Our main text this morning is a sequel—and not the blockbuster kind, but the kind that comes out a decade or two later because the first one wasn’t all that popular. In this case, we’re going back to 1 Samuel 4-6 to complete what some scholars refer to as the Ark Narrative. If you were here at the beginning of June, you remember that in 1 Samuel 3 God gave Samuel a word of bleak judgment for his mentor Eli. In chapter 4, that judgment hits like a sledgehammer—and it happens because Eli and his sons have not discipled the elders of Israel well.
Israel is going into battle against the Philistines, because of course they are, and the leaders of the nation decide to bring the ark of God (which is referred to elsewhere in scripture as the ark of the covenant) from the sanctuary at Shiloh to the battlefield. This is classic magical thinking, which is to say it’s pagan thinking: the ark is a divine object which has powers which they can use to help them win. It’s terrible theology, and it shows a lack of respect for—or even awareness of—God’s holiness. They are treating God as someone they can use to accomplish their own purposes. The result is utter disaster: the army of Israel is routed, the sons of Eli are killed . . . and the ark is taken by the Philistines. When Eli hears, he falls backward, breaks his neck, and dies. His pregnant daughter-in-law hears the news, goes into labor early, and dies in childbirth; she lives just long enough to name her son Ichabod—i-kavod, which means “no glory”—saying, “The glory has departed from Israel.”
Now, the capture of the ark is a loss for Israel, but no win for the Philistines, for a similar reason. Where the Israelites’ pagan thinking led to a lack of respect for God’s holiness, that of the Philistines produces a lack of respect for his power. They have captured the sacred thing of Israel’s god; by their understanding, that must mean their victory on earth was the result of a victory in heaven by their gods over Israel’s god. The thing to do with the ark, then, is to represent and honor that victory in heaven by taking it into one of their temples and setting it before the image of the god. So they do, taking the ark to Ashdod (one of their five main cities) and placing it in the temple of Dagon.
Again, the result of pagan thinking is disaster. The next morning, the Philistines find the statue of Dagon flat on its face before the ark. They set the statue back on its feet—and then the next morning, they find the statue has fallen on its face again before the ark, except this time the head and hands have broken off and are lying in the doorway. What’s more, the Philistines are hit by bubonic plague and overrun by rats, first in Ashdod and then everywhere else they try moving the ark, until the people beg their rulers to send the ark back to Israel before they all die.
So, the Philistine elders ask their religious leaders what to do; and here, finally, someone shows God a little respect. The priests say, “Don’t send it back without a guilt offering—five gold tumors and five gold rats for the five cities. Put them on a new cart with the ark. Take two cows that have never been yoked, take their calves away, and hitch them to the cart. If they head off to Israel, you’ll know Israel’s god did this to us. If they act like normal cows, this is all just coincidence.” The rulers do as they’re told, and the cows make a beeline for the border, mooing all the way and not stopping until they reach the Israelite city of Beth-shemesh.
The people of Beth-shemesh respond with delight, offering sacrifices to God for the return of the ark. They, too, however, take the holiness of God too lightly—maybe, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, they open it to look inside—and God kills seventy of them. They cry out that God is too holy for them to face and send it away, to Kiriath-jearim. The people there give the ark into the care of the family of Abinadab, apparently a Levitical family, consecrating his son Eleazar to watch over it . . . and there it sits, through Samuel’s judgeship and the reign of Saul.
In our text this morning, David has become king of Israel and is busily consolidating his position. This is why he has taken Jerusalem, making it his city and his capital. He has routed the Philistines, showing he’s still the great military leader the people of Israel remembered. Now he sets out to make the next logical move to consolidate his power: bring the ark of God to Jerusalem, making his city also God’s city. Note this very carefully: nowhere does the text say God told him to do this. It may well be what God wants done—in fact, I think we can safely say it is—but that’s not why David is doing it. It’s his idea, and he does it his way.
If you didn’t know any better, his way would look pretty good. Like the Philistines, he has the ark placed on a cart which has never been used; he brings along two of Eleazar’s brothers, Ahio and Uzzah, to guide and watch over the cart. David leads the procession as a worship service, with all those on the road making music and praising God. Again, that would look pretty good . . . if you didn’t know that God had decreed the ark was to be carried on long poles by members of one of the priestly families. It was fine for the Philistines to load the ark on a new cart, because they were pagans who didn’t know any better. It was not fine when Israel did it, because Israel did know better, and God expected them to act accordingly.
