Hilton Head Island, SC – July 5, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 51:1-8; II Samuel 12:1-9,13-15a; II Samuel 12:15b-24a
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not come back to me.” – II Samuel 12:23 (RSV)
The King & We: The Sadder-But-Wiser Sinner
Six weeks ago I preached the third in a series of six sermons about the life of King David. There shall be three more, starting today. I didn’t preach all six sermons one right after the other, because six sermons in a row about the eventful and stressful life of the second king of Israel would be at least three too many. It is hard to believe that so many memorable things could happen to one person. Furthermore, it might be too hard to absorb it all over just a month and a half. Therefore we shall now plunge into the last half of this six-part series.
I did not read anything from the major biblical event which precedes what I did read this morning. That is because it is probably familiar to you as one of the few truly X-rated episodes in holy writ. I am referring, of course, to David’s adultery with Bathsheba. Anyway, if you were here in March, you heard one of our co-pastors, Bob Naylor, talk about David and Bathsheba.
By the way, it isn’t surprising that many years ago Hollywood produced a movie called David and Bathsheba. Tinseltown loves spice, and the story of the king and her is nothing if not spicy. They might do David and Goliath, however, because Goliath had his head cut off by David, and Hollywood loves slayings almost as much as sleaze. But nobody ever thought to write a screenplay for David and Saul or David and Michal. That’s because most people might think Saul would perhaps be Saul Bellow, and almost nobody has any idea of who Michal was. But since I preached about both Saul and Michal a few weeks ago, you know everything there is to know about them - - - don’t you. Well, don’t you?
Today we come to David and Bathsheba. To put their story into one long nutshell of a sentence: David saw Bathsheba taking a bath (which has nothing to do with her name), and he took an overpowering lustful fancy to her, and sent for her, and did what a king could do with a commoner, and she got pregnant, and to cover up his sin David had Bathsheba’s husband Uriah killed in a battle, supposing thereby that everyone would think the baby that was coming was Uriah’s, and he thought nobody knew what had happened, but the prophet Nathan did, and that’s where I started reading this morning. Whoever said the Bible is dull? But it also tells it like it is, and with David a great sin was committed, and the Bible does not attempt to cover it up.
The last verse in the episode of what in effect was the grisly royally-ordered murder of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah has David saying this to a messenger he sent to his general Joab out on the field of battle, who had lost one his bravest soldiers, “Thus shall you say to Joab, ‘Do not let this matter trouble you, for the sword devours now one and now another; strengthen your attack upon the city, and overthrow it.’ And encourage him.” This is the man reckoned to be the greatest of the Israelite monarchs, and he talks about commanding the slaying of Uriah in the thick of battle as though a fly was being swatted or a cockroach was being squashed under foot.
But God was not about to let this terrible deed pass. It was horrible, and it needed to be rectified. So God sent His prophet Nathan to David. (In Hebrew the name Nathan, incidentally, means “Sent.” We know nothing of Nathan before, and almost nothing afterward. God just sent him for a specific purpose.) David, being the suave and sophisticated king he was, invited Nathan to come into the royal chamber in the royal palace. Nathan didn’t beat around the bush. He told David a little story about two men who lived in a certain city. One was rich, and had many sheep and cattle, and the other was very poor, and had only one little ewe lamb, which he treated as a pet. It was loved by the poor man and his children. The rich man had a traveler come to visit him, and he wanted to give his friend lamb chops in honor of his visit. But instead of butchering one of his hundreds of sheep, he took the poor man’s lamb, slaughtered it, and had it cooked for the friend.
When David heard the end of the story, he was livid. “The man who did this deserves to die!” David stormed. Nathan looked at the king for a long, poignant moment, and then he said, “YOU ARE THE MAN!!!” The prophet scared the king half out of his royal hide. David’s face turned whiter than the fictional ewe lamb’s fleecy coat. With that withering prophetic exclamation, David knew that he had been found out in the awful thing he had done.
