Ninth Sunday After Pentecost, Year B: Tent, Temple, Shepherd, King
The Salal + Cedar community, which hosts and curates Wild Lectionary, seeks to grow a culture that values rest, sabbath and a sense of “enough” over scarcity. This week we did not have a contributor for Wild Lectionary so project curator Laurel Dykstra patchworked together this offering with minimal verse by verse commentary and some sermon excerpts rather than suggestions for preaching. It is sourced mostly from previous posts and unless otherwise credited, the writing is Dykstra’s.
Tent or temple, circumcised and uncircumcised, storm and calm, crowds and deserted places, but most of all good and bad shepherds –the readings are full of nature-based metaphors of contrasts. The prevailing theme -the promise of David, the good shepherd’s enduring kingship, is an opportunity to reflect on interspecies relationships, which can be characterized by respect, interdependence and mutual learning, by exploitation (including rhetorical exploitation) and extraction, and often by a combination of both.
Commentary
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Kingship, divine sovereignty, and the Davidic covenant are the major themes of Samuel 1 and 2; hope for the good that kingship might bring, appears alongside knowledge of the abuses of kings. Two songs of deliverance frame Samuel 1 and 2: Hannah’s song of social reversal is the model for the Magnificat (1 Samuel 2:1-10), and David’s song of thanksgiving (2 Sam 22, Psalm 18) compares divine deliverance to powerful natural elements: rock, earthquake, fire, wind, clouds, water. Both songs end by proclaiming what God does for the king, the anointed, and they share metaphors from the natural world: God speaking with/in thunder and the paired horn and rock representing strength from the animal world and steadfastness from the geological.
Cedars, and more specifically the Cedars of Lebanon, appear throughout scripture with a variety of meanings but most can be grouped into two categories: cedar wood conveys wealth and luxury, cedar trees convey greatness, to put it another way, cedar is the tree of kings and the king of trees.
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In this psalm to David more-than-human entities represent qualities of strength, might and endurance. There is an element of royalist greenwashing here where animals, landforms and waterways are used metaphorically to endorse the monarchy, a king whose rule may not be to their benefit. (Certainly this is true as Solomon succeeds David)
Verse 24-26
His horn shall be exalted. The horn of the wild ox is a recurring scriptural motif conveying victory or strength. It resonates textually with the songs of David’s and Hannah in Samuel as does the pairing of rock and horn.
The kings power over rivers and oceans is like that of God. -
Jeremiah 23:1-6, is a woe oracle set within chapters 21-23, which focus on the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. The chapters emphasize that institutional and national leaders of the time — especially the kings, the priests, and the prophets — failed the people of Judah during a time of catastrophic national crisis.
The extended metaphor is one of sheep and shepherd. Bad shepherds are indicted, scattered sheep will be gathered and cared for by a good shepherd, the restored Davidic monarchy.
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(Notes by Amy Dalton)
The familiar words of Psalm 23 serve as a gateway for perceiving the nature of the Good Shepherd aspect of the Divine. Though the beloved poem has traditionally been read in a way that emphasizes the idyllic, pastoral imagery in its opening lines, the full text actually contains the shadow side of “wildness” too. John August Swanson’s serigraph on the Psalm helps to bring these two sides into conversation, reminding us that the “valley of the shadow of death” is in fact the setting of the whole process of finding our way to peace. The Psalmist is in need of the Good Shepherd’s guidance because he finds himself forced to travel through “the valley of the shadow of death.” Especially just now, as we are so surrounded by death, we should bring the harrowing experience captured by verse 4 into focus.Swanson’s notes on the creative unfolding of his artistic representation of this Psalm, as well as the quotations that accompany, are worth digging into.
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Brother Keith Nelson of the Society of St. John the Divine finds in the first four chapters of Ephesians a comprehensive Christian ethos for climate action, rooted in the mandate to “speak the truth in love” (Eph 4:15-16). Framed in the scale of the cosmos pervaded with divine presence, he sees Ephesians’ call to wholeness and repentance inviting a new ecological self, the church and individuals are awakened to our climate justice vocation.
