Hilton Head Island, SC – July 19, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
I Kings 1:1-8; I Kings 1:15-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now David was old and advanced in years; and although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm. – I Kings 1:1 (RSV)
The King And We: 6) The Lion In Winter
We have come to the end of this series of six sermons about David, the second and the greatest of the kings of Israel. In the Books of I and II Samuel and I Kings, we learn more about particular events in the life of David than we are told about anyone else’s life in the Bible, including both Moses and Jesus. The Torah and the Gospels tell us more about what Moses and Jesus said, but the history books tell us more about what David did.
Today what we learn about David is that he got old. We were told earlier that David was thirty years old when he became the king after Saul was killed in battle, and in three places it says David was king for forty years. So by the process of mathematical deduction, we conclude that David was either about seventy or actually seventy in the first verse of I Kings, where it states that “King David was old and advanced in years.” That’s redundant, but never mind.
The surprising thing, at least to people living in the year 2015 of the Common Era, is that anyone who was a mere seventy would be considered old. To us, seventy is perhaps simply late middle age. Three thousand years ago, however, seventy was old, or even, as it says in I Kings 1:15, “very old.” When you consider all the military and family and political battles David had suffered through, it is understandable that he was very old at seventy. With what he had both endured and survived, who wouldn’t be old?
The inspiration for the title of this particular sermon came from a classic 1968 movie called The Lion in Winter, which was based on an earlier play of the same name. It portrayed the conniving life of King Henry II of England, the Plantagenet king, and his conniving wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their four conniving sons, who were nothing if not chips of the old blocks. The movie is set during Christmas of 1183. Henry had imprisoned Eleanor for a while, but he had reluctantly granted her freedom. By that time Henry had crowned his oldest son Henry as the heir apparent. However, the young Henry was to die before his father, so the next son in line, Richard, was to be the next king. In 1183 Eleanor was scheming with Richard, who was later called Richard the Lion-Hearted, to become the heir apparent instead of young Henry. Unfortunately, Richard was killed in battle after he had become Richard I, and then John, called “Lackland” because Henry II refused to give him any royal lands, became John I after Richard died. It was John who was the incompetent and capricious monarch who moved the English nobility to force the king to sign the Magna Carta exactly eight hundred years ago this year at Runnymede, northwest of London.
If it sounds to you like Christmas 1183 must have been a royal mess for the English royal family, you heard it correctly. After all the intrigue and schemes and plots, Eleanor, played by the Oscar-winning Kathryn Hepburn, said to her smoldering spouse, “Well after all, Henry, every family has their little problems!”
In his turbulent seven decades, David had more than his share of little problems. And when he came to the end of his life, he also was the Lion in Winter, the powerful monarch who had escaped coup attempts and regicides to shrivel into an elderly man who couldn’t get warm, or having gotten warm, couldn’t stay warm. He is like my mother-in-law. She always feels cold, even on hot summer days, unlike her daughter, who often feels too warm. Go figure.
The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), is so much more “out front” with its narrative than is the Greek Bible, the New Testament. It tells us that in order to keep the king warm, they had a beautiful young woman lie down beside David. The text says, “The maiden was very beautiful; and she became the king’s nurse and ministered to him; but the king knew her not” (I Kings 1:4). With a little imagination you can figure out what that means. But why would the writer bother to tell us that? I think it is nothing more than this: It encourages those who are easily titillated to keep reading holy writ, when otherwise they might find themselves bored to tears.
The next thing we hear is that Adonijah, the fourth of David’s sons, who was born to his wife Haggith (and about her we hear absolutely nothing else), tried to organize a coup against his father. However, Adonijah was opposed in his coup attempt by several major leaders, including the prophet Nathan. Long before Nathan had excoriated David for his adultery, or more accurately, rape, of Bathsheba. But now, Nathan went to Bathsheba and told her to tell David that Adonijah had declared himself king. She was also to remind David that he had promised Bathsheba that her son Solomon would be king. This she was only too happy to do.
