call to Worship
L: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it;
P: The world and those who live in it belong to God.
L: Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and stand in the holy place?
P: Those who have clean hands and hearts will receive blessings from the Lord.
L: We are a company of those who seek the face of the God of Jacob;
P: Therefore, let us prepare for the coming of the King of glory.
—Based on Psalm 24.
PRAISE SONGS This Is the Day # 10
Great is the Lord # 30
Thy Word # 35
GREETINGS
Children’s Time Show the children a pair of cheerleader pom-poms. Ask for a volunteer to stand and show you how the pom-poms are used to cheer a sports team. Quiz the children on why cheerleaders jump around and shout and wave pom-poms. Suggest that it helps the sports fans to feel excited, and united behind their team. Tell the story of King David, who was a true cheerleader for God. Point out that “David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals” (2 Samuel 6:5). Have the children raise their hands if they think that David helped his people to feel excited, and united behind God. Then hand out tambourines and castanets and cymbals to all the children, and have them play their instruments and lead the congregation in a cheer: “Go, go, God! Go, go, God!” Have the congregation applaud the children for being their cheerleaders for God.
Hymn Give Thanks with a Grateful Heart # 496
INVOCATION /LORD’S PRAYER Gracious God, thank you for sending your Holy Scripture to us this morning. Let it be like a song in our hearts, a song that sticks with us, a song that we find ourselves humming long after we have left here. Let it be a song that changes us and makes us yearn for the fulfillment of your will among all peoples. ///
Living God, you invite all your people into the dance with you. It is a dance of praise, a dance of creativity, a dance of justice and a dance of rejoicing. We’re not always comfortable dancing in public; sometimes we feel self-conscious about the way our bodies look, and other times we feel we should present a more serious image to the world. Help us to overcome our reservations and to give ourselves wholeheartedly to your dance. Help us to feel you dancing with us and to teach the dance to others. In the name of the Lord of the Dance, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
praise
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SPECIAL MUSIC Kevin Clark, trumpet
Offering
Hymn I Know Who I Have Believed # 493
Scripture text 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19 The Ark Brought to Jerusalem 1 David again brought together out of Israel chosen men, thirty thousand in all. 2 He and all his men set out from Baalah of Judah(Kiriath Jearim) to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the name of the LORD Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim that are on the ark. 3 They set the ark of God on a new cart and brought it from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the new cart 4 with the ark of God on it, and Ahio was walking in front of it. 5 David and the whole house of Israel were celebrating with all their might before the LORD , with songs and with harps, lyres, tambourines, sistrums and cymbals.
Sermon When the Ark Got Parked
Whether picking up the ark of God or changing a church, it is essential to seek God’s will and be constantly conscious of his presence.
In most cases, church-changing is controversial. Change always is. The question isn’t, “Should we do this?” The question is, “Is this what God wants?”
Whose idea was it when King David took 30,000 raiders to bring the lost ark of the covenant from the thieving Philistines back to Jerusalem? Was it David’s or was it God’s?
The Bible is ambiguous about who made the original decision. There’s no record that God requested a change in venue. “Let’s go get God and bring him home!” was David’s idea. That it was successful was God’s doing. /// David’s achievement in creating the united kingdom of Israel rested on a number of factors, his military skill chief among them, and it was through a number of victories against Israel’s nearby enemies (especially the Philistines; 2 Samuel 5:17-25) that he was able to bring both relief from external threats and consolidation of his own power within and among the twelve tribes. Those expeditions (e.g., 1 Samuel 30:1-20; 2 Samuel 5:1-10) lay behind the word “again.”
