Sermon: Awkward Moments: When We Realize
It’s Not in Our Control, 2/5
Jonathan Arnpriester, Chandler United Methodist Church
January 10, 2016 (First Service)
2 Samuel 12:11-23
"This is what the LORD says: 'Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity upon you.
Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will
lie with your wives in broad daylight. You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad
daylight before all Israel.' " Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD."
Nathan replied, "The LORD has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. But because by
doing this you have made the enemies of the LORD show utter contempt, the son born to you
will die." After Nathan had gone home, the LORD struck the child that Uriah's wife had borne to
David, and he became ill. David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and went into his
house and spent the nights lying on the ground. The elders of his household stood beside him to
get him up from the ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them. On the
seventh day the child died. David's servants were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for
they thought, "While the child was still living, we spoke to David but he would not listen to us.
How can we tell him the child is dead? He may do something desperate." David noticed that his
servants were whispering among themselves and he realized the child was dead. "Is the child
dead?" he asked. "Yes," they replied, "he is dead." Then David got up from the ground. After he
had washed, put on lotions and changed his clothes, he went into the house of the LORD and
worshiped. Then he went to his own house, and at his request they served him food, and he ate.
His servants asked him, "Why are you acting this way? While the child was alive, you fasted and
wept, but now that the child is dead, you get up and eat!" He answered, "While the child was
still alive, I fasted and wept. I thought, 'Who knows? The LORD may be gracious to me and let
the child live.' But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I will go
to him, but he will not return to me."
You heard about the big event this week, right? I’m not talking the lottery, which is over
a billion dollars now. And we do expect you to tithe here at the church. [laughter] The
big event this week was the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry came
out with an announcement. There are four, count them four new elements to be added
to the periodic table. All the schools have to buy new periodic tables to go on the wall
and confuse most students. Elements 113, 115 117 and 118 by atomic weight, names
will be assigned later. This is phenomenal. This is amazing. Four new elements have
been discovered.
And so, in celebration of that, I would like to engage us, as twenty-first century thinkers,
in contemplating the biblical text. And I am going to start by being a little confessional to
you; I do not believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It was written down by
people and people make errors; oftentimes in writing and oftentimes in perception. I
would like to talk to you about that. But the biggest problem that I have with thinking of
the Bible as the inerrant word of God is that its latest writings were written in the first
century of the Common Era. In the 1st century of the Common Era it was believed that
the world was flat and that the heavens were a dome which were implanted above us.
And if you got on a boat you had to be very careful that you did not lose sight of land,
because if you got too far out “there be monsters” or you will fall off the edge and go
down into the unknown.
Now we know, at least were pretty sure that the world is round. That the earth is part of
the cosmos. That it is infinitely large and we also know it is infinitely small. There have
been quite a few milestones in human knowledge since the last words of the Bible have
been written. And those milestones have affected us greatly, how we see ourselves,
how we understand ourselves, the world, and the universe. Galileo discovered, it was a
mathematical equation, Galileo discovered that the earth is not flat and there is no
dome. That we are part of the universe which shapes our existence. Gravity exists as
a result of the earth being a sphere and spinning through space around a larger star.
For the modern thinker, the twenty-first century scientist, which we all are, unless we
decide not to be. This really gets in the way of our stories. There is two creation
stories, our stories of origin. If Genesis were intended to be, and if we read Genesis the
creation stories as historical records then the fossil record would be consistent and it
would only go back about 60,000 years.
We have also enjoyed some technical advancement that radically changed our
survivability. I am thinking here about Albert Einstein and his work with atomic theory.
And the whole area of medical advancements that that made possible. I am thinking
here of the fact that we have been to the moon. That we have probes now far beyond
the moon. They are sending back information. We are knowing things; we are
understanding things; that we never could have known, that we never could have
understood. We are living much longer because of these things. In the first century and
up to about two-hundred years ago, if we are generous, up to about thirty years ago if
were being truthful, people were very superstitious. Bad things that could not be
explained, like illness or deformity or death, were often regarded as demons or a curse
from God. And good things, like healing from a cold or healing from an injury or
surviving an accident, were miracles, if they could not be explained otherwise. In fact, I
still go to hospitals and I will hear people say “Thanks be to God.” for things that we
might chalk up to solid genetic coding and a healthy immune system.
