Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I

King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. Image source.

I've been reading Wilda Gafney's book "Womanist Midrash," and it's got me thinking about the story of Michal, in the bible. Let's talk about Michal.

Specifically, I want to talk about the scene where Michal judges David for how he worships God. But, "Womanist Midrash" has made me realize we can't just look at that 1 passage by itself. We need the whole history between David and Michal, the way he treated her. So here it is:

• Michal was one of Saul's daughters. Saul was chosen by God to be the king, but later God rejected him and chose David instead. So you've got this awkward period of time where Saul is still the king, but David has God's promise that someday he'll be king, and there's conflict between Saul and David because of that.
• Anyway, Saul sees that his daughter Michal loves David, so Saul tells David he can marry her, and the bride-price is 100 Philistine foreskins (wtf). Saul hopes that maybe David will die in battle fighting the Philistines. But David succeeds and comes back with 200 Philistine foreskins (WTF). So he and Michal are married.
• Then Saul decides to kill David. He sends men to David's house. Michal helps David escape out of the window, and she lies to the men, saving David's life.
• While David is on the run, he marries a few other women: Abagail and Ahinoam. Saul ends up giving Michal in marriage to another man, Paltiel.
• Oh and at some point David married 4 additional women: Maakah, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah.
• Years later, after Saul dies, Saul's son Ish-Bosheth becomes king. There is conflict between David's supporters and Ish-Bosheth's supporters. Finally, Abner (who was originally on Saul's side) comes to David to negotiate how to make David king. One of David's conditions is that Michal comes back to him. So, she is forcibly taken from her husband Paltiel, who follows after her, crying, until Abner tells him to give up and go home.
• Even though David and Michal were "together" again, it seems he wasn't having sex with her, or acting like a husband at all really. We can infer this because he's having lots of babies with his other wives, but none with Michal.
• And then, after all this, we come to the scene where Michal criticizes David for how he worships God. Now, after establishing all this history, we can talk about that.

2 Samuel 6:12-23

Now King David was told, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the ark of God.” So David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. When those who were carrying the ark of the Lord had taken six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. Wearing a linen ephod, David was dancing before the Lord with all his might, while he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets.

As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart.

They brought the ark of the Lord and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and David sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings before the Lord. After he had finished sacrificing the burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord Almighty. Then he gave a loaf of bread, a cake of dates and a cake of raisins to each person in the whole crowd of Israelites, both men and women. And all the people went to their homes.

When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!”

David said to Michal, “It was before the Lord, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the Lord’s people Israel—I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor.”

And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death.

Back when I was a good evangelical, "on fire for God," I loved this passage. I danced at church when we sang worship songs, and I had complicated feelings about it... I felt good, I loved God and wanted to express it in that way, but I also felt very self-conscious and kinda embarrassed. What if everyone is looking at me and thinking I'm weird? What if I'm bad at dancing? What if this is just super awkward?

I always heard Christians say "worship is just you and God." Meaning, we shouldn't care what people think. We should just repress those feelings of embarrassment; all that matters is that in God's eyes, you're genuinely expressing your worship towards Them.

And I truly believed that was the ideal. I strove to worship God in all the big wild ways I wanted to, and to repress my fears that I was being weird and people were judging me. This passage about David was an inspiration to me. The way I understood it, David was being a role model of what worship should be like, dancing in the streets without caring about how weird he looked, and Michal was being a wet blanket and judging him. She was in the wrong, and he told her so. He even told her "I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes." That verse was one of my favorites. It's all about expressing our love for God, I thought, regardless of what other people think.

(There's even a song about it, "Undignified" by David Crowder Band.)

But now that I'm reading "Womanist Midrash," which has a section on Michal, tying together all these events from her life, giving the reader a clear picture of how David and Saul mistreated her throughout her life, now I'm seeing 2 Samuel 6 completely differently.

Now I see it like this:

When Michal judged David for how he worshiped God, it wasn't about "wow you look so weird, dancing in the streets in your underwear, you should feel embarrassed about that."

Instead, her feelings were more like this: "You love God? You love God? After what you did to me, you have the audacity to go out there in public and act like you're just so wholeheartedly devoted to God? Come on."

She had loved him. She saved his life. And he used her as a political pawn in his quest to become king. (Both David and Saul used her in their struggle for power.) He tore her away from her husband, purely as a symbol of his dominance over the house of Saul, and then he didn't even seem to want her as a wife. Just the status, no actual relationship.

