The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost Sunday (Proper 11), July 21, 2024

This week, we continue learning from the establishment of the Davidic monarchy. David, having been raised up from being a shepherd of sheep to a shepherd of the people of Israel, points out to the prophet Nathan that there is a discrepancy between the structures in which the king lives and in which the ark of God is housed. Presumably, David is pointing this out with the intention of building a temple for the Ark of the Covenant. Nathan affirms David, and David fades from the scene.

The vast majority of the passage from 2 Samuel is a prophetic encounter between Nathan and the Lord. Remember that God’s call upon David is not a call to become a demigod-monarch among the wretched of the earth. David cannot lead on his own. Indeed, in this passage, David is not even the one to whom God reveals the divine vision for the people of Israel, David, and their relationship with God down through the ages. Sure, the word of the Lord to Nathan is about David, but this encounter is between the prophet of God and God, for the well-being of the king and the people. Amid the establishment of the Davidic line, we should not forget Nathan and the whole of the people of Israel.

In the divine vision, God promises to raise up offspring after David who will build a house for God’s name and who will be a son to God. The establishment of a house of cedar–a physically long-lasting structure thanks to cedar’s characteristic rot resistance–seems to David to be the clearest way to demonstrate the majesty of God and the faithfulness of the covenant between the people of Israel and their god. After all, don’t other communities and societies around have temples for their gods, demonstrating might, perduring power, and physical dwelling?

Yet, the divine hopes that are revealed to Nathan only mention a house of cedar in a rhetorical question (2 Sam 7:7). God, like David, is thinking about expressing faithfulness through generations. God’s dreams include a Davidic descendent who will build a house for God’s name, but God dreams beyond this house.

Here, the process-relational preacher may keenly recognize God’s relational language choices in the revelation to Nathan. In recounting their history, God identifies God’s own priorities for the people and, in turn, their relationship as a covenant community: safety, rest, self-determinative governance, and the intimate relationship of a parent and child.

God has been with them wherever they went. God knows the breadth of their wanderings and the depth of their weariness. Does God desire conquering might for these weary travelers? No. God desires rest, a gracious rest that recalls the gift of Sabbath shalom.

How might the people of Israel demonstrate the majesty and faithfulness of God? Live well with one another in gracious shalom.

God gives a vision that prioritizes the health of the relationships among the people and between the people and God. The covenants that God has made with all of creation and with the people of Israel can be made plain to all the world through a society that promotes the well-being of all people. God dwells within that society, inspiring each new moment and every new generation to appropriate the covenant for their context.

When so many of the gods of our world are given grand palaces–banks on every corner, arenas of sport, malls of conspicuous consumption–how great is the temptation to compete with a grand cedar house for God in the town square, in lobbyists’ offices, or on the Supreme Court bench?

What if God says “no” to our desire to build that cedar house? How might you and your people demonstrate the majesty and faithfulness of God today, within your church, your community, and our world? How can you participate in God’s priorities for relational well-being, safety, health, and world-transforming peace?

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Today’s psalm continues the focus on our covenant relationship, intensifying attention to the descendents of David. God will remain faithful to the covenant, holding David and his descendents in God’s steadfast love. The first few verses of this passage are monarchic praise, reiterating the chosenness and specialness of David. They recall God’s priority for safety that we saw in 2 Samuel, but the psalmist–Ethan the Ezrahite–seems under pressure to specifically identify David with God’s work, suggesting that the monarchic self-image or a communal memory of the monarch is more distant from “shepherd of the people of Israel” than 2 Samuel portrays.

Turning the subject to the covenant, then, is a reminder to the people and the monarch alike that God’s law and ordinances, not the king’s, are the measure of Israel’s faithfulness. The psalm plainly tells of God’s faithfulness to David, his descendents, and the people. As with every grace, the people must respond.

As with the passage from 2 Samuel, how can you and your people participate in God’s priorities for relational well-being, safety, health, and world-transforming peace today? How does confidence that God journeys with you, faithfully inspiring and upholding you, influence your discernment and action?

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The process-relational preacher might translate this deutero-Pauline epistle succinctly: as Christ emerges into the world, Christ brings each of us into a new life together and offers our lives into the divine life. Through Christ, we become members of the household of God, influencing God and the whole cosmos as the very sacramental dwelling place of God.

Of course, the writer of the letter to the Ephesians had not read Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead. In our succinct interpretation, then, we should not hastily blow past the real sociological and ecclesiological concerns that thrum through this passage. The author’s addressing a real tension between the uncircumcised and the circumcised in Ephesus. To whom did Christ come to share the good news? What are God’s expectations for the people called “Jesus-followers”? Do the uncircumcised have to become circumcised in order to participate in the life-in-Christ? What is the role of the Mosaic Law after the coming of Jesus?

These questions were not inconsequential then, and they are not inconsequential now.

Christians cannot rightly understand our life-in-Christ apart from the life of “the circumcision” in the history of God’s covenants with the Hebrews. Life-in-Christ together emerges through many influences, including the influences that Jesus of Nazareth experienced. Simply put, Israel’s salvation shaped the relationships that constituted Jesus’s world, and Jesus offers the salvific relationship between God and Israel for the life of the world, through the emerging church, today. Supersessionist ecclesiologies and soteriologies–theologies where the “uncircumcision” are the only proper and only possible recipients of God’s salvific relationship–run counter to the good news of Jesus Christ because they fully ignore the meaningful influence of Jesus of Nazareth’s Jewishness on his relationships, life, death, and resurrection.