And it is not that first century people were not intelligent. It is not that we were overly
superstitious and we were not smart. It is folks just did not know some things. Let me
be really clear here, it is not that I do not believe in miracles. But when I read the Bible,
I wonder if the miracle that we think is the miracle is really the miracle --- like the blind
man healed by the pool? I seriously wonder if he had pink eye. Do you remember pink
eye, you get crusts on your eyes? If nobody tells you to rub it out or get rid of it, you will
live with it, you will be blinded by it. I seriously wondered of Jesus spit in his hands,
rubbed his eyes, and took care of the crust from pinkeye. It is a miracle. Nobody told
him. Or like the demoniac in Mark 5, what combination of mental illness did he suffer?
He shouted out. Perhaps he had some Tourette's syndrome? Or he ran to the hills
away from others. He did self-harm. He appeared to be intelligent, but he lost control
of himself and bashed himself against the rocks. Sounds like schizophrenia to me. He
did not fit in, so they drove him out of town. Jesus came. And I do not know that Jesus
healing him was the big miracle. I think the big miracle of the story is that the people
cared more about their pigs than they did about their fellow countrymen.
Like the feeding of the five thousand, I think the true miracle there was not a divine
multiplication of bread, but the practical fact that Jesus got selfish people to share what
they had. That is a huge miracle. Does faith as twenty-first century Christians, does
faith require us to consent to continue to see and interpret things the way the authors
did? Even if that way is well ignorant and irresponsible?
In our story today, David has blown it big time. He has elicited an affair with the woman
he desired, her name is Bathsheba. Probably the granddaughter of his royal counselor
Ahitophel. What a snare David stumbled into. He reached middle-aged boredom. You
all acquainted with middle-aged boredom? You have pretty much achieve most of what
you are going to achieve in life; you have everything that you need. Now what? Life
becomes flat and so David took a stroll in the afternoon, and he looked off the deck. Oh
what is this? And he started an affair. And her, women were regarded as property,
women were unimportant. She was left behind by her husband, Uriah. She was lonely,
and so for her to be desired, probably pretty powerful thing for her. Anyway, there is
this affair and she becomes pregnant. And King David in a panic tries to avoid the
consequences of his sin, recalls her husband, Uriah from the front lines of the battlefield
under the pretext of wanting a report about what is happening on the battlefield, but
really wanting Uriah to come home and sleep with his wife and then the pregnancy will
be explained, and David is off the hook.
But Uriah is a soldier and soldiers in battle swore to act holy. No huggy, no kissy. And
even though there is a wedding ring, Uriah declines to sleep with his wife. He sleeps on
the steps of the armory. He says no, not until battle is over; I swore with my platoon; we
will not do these things. And David says that is fine, you are an honorable man. Let me
take you out to dinner and will do some drinking. David tries to get him drunk. David is
quite the manipulator. It does not work again. Some people are just too honorable.
Darn it, Uriah. And so David sends him back to battle with a plan, a sealed envelope
with a plan in it for his commanding officer. It tells his commanding officer to place
Uriah, the faithful husband, the honorable soldier, to place him in the way of danger,
guaranteeing his death. Well now, Uriah has died. All is well. Well, not really.
Bathsheba still pregnant and well since the poor husband was killed in battle, David
takes pity on this young woman marries her, moves her into the palace, and just keeps
the pregnancy quiet.
Nathan knows what is up, he hears pieces of scuttlebutt here, and stories told by
soldiers returning from battle there. He puts two and two together and he figures out
what is going on and he says “Somebody really ought to say something.”. And God
says to him, you are somebody. And so Nathan confronts David with his sexual
misconduct and David is sorry and he is penitent and Nathan says to David, your
punishment shall be the subsequent disasters of your life and the lives of your sons and
daughters which are amplifications of what you have done David. This is judgment and
it is not so much because of Nathan's pronouncement and is not God's judgment on a
specific life here. It is something of a universal truth about how sons and daughters
learn by watching. And as far as God is concerned David is forgiven. God forgives
David, tells them you are forgiven and David is in fact restored to God's favor.