You can understand how, if someone treats you like that, and then they're like "I LOVE GOD SO MUCH, I SIMPLY MUST DANCE," you might hate them.

It's like the apostle John says in 1 John 4:20, "For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen." David treats Michal this badly, and then he's all excited about worshipping God- no. Michal doesn't buy it.

It's like Jesus said in Matthew 5:23-24, "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift." I remember reading that long ago, reading it as Here Are The Rules For How To Worship Correctly. The hoops that God has arbitrarily set up for us to jump through to get our worship to "count." But wait a minute, maybe it's not about that at all. Maybe Jesus is saying, if you've wronged someone, you need to go make it right, and that's a higher priority than coming to church to participate in "worship."

Maybe Jesus is saying, your relationships with other people have to come first, before your relationship with God. It's not "just you and God."

I think of Michal looking out her window at the way David performed his worship in front of everybody, playing the part of "a man after God's own heart," and I think of sexual abuse coverups in the modern church. Victims are told that they shouldn't speak up, because their abuser is such a good man of God, doing great things for God's kingdom, and to tell the truth about their abuse would [supposedly] be going against God's work.

She saw David dancing, and "despised him in her heart." We see an echo in the words of God, in Amos 5:21-24,

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;

    your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

    I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

    I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!

    I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,

    righteousness like a never-failing stream!

Michal was right.

Let justice roll like a river. And after that, you can dance for God.

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Posts about the book "Womanist Midrash" by Wilda C. Gafney:

Womanist Midrash 
The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus 
The Second-Worst Bible Story 
Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I
Why did I think David was the good guy in the story of Abigail?
David's Womanizing
The Bible and "Purity"

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Related:

Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"

The things I've never let myself say about worship 

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me" 

For Rizpah (or, a post about human sacrifice in the bible)

Don't Protect God

Image text: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. - 1 John 4:20" Image source.

Last week I published this post, The Second-Worst Bible Story, which is about Numbers 25. I have one more thing to say about this story:

This bible story demonstrates how dangerous it is when people believe they need to protect God. 

If you believe the bible is true, you will come away from this story with the message that sometimes it's right to do violence on people who are minding their own business in a way your God considers "sinful." I do not believe the bible is true. And I believe this message is very harmful. So my message is this: Don't protect God.

In Numbers 25, Israelite men have relationships with Moabite and Midianite women (I always assumed this meant casual sex; Wilda Gafney, author of "Womanist Midrash" says it means all kinds of relationships, including cross-cultural marriage). In response, God tells Moses that those who are involved in this must be executed. And then Phinehas the priest takes his spear and follows a couple into their tent and stabs them to death.

The Lord said to Moses, “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal. Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him. He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.”

God is saying that Phinehas's actions were right because Phinehas was protecting God's "honor." Back when I was evangelical, I believed that people's sin hurts God, and if we really love God, we will want to stop people from sinning, in order to help God feel better.

That's how this story earned its spot as The Second-Worst Bible Story. The idea that we should protect God.

This idea of "if we truly love God and don't want him to be hurt, we should burst into other people's lives and force them to stop sinning by any means necessary, even violence" is definitely NOT a normal evangelical belief. Probably most evangelicals would be horrified by it. And yet, Numbers 25 makes a case for it. 

And the seeds of it are definitely present, in evangelical ideology.

Yeah, here's what I was taught about sin: God loves all people so much, and desperately wants to have a personal relationship with each person. He's just so broken-hearted at all the people who don't believe in him, or don't follow his rules. He's very sad. He created the world, so everyone *should* obey him, but they don't. And, every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God. God is so perfect, and therefore every little sin hurts him so bad.

Usually, we didn't talk about this idea that "God is constantly so heartbroken about all the people not doing what he says," but it was there, in the background, when we talked about how much God loves everyone, personally, loves them SO MUCH, and how people *should* submit their lives to God and have a personal relationship with God, and how wrong it is that most people don't. 

See how Numbers 25 says that this couple (Zimri and Kozbi) needed to die because of their sin- that from God's perspective, their sin of having a forbidden relationship was so bad that it completely overshadowed anything else about them. It was the only thing that mattered to God, apparently. He couldn't see them as people. The most important thing was that the sin needed to be stopped, and the easiest way to do that was to just kill them. That's the fastest way to help God feel better. In some sense, it was "right" to kill them; it was "right" that they should die, because if they lived, they would continue to hurt God with their sin. Usually, though, God lets people live, and they continue to sin and hurt him, and it hurts him so bad- but because of his great love, he's willing to be hurt like that. It's not fair to him, but he allows it because he loves people so much. (I was taught that this is what "mercy" means.)