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Dong Heyon Jeong’s focus on animality, vegetality and colonization disrupt typical anthropocentric readings of Mark. He sees the Markan Jesus as the colonized messiah with a complex and ambiguous relationship with the more than human world.
Ched Myers comments on what is missing from the lectionary the wilderness feeding (6:35-44), neither of Mark’s two versions of this tradition in Year B, and the second sea crossing in a storm.
“The wind and waves in Mark’s story, as cosmic forces of opposition (see Ps 104:7), symbolize everything that impedes Jesus’ attempted “boundary crossing.” The enmity between Jew and Gentile was seen in antiquity as the prototype of all human hostility, the separation between them considered part of the “natural order.” Mark’s harrowing Sea stories suggest that the task of social reconciliation was not only difficult, but virtually inconceivable.”
Teaching and Preaching
Temple and Tent
(Excerpts from a paper on the Cedars of Lebanon by Laurel Dykstra)
Lebanon cedar is referred to more than seventy times in the historical, prophetic and wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible but it does not grow in Palestine; the southern limits of its growing range are north of any territory ever occupied by the Israelite Kingdom. So the first question of a bioregional reading must be, what makes a non-native species so important that it is referred to twice as many times as wheat, the staple food crop?
Israel has no true forest but rather scrub-land characterized by shrubs and dwarf vegetation; the native trees are quite short so building projects with large uprights and long straight roofing beams are dependent on import. In the biblical text and the archaeological record, cedar is associated with the urbanization of the Middle Bronze Age and later. Several passages in the historical books, particularly in the material lauding the “Golden Age” of Solomon, describe unprocessed logs, brought as tribute or trade to the king of Israel by the rulers of Phoenician city-states (2 Sam 5:11-12, 1 Chron 14:1, 1 Chron 22:2-4, 1 Kings 5:5-9, 2 Chron 2:3, 2 Chron 7:2-12 2 Chron 9-12).
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Cedar, logged in the Lebanon highlands, is imported by sea for massive, luxury building projects in Jerusalem. Tellingly the descriptions of temple and royal palace are difficult to distinguish from one another. The King of Israel provides payment in goods and a massive labour force, conscripted either from his own people (1 Kings 5:13-18), resident aliens (2 Chron 2:17-18), or enslaved indigenous populations (2 Cron 8:7-8). Cedar is especially associated with Solomon, his wealth, military might, and his great wisdom. This “wisdom” is both the engine that drives this massive extraction machine and, like cedar pillars and panels, a luxury product of it.
In less detailed passages not confined to the royalist history, cedar is used as a kind of shorthand for luxury, grandeur, and wealth, “silver as common as stones and cedars as numerous as sycamores” (2 Chron 9:27), “the beams of our house are cedar” (Song 1:17). Often there is an implicit connection between cedar and royalty; whether it is viewed positively or negatively, a cedar house, cedar panels and cedar beams are equated with kingship. Indeed, in 2 Sam 5:12 and 1 Chron 14:1 David takes Hiram’s tribute of cedar as divine affirmation of his kingship.
The seventeen passages in which cedar lumber and logs represent wealth are the largest number of cedar references with a single theme. Numerically, the strongest biblical message about the cedar is that it is the tree, or at least the wood, of kings.
In the royal conquest ideology, cedar is like the land itself, a source of wealth that the king can, indeed must, exploit. From this perspective, the predominance of this luxury import, this empire builder, over subsistence crops makes perfect sense. Not only because of the scriptural emphasis on royalty and divinity, rather it is the economic role of cedar that trumps both agriculture and ecology. In simplest terms the wealth of kings is more important in this history than the food of the community.
Tents -tent cities, homelessness, displacement of indigenous people from their lands.
(Excerpts from a sermon on Second Samuel by Laurel Dykstra)
In today’s reading from Second Samuel, David is on top and he wants to stay there. Israel is at its political high point. King David, flush with military victory over the Philistines has built himself a house of cedar –a palace-- and he seeks to do the same for God, build a place where the Ark of the Covenant will rest—a temple.But God, through the prophet Nathan, scorns David’s offer of a physical house
Are you the one to build me a house to live in?