Nevertheless, the actual effects of David's sin are not voided.
This is an excellent example of good parenting provided by God the father. It is also a
definition of what it means to be in God's favor. In fact, I think these words need to be
spoken in every parent-child relationship. You have done something stupid and there
will be some natural consequences that come with it, not supernatural consequences,
natural consequences. There will be some consequences that come because of what
you have done. I will be with you as you go through those consequences. I will not
undo what you have done. I will not prevent the consequences. I will not bail you out.
But I will be with you as you go through those consequences. This is a wonderful
example of how we are punished, not FOR our sins, we are punished by OUR sins. I
know this because I learned to cuss as a young person and I have kept up the practice
when I get frustrated. Oftentimes it happens when trying to put a mail somewhere and
my thumb becomes attractive to the hammer and I will curse. And I will get over it
quickly and that is fine and then we will be outside and I will be watching the kids play;
and one of them, something will happen, and I will hear them curse. Yeah. It is a real
eye-opener about how my actions are amplified into their lives.
Well so far this text is making a whole lot of sense about parenting and children and
self-discipline and what gets passed on, and sin and consequences. But next in the
text, right after this next line, things kind of get unraveled a bit. And Nathan says to
David, you are an embarrassment to God, and the child of this adulterous affair must
die. And so now we have a question on our hands, as twenty-first-century biblical
thinkers, why did this child die? What did this child do to deserve this? And the biblical
text answers that second question, what did the child do to deserve to die. The text
says it was the sins of the father and the mother. We do the same thing you know, we
do. In the hospital, people will say well I did not think I had survived, but I did; God must
want me to do something. Or at the funeral home, we say God needed him, so God
took him. Christmas 1970, I was 4 years old. My mom was going to have a baby, was
going to be my little brother, Christmas day 1970. My parents gave birth to a stillborn
child. Of course, the question around the church --- my dad was a pastor as well --why did this child die? Whatever did this child do to deserve this? This is one of my
first memories, and I remember the funeral and the reception afterwards, people coming
up to my parents, eating mixed nuts off those little paper plates and smiling and shaking
my parents hands, telling my parents just to accept it; it is God's will. And I remember
one woman in particular, saying smiling, God needed a baby and chose your son, you
should be happy.
All I can say now as an adult is; it is hard to make sense of all of this. I think that is
exactly what happened here. The biblical text was actually not written down in the 5th
century BC, it was carried on as an oral tradition for quite some time. And I do not think
I am going out on a limb to suggest this, but my guess is, that following the birth the
child became sick. Child got the flu, child got a bad cold, the croup, an infection, and
the child died. And someone a storyteller in the oral tradition, trying to make sense
about why children die, thinking that they are being helpful by including the death of this
child in the punishment of David, probably someone who went to church, probably trying
to curb adultery and other sins, wanted to help people stay on God's good side, wanted
righteousness to flourish and obviously David had not been righteous or else the child
would have lived. There you have it, right? Humm. Thank you storyteller.
It is difficult. It is difficult when we are in crisis; when it is our child that is on the edge;
when we are up close and personal with dying. It is difficult for us, so we do. We have
done what fathers and mothers and daughters and sons have been doing since the
beginning of time. We make a silent deal with God. We page through our personal
past and we find something about which we are embarrassed or ashamed. We come to
a fairly clear understanding that what we have done has brought the suffering by our
child, our parent, our spouse. That we have assigned responsibility for the suffering to
us. And we begin to pray and we begin to apologize and we plead with God, and we
promise to change our behavior, hoping, hoping, hoping that it will change their
suffering.