That is what evangelicals teach about sin. Every person sins sometimes, and is therefore so incredibly disgusting to God that God can't even bear to look at them. God should just send all of us to hell. God can't pay attention to anything about who you are as a person. Fortunately, Jesus comes and covers our sin, if we believe in him. Then God can tolerate us.

(I submit to you that this is not "good news"; this is not the gospel.)

When I left evangelicalism, and I began to believe "people are good", that was a such a huge change for me. Seems like such a simple, obvious thing- "people are good"- but as an evangelical I very explicitly did NOT believe that.

Anyway, don't protect God. Don't hurt people in the name of faithfulness to God. 

Jesus said the greatest commandment is "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." And, he said, "the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’" I do not read these as 2 separate commandments (though when I was evangelical, of course I did). We love God by loving people. I do not read this as, "We should love God first, and people second- and if they're ever in conflict, God takes priority." No. If they're ever in conflict, you're doing something wrong. The apostle John said, "Whoever does not love their brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen." 

Jesus said "the second is like it" and I believe that.

The place where this idea of "protecting God" would come up in real life is, typically, as it relates to other people's sex lives. Other people just minding their own business and not hurting anyone, but *you* believe that they are hurting God by having unmarried sex/ being queer/ etc. (And, in this ideology, it's not true that people are "just minding their own business"- in this ideology, everything belongs to God, everyone's sex life belongs to God, and it's not okay for people to make their own choices.)

You can use this kind of belief to justify anything. If you believe that some behavior is "sinful" even though there's no actual real-world evidence that it's harmful- you believe it's sinful just because "God said", and no real-world reason is necessary- well, what's to stop you from claiming that about anything at all? "We need to stop people from doing xyz because it's a sin" - xyz can be anything. And yes, when I was evangelical, I did believe that there were things God commands us to do or not do which our limited human minds can't make any sense of, but we need to obey anyway. This kind of thinking is so dangerous; it can justify literally anything at all. It justified Phinehas's murder of Zimri and Kozbi.

So don't separate "loving God" and "loving your neighbor." Loving God is loving your neighbor.

Somewhat related to this is Christians claiming that God caused hurricanes or whatever as punishment for the US giving rights to gay people. You have to wonder, do they agree with God on this? Or are they saying it's awful that we need to submit to the violent whims of this God, we have to hate the people that he hates, or else we'll be next... In that case, it's not about policing other people's behavior because we love God so much and don't want him to be hurt by their sin; it's about policing other people's behavior because we fear that when God punishes them, the punishment will come on us too.

Okay, I know that evangelicals would argue with what I'm saying here, and say "hey that's not what we believe." I mean, they believe everyone is a sinner who deserves to go to hell, but some of these other things, they would disagree with. Like the idea that we should try to force people to stop sinning. Or that God sends hurricanes as punishment for a society's acceptance of gay people. Okay, I'll give them the second one- when I was evangelical, I regarded Pat Robertson as a crackpot and definitely wouldn't want to be lumped in with him.

For the first one- the idea that if we really love God, we should try to forcibly stop other people from "sinning" because their sin hurts God: Yeah, most evangelicals would recognize this idea as horrifying, and argue against it by saying "it's not our role to invade people's personal lives and stop them from sinning- our role is just to love people" or "even if we try to force people to stop sinning, it won't work because sin is in the heart- they still *want* to sin, and that also hurts God."

Sure, yeah, those are great arguments. But then, what do you do with Numbers 25? If you believe the bible is the authority over our lives, then you have to believe that Numbers 25 teaches there do exist some circumstances (rare as they may be) where we should butt into people's personal lives, even though they are not hurting anyone, and stop them from "sinning"- and maybe even go as far as murdering them, if that's what it takes.

I mean, that's horrifying, but what else can you say about Numbers 25, if you believe the bible? That's why this is The Second-Worst Bible Story. (If you're wondering which is the worst, it's 2 Samuel 21.)

So don't protect God from "sinners." Don't love God in opposition to loving people. Numbers 25 got it wrong.