The next observation by Nathan is one which can turn our blood to ice. After David forthrightly acknowledged his sin, Nathan said, “The Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die” (II Sam. 12:13-14).
Please listen very carefully. You don’t need to accept my theology regarding this incident, but I feel compelled to divulge it to you anyway. This verse implies that the birth of children is a great gift from God, and I would hope everyone sees it that way, though I know that under certain conditions not everyone does. However, it is anathema to me to imagine that God would ever snuff out the life of an innocent infant in order for the sin of one or both of its parents to be paid to God. God never ever operates like that, despite the Bible clearly proclaiming here and there that He does. If we pay for our sins (which sometimes we do and other times we don’t), we alone must pay the price, and not anyone else. Nathan’s explanation of what is going to happen has a very clear biblical precedent, but also a very murky theology, in my opinion. However, that observation is not crucial to this sermon, even though I insisted on making it anyhow.
What happened after the baby was born is that he was deathly ill from the moment of his birth. David fervently fasted and prayed, hoping that God would allow the child to live. When the baby died seven days later, the king’s servants were afraid to tell David, because they feared he might harm himself. When David saw the courtiers whispering to one another, he calmly asked them, “Is the child dead?” Hesitantly, they told him that his son had indeed died.
Then David did what the royal retinue thought was a very strange thing. Instead of putting on sackcloth and ashes, to symbolize deep sorrow and contrition for his sin, David bathed himself and put on fresh clothes. The servants quizzically said to their sovereign, “While your son was alive, you fasted and wept, but now that he dead, you arise and you eat food. Why?”
Why indeed? Is this another instance of a heartless royal personage acting as though he can do anything and get away with it? Not at all! Never! This is a man who interprets (incorrectly, I think) that God has taken the life of his infant son in order for David to pay the price of his adultery with the baby’s mother. That would be bad but understandable theology. But that isn’t it at all. David knows that he has sinned. He is willing to admit it with tears and sorrow. But now that his son has died, David picks himself up and goes on with his life.
How many of us fail to do that? When we suppose that some tragedy befalls us because of our own bad behavior, and that it is God’s way of punishing us, do we accept the consequences, and then move on? Or do we wallow in our grief, refusing to move either forward or backward, allowing ourselves to remain in lethal neutral, flagellating ourselves for what we have done?
In the Broadway show Music Man, Harold Hill, the leading male character, sings a cynical song about the kind of woman he would like to find in River City, Iowa. “The sadder but wiser girl’s the girl for me,” he intones, “the sadder but wiser girl for me.” In Marian Paroo he does not find such a woman, but she also learns that she must no longer look for “My white knight, not a Lancelot nor an angel with wings/ But someone to love me, who is not afraid of a few nice things.” Nonetheless, Marian turns out to be the right one for Harold, and Harold for Marian.
Sometimes, in order to move forward in life, we must encounter problems we would much rather avoid. Being sadder but wiser ought not to be pursued, but if we stumble into it, the wisdom we gain from sadness may truly be a blessing, even if a blessing initially in disguise.
Have you ever done something you knew was wrong, and not merely a little wrong, but a lot wrong, an enormous wrongdoing? Maybe you never did such a thing, and if so, you are fortunate. Or maybe you did it, but you dealt with it by deliberately ignoring it, attempting to act as though you could never do such a thing. Many people truly never commit major sins, but others do, and yet manage psychologically and spiritually to overlook them altogether.
Two weeks ago I was in worship in the Christ Presbyterian Church of Madison, Wisconsin. This was the church I grew up in and in which I was ordained as a minister more than fifty years ago. I shall never forget being in that church several days after my second-oldest brother had been killed in a military accident, and after we in the family had attended his committal service in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia a couple of days previously.
Even though I was still engulfed by grief and disbelief, I was nevertheless sufficiently a member of the clergy to wonder what biblical passage the pastor of the church, who was not the pastor I had known growing up, would use to address Ray’s tragic death. He used the story of David after the moral plunge with Bathsheba. You may think that was odd, perhaps even outrageous. How could a story about a king’s adultery and the death of the baby born of that adultery possibly relate to an airborne commander dying in a disastrous parachute landing?
