Sermon for the 9th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Maybe I’m over-reaching, but I wonder if you could trace all the problems in our world, our divisions, our arguments, our wars, to this one sentence: David captured the stronghold of Jerusalem and named it the City of David. “Jerusalem my happy home…There David stands with harp in hand as master of the choir: ten thousand times would one be blest who might this music hear.” But there is also this: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Luke 13:34). Today, we say O Jerusalem, city of three faiths worshiping the same God, claiming the same place as their holy place, unable to live there in peace.

Yet still the dream endures, in ways that David could never have imagined. How could he have imagined that another people would arise thousands of years later, and make their way to a New World. When John Winthrop told the first Puritan settlers that they would be “as a city upon a hill,” he meant that they were to be as Mount Zion, Jerusalem, and the Americans as a chosen people.

On the one hand, that sense of destiny has blessed us with the confidence to overcome obstacles that other people have just accepted in a fatalistic way. Looking ahead to having to fight two implacable enemies, with our Navy crippled and our Army undermanned, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made this promise to the U.S. Congress on December 8, 1941: There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.” Look at our history from one perspective, and you get this sense of inevitability, of ‘chosenness” about us.

But for what did we fight and win that terrible war? To be the richest country, or the most powerful? Abraham Lincoln once recalled reading the story of Washington crossing the Delaware river to attack the British at dawn in Christmas Day. Was it merely the independence of one nation that was at stake in that struggle, Lincoln asked. He called us the “almost chosen people.” There’s just enough sense of our destiny in that phrase, without giving us a blank check.

Of course, if Jerusalem is any sense a city on a hill, our happy home, the stronghold of God, it is that because of this almost chosen man who captured it and named it for himself. If the story of King David as we have it in 1st and 2nd Samuel, conveys anything to us, it is the sense of God choosing, not by any human category, but by grace. His story starts when God sends his prophet Samuel to the house of Jesse, where God promises to reveal one of Jesse’s sons, whom Samuel is to anoint as the future king of Israel, never mind the current king, Saul. Son after son parades before Samuel, from the oldest to the youngest, and yet Samuel keeps hearing God say, “No, not this one.” It is, indeed, the 8th son, who has to be brought in from the field, that God chooses, and Samuel anoints.

That is hardly the end of the story. But day by day, year by year, every obstacle in David’s way is removed, including Saul and his sons, until there is no one left but David, the one whose very name means “beloved of God.” And throughout the Old Testament, there are many whom God chooses and rejects, blesses and curses. But only of this man is it ever said that God loved him.

So that’s the end of the story. David ruled a happy kingdom in peace and power for 40 years, and lived happily ever after? If David was “chosen,” if we were “chosen,” it cannot be for our selves only. What were David and his city chosen for? The clue is in the verses that were omitted from our reading. The Jebusites holding Jerusalem taunt David and his men: This city is so secure we can defend it with our lame and disabled they say. Now sadly, it reads as though when David occupied Jerusalem that he expelled the lame and disabled. But as the story of this people moves through the centuries, their understanding of Jerusalem’s purpose will expand. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,” the prophet Isaiah will write a few centuries later.

David was a shepherd boy, then a soldier in Saul’s army, then an outlaw on the run from Saul, then a fairly successful king of a decent-sized empire. But what God started through him was so much greater than he could possibly imagine. We have been a free people for a few centuries now, certainly much longer than the Greeks' Democracy or Roman Republic., but still a very brief time within the scope of human history. We’ve had our “American Century.” Rome had 800 years. If we are, as Lincoln said, “almost chosen,” it cannot be about our power, our wealth, or even our freedom. If we are as a shining city on a hill, it cannot be for our glory, but for God's glory. And the glory of God is a world of nations reconciled: one city of God, in peace and liberty with justice for all.