One of David’s most important early tactical decisions was to make the ancient Jebusite city of Jerusalem his capital (2 Samuel 5:6-12), a political decision that was reinforced by the religious decision to bring the ark into the citadel that became known as “the city of David” (2 Samuel 5:7, 9; 6:10, 12, etc.). The force that David assembles sets out to bring up the ark from Baale-judah, another name for Kiriath-jearim, a village approximately eight miles northwest of Jerusalem. The fortunes of the ark, recounted most extensively in the so-called “Ark Narrative” of 1 Samuel 4-6, had included its capture by Philistia (1 Samuel 4:11) in one of the periodic battles between Israel and its neighbors on the plain between the Israelite hill country and the Mediterranean Sea. // The Philistines had experienced a devastating outbreak of tumors (probably bubonic plague) during the ark’s seven-month Philistine captivity, and in desperation they released the ark with guilt offerings and let it be returned to Israel by an unmanned cart pulled by nursing cows (1 Samuel 6:1-12). The ark was lodged first at Beth-shemesh, about 20 miles west of Jerusalem, but then remained for some 20 years in the house of one Abinadab of Kiriath-jearim, whose son, Eleazar, was consecrated for its service (cf Joshua 15:9; 1 Samuel 6-7:2).
No reason for David’s decision to bring the ark to Jerusalem is given in the text, but the reason is clear: Having consolidated political and military power in Jerusalem, David needs also to consolidate religious power, which continued to play an important role in the life of ancient Israel. Prior to the construction of the temple (which David sought but was unable to build), the ark was the most important religious artifact in Israel, symbolizing the Lord’s presence on earth among his chosen people./////////////////
On the way back home, God clearly says to David, “I’m in charge here.”
What happened was this: At one point, an ox shook the Ark of God. Uzzah, trying to be the good guy, reached out his hand to steady it. But Uzzah wasn’t a Levite, and only Levites got to touch the ark, so Uzzah perished on the spot - a turn of events that so infuriated David, that he washed his hands of the whole affair, left the Ark with Obed-edom, a local fellow and went back to Jerusalem. //////////////
When he heard that Obed-edom was greatly blessed by the presence of the Ark, David reconsidered.
To recap: David got angry when it looked as if he weren’t in control. Then he got scared. Then he remembered for whom he worked, and then he let God be God. ////
The entire story is a parable on how to invite, welcome and celebrate the presence of God. /////
Settling on a decision without seeking the will of God is an easy mistake for a church or a person to make. That’s the first thing to remember. Before the pledge cards get printed, before the color rendering of the new facility is drawn, before the new pastor arrives, you better all be comfortable that this new endeavor is in the will of God. It doesn’t matter whether it’s switching the hymnals, changing the hour of worship, shifting denominational ties or moving the church. We often forget who is in charge. When we are reminded, we, too, might be angry, or fearful, and be tempted to quit in frustration.
But frequently, change is precisely what God wants of us. There’s no record that God objected to the transfer of the Ark of the Covenant, a very real symbol of the abiding presence of God, from the Philistines to Jerusalem - even if it was David’s idea. But we can’t presume to limit God.
Perhaps that’s the second lesson here. Change has to happen in God’s way. Uzzah attempted to minister where he clearly was out of his league. In doing so, he reaches out with his hands and pushes against, constrains, attempts to keep level, // attempts to keep God in his box. Catch the visual image here. His was such a limited and narrow view of God, that he must’ve believed that God couldn’t take care of himself. // God can //-// take care of himself.
Then, it’s also significant that David prepared a new cart (6:3) in preparation for welcoming the presence of God in Jerusalem. True, his plan was foiled by Uzzah’s mishandling of things, but David can’t be faulted for a willingness to create a new vehicle to welcome the presence of God.
Finally, David wasn’t afraid to celebrate the presence of God in wholly flambouyant colorful and daring ways.
The bull was sacrificed. The fatted calf was slain. The trumpets were blaring, the people were shouting.
And David, clad in a linen ephod, was dancing. With change comes opposition. With change comes scorn. Not everybody will be pleased with change, even when God is involved. ////
David’s celebration was before the Lord.
When God is in the house, it calls for celebration. Worship too often has ignored or dismissed the celebratory nature of the people of God gathered in the presence of God. When God is present with us, it is cause for great celebration!
Take the true case of two brothers a century ago in Maine who owned a home on the eastern side of Lineken Bay.
The brothers wanted to move that home from the eastern shore to the western side.
One very cold winter the bay froze deep and solid. These two brothers jacked up that house, put it on skids and dragged it with oxen to the edge of the bay.
Each day they would walk out a couple dozen yards from that house, they’d drill a hole in the ice, place a ship’s anchor in the hole, tie a line to the home, and using a block and tackle, would winch and inch the house westward.