Jesus becomes the one who integrates the “circumcision” and the “uncircumcision,” the Jew and the Gentile, into a living sacrament of the living God. The “one new humanity in place of the two” neither ignores its past nor tries to live its life stuck in the past.

Where the old divisions caused animosity, suffering, and dehumanization, the new humanity is called to confession, repentance, and restoration.

Where the old histories are full of healthy and life-giving relationships between God and creation, among humanity, and throughout the creation, the new humanity is called to learn, analyze its own context, and participate in the Holy Spirit’s integration of earlier experiences of well-being into fresh contexts that are full of particular gifts and needs alike.

The reconciliation that different persons and peoples experience in life-in-Christ does not annihilate the distinctive characteristics or gracious uniqueness of the persons, slushing us all into an ontologically simple substance called “New Humanity.” Rather, the good news of Christ is that Love knits communities together in dynamic solidarity through our profound participation in the concrete fulfillment of each other’s lives. Process theology, recognizing how events are interrelated and influence one another throughout the cosmos, can interpret this epistle writer’s message as an attempt to articulate, encourage, and evaluate Christian participation in God’s cosmic love. How we relate to all those with whom we share the world is a Christian concern and an opportunity to enact gospel in and for the life of the world.

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My preaching professor, Brad Braxton, used to remind us that “Sunday comes with a fierce regularity.” Of course, plenty of experiences in life come with a fierce regularity, and that ferocity can wear down even the most resilient person. Earlier this month, I remarked on how tired I felt. I still feel tired, though I may not be as tired as the day I was writing that commentary.

Jesus’s words, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while,” were a balm to read. I imagine that they would have been even more soothing for the disciples to hear.

Maybe, preacher, they are a balm for you. Given the harriedness of life, I am confident that many of your people need to hear Jesus bid them to come and rest.

Two questions arise; one metaphysical, one ethical. First, metaphysics. How could you preach rest when the process of creative advance continues unabated? The potential for sensory overload in a process theology seems high. After all, each moment of concrescence is the coming together of the whole cosmos into a single instance that then perishes, giving itself over as a datum that influences possible future instances. There’s a fierce regularity to creative advance. We can’t stop the world and get off. Even when we die, the process of creative advance seems to continue. Whatever it means in the context of the gospel of Christ, rest must mean more than the mere cessation of activity.

Second, ethics. How could you preach rest when so many sectors of our local, national, and multinational societies depend on constant production, exploitation of labor, and isolation of individuals from one another so that, in our high anxiety, we only manage to regroup in the brief moments of pause between extended periods of output? These are more pressing questions than the metaphysical in a lot of ways. For many people today, your people in the church and in the church’s community included, “rest” is illusory or reserved as luxurious. Whatever it means in the context of the gospel of Christ, rest must mean more than the recharge (input) of energy for future output.

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” could be an offering to each of us and all of us together to actively choose to participate in a new way of living in creative Love. Good News Rest is shalom, a healing peace that is transforming the world in God’s adventurous beauty. Good News Rest is communal, protecting and empowering one another to resist the onslaught of productivity and hustle culture where a dollar is more valuable than a life. Good News Rest is practical, constructing time and space with the Spirit of God and one another where healing and visions of possible futures of Love can be made real and influential today.

When we participate in the Good News Rest, we get glimpses of the divine work that remains, work for which we have been gifted and to which we have been called. At Gennesaret, Jesus and the disciples encounter a great crowd who begin to bring their sick to Jesus for healing. I don’t know if I can fully grasp the potential chaos of this scene, and Mark’s rhetorical hurriedness effectively intensifies the commotion. “They were like sheep without a shepherd” may be the most significant clue for the process-relational preacher in this passage, for it reveals a crucial value of participating in the Good News Rest.

Above, I mentioned that the potential for sensory overload in the process of creative advance seems high. Most actual occasions cannot effectively include the whole cosmos within their becoming. Many influences on an emerging moment are influences of negation, for they are cut off as a “negative prehension.” Even the influences that are positively prehended are not equally weighed. In addition to the sheer scope of data to prehend, actual occasions are lured into divine possibilities for the world: aims. All of this metaphysical language might be summed up in “they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

Whether in need of a divine aim for a particular occasion or a guiding nexus for a society, the sheer chaos of possibilities and influences can fly at us like sheep without a shepherd. Good News Rest does not reach the other side of the lake, the shore you thought was deserted, groaning when the crowd recognizes you, your gifts, and your embrace of God’s creative love.

Good News Rest can tune our discernment of God’s lure for the well-being of our individual and social lives.

Good News Rest can be practices of listening, of critical and self-critical reflection, of awareness of feeling within and beyond the body that focus our participation in the world to be a priestly participation, offering the world to God and receiving the world healing through God.

Good News Rest values the nourishing necessities of water, sleep, food, and safety, and it moves us from subsisting necessity to flourishing abundance.

Christ said to them, says to us, that we are empowered to join God and one another in the healing of the world, transforming societies on personal and structural levels alike.

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Tom is an ordained United Methodist Elder and process theologian. He earned his PhD from Boston University School of Theology, where he developed a process theology of Holy Communion in a sacramental ecotheology. Currently, he serves as the Acquiring Editor at Orbis Books, an affiliate faculty member in Wesleyan and Methodist theology at Memphis Theological Seminary, the Lecturer in United Methodist History and Doctrine at Yale Divinity School, and on the steering committee of the Open and Relational Theologies Unit of the AAR.