When I was a kid, my favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz. I loved the characters, the transition from a sepia-toned Kansas to a technicolor Oz, and most of all, I loved the idea that a timid, hometown girl could eventually stand up to the great and powerful wizard before making her way back home. Though I loved all of the characters In the movie, the character that seemed the most real to me was the Wicked Witch of the West, played by actress Margaret Hamilton. Her performance was so terrifying the American Film Institute ranked the Wicked Witch of the West as the 4th best movie villain of all time, placing only behind Darth Vader, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter.

Off the silver screen, Margaret Hamilton loved children. Before becoming an actress, she taught kindergarten for years. Even after her role as the Wicked Witch of the West, Hamilton served on the community board of education and taught Sunday School. After the movie’s release, Margaret found herself having to reassure children over and over that her character was only make-believe. She was not the scary person they believed her to be.

Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West was only make-believe, but her winsome performance reminds me that people are terribly complicated. We can be so good and so bad at the same time. Godly and upright folks can have less-than-flattering stories in their pasts. People who seem like lost causes can suddenly have a moment of clarity and level headedness. Even the heroes of the faith–the people we learned to admire most in Sunday School–come with complicated background stories and behave in heartbreaking ways. People in the Bible show us great faith and make sinful choices, sometimes in the same story. If this is true, how do we know who to look up to? Are any of the characters we admired still worth admiring? Or, is it all just too much of a mess?

In today’s story from 2 Samuel, we see David dancing before the ark of the Lord and we see his wife Michal despising him in her heart. I’ve heard so many sermons–and read so many commentaries–and probably even given sermons myself that went something like this: “David was upright before God, so much so that he didn’t even care if he looked undignified and shameful as he worshiped God with his whole heart. His wife Michal couldn’t understand why he would behave so foolishly because she cared too much about appearances. David was behaving in a godly way, and Michal hadn’t learned how to do the same.” In short: David was good. Michal was bad. But, the more I’ve studied this story over the years, the less clear cut it seems to be. Is it possible that David’s actions weren’t all good and Michal’s weren’t all bad? 

2 Samuel 6 is merely a snapshot in the life of David as king. We have to back up to get the whole story. At the beginning of 2 Samuel, Saul–the first king of Israel–dies. After his death, David steps into the role of king of Judah, but his reign is not uncontested. Saul’s son Ishbaal becomes king of Israel, reigned for two years, and the conflict of power culminated in the deaths of both Ishbaal and Abner, who had made Ishbaal king of Israel. After this intense conflict, David becomes king of all Israel and makes Jerusalem the new capital city of the new, unified kingdom. As a symbol of David’s consolidated power, David decides to move to the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem.

This all sounds great, right? There’s only a couple of problems with this: the ark of the covenant had a fearsome and terrifying past. Under the leadership of Moses, God called Bezalel to build the ark. The ark then accompanies the people on their journey from Sinai to the Promised Land. The ark was said to contain the ten commandments given to Moses by God, and the ark was also a visible symbol of God’s presence among and with the people. In Exodus 25, God says this about the ark: “There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the covenant, I will deliver to you all my commands for the Israelites.”

Later on, the Philistines stole the ark, but they suffered so much as a result that they returned it after having it for only seven months. When the ark was returned, most of Israel celebrated, but the descendents of Jeconiah did not rejoice for whatever reason, and 70 of them died. The ark was a cause for celebration because it was the tangible and visible reminder of the presence of God. But the ark was also something people feared–and with good reason. People suffered, and even died in the presence of the ark. Clearly, the ark was not to be taken lightly.

So, when David decides the ark needs to be moved to Jerusalem, I imagine there were concerns about how this would be done. David assembled 30,000 men to accompany the procession of the ark, and two men–Ahio and Uzzah were in charge of the ark itself. Along the way, as they crossed the threshing floor, the oxen caused the ark to shake, and Uzzah didn’t want anything bad to happen to the ark. He reached out to steady the ark and as soon as he touched it, he fell down dead. David was terrified, and instead of bringing the ark to Jerusalem, he left it at Obed-edom’s house for three months. I’m sure Obed-edom was thinking, “Gee, thanks a lot.”

Obed-edom prospered for those three months with the ark in his presence, which made David think it would be OK to resume bringing the ark to Jerusalem. As David and his men brought the ark into the city, David danced wildly before the ark. The text tells us he was wearing a linen ephod as he did this, which was a priestly garment. Michal, David’s wife and daughter of Saul, saw David and despised him in her heart. In a verse that is not included in our reading for this morning, Michal used the word “shameful” twice in a row to emphasize how inappropriate she thought David’s behavior was. The double usage of this word has led some scholars to believe that David was wearing only the linen ephod, and was therefore mostly naked as he danced. Is this story a case of one person worshiping God so fully that other people couldn’t understand or relate? Or, is it more complicated than that?