It has been very enlightening for Lois and me to live in a retirement home for the past seven months. One learns things about aging in a magnified way which would not be possible unless one had worked in a retirement home or had been a gerontologist. Advanced age affects different people differently. Some people live to be very old and then, to their great fortune, die almost instantaneously. Some die very slowly but without pain, and some slowly and painfully.
Furthermore, advanced age mentally affects different people differently. Lois plays bridge once a week with three nonagenarians. And if one of the ladies in their nineties can’t play for some reason, another lady, who is 102, fills in. On the other hand, there are people in their late 70s whose mental capabilities have disappeared into the nether regions of the aged. We can do certain things to lengthen our mental acuity, but probably genetics is the major factor why some are so sharp at 98 and other are so limited at 68.
At 70 David was like a man of 90 or 100. Perhaps he had faced too many slings and arrows, perhaps outrageous fortune had had assaulted him too many times. He almost was at the point of not caring which of his sons followed him on the throne, or if any of them did. But Bathsheba, the woman he had violated many years earlier, cared. She remembered that she had deftly twisted David’s arm to promise her that her son Solomon would be king, and on his deathbed, perhaps with beautiful Abishag there keeping him warm, she coerced David into renewing his pledge to her. In his old, creaky voice, David said to Bathsheba, “(A)s I swore to you by the Lord, the God of Israel, saying, ‘Solomon your son shall reign after me, and shall sit upon my throne in my stead’; even so will I do this day.” Having extracted the promise she felt the king owed her, Bathsheba exclaimed, “May my lord King David live forever!” (I Kings 1:30-31) It is possible her praise was more effusive than truly heartfelt, but the promise was sealed.
The Bible is interested in many things, but it is most interested in whether things work out in God’s favor. From Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, the Bible is a book of books about God, and it tends to report events that support the worship and the will of God. Solomon turned out to be the most glorious of the kings of Israel. He ruled over more territory than any other Israelite monarch. Not even Bibi Netanyahu in his wildest dreams would ever seek to control such a vast territory as that which Solomon acquired by battles, political stratagems, and cleverly arranged marriages. He would marry a foreign princess, and then when her father died, he would take over the foreign kingdom. I Kings (11:3) says that Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. He makes David look like a celibate hermit monk by comparison. But it is all OK with the Bible, because all those brazen political marriages helped guarantee Israel’s political future. Without a strong Israel, there could be no worship of the God of Israel, and above all, that is what matters in the Bible.
So the king gave his final blessing to his son Solomon via the pleading of his wife Bathsheba, and thus did Solomon succeed David as monarch. But David was almost too old and tired and mentally exhausted even to care what happened.
Some people make it only to the spring or summer or autumn of life. Those who make it to winter do not arrive there with uniformity of astuteness, ability, or acuity. Some lions in winter still roar incessantly, but many can roar only occasionally, or pathetically pant, or merely purr.
We cannot know what shape we will be in when we are old unless and until we get old. Most of us in this congregation are, if not old, at least older, and not many of us are the man or woman we once were. To deny that is to deny the fact of our age and the stage of our age. As the great old hymn says, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.” But in what shape shall we be when we are borne away? Shall we be like George Burns or Irving Berlin, still going strong at a hundred? Or shall we be a shell of our former selves? Only time will tell.
By now you probably realize that I like Non Sequitur cartoons. Eight days ago a man holding a life preserver walked out of the waves onto a small desert island about forty feet wide with two palm trees on it. He looks at an ATM machine beneath the trees, with nothing else around, and the caption reads, “Bob’s revelation that the key to putting things in proper perspective is timing.”
Sometimes timing is everything. Did we do what we should have done when we should have done it, or did we let it slide, blithely assuming it would somehow all work itself out? Was Henry II wise in the decisions he made with respect to his wife and sons? And how about David? Did the Sweet Singer of Israel come to the end of his life wishing that he had done things differently, that he had not violated Bathsheba, that he had paid closer attention to what was going on in his family, that he had nipped Absalom’s coup attempt in the bud rather than let it fester for ten tortuous years? Was he certain that Solomon would make a better king than Adonijah, or did he just give in to badgering Bathsheba, having no more strength left to decide anything?