So, once again we have people doing things in God’s name without bothering to do what God actually said. Once again, that lack of respect for God brings calamity. The oxen stumble, the cart tilts, and the ark begins to fall; and Uzzah, walking alongside, reacts the same way he would if any other cargo were falling—he puts out his hand to stop it. I’m not sure how much we can blame him, to be honest; he surely knew he was forbidden to touch the ark, but that’s conscious knowledge, reaching to stop something from falling is reflex, and reflex is far faster than conscious thought. To have held himself back and let the ark land in the mud, he would probably have to have been thinking about that possibility and preparing himself for it. Maybe he should have been. His family had been consecrated to have charge of the ark, so it’s safe to say he knew the ark shouldn’t be carried on a cart; the ark falling was a sign, God’s way of bringing the proceedings to a halt as a logical consequence of its being moved in the wrong way, and maybe Uzzah should have seen that coming. But if he didn’t, is that really his fault?
Uzzah takes the hit, but the primary responsibility rests on David. He put the whole sequence in motion without consulting the Lord. He allowed the ark to be carried on a cart pulled by oxen, rather than on poles resting on the shoulders of Levites, as the Torah specified. Was it his idea? I don’t know, and I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter. He was there, and he was king. If he had wanted things done to God’s specifications, they would have been. They weren’t, and that’s on him.
Once again, God’s holiness has been taken lightly by his people, once again, that has resulted in tragedy, and once again, the response is to back away from the ark. David is angry at God, but he’s also afraid. He has had a very close relationship with God over the years, but now he’s overstepped the mark; he moved from closeness to presumption, taking it for granted that God would bless whatever he did because that’s just how God treated him—and for his presumption, one of his people has paid the price. So has David, in a way, as he’s been humiliated before his people; one certainly hopes he cared much less about that than about Uzzah’s death, but I think the fact of his humiliation is actually important, as we’ll see in a moment.
As before, the ark is placed in the charge of a family, probably another family from the priestly tribe of Levi, the household of Obed-Edom. The Lord blesses Obed-Edom and his whole household conspicuously enough that after three months, David resolves again to bring the ark to Jerusalem. This time, he does it God’s way: the ark is carried on long poles as the Law required. After its bearers have taken six steps, David offers a sacrifice to God, presumably both thanking him that they have begun the journey and asking his blessing for the rest of it. Most interestingly, David is wearing a linen ephod—not kingly garments, but the simple clothing of a priest. He leads the procession again, but not as a victorious king celebrating his triumph; instead, he leads it as a worshiper, dancing before the Lord with no, pouring out his soul and holding nothing back, all the way into Jerusalem.
And as he enters the city, his senior wife, Michal, sees him and despises him. We should take a moment here to see her with compassion, because her married life has been an utter trainwreck. She married for love, then saved her new husband’s life by helping him escape from her father, King Saul—who then berated her for betraying him. Since David had left the court, Saul married her off to someone else instead. After Saul’s death, when Abner went over to David’s side, he forcibly took Michal away from her second husband—who seems to have loved her—because that was David’s price for accepting Abner’s allegiance. When she sees her first husband again, she finds him with six other wives, who have borne him six sons (and presumably some number of daughters). Whatever she felt for him once, he is now the man who has overthrown her father, and the reason her father and brother are dead. She is clearly estranged from David and thoroughly embittered, and she has plenty of reason to be.
All the same, her position and posture deserve condemnation, and the author of 2 Samuel highlights the reason by referring to her—three times!—as the daughter of Saul, never the wife of David. She has chosen her father’s side against her husband, and even if that’s understandable, it also means she has taken her stand against God. She regards David with contempt for not being like Saul. Rather than holding himself aloof from the people, he is out leading the parade as one of them. Instead of guarding and valuing his dignity, he has set it aside completely to worship the Lord with all his might. He is not acting like the proud, brave warrior who killed 200 Philistines for the privilege of marrying her, and she despises him for it; and as soon as he’s in range, she lets him have it with both barrels. She lashes him with sarcasm for acting like a commoner. She dismisses and belittles his worship, accusing him of showing off for the slave girls. And, interestingly, she completely ignores the ark of God.
From David’s point of view, he comes home on a spiritual and emotional high, and he’s ambushed out of nowhere. It’s no wonder he strikes back. His immediate response is shameful, if understandable: he aims his words where they will strike deepest and hurt worst, twisting the blade in his wife’s heart. Even in so doing, however, he speaks nothing but the truth, that it was God who took the kingdom away from Saul and his line and gave it to David.
The defense of his behavior which follows is honorable and praiseworthy. Michal has condemned him for acting in an undignified manner—David turns her accusation to affirmation, for nothing is more important than worshiping God wholeheartedly. “I will become even more undignified than this,” he declares, “and I will humiliate myself in my own eyes.” What God did to him, humiliating him in the eyes of the people and his own, he now willingly does for God; but Michal doesn’t see (or care) that only that willingness made this victory possible.
