Hilton Head Island, SC – July 31, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
II Samuel 15:7-12,30-31; Mark 14:32-42
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” – Psalm 91:1&2
Regret - and Redemption
King David had a family like the Charles Manson family, although the Manson family was not truly a family. What this means is that virtually all David’s children had major behavioral aberrations; they were a psychotherapeutic mess. One of David’s sons by one wife raped David’s daughter by another wife. In retribution the full brother of the raped daughter murdered his half-brother. Then the full brother, named Absalom, staged a palace revolt against David, and eventually Absalom was killed by David’s commanding general. David was heartbroken. His grief-stricken wail has echoed across thirty centuries: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son!” That cri de coeur was the inspiration for the title of one of William Faulkner’s novels, Absalom, Absalom.
The Hebrew Bible is an astonishing collection of writings. It paints portraits of people as they were, not as we might like them to be. There is no one of whom that sober observation is more valid than is seen in the personage of King David himself. He is portrayed in all his grandeur and gore, his fame and fallacies, his spiritual heights and his sinful depths. But in the end, in the end, David always returned to God in humble faith and contrition.
David had many regrets, and many reasons for his regrets. We see them enumerated in I and II Samuel, and in the many Psalms which are attributed to David. Regarding his family, I think David probably deeply regretted that he did not ride herd more carefully on a very talented but also headstrong group of offspring by several wives. And the child over whom he seemed to have the most regret was his son Absalom. We can legitimately infer that David wanted Absalom to succeed him on the throne, but it was not to be. Absalom foolishly plotted to seize the throne from his father, and the coup was put down by David’s general Joab. He ruthlessly ordered Absalom killed without consulting David. Joab knew if he asked permission to slay the young prince, David would have refused, and in doing so, David probably would have lost his kingdom. So Joab prevented that from happening by slaying the royal conspirator.
To his dying day, David regretted many things. And he had good reason to regret them, for the king acted badly on numerous occasions which the Bible records without hesitation. But David always turned back to God after he had acted badly, confessing his sins, and imploring God’s forgiveness. By those acts of contrition, David was always ready to be redeemed again, going forward with renewed confidence until the next time he did something he regretted. The only way to overcome regret is to be redeemed from its consequences. And ultimately only God can enable that to happen. For all his many mistakes, David knew that in his inmost being.
I believe Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest current American novelists. She has written 26 books, many of them filled with religious themes and overtones. She taught for years at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, one of the premier academic institutions in the country for writers. Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy, Gilead, Home, and Lila are all set in a small town in Iowa. They tell the story of a retired minister and various members of his family.
In Gilead, the first book in the trilogy, Ms. Robinson is the narrator. She refers to a dispute between her fictional father, a Presbyterian minister, and her grandfather, also a minister. The grandfather had lived in Kansas before and during the Civil War at the time of the border disputes between the free-state Kansans and the slave-state Missourians. The grandfather had done something awful in that tragic period, and he and his son had forever become estranged because of it. The author, who assumes the position of narrator, writes, “So I was predisposed to believe that my grandfather had done something pretty terrible and my father was concealing the evidence and I was in on the secret too --- implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that’s the human condition, I suppose…. It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water. I believe my father was trying to cover up for Cain, more or less. The things that happened in Kansas lay behind it all, as I knew at the time” (Gilead, pps. 81&2).
Regret over past mistakes can flow over us like a flood, can’t it? When we were teenagers, we wronged a friend, and it has haunted us ever since. We became estranged from someone we loved, and life has seemed to be out of joint from then on. We once did something we know badly hurt someone. At the time we couldn’t make it right, and we never really tried to do so afterwards. Thus regret festers within us like a never-ending infection.
In her novel called Home, Marilynne Robinson is again the narrator of the story. She tells about her ne’er-do-well brother, Jack, coming back to their small town in Iowa. Jack was always secretive, and when he returns to his birthplace, he still carries many secrets within him. Jack talks about his relationship with their father to his sister Glory. “The last time I spoke to him, before I left, I knew I had done something he couldn’t forgive. He thought he could. He said he had, but he’s a terrible liar. It shocked me that I could hurt him so badly. It scared me…. It was like stepping off a cliff. And it was a relief, too. I thought, It’s finally happened. I knew it would” (Home, p. 277).