When the sun set and the night rose they’d hike home. They’d eat dinner, go to bed, sleep peacefully, rise with the winter sun then repeat the process.
All season that house sat and slid and sat and slid across the bay, and each day they hauled it closer to the new shore.
Before the spring thaw, they placed it on its new foundation.
These men had faith in God, tried some new ideas, worked hard for their success and no doubt celebrated when they were done. (Story told by Max Tibbetts, ship’s engineer, stone sculptor, storyteller and seaside hermit.)
When we let God be God, when we remember that God doesn’t need our protection, when we replace our old carts with new ones, and when we take to some dancing in the presence of God, we’ll get a scolding by some, but we’ll know what it’s like to be in the presence of God. Remember for whom you work, and then let God be God.
Participation Pointers:
• This service cries out for celebration and dancing! Prepare ahead of time (several weeks, if not months) for interpretive and liturgical dancers to be a part of your worship experience. If you do not have anyone within your congregation who can provide this experience, contact a local seminary, or perhaps another church in the area who may have a team or even one or two people with experience in liturgical dance. Invite them to share their gifts during this service.
HYMN Wonderful Grace of Jesus # 497
Benediction
Commentary
The ark was an object of great veneration, surrounded by an aura of sanctity that precluded all but the specially authorized from coming into contact with it; violation of its sanctity, even by accident, resulted in death (2 Samuel 6:6-7).
Animating Illustrations
Dakota Wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in the church we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:
• Changing riders
• Buying a strong whip
• Trying a new bit or bridle
• Moving the horse to a new location
• Riding the horse for longer periods of time
• Saying things like, “This is the way we have always ridden this horse.”
• Appointing a committee to study the horse
• Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses
• Increasing the standards for riding dead horses
• Creating a test for measuring our riding ability
• Comparing the state of dead horses today
• Complaining about the state of dead horses today
• Coming up with new styles of riding dead horses
• Blaming the horse’s parents
• Tightening the cinch
• Declare that this horse is not dead and ask others to believe it, too!
• Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed
• Trying to resuscitate the dead horse
• Praying for the dead horse to be resurrected.
—Source unknown.
Nothing endures but change.
—Heraclitus (540 - 480 B.C.).
We’re ministers on turntables. I can’t make you believe, but I can make you dance yourself closer to God.
—Frank Horvath (DJ Frankie Vibe) on Christian raves, quoted in Rev., January-February 2003.
Sometimes when we get a leader who wants to lead us into the presence of God, we don’t want to go.
A Boy Scout showed up at a meeting with a black eye.
When his scoutmaster asked him what had happened, he replied that he had tried to help a little old lady across the street.
“How in the world could you get a black eye doing that?” asked the scoutmaster.
“She didn’t want to go,” the scout replied.
Sometimes I think I have lost my head, devoting so much of my ministry to dance as a way of prayer and worship. For years I have heard the jokes, the critiques and the condemnations. And yet I cannot ignore the scriptural exhortation to “praise God with timbrel and dance” (Psalm 150).
Our bodies are our way of being in this world and our way of responding to God’s overtures of love. And yet there are many negatives that influence our body images. Size, shape and sexuality are just a few. The work I have done in enabling people to claim movement and dance as a form of prayer has made a difference in the way people see themselves and their being with God. For this reason, I am amazed at the negative reaction to liturgical and sacred dance. Through dance — whose intention is to give praise, reverence and service to God — the person affirms his or her body as a gift from God.
—Robert Vereecke, “Shall we dance?” America Magazine, March 25, 2002, 12-14.
Most people are willing to change not because they see the light, but because they feel the heat.
—Unknown.
In 1999 it became necessary to move the 208-foot-tall Cape Hatteras lighthouse to a location more than a half-mile away. The lighthouse weighs 4,830 tons and had to be moved in one piece in its upright position. How was this achieved?
The use of cranes was impractical, and the actual technique used was very similar to that ascribed to the ancient Egyptians. First, the lighthouse was undercut and shored using timber .... One hundred hydraulic jacks were installed on rollers to slide along steel track beams placed beneath the lighthouse. A road was made by compacting the natural sands, overlaid with crushed stone and finished with steel mats. Five hydraulic push jacks slowly shoved the lighthouse along the track beams in five-foot increments. The track was lubricated with soap shavings to reduce friction. The move, from start to finish, took 23 days.