This story from 2 Samuel reminds us that human beings are terribly complicated. Sometimes we do good things for questionable reasons. Sometimes we think we are doing things for the right reasons, but deeper down, ulterior motives are steering the ship. For David, I see his move of bringing the ark to Jerusalem to be both about giving others a visual display of his new, unified kingly power and of his hope to have the worship of God at the center of his rule. I like the way Richard Nysse, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Luther Seminary wrote about this: “In other words, David’s motives are not pure and yet God is involved. Sin is real and faith is real; at times they are concurrent in one event and one character. The narrative leaves room for both readings.”

Good…and bad. David danced with abandon before God both because in the ark’s history, people who didn’t celebrate the arrival of the ark died, and because he was rejoicing they had made the trip safely this time. And probably also because he wanted to worship God rightly, even though he was a terribly flawed human being just like all of us, a man whose motives may not have been entirely pure, but who also wanted to do the right thing.

 Just like Margaret Hamilton after filming The Wizard of Oz spent her life reassuring children, “What you saw back there… that’s not all of who I am,” we, too, long not to be defined by our worst moments–or even by our mountaintop successes. Human beings are complicated. Our relationships with each other are complicated. Our relationship with God is complicated. We can rejoice because God, in God’s infinite wisdom, knew both our deepest valleys and our highest mountains and said, “I love you as my child anyway.” 

The book of Ephesians tells us: “In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.” This inheritance was given to us in all our complicated humanness because of God’s abundant and gracious love. 

Friends, we live in polarizing times. I felt compelled to talk about this even before the horrifying news out of Pennsylvania last night. We are urged by so many voices to divide people into groups of good and evil, right and wrong, in and out. The 24 hour news cycle has further entrenched us, and for many of us, we have become so separated from people who think differently than we do on this or that that we may have a hard time remembering that there are real human beings involved. And while there are important things we should not compromise on, people are so much more complicated than these “good and evil” categories we try to put each other into.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Michal in this story because she, too, is a complicated human being who reacted the way she did for myriad reasons. She had been passed around as a political pawn first by her father, and then by her husband David. She was deeply wounded, and also probably jealous that her father lost God’s favor as king when he decided to act like a priest, but God didn’t seem to mind when David did the same thing. Yet, as I revisited this passage in light of the great turmoil in our nation, I paused on the word “despised.” She looked at David and she despised him, a word in the Hebrew which means to look on with contempt, and which literally means to raise one’s head and look down on another.

As Christians, we are never called to despise other human beings, others who are created in the image of God. I love the way Rev. Mark Sandlin put it when he wrote this: “After close study I’ve concluded that Jesus believed there are two kinds of people: 1) your neighbors, whom you are supposed to love, 2) and your enemies, whom you are supposed to love.” 

As people who have been loved by God in all of our complicated humanness, we are called to embrace others with the same love with which Christ loved us, to point others toward the love of Christ that picks us up out of the muck and mire we put ourselves into and says, “You are my child, and I have much better things for you than this.” It’s so much easier to define people by their worst moments. Our biology doesn’t help us with this either. Our brains are twice as likely to remember negative things than they are positive ones. But, our calling as people who have received an inheritance far beyond anything we could ever deserve is to love people with this same love–to see them in their complicatedness and not write them off as a result of what we see.

In a beautiful article by Whitney Dziurawiec on the book of Leviticus, she writes this: “And maybe, we are too. Too tired, too confused, too angry to follow the rules we’ve come up with. Where is Love, anyway? Where did it go? Perhaps we exiled Love long ago – it was too wild, too uncontrollable, too chaotic. We preferred strategies, conviction, shame, agendas. Love had to go. The land lies fallow. The heart lies fallow. It is free, unencumbered by all its previous anxieties, but still very sad. If only we had allowed the chaos of love, if only we weren’t afraid of the uncontrollable. But wait, here in this fallowed land, it is all wild. Noothing is tame. Perhaps where I find myself in this wilderness is back in the Love I’d shunned long ago. Perhaps it was always waiting for me, waiting for my heart to have enough. God Himself waiting outside the camp for the shattering of plans, vision, strategies – waiting for us to be ready for His wild love.”

Friends, the love and belonging of Christ are not make-believe. They are not some fiction only on the silver screen. They are real. They are for us. They call us to offer the same love and belonging to others so that all might know the inheritance befitting those embraced by Christ. They call us to stand in the gap in a violent world and proclaim the good news of love, even if that good news sounds like nonsense to the world around us. May we find the courage to love the complicated people God places in our paths–even our own complicated selves–as we seek to embody the love of God in our lives.

After all, in God’s boundless wisdom, God chose to love complicated us. Thanks be to God. Amen.