Pentecost 9 / Proper 12 B
2 Samuel 11:1-15
John 6:1-21
July 26, 2015
Pastor Susan Henry
House of Prayer Lutheran Church
Hingham MA
Grace to you and peace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
37 Million -- and Us
Before Nadia Bolz-Weber was a Lutheran pastor, and before she went to
seminary, and even before she was the Lutheran kind of Christian, she was trying out
various churches, going here and there. Sometimes she worshipped with a Unitarian
congregation. However, she was baffled by the extremely optimistic view of humankind
that Unitarians profess. “Uh -- don’t they read the newspaper?” she wondered.
When she began dating a Lutheran seminary student whom she met playing
volleyball, she started going to church with him. There she discovered language about
who God is and who humankind is that made sense of her life. There was nothing in
Lutheran theology that she had to make herself believe, she says. Instead, when
Luther talked about things like us being “saints and sinners at the same time,” she knew
from her own looking-good and totally screwed-up life what that meant – and she must
have known that Lutherans do read the newspaper.
Surely Luther would have seen in King David a man who was “saint and sinner at
the same time” -- always forgiven and always in need of forgiveness, always beloved of
God and always failing to fully live out of that belovedness.
In our story today, it is “the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to
battle.” Maybe fifty years earlier, when things had been falling apart among the twelve
tribes who’d settled in Canaan, the people of God had begged Samuel for a king: “We
want to be like other nations and have a king ‘to go out before us and fight our battles.’”1
That’s what kings do, they said. You might recall that Samuel told them they already
had a king. God was their king, powerful and protective and gracious, providing all that
they needed.
Samuel said an earthly king was a bad idea because earthly kings do far more
than lead in battle – they take what is not theirs. They’ll take your sons, Samuel said;
they’ll take your daughters; they’ll take your land, your servants, your money, your time,
1
1 Samuel 8:20
your hopes, you. But the people were determined, and God and Samuel gave them
what they asked for, despite what would be the inevitable consequences.
Now, David, their king, is not leading them in battle but is instead hanging out in
his house-fit-for-a-king overlooking Jerusalem. Others are waging war, but David is
sleeping in. Late one afternoon, as he’s walking around up on his rooftop patio, he sees
a woman down on her rooftop. A beautiful woman. He sends somebody to “inquire”
about her and learns that she is “Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the
Hittite.” Let’s be very clear here – although she’s sometimes portrayed as provocative
or as a temptress, she probably had every expectation that her bathing, her ritual
cleansing, was being done with some privacy, unseen by anyone. But King David has
seen, and King David wants what he wants, and so, as kings do, he takes it. He takes
her. “David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.”
And then she went home.
Some stories in scripture really point out how distant in time and place and
culture we are from what has taken place in a story, and yet – and yet the arrogance of
those with power and the vulnerability of those without it are not foreign to us. If this
story makes us queasy, it ought to. If we’re shocked or saddened by David’s disregard
for Bathsheba as a woman, a daughter, a wife, maybe something like this is running
through our minds: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” and “You shall not
commit adultery.” If we ourselves have been the object of someone’s unsought,
unwelcome, intrusive attention or if we’ve experienced sexual violence, we may be
distressed by memories that come up when we hear this story. It’s a hard story to hear
– and it gets worse.
The only words Bathsheba speaks are these: “I am pregnant.” And, at these
words, David becomes like those 37 million people who’ve gone on the Ashley Madison
website that recently got hacked. It’s all about cheating, and its tagline is “Life is short.
Have an affair.” That’s what David signed up for, although Bathsheba didn’t. But now
David doesn’t want to be found out. He wants his personal data deleted, not for
nineteen dollars, but for whatever it will take to make that happen. And what it will take
is murder.
David calls Bathsheba’s husband Uriah home from the battle and wants to know
how Joab, the commander, is doing, and how the people are faring, and how the war is
going. Then David sends Uriah home to his wife, hoping that they’ll eat and drink and
make love and that this whole pregnancy thing will no longer be an issue for David. You
know -- Uriah was home, Bathsheba is pregnant, mazel tov!
But instead of going home, Uriah sleeps at the entrance to the king’s house with
all the servants, and when David asks him why, he says, “It wouldn’t have been right.