I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.
David is trying to tie god’s presence to his own military victory, to domesticate a God who is restless, on the move, dwelling with us in tents.
Now if I were in charge God would have something sharp to say about David’s arrogance. But God responds much more generously than I would
Using a play on words:
7:11 YHWH declares to you that YHWH will make you a house.
7:16 Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.
In effect God says, “I won’t take your house instead I will give you a house—not a building but a family, and a promise”
Having shattered David’s expectation, God shatters mine.
Even when we completely fail to get it, God offers promise and blessing and relationship. God meets our attempts to control with a gift.
But the promise of a throne that will last forever is not fulfilled, Or not as David expects. the tribes of Israel are united under one king for only three generations before there is civil war
In a few hundred years both the Northern and Southern kingdom fall and Israel is subject again and again to the changing empire of the day: Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks,
Eventually Solomon builds the temple and by the time the Gospels were written it had been stripped by the Egyptians, and Assyrians, and destroyed by the Babylonians, rebuilt, destroyed by Romans
By the time of Jesus the land once ruled by David is occupied by Rome, so what does this promise mean? What kind of kingdom will have not end?
The gospel asks questions and warns us to expect the unexpected.
Urgent Risky, dangerous, world changing, Samuel speaks of God’s persistent choosing to be with us in the ordinary and the extraordinary.
this challenging, unexpected God who would rather live in tents than temples.
I am reminded of others who live in tents who won’t behave as we expect, who are persistent in their call for connection/relationship/justice.
People of Attawapiskat First Nation–in Northern Ontario where temperatures regularly drop below –40, are experiencing housing crisis where people are living in tents and trailers, often with one family per room and those who have plumbing share toilet with 10 to 15 others,
10 years ago this community declared a state of emergency and former chief Teresa Spence began a hunger strike from a tipi near the nations capital
All over North America unhouse people are making makeshift communities for themselves in urban Tent Cities. Refusing to be invisible, creating relationships of mutual aid and support where governments, cities and municipalities fail them.
On university campuses all over the world students are setting up encampments in solidarity with the people of Palestine, calling for a lasting peace and a withdrawl of their universities’ complicity in and profit from this genocidal war.
How do these tent dwellers show us something of God?
Ephesians’ Ethos for Climate Response
Brother Keith Nelson of the Society of St. John the Divine finds in the first four chapters of Ephesians a comprehensive Christian ethos, a wholistic hopeful vision, for climate response. Given that the lectionary has us reading from Ephesians for 7 weeks, Nelson’s take on Ephesians ecological big picture is worth preaching on at least once during that time.
In Ephesians 4:15-16 we are enjoined to speak the truth in love in order to build up the body in love. For many of us the most difficult truth that we need to hear and to speak is the extreme state of the climate emergency and our own culpability in it.
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The preacher might ask their community if there are particular beings (animals, waterways, trees) speaking to us in love. And if so what are they telling us? Asking for?
How when we know the information, the statistics do we hold this in love?
Ephesians is framed in the scale of the cosmos, a cosmos which is pervaded with God’s presence. The fullness, the wholeness of the church is described in bodily language—wholeness, growth, interdependence, diversity. And this wholeness calls and invites us to a new (ecological) self.
So we can ask what a new and worthy self might look like,in light of the Climate Crisis?
Nelson suggests this self would be:
“Created according to the likeness of the Creator;
rooted and grounded in love;
loving one’s neighbor as oneself, having extended the definition of neighbor to all things in heaven and earth.
And that new self is not alone but part of a body, the body of Christ and the body of earth -a church awakening to its ecological vocation.
“We each occupy a vital niche in this global web. What we do matters, but what and how we love from the center of a new self, matters most of all: how we love every molecule of soil, every tree, and every human life for whom Christ “descended into the lower parts of the earth” and “ascended far above all heavens, so that he might fill all things” (4:9-10).”
