Putting God in a Box
Anne Lynch (’12)
Kay Spiritual Life Center
December 1, 2011
2 Samuel 6:1-11 • David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand. 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. They carried the ark of God on a new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the ark of God; and Ahio went in front of the ark. 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.
When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen shook it. The anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God. David was angry because the LORD had burst forth with an outburst upon Uzzah; so that place is called Perez-uzzah, to this day. David was afraid of the LORD that day; he said, “How can the ark of the LORD come into my care?” So David was unwilling to take the ark of the LORD into his care in the city of David; instead David took it to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite. The ark of the LORD remained in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite three months; and the LORD blessed Obed-edom and all his household.
So, who here is stressed out? Upperclassmen, I’m sure, are painfully familiar with this time of year, and those of you who are freshman are also becoming aware of that period I call, “pre-finals.” It’s that time in the semester when we have two papers due, an hour-long presentation, and an exam to study for… per class… next week. Oh, and to top it all off, our professors hate Blackboard as much as we do, so they haven’t posted any grades, making it rather difficult to know what exactly is going on. And that’s the aggravating part of this period, isn’t it? Not knowing what grades I have in what classes, or what kind of exam the professor will give me, or how my work has been graded, etc. It’s like my professors don’t realize that I need this information, pronto, chop-chop. How else am I going to pass their classes?
But do I really need that information? A little over a year ago, I found myself in a very uncomfortable situation that did not come with any easy explanations. Some of you or your loved ones have experienced being sick without a clear diagnosis, and that’s what I was dealing with. I had a severe headache that escalated over time, refusing to budge no matter what medication I was prescribed. After a month with no answers, I had been in the Emergency Room twice, once because I had been prescribed something inappropriate for my malady and overdosed, and once because no medication was diminishing the pain. That second time, a friend of a friend found me on the floor of a dorm bathroom. And we still had no idea what was wrong with me.
It was kind of a low point in my college life. The next week my doctor tried me out on the strongest anti-migraine steroids she could muster, and all they did was knock me out and fuzzy up my brain enough that I didn’t notice the pain as much. Thankfully, she decided to put me on a different medication that did help, but it was a generic medicine that didn’t give us any answers.
I really needed answers during all of this—to me it was the difference between sanity and a lack thereof—and there simply weren’t any answers. At the same time that all of this was going on, I was in a Covenant Discipleship group, and out of seemingly nowhere, I started feeling “called” to seminary and ministry. Considering that I saw myself as a Buddhist at the time, I had more than a little trouble swallowing this bizarre state of affairs. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I accepted my state of unknowing, in both situations, that I was able ignore the pain and function normally again.
This brings me to the odd story we just heard. I first heard this story in the fall of 2009 when I was in my first of what would be several of “Professor Schaefer’s” classes, Religious Heritage of the West. We were covering Judaism first, and when we came to this story, Mark explained how King David was having the ark of the covenant—which had previously traveled with the people of Israel all over their Promised Land—taken to Jerusalem to be placed in the Temple. The very presence of God for the people of Israel since the time of Moses would no longer travel wherever the people were, but would be placed in a glorious, beautiful box.
Until those oxen shake. Apparently, it looks like the ark is about to fall—a dastardly escape—when Uzzah puts out his hand and prevents the ark from moving. As Mark explained (and I checked online, so he wasn’t making it up), certain commentators note that Uzzah was perhaps getting in the way of an indirect message from God. Perhaps God was acting through those oxen to show to King David that a box, no matter how glorious, was not suitable for something as dynamic and strange as God. So when Uzzah puts out his hand, he is in some way trying to box in God, a simply impossible feat, and Uzzah’s own action kills him.
You see, I read this text more as an effect of Uzzah’s actions than a punishment from God. I assume that I know this ark so well; surely I have it in my power to protect this ark from falling. Except that it isn’t about the ark itself, it’s about God.
King David of course freaks out, and decides to postpone moving the ark. Eventually it does end up in Jerusalem, in Solomon’s Temple, but as we learn later from the prophets, Israel continues to struggle with idolatry and eventually Exile. With the ark in possession, there is an assumption that God can in some way be controlled. And to praise that understanding-of-God perhaps is not to praise God at all. After all, back when God first sent Moses to save his people, what did God say? “I am (what) I am.” God is God, and no other adjective or description can adequately define God. And to praise with the idea that God can be controlled—which really is to presume we know God’s very essence—is idolatry.
The truth is I don’t know what God “is.” I don’t know God’s essence. There’s a whole school of theology called apophasis—negative theology—that says we can only describe what God is not. God is not finite, God is not static, God is not a person (although personal language is very useful when discussing God), and God is not a knowable, controllable thing. In fact, just about anything we say regarding God is bound to fall far short of the truth. Even saying God is Love. Not that saying that is wrong or bad, I think it’s a good thing. Love too is complicated, dynamic, and hard to define, especially in the English language.
It’s that “is” I personally struggle with, that implication that I know God is Love. I can say so, and I could use whatever definition of Love I want that will make God do what I want God to do. Not that I would. But for me personally, I’d rather just not say God is “Blank.” Because as lovely and glorious as Love is, it remains, to me, a box.
Which means, maybe everything I assume about God is wrong. To steal from Socrates, if all I know is that I know nothing about God, that seems like it would be a major problem! What if I do things I think are right in God’s eyes, so to speak, and I’m actually just being a jerk? That’s terrifying! Why bother believing in God at all?
Except that actually this situation isn’t that scary. As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s comforting. A few weeks ago, I went to a program put together by the United Methodist Church for people interested in going into ministry and seminary, called “Exploration.” While I was at Exploration, I found myself surrounded by people saying “God is Blank.” God is this, no God is that, no, you’re both wrong and I have the real answer. Each time I heard it, I was immediately suspicious. Because God doesn’t belong in a box, and God cannot be constrained by simple definitions. My experience of God has been of a great mystery that I cannot begin to understand. But see, that’s just it: I might not know God’s essence, but I can have experience of God.
What we do know is God moves through us, dynamically. God has might and understanding that we could barely comprehend. God loves. We know God’s love through our very existence, even when we don’t understand God, when we don’t know the answers. God loves so much that somehow, the unfathomable, indefinable, incomprehensible essence of God walked among us, as a human being, with all the experiences of happiness and sorrow we could expect in a typical human life, and so much more. It is that indescribable transformation that makes Christmas so miraculous.
This time of Advent, of waiting, is worth that miracle. It’s a time of unknowing. It’s a time of belief—in the original sense of the word (as defined by Karen Armstrong, of whom some of you know I’m a big fan-girl)—belief in God not as intellectual knowledge but as a movement of the spirit to trust in God despite the mystery, because soon God will come among us as a human child.
There are a lot of things I don’t know. I don’t know how my grades will turn out this semester. I don’t know what’s happened to a Buddhist monk that protested in Burma recently who I met a few years ago. I don’t know where I’ll be living—much less doing—in six months when I graduate. I don’t know why a close family friend died so suddenly on Thanksgiving night. I don’t really know how planes fly—it’s somethingt I struggle with each time I travel. And I don’t have any intellectual comprehension of what God “is.” And you know what? That’s okay. Through Jesus Christ, God knows me and you and every human being on the planet. God has experienced life with us. And that is the miraculous mystery.