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Related:

The Second-Worst Bible Story

The Worst Bible Story

Dr. Strange's Ways Are Higher Than Our Ways 

God of Bad Snaps 

I knew Desiring God ideology is spiritual abuse, but wow.

Blogaround

A black cat looks up at us and meows. Image source.

1. ‘So heavenly minded you’re no earthly good’ (posted July 10) "Therefore, one of these groups, according to the Bible, knows God and abides in God. The other group, according to the Bible, consists of 'liars' who do not know God."

2. The Disney Renaissance Explained (posted August 6)

3. Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors, Sit Down. (posted August 9) "I’m performing an act of devotion to my Ancestors. This is not about your comfort, it’s about honoring their story on it’s own terms in context."

4. On Republican outreach to black voters and the utter lack thereof (posted July 16) "And so what this exercise shows, I think, is that both of our hypothetical premises cannot be equally true."

5. Honest Trailers | Avengers: Endgame (posted August 7) [content note: spoilers for "Avengers: Endgame"] "The Hulk, who cut down on the run time by finishing his arc before the movie starts."

Honest Lent: Unclear Passages

Image text: "God is love." Image source.

For Honest Lent, let's look at 1 John 4:7-21.

Wow, I love this passage! It's about how love is the most important thing, how "knowing God" is equivalent to loving people. It doesn't matter what religion you are- if you love people, then you're connected to God. Yes, even if you don't believe in God. This passage says, "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God." This is probably THE MOST important belief in the Christianity I follow. What truly matters isn't the language you use to describe what "God" is or what gives your life purpose. What truly matters is how you treat people.

But here's something a bit odd about this passage: Verse 15 says "If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God." Wait a minute, but verses 7 and 8 said that loving people is equivalent to knowing God. And then verse 15 here seems to be saying that agreeing with the statement "Jesus is the Son of God" is equivalent to knowing God. So, which is it? Those are very different things. One is about actions and one is about religious beliefs.

Well church people always say "use the clear passages of Scripture to interpret the unclear ones." However, what they really mean is this: "clear passages" means "things that fit with what I believe the bible teaches" and "unclear ones" means "things that just seem wrong to me." It's not actually about how "clear" or "unclear" the actual language of the passage itself is. "Unclear" means you read something and you think "no way, this can't be right." Like verses that clearly say women need to be silent in church- but you're like, no, that's ridiculous. You label it an "unclear passage" and then go find some "clear passages" about how God loves all genders equally, and decide that the one about how women can't speak in church can't possibly have really meant it.

Or you find a verse that says after death, people will be rewarded according to what they've done. But you say, no no, that can't be right, the evangelical church very clearly taught me that "the gospel" is you don't get to heaven based on what you've done, but based on whether you "got saved." So you call Matthew 16:27 an "unclear passage", even though it very clearly says "he will reward each person according to what they have done." And you go off and find a different verse, a "clear" one, which says we are saved through faith alone, and you decide Jesus didn't really mean we're saved by what we've done.

That's how this works, this "use the clear passages to interpret the unclear ones." "Clear passages" are the ones you can easily accept because they confirm what you already believe. "Unclear passages" are the ones you disagree with.

So if I was using that strategy here in 1 John 4, I would say the bit about love being equivalent to knowing God is a "clear passage" because, ya know, that just makes sense, right? Like, of course the most important thing is love, of course God would think that's what really matters, not the specific religious facts you believe. And then this bit about how you need to believe Jesus is the Son of God in order to have God living in you, well that's an "unclear passage" because hey, that doesn't make sense, then only Christians can know God, and obviously that can't be right, because God loves everyone, no matter what religion (or none at all) they follow. So the conclusion is that verse 15 didn't really mean what it said.

Yeah, you see how ridiculous this is, right?

This is why I don't really believe in "use the clear passages to interpret the unclear ones"- or at least, not the way I've seen it practiced in church groups. I have a conscience which says love is what really matters, not religion. I really don't care how many bible verses agree or disagree.

The End of My Gnostic Faith

Image source.

I recently read this post: Sunday Billy Sunday, about the gnostic Christianity preached by Billy Sunday. Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of gnostic Christianity is to die and go to heaven. There is no heaven on earth. There is no hell on earth. Earth - and the body and everything physical - is a mere ladder, a resting place, a waiting room, an station where we expectantly twiddle out thumbs anticipating the Glory Train. The rest of the world can burn, and will. Just try to save as many people by bludgeoning them with scary words about their eternal damnation while you can.