—“Moving the Cape Hatteras lighthouse,” Moving Large Objects Web site, Catchpenny.org/movebig.html. Retrieved February 26, 2003.
In the mountains of Tennessee they have a type of religion in which people get saved in the spring, grow cold in the summer, backslide in the autumn and fall away completely in the winter: Then they get saved all over in the spring revival.
A story goes that the revival had gone on about 10 days, and people knew it was nearing its climax. A certain man came into the meeting and sat in the back row. The next night he moved halfway toward the front. The third night he was sitting in the front row. The fourth night he broke out in prayer, “Lord, fill me!”
Over to one side there was a woman who knew the man well. She cautioned the Lord, “Careful, Lord! He leaks!”
—Source unknown.
Fast Company magazine reports on a new book in their September 2002 issue: Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values and Defining Moments Shape Leaders. Authors Warren Bennis and Robert J. Thomas coin a new word for old leaders: “neoteny.” It is defined as “the retention of youthful qualities by adults,” and it explains why geezers keep winning. The secret of senior leaders isn’t OLD experience, but is instead a playful, fearless approach to NEW experiences.
King David had neoteny. Do we?
Churches can be a hint of something long gone — the Evangelische Kirche in a neighborhood where no one has spoken German as the language of daily life for 50 years. Or they can be signs of new arrivals — the cavernous Baptist church now living inside the skin of an old synagogue, stained-glass windows with a Hebrew Ten Commandments testifying to another life.
These critical institutions were witnesses to all the changes of a corner of the city, from optimistic beginnings amid growing prosperity when the cornerstone was laid, to decadent old age, or polished marble now echoing with prayers offered up in unfamiliar new tongues. The church often missed the change offered by history, to be the glue for a neighborhood in crisis.
—Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood — What We Lost In The Great Migration: 1966-1999 (The Free Press, 1999), 46.
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.
First, we need to come to grips with the epochal change as our culture transitions from a modern world to a postmodern world. Second, we have to come to terms with the fact that we live in a post-Christian culture. This means we have to approach our culture with a missionary strategy as though we were presenting the gospel for the first time. Christian faith thrives in this kind of situation and provides us with wonderful ministry opportunities.
—Pastor Brian McLaren of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Washington, D.C., area, quoted in Liaison, Spring 2001, 1.
This is how to move the church:
It was an extraordinary scene, even for South Africa: an angry black crowd sensing betrayal, a car turned upside down and set afire, and Bishop Desmond Tutu, in purple clerical robes, moving through the people to wave them off a gasoline-doused man — a black man — who, were it not for the bishop’s intervention, would now surely be dead.
The crowd in Duduza accused its victim of being a police informant. For this he would be dealt with as have been many of the township councillors, deputy mayors and the like: hacked to death or set afire — deeds seen as fit punishment for turning against one’s own. Bishop Tutu and Bishop Simeon Nkoane were moving in the crowd, gesturing urgently without laying on a hand. “This undermines the struggle,” Bishop Tutu cried, acting out his philosophy of nonviolent resistance at extraordinary personal risk.
This is the same Bishop Tutu who confronted a large, white policeman beating an elderly black man with a stick and held a cross aloft until the beating stopped. In late 1981, a black crowd at a funeral attacked another suspected informant, and Bishop Tutu flung himself across the victim, persuaded the attackers to back off and then led a service wearing clerical robes soaked with the man’s blood.
—Thanks to Wesley Taylor, Tualatin United Methodist Church, Tualatin, Oregon.
The church is: a conspiracy of love for a dying world, a spy mission into enemy-occupied territory ruled by the powers of evil; a prophet from God with the greatest news the world has ever heard, the most life-changing and most revolutionary institution that has existed on earth.
—Peter Kreeft.
In the final analysis there is no solution to man’s progress but the day’s honest work, the day’s honest decisions, the day’s generous utterances and the day’s good deed.”
—Clare Booth Luce.