But it wasn’t the rest of the story upon which Bill Wimberly focused. It was upon David’s reaction to his sad circumstances to which the minister called our rapt and wondering attention. A tragedy had occurred in David’s life, the tragedy of his adultery, and then of the death of his infant son. But David picked himself up and went on from there. He could have wallowed in self-pity, or in feelings of severe divine punishment, but he didn’t. He stood up, brushed himself off, and went on with his life. Psalm 51 illustrates that. To do otherwise would be to thumb his nose at God, whom he incorrectly assumed had caused the child’s death. Even when we have greatly sinned, we are disloyal to God if we let our painful awareness of our sin forever cloud our lives from that point on. Dr. Wimberly did not attempt to explain either David’s tragedy or that of our family, but he proclaimed that by God’s grace we could move beyond our sorrow to the foundation of faith which we had once known so fully, and which he knew had been so fully and forcefully shaken.
The superscription before Verse 1 of Psalm 51 says this: “To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone into Bathsheba.” It is a gentle euphemism, to be sure, but we know exactly what it means. “Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy steadfast love…. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin…. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean…. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a right spirit within me” (51:1,2,7,10).
The king and we are intimately related to one another. We are all cut from the same cloth. Our being has the potential to be flawless, but in fact it inevitably becomes flawed. Not to recognize that is to do a great disservice to God as well as to ourselves, but to let it destroy us is to do a greater disservice to both God and us.
Now I want you to turn away from any thoughts of sinful behavior, and to reflect instead on other kinds of occurrences in our lives. How do we deal with other calamities or misfortunes? What is our attitude when misfortune assails us or we are left bruised by circumstances over which we may or may not have any control?
Two weeks ago, on the par-3 71st hole of the US Open Golf Tournament, Jordan Spieth, who had been the leader in the final round, double-bogeyed. On the 72nd hole he birdied, but he thought it was over, because behind him, Dustin Johnson was coming on strong. Johnson hit his second shot onto the par-5 green. If he sank the putt, he would win by one stroke. If he 2-putted, he would tie, and there would be an 18-hole playoff the next day. Johnson missed his first fairly long putt, and then missed his short second putt. He made the third putt, but a 3-putt hole did him in, and he lost the tournament by one stroke.
Things like that happen regularly to every golfer, professional or otherwise. If they don’t get over it, they will never play well again. The golf course outside Tacoma, Washington was horrendous, in my opinion, but it was horrendous for everyone equally. In any case, there is always next week, and next week always can be better.
During the American Revolution, George Washington made many military miscalculations. Perhaps more sensitive men would have given up, but not the tall Virginian. He kept on keeping on, until the British finally waved a white flag at Yorktown, eight years after the war started.
All of us make decisions at the time events sweep over us, and later we question whether we did the right thing. Regardless of our choices, God goes with us, knowing that for our own sakes we must move on. We may be sadder for having done what we did, but we can also be wiser if we do not keep second-guessing ourselves.
A few days ago I met a fine young man who wanted to speak to me about an institution I have supported through the years. He told me that when he was as freshman in college he met a beautiful fellow freshman with whom he established a relationship. He hoped it might evolve into marriage. But before their love could mature, she was killed in a car accident. Because of the kind of theology to which he was exposed in the church in which he grew up, he assumed God took her from him for reasons known only to God. I strongly disagree with that line of thinking, but I did not tell him that. However, he said, he met another young woman, and they were married, and his wife is about to give birth to their first child. Happily, he did not allow his sorrow over the death of his first love to prevent a new love.
Periodically bad things happen to us. God will lead us through them if we permit Him to do so. David refused to become frozen in time by a terrible choice he made. He never forgot his sin; Psalm 51 is literary verification of that. He was forever saddened by what he had done, but he was wise enough to move beyond it. Whatever happens to us, may we do the same, God willing. And as people of faith, we know that, indeed, God is willing. But are we?