July 19, 2009 Des Moines
2 Samuel 7:1-14a

Shifting Construction

In the cartoons, they always have a name over the door, a food dish just outside, and the resident contentedly lazing away the day inside, enjoying the view of the day drifting by. In real life, I have never had a dog so much as take a single self-initiated step inside of a backyard doghouse.

I have had lots of dogs in my day, and until the current iteration, they have always spent the majority of their time outside. Partly, I suppose, out of sympathy, and partly because of those cartoon-driven paradigms, I have always generously provided them with a more-than-adequate residence of their own, purchased at what always seemed to me breathtaking expense, given the square-footage accommodated.

But the dogs never went inside of their own free will. I forced them, from time to time. In my younger, more flexible years, I have even crawled inside myself, trying to be a good role model; or at least demonstrate the object of the thing. I cannot, however, even begin to describe the utter disinterest that each of them, in turn, displayed. They wanted no part of the doghouse. Rain storms would come and I would look out in the backyard, confident that I would see a dry little face peering out from within the shelter. Instead, I would inevitably see a miserable little drenched and shivering rat looking creature staring forlornly up at the back door.

Perhaps it was defiance; perhaps a measured and considered preference for the vicissitudes of the great outdoors over the dryer but claustrophobic confines of the shelter.

The City periodically wrings its hands and blusters and finally bulldozes the camps of homeless people that routinely pop up along the river banks like dandelions in the lawn. I feel sorry for the public officials who are caught between hopeless alternatives – damned by an aesthetically-minded public offended by the eyesore of it all if they do nothing, and damned by the sympathetic and compassionate if they do anything. The paper again this week reported on their renewed determination to clear them out and clean it up. There are, after all, shelters for those kinds of folk – why, we helped to create one, after all.

The funny thing about it, however, is that by and large those people living alongside the river don’t want to go. I don’t know all their reasons. A few of them might be there because they aren’t aware of the alternatives. Other might have burned all their bridges back to those shelters, even the most lenient of which have some basic rules the residents have to honor. Some of them probably rather enjoy the role of “public nuisance” – thumbing their noses at the offended and the do-gooders alike.

But my guess is that most of them simply prefer to be on their own, exerting some measure of personal agency and independence, and who loathe the idea of being “cooped up” – quarantined, so to speak, and “kept,” even with the best of intentions. “We don’t really want your kindness, thank you very much. We would rather make our own way.”

Whether it makes sense to those of us who prefer our air-conditioners and 400-thread-count sheets, I am guessing that God understands. God, after all, was once in the position of needing to say “thanks, but no thanks” to an offer of shelter.

God, you might have noticed, has always been a rather mercurial rascal.

· Jesus once described God in terms of the wind that “blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.”

· In the Garden of Eden, God had a way of just showing up, whenever Adam and Eve least expected or desired it.

· Moses stumbled across the Holy emanating from a burning bush, and later, along the path of the Exodus, in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

· Even God’s name is enigmatic: “YHWH” – a form of the Hebrew verb “to be” which can equally be translated “I am who I am,” “I was who I was,” or “I will be who I will be.”

Eventually, God condescends to the shelter of a tent or a tabernacle – a portable structure that could be erected, dismantled, and moved as the situation – and the whim of God – called for it. God, the message was always clear, is a moving God, loathe to be nailed down by a single address.

But King David, newly enthroned after besting the family of his predecessor Saul, and with a charitable initiative born out of the boredom of peace, volunteers to build God a house. “After all,” he thinks to himself, “it’s just not fair that I have this big nice place to live in while God makes do with that drafty old tent.”

How many perfectly contented parents, I wonder, have been dislodged from their familiar neighborhoods and happy homes and relocated to some upscale but somehow sterile new address by well-meaning and successful kids who felt guilty living in a house fancier than those who had raised them?

David shops the idea around to Nathan, the priest, who immediately falls in love with the idea, perhaps anticipating the comforts of a room or two in the new building reserved for him. But, as we read in the story a moment ago, God nips the idea in the bud. “Don’t be treating me like Fido in the back yard, with a leash and a food bowl and a box. I will not be domesticated,” God says to David. “I will not be your lapdog.”

God goes on to recall everything that God’s agility and mobility have and will accomplish for David – taking him from the pasture following sheep to the throne room over Israel; cutting off his enemies, settling the people into peace and prosperity and giving them all rest. But that turns out not to be the end of it. God then shifts the angle of the word, and asserts that while David will not build God a house, God will build a house out of David:

When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.

It is as though God is clarifying that it’s God’s role to shelter us – not the other way around. Our gift to give in return is affection, and honor, and obedient devotion.

Reading over again this story, I think about all the ways that I tend to build a house for God – a house that turns out to be more prison than anything else:

· A Sabbath day, originally intended to remind us that the world does require our agency to keep it spinning – that God is ultimately in charge – has become for many the only day of the week we let God out to run around a little in the yard before being locked back up until next week.

· A building – originally constructed to be a place where the faithful gathered to practice their worship and nurture and equip each other for ministry in the world – become, in the minds of some, the only place where ministry is allowed to happen.

· God, imprisoned in the platforms of the Democratic or Republican party, depending on your persuasion.

· God as a “Red, White and Blue American.”

· God, the ventriloquist dummy on my knee, parroting all my same opinions, all my same biases and prejudices and hungering after all my same appetites, aspirations, and titillations.

· God, the patron saint of “church” as I am comfortable with it.

“Here,” I charitably say to God, “let me build you house. It just isn’t proper for you to be out there among the brutal elements, fending for yourself. I worry about you. Here, let me take care of you, and you can just...take it easy. I’ll be sure and call you for supper.”

God saw through David’s gracious invitation, and declined. “You will not build me a house, but I will build a house out of you.”

And who knows? Maybe this same wild, free-spirited and free-ranging God will do the same with us: make of us a house – perhaps even the likes of which Jesus once described, with many rooms, so that wherever he is, we might be also.