Regret can freeze our spirit. Or it can turn us into stone, like Lot’s wife becoming a pillar of salt when she looked back as Sodom and Gomorrah lay smoldering in volcanic ruins. If we don’t deal with regret soon after it takes hold of us, it can spiritually and psychologically destroy us.
A River Runs Through It is Norman Maclean’s fictionalized account of his early years living in western Montana. For years Maclean taught creative writing at the University of Chicago. In his family were his parents and his younger brother Paul and himself. The brothers’ father was also a Presbyterian minister. (Why am I citing illustrations from novels about conservative Calvinist Presbyterian ministers? I probably need to have my head shrunk to find out.)
Norman falls in love with Jessie, a local girl who comes from a Methodist family. The brothers’ father, the Presbyterian parson, wryly declares that “Methodists are Baptists who can read.” Not a kindly sort of statement, but from his highly prejudiced standpoint, it was at least honest. Jessie’s brother, like Glory’s brother in Gilead and Home, is a callow, calculating cad. If you saw the movie, there is that memorable scene in which Jessie’s brother goes with Norman and Paul on a fishing expedition, taking with him the town’s most notorious trollop. They get terribly sunburned, sleeping in a drunken stupor in their birthday suits on a sandbar in the Blackfoot River. There seems to be no way anyone can straighten out either Jessie’s brother or Norman’s brother Paul, who, in the story, ends up killed in a barroom brawl.
Jessie asks Norman, “Tell me, why is it that people who want help do better without it – at least, no worse. Actually, that’s what it is, no worse. They take all the help they can get, and are just the same as they always have been.” “Except,” Norman cheekily observes, “that they are sunburned” (A River Runs Through It, p. 84).
Last Tuesday evening when Bill Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention, he used a fascinating phrase about looking back over a relatively long life: “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” he said. Almost everyone here this morning is in that category; we have more yesterdays than tomorrows. Do we regret getting older, or do we accept it as an inevitable and natural part of life? In the movie version of A River Runs Through It, the last scene shows the actual author Norman Maclean casting flies on the Blackfoot River. It is his voice-over which muses the final lines of his outstanding book, as an elderly man sagaciously contemplates both time and eternity. “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”
If we allow it to do so, regret will eat us alive. In the novel, Norman and Jessie had regrets, but they moved beyond them. Their brothers didn’t, and their regrets engulfed them.
During the most vulnerable 24-hour period in his life, Jesus was abandoned by every single one of his disciples, but especially by the Prince of Apostles, Simon Peter, the Big Fisherman, the spiritual progenitor of the Church, although actually it was the apostle Paul who eventually assumed that role. When Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter did nothing to try to stop it. When Jesus was taken to the home of the high priest to be questioned, twice Peter denied that he even knew Jesus. After the final denial, a rooster crowed. Peter remembered that Jesus had said to him at the Last Supper, “Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” When his Master needed him the most, Peter sneaked away into the darkness.
How could Peter ever live that down? He couldn’t! We can’t magically obliterate the misdeeds that we regret! But we can live through our regrets, if we allow God to forgive us, and, if possible, to ask the forgiveness of those we have wronged whose great hurt we caused.
Sadly, regret sweeps over us sometimes as easily as breathing. It isn’t that one day we suddenly start living properly and never again do we hurt anyone. But when we harm someone, as inevitably we shall, then we must try to make amends with that person. And if we can’t do it with the one we have offended, at the very least we must do it with God. Sometimes those we have harmed have departed this earth, but God is always with us. “He who dwells in the shelter of the most high, who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust” (Psalm 91:1&2).
That was the innate wisdom in both David and Peter. Though they made serious mistakes, far too many of them, they realized that in order to be redeemed and to start life anew, they had to get on with life, admitting their errors, but moving through them to a new and better life. We are no good to anyone, least of all to ourselves, if we continue to regret something but refuse to move beyond it by confessing our mistake and trying not to repeat it. If we allow mistakes to hold us permanently in their grip, we are not only pathetic -- literally “filled with pathos” -- we are also psychologically and spiritually stupid.
We need to get over ourselves. We need to get over ourselves, so that we get on to living with and for others. Every day God wants to redeem us. Do we want to be redeemed?