In the fifth century before the Common Era, when the story of events, David and
Bathsheba, and a long time afterwards, there was no knowledge of things like
chromosomes or DNA or genetic predisposition. They did not even understand
bacteria. In fact it was not until Dr. Ignaz Semmelweisin in 1850 began to notice that
when he washed his hands before examining a woman who had just given birth, when
he washed his hands, the woman was less likely to get sick and die. And he began to
spread this knowledge. And he began to challenges his colleagues, wash your hands
between patients, and they fought back. Oh no, we do not see any germs. Dr. Ignaz
Semmelweis began the conversation about soap and water making a difference,
reducing bacterial and viral infections. They had no way of understanding, let alone
combating fevers and infections and Reye’s syndrome and meningitis, and diarrhea and
respiratory infections and hepatitis and measles and polio; and a lot of people died. A
lot of children died from things they did not understand. Things they could do nothing
about. Things they felt rightfully helpless to face and so to them it was the hand of God.
The text says David begged God to spare the child. David fasted, did not eat food. He
lay all night face down on the bare ground, begging the Lord in prayer. David did what
David knew to do. For us, twenty-five centuries later, we do what we know to do. We
have a lot more answers. We know more every day about chromosomes and DNA and
genetic predisposition. We know about seasonal flu. We know about respiratory
syncytial virus (RSV), we know about croup. We know about whooping cough. We
know about rubella. We know about pneumonia and diphtheria and cystic fibrosis and
meningitis and scarlet fever and mumps and measles and pertussis. We have answers,
we have preventions, we have treatments and we know that a lot of it is just luck. We
understand, we understand that there is a whole lot of math involved in combining
twenty-three chromosomes from each parent and hoping each set is complete and in
good shape. We know about the randomness of genetic coding. And the same code
that made us have eyes and ears and fingers and noses and lips, and these hips, and
why do I have hair here, is genetic coding.
Some of it we know, we understand, is how much we have eaten and how much we
have walked. Some of it is who we have been around and what we might have touched
or breathed in the last twenty-four hours. Some of it is the strength of our immune
system. We understand these things and when everything is going well, understanding
feels good. We perform web searches to find out more and we have answers. In fact,
sometimes there is even a phone call on our insurance card, a phone number we can
call to a voice to tell us what is wrong with us, “Dial a Nurse” and the nurse will tell you
what is wrong with you and what you can do about it. But then there are those times
when there really are not any answers and part of us wonders if we would be more
comfortable if God did handle everything. We could bargain with God, make it easier to
cope with the randomness of life.
We are rational and reasonable people. It is uncomfortable to be in the know,
especially when we are in crisis because we want to believe there is always something
that can be done. But even when we know, we understand there is not always
something that can be done. We want someone, we want anyone, to pick up, to tell us
why. Tell us what we might have done to get out of God's favor and what we could do
to get back in God's favor. But it does not work that way. We know that. But that is
what we want. We wanted so much that make it work that way. And in doing so we
make God responsible for things God does not do. When the child was ill, David did
what he could do. No one likes to be helpless. When the child had died, David got up
off the ground, he washed his body, put on fresh clothes, and he went to worship.
David did all that he could do, fasting and prayer were what you did. Today we might
seek mental help or medical care. David did all that David could do. We do all that we
can do. David then tried to move on with his life and he asked God to help him.
I actually think that is what this text is about. Not so much to point to David and nail
everything to David and you killed this child with your sin. That might be what the text
wants to point toward but it is not really what this text is about. This text is about is a
moment of crisis, bringing us closer to God, not because we have come to bargain, not
because we really want to get on God's good side but because we want to know more
of what God's presence is like. We know there is the calm in the storm. We understand
a storm of scientific things. We understand the storm of infections and defections and
illnesses with names; we understand symptoms and manifestations and treatments and
side effects and consequences. We understand a lot and yet we come to God because
we long for a peace that surpasses understanding. God's promise now is the same as
God's promise then, I will be with you as you go through what lies ahead and in the end,
I will have the final word. There will be times when that does not feel like it is enough,
but it will be. Thanks be to God.