Preached at Prince of Peace, Wasaga Beach, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Sunday, 14 July.
Readings for this Sunday: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12B-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29
David and all the people with him set out and went from Baale-judah, to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who is enthroned on the cherubim. (2 Sam 6.2)
If I put three theological propositions to you, I’m sure you would agree with the first two. “God is good”: yes, I’m sure we’d all agree to that. “God is love”: ditto, I’m sure. Here’s the third. “God is powerful”. Would you agree? I suspect we’d have to think about that a bit, and would probably want the third proposition to be constrained by the first two, because a powerful God who is neither good nor loving would be terrifying to contemplate.
I’m thinking about the power of God because of a powerful object from our first lesson that was made famous forty-years ago by a major Hollywood movie. Yes, you know the one, made when Harrison Ford, like most of us, was a lot younger. I suspect that for most of the people who watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was their first introduction to the piece of holy furniture that the ancient Hebrews called The Ark of the Covenant.
So for those of us who remember the film more vividly than we do the Hebrew Scriptures, here’s a bit of a refresher on the Ark. When the Israelites were in the Wilderness, God told Moses to build a kind of portable chest which would contain the stone tables on which the Ten Commandments were written (Ex 25:10-22). On top of the ark there was a kind of throne called the Mercy Seat, and the seat was flanked by the golden figures of two angels, or seraphim.
God told Moses that when the Israelites needed instruction, God would speak to the them from above this mercy seat, and God commanded that the ark accompany the Israelites on their journey. So, one way for us to think of the ark is as a kind of portable church which would a focus for God’s people and which would allow them to hear the word of God.
It’s one of the ironies of the film Raiders that the Nazis would want to find and posses the Ark. They think of it as a kind of super weapon, and as one of the characters in the film says, any army that possesses the Ark of the Covenant will be unbeatable. Perhaps the Nazis remembered the story of how the Israelites paraded with the ark around the walls of Jericho for six days, blowing trumpets, and how on the seventh day the walls fell and Jericho was captured (Josh 6:1-14). But, as you may remember from the film, it does not end well for the Nazis!
What the Nazis in the film don’t understand is that the ark has power because it is a place where God is present. God’s power is righteous and just, it doesn’t exist to serve human agendas. In scripture, when bad men try to use it, like the corrupt sons of Samuel who take the Ark to use against the Philistines, they die and the Ark is captured(1 Sam 4.10-11). Likewise it doesn’t go well for the Philistines. They are so tormented by plagues and diseases that they send the Ark back to Israel (1 Sam 5,6). Obviously the Philistines never saw the Indiana Jones movie.
So the Ark can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how people stand with God and whether they follow God’s will. The Ark is full of a God’s power, like one of those electrical transformer boxes with the scary decals telling kids to stay away. In one of the strangest stories from the bible, as David is bringing the Ark to Jerusalem, it starts wobbling on the ox cart and a poor guy named Uzzah reaches out to steady it (2 Sam 6:6-8). Altar guilds today can be eternally grateful that the Ark of the Covenant is not a standard piece of church equipment!
Which raises the question, what happened to the Ark? The answer is, we don’t know. After King David placed it in the Temple in Jerusalem, it stayed there for centuries, but God’s covenant always depended on Israel wanting to be God’s people. When the people pulled away from God, God’s protection was withdrawn, and so Jerusalem was captured by Babylon, and the Ark vanished, lost to history.
The Temple was rebuilt, but it didn’t last either. Jesus told his disciples that he could destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days, which got him in trouble, but as St John says, Jesus was speaking about how own body, which predicted would be destroyed and raised again (John 2:21). That body now exists as the church, the body of all faithful people across the centuries. As St Paul tells us in Ephesians, we are the “living stones” out of which the church is built, with Jesus Christ as our foundation (Eph 2.22).
Now if you look around this church, you won’t see anything like the Ark of the Covenant. Even so, we acknowledge that there is power here. Perhaps you know that praise song, “Sure the Presence of the Lord is in this place”. We sing it at All Saints every Sunday after communion, and the words go like this:
“Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place, I can feel his mighty power and His grace. I can hear the brush of angel’s wings, I see glory on each face; Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place”.
At the conclusion of our Communion service, we give thanks for God’s “power, working in us, which can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine”. But it’s not a scary power. Some of us may bow to the altar as a sign of respect and piety, but the altar isn’t going to strike us down or kill us.
After the Ark of the Covenant was lost, God decided to use God’s power differently, which is one of the ways of understanding the New Covenant. We call this place “Prince of Peace” rather than “Prince of Power” for a reason.
CS Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters that God refuses to use this power to overwhelm us and conform us to his will. Good chooses instead to try to win us as if God was a suitor: “He cannot ravish. He can only woo” (Screwtape Letters Chapter 8).
The price of this self-constraint is that God often appears powerless, and so we wonder why God lets bad things happen. Sometimes it seems like God lets evil triumph, as we see very clearly when we hear about the killing of John the Baptist. John was the cousin of Jesus, he was given the Holy Spirit to preach and to baptize, he was the one who would announce the coming of the Messiah, and yet he’s murdered by a corrupt and sleazy king and his courtiers. How could God let this happen?
Someone once said that just as John announce’s Jesus’ coming, he also predicts Jesus’ death. And just as Herod fears that Jesus is somehow John resurrected, Jesus will, as he predicted, rise in three days. The Spirit of God raises Jesus because it has power over death, the Temple of Christ’s body becomes the church, and the church lives on for two thousand years.
So the good news, my friends, is that we don’t need an ark of the covenant. We don’t need to carry God around in a box, and we don’t need to fear what’s in that box. God’s power is here, in this place, and it is the power of goodness and the power of hope. It’s a power that comes to us gently, like a friend or a beloved’s invitation, and it promises to hold us and never let us go, so that we can be the people of God, in this life and in the next. And for that power, we say thank you, and amen.
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