The preacher can share examples of their own beloveds from the more-than-human world or ask for examples from the congregation. These might be incorporated into prayers or litanies.
Explorations of a community’s specific ecological vocation could also be the subject of preaching and prayer.
The epistle invites hopeful action rooted in our relationship with a God who is creator and lover of creation.
Sheep, Shepherds and Interspecies Mutuality
(Excerpts from a Good Shepherd Sunday sermon by Laurel Dykstra)
We tend to hear the echoes of other sheep and shepherd passages:
The ram that Abraham finds in the thicket and sacrifices instead of Isaac
You might remember that the matriarch Rachel was a shepherd
the shepherds of Ezekeil –leaders who fail to care for their people
the lost sheep of the parable
the shepherds who watch their flocks by night
slaughtered lamb of Revelation
Human relationships with sheep possibly go back some thirteen thousand years; a bond initially nurtured among the rock and sand of ancient Mesopotamia. And images of both gods and kings as shepherds of their people are older than Christianity and older than Judaism
But misunderstanding the sheep-shepherd relationship and then applying it to our relationship with God ends up being not very flattering for either of us.
Sheep
If I said “you are all a bunch of sheep” who would take that as a compliment? We tend to think that sheep are powerless creatures, needy, easily lead, and unable to think independently. “Wooly” is a word used for someone who is vague, confused, not very smart. Where we don’t depend on them for meat, milk or textiles sheep can even seem useless.
But my shepherd friends tell me sheep are far from stupid.
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They are fast, good climbers, have 320 degree vision, they can recognize voices
10:27 My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.
They can identify human and sheep faces from a photo after a year without seeing the individual. Sheep can solve problems—there are several cases where sheep have figured out how to roll across cattle guards in the road
Sheep are among the only creatures that can convert the desert plants to forms more available for human use.
In the ancient near east sheep were a herding family’s source of livelihood and wealth -they were incredibly valuable.Sheep are brilliantly adapted for their lifestyle: they are herd animals, dessert dwellers, and prey, -as species for whom sticking together is the best form of defense.
Former shepherd and one of my wilderness teachers, So Sinoupolos Lloyd, says we project our fear of conformity onto sheep. But in fact they teach us about the intelligence of the collective, about trust, and community. They also really teach about the gifts of fear and vigilance.
So the first common mistake in reading this passage is underestimating sheep.
Shepherd
The second mistake is overestimating shepherds -or at least miss-imagining them. The flip side of the dumb sheep is the wise, benevolent shepherd (often in pristine robes and flowing hair) who saves the dim-witted sheep from inevitable doom.
But my shepherd friends say shepherd craft is not about control, power, and dominance.
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Despite bishops and their crooks and the imagery of King as shepherd, Shepherding is not a high-status profession. It is often carried out by children. And Noel Moules reminds us A shepherd is a wilderness figure. Often an outsider in terms of mainstream society. The fact that angels appear to shepherds in Luke is shocking not cozy.
Shepherding is primarily about relationship and mutual learning. A shepherd must respect sheep.
During WW2 shepherds of Crete were critical guerrilla resisters because they saw and experienced the land, the terrain through the eyes of the sheep. In being a shepherd, they also were shepherded by these animals.
A sheep that does not know and trust the shepherd will not follow the sound of their voice.
In Greek both ‘to follow’ and ‘to know’, strongly stress the experience of reciprocal relationship. This is a call to all of us to lively mutual relationships between humans and with the more than human world.
It is an interesting thing in the shepherd passage, Jesus does not use the definite article, Jesus doesn’t say he is THE (one and only very special) Good Shepherd but a Good Shepherd. So here we are coming back to vocations again. Ours is “a priesthood of all believers.”
each person here has a vocation for leadership in God’s church
What if we had that kind of reciprocal trust and mutual learning relationship with place and other beings in our church, in our neighbourhood, in our watershed? How would we care for one another?
Who are the thieves and robbers, nations and false shepherds that threaten, consume, commodify and displace?
