Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2024
2 Samuel 6:12b-23
by Allison Courey
I have a photo of Adeline from when she was three and we were visiting her grandparents in Belgium. She’s at the back of an old monastic church, staring up at a stone statue of the woman at the well. I will never forget our conversation. “What was her name?” she asked me, and my heart sank. I wanted so much to tell her the woman’s name, and who her children were, and what she did after she met Jesus — but I couldn’t.
Because the truth is, the Bible doesn’t focus on the stories of women, particularly in our English translations. When we meet women in the bible, they are usually nameless, or when they’re named, they play supporting roles to the men in their lives. They’re often villainized and victimized, forgotten between the pages like a stone statue with no inscription.
In our readings today, we meet three of these women, all of whom are usually described as foils to the good guys. Herod’s wife and her daughter are blamed for the death of John the Baptist, and David’s wife Michal is blamed for raining on David’s worship party. In both stories, the women are sexually exploited, and in neither story are they vindicated.
I can remember a time, maybe 20 years ago, when I realized that violence against women and foreigners was being described in a biblical story without any response from God. I was used to thinking about the Bible like Aesop’s Fables, where there’s no doubt about who’s wrong and who’s right at the end of the story. I’d learned to gloss over the shocking bits using a lens that assumed if a good guy was doing something terrible, there must be a reason I didn’t understand.
But the bible is more like a complex drama than Aesop’s Fables, with all the nuances of the human condition. In the bible, like in our own lives, it’s possible for two things to be true at the same time, like David being a good king and a terrible husband. Or David being loved by God and doing a lot of things to not deserve that love.
Our reading from 2 Samuel begins with David returning the sacred ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, caught up in an ecstatic dance like a whirling dervish. Never mind that he had murdered and pillaged his way to the top of the kingdom. For the moment, the scene is celebration and worship. But then the story shifts quickly. Like every generation in every culture, the rise of a few to opulent wealth and privilege means that others must be crushed. In today’s story, it’s David’s wife Michal.
Michal is the only woman in the Hebrew Bible to be described as loving a man. Earlier in David’s story, when her father Saul is trying to kill him, she tricks Saul to help David escape. Although she has been promised as a wife to David, Saul then sends her to marry another man. David flees into exile to protect his family and newer wives, but he doesn’t protect her. Later, he has her kidnapped from her husband in exchange for a military alliance. He locks her away and refuses to give her any children, because he doesn’t want Saul to have any descendants. Other sources say that she did have children, but he killed them.
In the story today, Michal seems to be locked in a tower as David finalizes his kingship in the streets of Jerusalem. She watches from a window as David pretends to be a priest while dancing in a sexually explicit way in front of many other women. The writer says she was disgusted, and anyone would be, after risking everything for a man who killed her family, abused her, and then abandoned her. When she confronts him over the scene, he is anything but remorseful, saying that he will have whatever women he chooses. And David does go on to rape, marry, and conquer many other women.
The story of Michal seems to end here, but her story isn’t really told at all. No where in the text will you find an explanation of how she felt, and what she experienced from her perspective. From the little we know about her, it’s easy to assume that either she doesn’t deserve to have her story told, or God is a patriarchal chauvinist who cares nothing about the experiences of oppressed women. But neither are true.
The reason Michal’s voice is silenced in the text is not because God silences her. It’s because our scriptures were written by particular people with their own prejudices. The bible is different from the Quran, which is said to be dictated by God directly to Mohammad, who only transcribed the message. Our scriptures are filled with all the mess and nuance of the humans who fill their pages. This is because the first purpose of the bible is not to teach us right from wrong. It’s primary purpose is to demonstrate a God who shows up in the midst of chaotic human culture. God shows up in the life of David, the life of Michal, the life of Mary of Nazareth, and in your life.
There's a story about the prophet Elijah when God promises to speak to him. So Elijah goes up the mountain to wait for God. There’s a great windstorm, but God’s not in the storm. Then there’s an earthquake, but God’s voice isn’t in it. There’s a fire, but God’s not there either. Finally, there’s the sound of complete silence, and it’s there that Elijah hears the voice of God.
What Elijah’s experience teaches us is that God isn’t usually found in the loudest, most central voices. We often see God at work around the edges of a story, and we know it was at the edges of society that Jesus spent most of his time. Actually, because Jesus shows us more clearly what God is like than all of the rest of scripture, he can be used as a lens to read any other story. Where would Jesus be? In the story today, Jesus wouldn’t be dancing with the king and his warriors in the street. He’d be up in the tower, holding Michal’s hand, telling her that she’s going to get through this.
The Roman Catholic Church has a teaching called the “preferential option for the poor”, meaning that God has more time and space for the poor than the rich. But God’s love overflows for more than just the physically impoverished. Whenever a person or a group of people are excluded, marginalized or oppressed, that is where Jesus is. I believe this is the most essential teaching of our faith. I believe it so deeply that I made this sign to take to a counter-demonstration at the school board last fall.
There were many thousands of protesters at rallies across the country, yelling hateful things about queer youth in the name of God. To me it sounded like David, shouting that he could do whatever he wanted because he was the king now. But looking out of a tower window in the distance, I could see Michal, like a trans kid kicked out of her home, scared and alone. I couldn’t allow David to be the only person speaking for God at the rally that day. So I put on my collar under my t-shirt that says, “Protect Trans Kids” and I took my sign to the school board.
Have you ever seen the bumper sticker that says “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention”? Many of the people I marched with that day would say that this means to reject the biblical text because Michal’s treatment is outrageous. But I have a different conclusion. I think that the text is often intended to outrage us. We are supposed to ask hard questions, to ask where God is in the story, and wrestle with why this happens.
Most people’s lives look more like Michal’s than David’s, don’t they? Unlike Aesop’s Fables, the Bible is full of real people and their all-too-real lives. Maybe the writers of the story of Israel’s greatest king were too afraid to tell the rest of Michal’s story. Or maybe they believed that we would be able to see, when we look closely, a God who sits with us when we are broken and alone, a God whose arms are wrapped around the would-be mother, the misunderstood wife, the lonely shut-in. A God who is able to hold us close, and hold us up when no one else is there to do it. Her name was Michal. And this was her story.
Comments