7/26/09 Ordinary Time
2 Samuel 11:1-15
Hearing this morning’s scripture, you might think you were reading a transcript of some reality tv show, a telenovela, perhaps, rather than listening for the word of God. There’s just nothing uplifting, holy, or, well, biblical about this tale of the sordid fall of Israel’s golden boy, King David, who used his power to serve his lust, who took what he wanted without pity, and who, in serving his own transitory need, shattered the lives of an innocent woman and her soldier husband, setting his own family’s fortunes on a downward spiral toward destruction.
Church folk read the bible to be inspired, not disgusted—we want to raise up our lives. We come to church for better, not for worse—and if any of our own personal histories bear the burden of some similar story of shame—well, that is not for church, but instead is a secret best kept hidden, even from ourselves.
I had a professor of pastoral counseling in seminary who made this fact abundantly clear while teaching us how to minister to parishioners in crisis. Before she brought into class some “real” people whose personal and familial problems were to be addressed by us in counseling, she would introduce their issues—adultery, alcoholism, financial misfeasance, abuse—and with a grimace of distaste on her face and a shake of her head would conclude this situation is as ugly as homemade sin. From which I learned that, at church and in the family of God, some folks’ troubles were just too nasty to talk about; too ugly to be redeemed.
But this morning, just for a few minutes, the bible—the bible—would ask us to believe that even homemade sin is not too ugly to be unveiled, too awful to examine, too far beyond redemption to be offered up to God and to God’s people. This morning, the bible offers us a rare opportunity to listen to one such story—a story as ugly as homemade sin—and to find in it, a word from God.
This is a story that, as scholar Walter Brueggemann puts it, reveals more than we want to know about David and more than we can bear to understand about ourselves. It is a story that cuts deep into the strange web of foolishness, fear, and fidelity that comprises the human map.1
This is a story about David—or maybe about any one of us, a story about what happens when a person experiences a failure of vocation, a loss of meaning, a breakdown of identity, a surge of ruthlessness or recklessness that, once indulged, changes the landscape of family, faith, and life forever. It is a story about a ball player who struggles with addiction, about the priest who fell in love, the neighbor whom desperation led to “borrow” money from his company’s coffers but who was caught before he could repay it. It is a story about a husband, a wife, a stranger whom you would never have suspected… it is a story about you, or about me.
In the spring of the year, when kings go forth to battle, David stayed home. His place was with his soldiers in the field, but his heart, lulled by security, had turned in boredom to matters of power, and of lust. How strange, that stories of human tragedy can be told so pitilessly, with such brevity and baldness. It happened. He saw a woman. He sent. He lay with her. She conceived. She sent and told him: “I am pregnant.” Told so coldly, what are we to believe? How are we to feel? Where are the explanations, the details, the mitigating circumstances? Where is the personal charm that will permit us to understand, to excuse, to embrace David and what he has done with compassion and grace? How are we to feel, when nothing and no one is spared in the telling of this old and ugly story?
Like David, our first reaction is to deny, to cover up, to hide. We aren’t that kind of person. He would never do anything like that. Maybe she’ll never find out. There must be some reasonable explanation. Maybe if I get busy, have a drink, get a lawyer, start over again somewhere else, strike a bargain, pretend a lot and lie a little, this mistake can be erased as if it never existed, and I can have my life back again, the way it was before.
We listen to David, and we watch him, trying to repair the shattered fragments of his life and Bathsheba’s, and sadness fills us. Calling the man he has betrayed in from the field of battle, David seeks for peace, yearns for it like a man dying of thirst in a desert of his own creation. Is it well with Joab? With the war? With you? With the people? Is everything okay? Uriah doesn’t know, but David does, that nothing is okay—not now, and perhaps not ever again—and no assurance of peace, offered in ignorance of the truth, can touch this pain David carries. For David alone knows what he is: he bears the pain of his fall from grace in secrecy and shame. He believe that the love of God cannot reach him there: and so believing, he despairs and compounds the wreckage he has made of his life by committing murder. The secret must be kept for David to survive; and so, Uriah must die—and with him, the last of the shining innocence of the shepherd boy who became king, and the last of that man’s hope and trust in the saving power of Love.
In short order, the story rushes to its unhappy conclusion. Uriah returns. Joab obeys. The soldier dies, and a messenger is sent with the news to David, who now must pay the additional cost of the hardening of his soul against his comrades, his people, his friends. People die, he shrugs, swallowing against the grief. It is the way of battle. Do not be troubled, he tells the messenger to tell Joab, and it is evident that it is himself he is trying to convince. And the story tells us: the thing was not evil in David’s eyes. And how could it be? For deadening the conscience to the soul’s cry of pain is the only way David can now survive in the script he is penning for his life.
Or is it?
Could it be… that there is something bigger at work in David and in Israel than power, and cynicism and fear? Something that will not abide a cover up that deadens the soul of a man and cripples the future of a family, a people, and a land. Something that will not let sleeping dogs lie; something that is standing for the possibility of truth when silence might have been enough to get by.
The narrator of this story knows what that Something is, and he names it: Now the thing was evil in the eyes of the Lord. “The thing” was good enough for the broken David; but it was not good enough for David’s God. And so God’s people found the courage to tell this story, and to tell it straight: as ugly and impossible as it was.
Where before in David’s life there were circumstances, explanations, justifications—just like in our own lives—where before, there were reasons to explain away the truth, to distance the knowing of self, to silence the voice of God; now, there is inexplicably a new Power at work.
A people willing to open their eyes and face the truth about the golden boy of Israel. A family willing to share the cost of David’s mistakes. A genuine possibility that a man might be loved, not despite, but in the midst of, his brokenness and his flaws. An astounding, ground-breaking, reckless new trust in truth—and in truth’s God—that calls the people to tell it like it is, let the chips fall where they may, and listen for a saving, a judging, a healing word from God.
Long ago at seminary, I learned how good God’s people are supposed to be, and how ugly it is when people of faith upon whom we rely and trust, fall prey to human flaws and fail us, and themselves. What I did not learn, in that polarizing professional training ground, was how much power is at work in the church that holds with equal strength both the reality of sin and brokenness and the reality of mercy and redemption. A few years into my work as a pastor, I saw the wonderful Robert Duvall film Tender Mercies, about the drunk and disgraced country singer who found redemption and a new beginning in the household of a struggling single mother, and I thought, that’s what church is supposed to be, a place of tender mercies where you can tell the truth about yourself, and hope and be helped to a new life.
This story of David’s, of ours, has guts. It asks us: does faith mean perfection, or does it mean trust, even in the midst of brokenness? It asks us: is fidelity about the appearance of goodness? Or about a willingness to persist and to begin again to live for the Good, even in the midst of shattering, ego-breaking failure and sin? Are there tender mercies at work in the lives of God’s children, even when they are broken, mercies that are shaped by the kindness of a friend, a neighbor; by the willingness to confess and forgive, even one’s own self? This story says, yes.
It tells us something very important about the nature of God and about the possibilities of a life sustained by God’s grace: that God works for good even in, or perhaps especially in, the deeply flawed and terrible circumstances of lives broken by sin and hidden in the Lie. The old hymn says it as well as anything else:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea
There’s a kindness in God’s justice which is more than liberty.
There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven.
There is no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgment given.
1 Brueggemann, Walter, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching; 1 and 2 Samuel, p. 272.