Gift-giving is a tricky thing. It takes time and energy and money, usually, and there are lots of pitfalls to avoid. Pitfalls like getting something for another person that’s really, it turns out, for you. Or perhaps purchasing something without a good sense of the person’s size or style. Or getting something they already have. Or failing to take into account their requests or suggestions. Or getting something they won’t actually be able to use. Like I said, it’s hard!
At its best, gift-giving is a way to show love and care; a way to communicate that you really see that person in a meaningful way. The hope is to surprise them, in a good way, and to share in joy together.
At its worst, though, gift-giving can leave a wake of resentment or hurt feelings at being misunderstood so deeply by someone who is supposed to care about you.
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| Photo by Lore Schodts on Unsplash |
In today’s first reading, King David’s attempt at gift-giving doesn’t go quite the way he hoped or expected.
The setting is this: finally, God’s promise made to Abram and Sarai way back in Genesis 12 had been fulfilled. God’s people who had wandered and hungered and battled were finally settled on their own land, and could live in peace. David, their king, decides that it’s not right for God to continue to dwell in a tent, especially now that David is comfortably settled in a house of cedar. So, without really consulting anyone, David makes a plan. He tells the prophet Nathan (our first clue that this is going to go badly is that this interaction usually goes the other way around, with the prophet as the one doing the talking!) that he, David, would build a house for God. Nathan rubber stamps it, and the plan is underway - gift incoming!
When God hears about this surprise, the reaction is perhaps not what David had in mind. God gives the prophet Nathan a message for David. The message from God, said another way, might sound like - Gee, David, you’ve made some awfully big assumptions here. Have you, perhaps, forgotten your place in relation to me? Don’t you think that if I wanted a house, I would have one? For what it’s worth, I like being in the midst of my people and journeying with them wherever they go. Don’t you remember how it was I who found you, and called you, and made you who you are, and protected you along the way?
You want to make me a house? A dwelling? No, David. Instead, I will make you a house - not a house of cedar, or of stone; not a dwelling stuck in one place, but a house that is a dynasty, a lineage.
I wonder if David could have imagined the way that this promise from God was to be fulfilled. Would he have balked at the unmarried young woman from nowhere special who God chose and called to bear God’s Son? Would David have been taken aback by the child’s lowly birth, with only a manger for his bed? Yes, to this ordinary woman, tucked away in a small town, God would be born. As Gabriel announced to Mary in Luke’s gospel, “[This child] will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
In this child, God would continue to dwell with God’s people - not in a house of cedar or stone, but in the vulnerability and weakness of human flesh. In this child, God would enter and live and die in the world not with a traditional display of strength or might, but through the tender, tenacious power of love. If gifts are meant to be a surprise, this certainly is - for Mary, and Joseph, and Elizabeth, and God’s people then, and for all of us, still, today.
The gift of God’s Son continues to come to us, still revealed in surprising, unexpected, ordinary ways: through the power of God’s Word alongside a bit of water, and in a simple meal of bread and wine. With these gifts, God reminds us of who we are - not God, not all-knowing, but human, and forgiven, and so, so deeply loved.
Like God did for David, God has made us a house, a lineage, too. In the waters of baptism we have been joined to the family of God, sharing in the inheritance of grace given to all of God’s children.
When our own gift-giving is fraught, and difficult, we remember the gift that is already ours - the gift of God’s Son. In Jesus, God continues to come close to us, journeying with us wherever we go.
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