That's gnostic Christianity in a nutshell. And it prioritizes individual over social, the powers-that-be over the oppressed, the here-and-now over sustainability. It expects heaven. It doesn't participate in bringing heaven to earth. For heaven is for the Christians only, according to gnostic Christianity. And if we brought it here, what's the purpose of an afterlife?

Go read the whole thing.

First, let's take a second and define "gnosticism." According to Wikipedia, gnosticism is the belief that the physical and spiritual world are totally separate, and the physical world is evil and should be avoided. (By the way, this definition of "gnosticism" is different than the concept of gnostic vs agnostic belief. Don't get confused. I'm totally not talking about that.) And the writer of the above-quoted blog post, Jasdye, connects gnosticism to the teaching common in evangelical Christianity that heaven and hell are all that matters.

You know, I've heard of gnosticism before. I heard it was a heresy that the apostle John argued against in the book of 1 John, in the bible. I heard that the gnostics of that time were claiming that since the physical world was evil, God did not really become human and die. Which is, you know, kind of an important part of Christianity. And that since the physical world was separate from the spiritual world, the physical world didn't matter- so you can sin if you want, it doesn't matter. And that gnosticism also emphasized having special secret knowledge, but John wrote that the knowledge about Jesus is freely available, not meant to be kept secret. Gnosticism was incompatible with Christianity, according to the apostle John.

But wow, the idea of the body and spirit being separate, and the spiritual world being all that matters- dude... that is exactly what I was taught about Christianity. (Even the idea of the body being evil, umm, purity culture much?) Maybe it wasn't taught in those exact terms, but if heaven and hell are real, and everyone is going to get an eternal infinite reward or eternal infinite punishment based on their beliefs, then why the hell would anything else matter besides spreading that message? This is infinity we're talking about. Physical suffering experienced in one's lifetime on earth is negligible compared to an eternity of torture in hell. So don't waste your time trying to help people- feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving to the poor... NONE OF THAT MATTERS! We've got to save them from HELL!

I remember wondering about how Christians should respond to humanitarian crises in the world- do we send them food or bibles? And I thought, well, people have physical needs and spiritual needs, but the spiritual needs are more important. Still, sending bibles is useless if you don't also send food- no one's going to listen to your message if you don't help them with what they think they need. So caring for the physical needs of our fellow humans is a means to an end- the goal is to get them to trust us enough to listen to our message about their spiritual needs.

And yeah, I don't believe that anymore.

In a post last week, I explained how I now understand the gospel, the central message of Christianity. I used to think it was "Even though you are a sinner, Jesus' death and resurrection make it possible to be freed from sin and reconciled to God." The end. That's it. That is all that Christianity's about. (I mean, sure we're supposed to love others, but that's just tacked on to the end, sort of an unrelated extra credit assignment.)  

But now I believe the gospel is so much more. It's about Jesus and his upside-down kingdom, where "the first will be last and the last will be first" and there is healing and justice for the weak, the victims, those who are marginalized and oppressed by society. And being a Christian is all about working with Jesus to bring that kingdom to the world. Sure, it starts with God's forgiveness toward me, and healing in my own heart- the narrow view I had before- but it goes so much farther than that.

And I thought I was being rebellious and controversial, saying the gospel was something other than that narrow, spiritualized forgiveness-of-my-own-individual-sin-against-God concept. But wow, maybe that's gnosticism, a heresy. Maybe making 2 categories- physical needs and spiritual needs- is wrong, and the question of which is more important is the wrong question to be asking.

And actually, this calls heaven and hell into question. If everyone in heaven gets the same infinite eternal awesomeness, and everyone in hell gets the same infinite eternal torture, and it's based on what you believe about Jesus, I don't see how you can NOT come to the conclusion that this world does not matter. That helping those in need does not matter, and all that matters is getting people to change their beliefs and get into heaven. So, yeah. That can't be right. That can't be what heaven and hell are. Let's question that.

Because I don't believe that a God who thinks life on earth only matters to the extent that it puts you in the "heaven" or "hell" category would come to earth as a human and waste his time healing and teaching "blessed are the poor in spirit" and suffering as a servant. Jesus' own behavior indicates that heaven is not what I thought it was or hell is not what I thought it was or maybe Jesus was just bad at time-management.

No, it can't be true that the physical world doesn't matter. And I'm glad I'm not the first Christian to think so.