(Excerpt from a previous Wild Lectionary post from Amy Dalton)
There is a deep danger in the shepherd-sheep imagery. It can feel as though the sheep are powerless needy creatures and the shepherd is the ultimate benevolent dictator, graciously deciding to save them from otherwise inevitable doom. Using this relationship as a metaphor for the relationship between people and the Force of Guidance leads to a preference for passive following as the way to live a faithful life. Unfortunately, this is widely accepted amongst Christians as the accurate understanding of the relationship between ourselves and God. But is this really an accurate understanding of the felt connections between sheep and shepherds? In exploring this question I’ve been reading some blogs by people who work as shepherds. When working to dismantle the confusing ways that metaphors get mobilized, it is always helpful to remember that the “objects” of metaphors are also and actually subjects of life in our world. Sheep and shepherds are real subjects with their own identities. And by the accounts of actual shepherds, the relationships between them are much more nuanced than dictator-follower! Kim Goodling, who blogs at livingwithgotlands.com, describe her sheep as clever creatures with will and personality that she must work to understand on a daily basis. Moreover, she identifies “humility” as one of the core qualities of a human who wants to work with sheep. In Kim’s writings, you can find some support for the use of sheep/shepherd as metaphors for humans/God, and Kim herself draws from this metaphor at times. But you will not find support for an understanding of either relationship to be one of caricatures or simple power over relationship. Let us commit to seeing sheep, as well as ourselves, as much more than needy followers – even as we acknowledge and respond to our primordial need for Guidance from Beyond ourselves.
Sources and Resources
Anderson, All the Trees and Woody Plants of the Bible, 1979.
Ariel Bloch “The Cedar and the Palm Tree: A Paired Male/Female Symbol in Hebrew and Aramaic” 13-17. Solving Riddles and Untying Knots: Biblical, Epigraphic, and Semitic Studies in Honor of Jonas C. Greenfield. Eds Ziony Aevit, Seymour Gitin, Michael Sokoloff. Winona Lake Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1995.
Dong Heyon Jeong Embracing the Nonhuman in the Gospel of Mark, Society for Biblical Literature, 2023
Dykstra, Laurel “Tree of Kings or King of Trees?” unpublished paper, 2018
Wes Howard Brook “The Books of Samuel” Radical Bible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaS3vy0yhYM&list=PL0oii_dF2MUxJ6z49L-f06bFFpS_tZmJ0&index=1
Matthew W. Humphrey, “Sheep Are Not Sexy” Radical Discipleship, https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2018/04/19/wild-lectionary-sheep-are-not-sexy/
Liphschitz, Nili, “Cedars of Lebanon: Exploring the Roots” Biblical Archaeology Review, 2013 49-56
Marvin W. Mikesell. "The Deforestation of Mount Lebanon," The Geographical Review. Volume LIX, Number 1 (January, 1969)
Noel Moules, “Good Shepherd” Radical Discipleship https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2017/05/04/wild-lectionary-good-shepherd/
Kelly J. Murphy, “Commentary on Jeremiah 23:1-6” Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/christ-the-king-3/commentary-on-jeremiah-231-6-4
Ched Myers, “The Crossings” Radical Discipleship https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2021/07/16/the-crossings/
Keith Nelson, “Truth in Love: A Christian Ethos for Climate Emergency” https://www.ssje.org/2021/08/01/truth-in-love-a-christian-ethos-for-climate-emergency-br-keith-nelson/
Leah D. Schade, “When Psalm 23 Shepherded Me,” https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ecopreacher/2017/05/psalm-23-shepherded-me/
John August Swanson’s serigraph on Psalm 23 https://johnaugustswanson.com/catalog/psalm-23/
So Sinopoulos-Lloyd, “Toward a Multispecies Apocalyptic Shepherdcraft” Queer Nature https://www.queernature.org/criticalnaturalistblog/shepherdcraft
Paul M. Washington, “Other Sheep I Have” The Autobiography of Father Paul M. Washington, https://alt.library.temple.edu/tupress/titles/1036_reg.html