David doesn’t mention the ark either, though for a very different reason than Michal. He could bring it up to justify his actions, but he doesn’t feel the need. None of this is about him—not his dancing, not the ark, none of it. It’s all about God, and only about God. If we understand that, we see his final word to Michal is not just another backhanded slash at her, it’s also a statement that the approval of other people only matters if they are on about what God is on about. Michal cares about social concerns of class and reputation; David declares them irrelevant.
With that, the curtain falls forever on the house of Saul. The relationship between David and Michal is irreparably broken, and she will have no children to carry on her father’s line.
Now, as we’re focusing in this season on the concept of integrity, I think our passage this morning has a lot to teach us about integrity in leadership. It’s not a text about leadership, but differing understandings of leadership are critically important in the narrative. One, represented by Saul in the person of his daughter Michal, is what we might call secular leadership—which honestly doesn’t seem to have looked much different in his world than it does in ours. Western culture places a high value on leadership, but largely for the wrong reasons. Leadership is treated as the work, and leaders take the credit for “their” accomplishments (while, usually, trying to deflect the blame for failures onto someone else). It’s an individualistic imagination that sees leaders as people who decide what needs to be done and then get it done—which boils down in the end to the assertion that being a leader means having the right to get your own way. Over time, the institution (or country, or whatever) comes to be seen as existing for the sake of its leaders rather than the other way around.
On this read, leadership is self-followership. It gets put in prettier language than that—follow your dreams, follow your heart, follow your vision—but Rich Mullins had the right of it in his song “The Maker of Noses”: “They said, ‘Boy, you just follow your heart,’ but my heart just led me into my chest; they said, ‘Follow your nose,’ but the direction changed every time I’d go and turn my head.” However you dress it up, it’s all just following yourself, and the only dog I’ve ever seen who could take himself for a walk was Rowlf in The Muppet Movie.
There is no integrity to this understanding of leadership. If you have enough personal integrity, that will carry you for a while, but the acids of power will eat that away, and there’s nothing else to hold it up, or hold it together, because it is not in line with the character of God. What’s more, that means it cannot be properly aligned with anything God has made—which is everything; it is fundamentally incoherent both with what any organization needs from its leaders and with what is needed to lead well. Like Saul, it may succeed for a while, but only as long as God decrees; when he allows it to face the consequences of its approach, it will fall.
The second approach, we might call spiritualized leadership: allowing our understanding of God to change our goals without questioning our assumptions about how to pursue them. See: “The church should be run like a business,” which I have heard far too many times in far too many churches. We decide what we think God wants us to accomplish, we determine how we want to go about it, we put our plan in motion, and then we ask God to bless it. This is outwardly different from secular leadership, but though one might be thinking about God and using all the right “spiritual” language, this is still self-followership; it does not begin with submission. This is where David starts off in our passage this morning. It isn’t where he’s always been, but success has him taking God for granted. He does what he thinks is the right thing to do—and he’s not wrong about that, but he goes about it in the wrong way. This, too, only works until God lets it fail.
The third understanding we see here, I would call servant leadership, but I want to be clear that when I say that, I don’t necessarily mean what you’re thinking. Servant leadership is not a type or a style of leadership, it’s the understanding that leadership is not the work. Whatever the organization, whatever the work that is being done, leadership is not the work. The purpose of leadership is to equip and enable those who are doing the work—the people upstairs in the big offices exist to support those who are out on the shop floor making the screws and rods and plates. Therefore, in its essence, leadership is a work of service. To the extent that one is truly a leader, one is a servant.
Now, when we’re talking about leadership in the people of God, there’s a particular dimension which is absolutely critical that doesn’t exist in any other context. Christian leadership, to be anachronistic, is mimetic. The essence of Christian leadership is saying with Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:1, “Follow my pattern of living as I follow the pattern of Christ.” It is therefore, as Emily said last week, an expression of followership: one can only lead God’s people with integrity if one is doing so by following Jesus. The call to leadership is not a call to dominance, control, or privilege, it’s a call to submission: obviously to God, to lay down my will at his feet, but also to God’s people, to lay down my life with and for the church.
The second time around, David exemplifies this understanding of leadership. The fact that he submits to God’s directions as to how the ark is to be moved is obviously critical, but the change in his behavior during the procession is almost as important. Both times, he leads as a worshiper, but the first time, presumably, he leads as king; the second time, he leads as a priest among the people. He has laid down both his will, following God’s plan instead of his own, and his pride. In worldly eyes such as Michal’s, he has laid down his kingship, but the eyes of faith can see more clearly: this is how it must be to be king of a nation whose only true king is God. So also must it be to be shepherd of a people whose only true shepherd is Jesus.
Photo © 2011 Joan Campderrós-i-Canas. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.