Still Alice is Lisa Genova’s very perceptive novel about a woman named Alice who was afflicted with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The story follows Alice, who is a professor at an Ivy League university, down the slippery slope which led her into severe dementia and early death. It won Julianne Moore the Academy Award for Best Actress for her deft performance of a woman fighting the ravages of what seemed like old age in her fifties. Toward the end of the movie she gave a speech to a group of experts in the field of dementia, and she wrote it in such a way that she would not lose her place in her manuscript and forget why she was there. Her husband and children all displayed faith in action in their own distinctive ways, but Alice herself showed great faith, especially in her speech, which was her last appearance in public. Despite being robbed of her mind by an insidious illness, she showed that despite all, she was still Alice.
Have you come to the point in your life where you know you have learned something, but perhaps not nearly enough, or what you have learned you haven’t put into practice nearly well enough, but it probably will have to be enough, because there won’t be much more time? Or have you started to realize that you won’t accomplish everything you’d like, maybe because you can’t, or maybe because there won’t be enough time? When you know time is running out, does time seem to become more valuable to you? Do you start to regret more when you know that your days are increasingly numbered? Has the cold reality finally gripped your heart that, truly, old age is NOT for sissies? Do you have what it takes to get old gracefully, or at least somewhat productively? Or shall you keep on acting as though old age is a condition others may have to face, but it shall never make an entrance into your life?
I joined AARP when I reached the required minimum age of fifty, and thus I have subscribed to the AARP Magazine for the past 26 years. It isn’t the most thrilling journal I receive, but it has interesting and timely stuff, especially for geezers of 50 and beyond. This month, in a feature called What I Know Now, actresses Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, who are co-starring in a new television series called Grace and Frankie, tell about how life seems to them at this stage of their earthly pilgrimage. Jane is 77 and Lily is, I deduced, 70. Lily said that she and her partner of 44 years impulsively decided to marry after 43 years. I never knew Lily had a female partner, or that they decided to marry when same-sex marriages became legal.
Jane said she has two new knees and what she calls a “fake hip,” which I take to mean a replacement hip. Physically she can’t do what she once could do, she said, and I’d be surprised if anyone here is not also feeling like that. Jane also said, “You’re born, you peak at mid-life, then you decline into age. That’s an arc. For most people life is more of an upward evolution.” Is it? Are you still going upward, or does it seem like you’re headed downward? Lily said, “It never occurred to me in 70 years that kindness was important in a relationship. Fascination, sex appeal, intelligence, yes. Why aren’t we taught that kindness matters?” Why not, indeed? But if we haven’t learned it, isn’t it better to learn it later rather than never? Or as Jane expressed it, “What did Pablo Casals say? In his 90s he still gave the same answer when someone asked why he continued to practice cello every day. He said, ‘I’m beginning to notice some improvement.’”
Have we noticed any improvements lately, or are we just sliding down the long slope of longevity, picking up momentum, but making no progress at anything? Does old age have to connote loss? Can’t it include gain?
Do you ever stop to think that maybe death is no longer theoretical, but that it shall be actual? Has it hit you yet that you too shall die? We all are divine instruments; none of us is meant to be an independent being, living unto ourselves. Whether we write psalms or produce children or command battles, or we write letters or e-mails or texts to children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren, or visit friends or see patients in hospitals or nursing homes or read good books or play cards with other old folks, or quietly sit in a sunny room on a summer afternoon and look at photographs which are 25 or 50 or 75 --- or 90 --- years old, happily bringing back memories which may be faded around the edges but produce new-found pleasure simply by allowing aged eyes to peruse the images: in all those things we are all God’s agents in His world. Getting older happens to everyone; getting old will happen to most of us. Shall we be lions who rail against our winter, or shall we be lions luxuriating in our winter?
Don’t let old age sneak up on you. Think about it, so you can be a blessing to God and others when it sweeps over you. Getting old with God is good.