The ark is in a tent, and my commander and the other men are camping out in the
fields, and then I’m going to ‘go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my
wife?’ It wouldn’t be fitting.” Which is true. So the next night David gets him drunk,
hoping then he’ll go home and sleep with his wife – but he doesn’t.
And so, the following morning, David writes a letter to Uriah’s commander, telling
Joab to put Uriah up in the front where the fighting is fierce and then to “draw back from
him, so that he may be struck down and die.” David gives this letter to Uriah himself to
deliver. Can you even imagine unknowingly handing over a message that will assure
your own death and the death of those serving beside you?
A few weeks ago, we heard David lament the deaths of Saul and Jonathan,
saying, “How the mighty have fallen.” Today that phrase comes to mind dripping with
irony: “How the mighty have fallen. How the mighty King David has fallen into sin -coveting, taking, stealing, deceiving, murdering, abusing his power, insisting on what he
wants rather than what God desires for him and with him and through him. How the
mighty King David has fallen.”
It’s pretty sobering, isn’t it? I’m hoping nobody here is one of those 37 million on
the Ashley Madison website, but maybe someone is. We are all saints and sinners at
the same time, and there are no doubt things in all our lives we hope will not be made
known or made public. Such things would reveal our stupidity and selfishness, our
eagerness to use our power and privilege to our own advantage, our susceptibility to
completely deluding ourselves, our willingness to give over our money or our time or our
lives to things that harm us or the people who love us, our fascination with what we
think we can get away with, our looking for love or meaning in all the wrong places, our
refusal to acknowledge the truths about our lives, our deep resistance to believing that
we are indeed beloved of God. Need I go on?
What all these things have in common is that they keep us turned in upon
ourselves and rob us of the rich and abundant life God desires for us and with us. Such
things leave us impoverished and hungry -- spiritually and emotionally and in our
relationships with God and others. Such things lead us to hunker down, to protect
ourselves as best we can from the consequences of our sin, and to pretend we are just
fine, thank you very much. But God has more in mind for us than this, and Jesus is
here to tell us about it.
In our gospel for today, a massive crowd of people who have been following
Jesus find themselves hungry, too. And all there is for Jesus to work with is five barley
loaves and two fish. We’re talking peasant food, not artisanal bread here. But it is
enough, with Jesus. In the gospel of John’s telling of this story, it is Jesus himself who
feeds all those people, Jesus himself who gives them as much as they want. It’s all
about abundance, about grace upon grace, about being full and satisfied.
The people begin to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the
world.” And when Jesus sees that they intend to “take him by force to make him king,”
he slips away. As in Samuel’s time, what the people want is a king, but the kind of king
Jesus will prove to be will redefine kingship and reveal the gracious and powerful reign
of God that is both here already and yet to come.
For the next four weeks, our gospel reading comes from this sixth chapter of
John, the “bread of life” chapter.
Each week, we’ll hear more about how what Jesus
has done -- feeding all those people -- reveals who Jesus is and who God is.
David, in all his kingly glory and all his frail humanity, is the one from whose
house, whose lineage, Jesus will come. While David was all about taking, Jesus will be
all about giving. While David’s name itself serves as a reminder that he is “beloved of
God” – which he knew himself to be -- it is Jesus who will fully live out of the
belovedness he himself knows as God’s Son. While David and the people live under
God’s gracious and forgiving rule, they also live with some of the consequences of their
insistence on having their own way.
Whether the supposedly-deleted information is ever revealed or not, some of
those 37 million people who used that hacked website to cheat will, I hope, find their
way to healthier marriages, stronger relationships, and renewed commitments to the
people who they love and who love them. Others will be picking up the pieces of their
lives and living with consequences they had hoped they would not have to face. We’ll
hear more of David’s story next week as the prophet Nathan confronts him. David,
Nadia Bolz-Weber, all of those 37 million people, and all of us are saints and sinners at
the same time, always forgiven and always in need of forgiveness, always beloved of
God and always failing to fully live out of that belovedness.
May we hunger to become more fully who we already are -- God’s beloved
people, the body of Christ. It is Jesus himself who will feed us, Jesus himself who will
give us as much as we want. It’s all about abundance, about grace upon grace, about
being full and faith-full saints and sinners at the same time.
Amen