Oh the blessing of haverim!

And when Araunah looked down, he saw the king and his servants coming on toward him. And Araunah went out and paid homage to the king with his face to the ground. And Araunah said, “Why has my lord the king come to his servant?” David said, “To buy the threshing floor from you, in order to build an altar to the LORD, that the plague may be averted from the people.” Then Araunah said to David, “Let my lord the king take and offer up what seems good to him. Here are the oxen for the burnt offering and the threshing sledges and the yokes of the oxen for the wood. All this, O king, Araunah gives to the king.” And Araunah said to the king, “May the LORD your God accept you.” But the king said to Araunah, “No, but I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God that cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. (2 Samuel 24:20-24 ESV)

Some nice havering yesterday in our Sunday discussion.

Examining David’s motives in refusing to accept Araunah’s gift of this threshing floor…doesn’t he know how to receive a gift? Was it his own pride – he made a mess and by golly was going to pay to “clean it up”? Or was something else at work here? And does worship have to personally cost us something for it to truly be worship?

The whole discussion was for me a reminder of why reading the Bible is supposed to be a community event. Too many of us are solo reapers swinging our hermeneutical sickle into the text and “harvesting” our implications and applications very nicely on our own, thank you very much.

But the fact is we are never truly solo.

Our hermeneutical sickle has a handle shaped by others more than we realize, swung over a field we didn’t even sow along a path that has been travelled countless times before us. Our self-sufficient, American individualistic mindframe simply has to go. When we enter the Bible we are entering a community library with many volumes that have passed through many hands – authors, editors, copyists, translators, scholars. And it is meant to be received and processed through many hands joined together in a common faith and passion to hear and enter the text, to enter the story. I have met plenty of proud, self-made Bible “scholars” who have just “read the word” on their own (used to be one too!) – because, after all, that’s all it takes, right? Just me and my Bible.

But hearing the Word is a community endeavor, involving hearing and discussing, sifting and sorting, give and take. And hopefully some honest calling each other out when there’s far too much personal conjecture and say so and far too little immersion in the text and story itself.

And so back to our wee circle yesterday, with David “on the couch” as it were. What does this story say about his motives? What lessons are here about worship? After exploring various paths and suppositions, each with valid points along the way, we ended up observing together that there may be nothing more at work here than cultural conventions. Araunah may well be bargaining with David the way Ephron the Hittite bargained with Abraham over the cave of Machpelah in Genesis 23 – offering to give it freely (showing his generosity) and then proposing a fair price after the free offer was appropriately turned down. Maybe that’s what’s driving this exchange. Or maybe it’s what I have always heard “harvested” from this story: that worship and obedience are only truly worship and obedience when there’s sacrifice, only when it hurts (at least a little).

Nothing earthshattering in imporantance here, I suppose, either way.

The blessing for me – the blessing of my wonderful little Sunday morning band of haverim – is that the group discussion opened up some legitimate options based on the wider text of Scripture and it blessed me. I fell in love a little more with the Lord, with the Word, with my wee group.

Which is why we all so desperately need this kind of honest, thought- provoking, life-stimulating, face-to-face havering.

Oh the blessing of haverim…