January 15, 2012

YOU ARE THE MAN

Scripture – 2 Samuel 11:27b-12:14a

What a story. It’s got everything – sex, violence, nudity, passion, greed, arrogance, crime, selfishness…all that any red-blooded American could wish for in “entertainment”. What I have just described sounds like it was written by someone like Jackie Collins or was perhaps viewed on television as a soap opera or an HBO special. But, no…it comes from the bible. The bible? Are you crazy? The bible doesn’t deal with issues and instances that would be offensive to family values! Wrong. The bible usually deals with reality and portrays the worst of human nature at least as often as it presents the best. And here we have a tale with King David, the “chosen of God” (with whom God, so we are told, has a special covenant), at the very center.

Here’s what happened leading up to the scripture reading I shared with you earlier. Israel, in waging war against the Ammonites, is besieging the city of Rabbah. It is a long, drawn-out process and taking more time than King David would have liked. Reports go back and forth from the front lines where David’s general and kinsman, Joab, is in command…a role David wishes he could have assumed but whose life as the ruler of the nation is considered too valuable to risk in such a way. So there he is in Jerusalem…issuing orders and getting bored.

At the end of one day, not that long before sunset, he is walking on the roof of the palace…up and down, back and forth. And then what he sees really catches his attention. On the roof of the house next door is a beautiful woman…bathing. Now, don’t tell me she doesn’t know exactly what she is doing since she lives so close to the palace, her roof is lower than David’s roof, most wealthy people with such houses and such roofs spend time on those roofs to escape the heat of the day, and David is known as a “dedicated” and accomplished lady’s man. Talk about being a bit obvious…but that is neither here nor there for the purposes of this particular sermon.

David immediately sends someone to find out who she is – maybe she’s new to the community. And the servant comes back to inform the king that she is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah (who happens to be a Hittite mercenary serving in David’s army). David decides that he is in love (or at least in lust) and, being the king, figures that he can have whatever he wants. So back goes the same servant to invite Bathsheba to the palace…where she ultimately spends the night. I won’t go into details which might offend innocent ears…so you can determine for yourselves what happens.

Not too much later Bathsheba informs David that she is pregnant. Uriah’s been at the walls of Rabbah so it is obvious who is responsible for what. What to do; what to do. Even for the king it is not good public relations (at the very least) to break the rules of society and try to get away with what others would be severely punished for. So David comes up with a plan. He gets Joab to send Uriah back to Jerusalem, supposedly to report on how the siege is going. When they are done talking, David tells Uriah to go home and, since he has been away for a good while, figures nature will take its course and the child to be born will be assumed by all to be Uriah’s. Uriah doesn’t do it – instead he stays at the palace with David’s servants. When David questions why, Uriah tells him that he would not feel right enjoying good home cooking and his wife’s company while his comrades in arms are uncomfortably and dangerously camping in the open on the front lines. David invites him to again have dinner with him, gets him drunk, and orders him to stay in town a few more days, sure that he will change his mind about getting together with Bathsheba. He doesn’t.

David’s becoming a bit desperate. So he sends Uriah back with secret orders for Joab. David tells Joab to place Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting in the next battle and then to draw back most of the other troops. This Joab does and Uriah dies. When the matter is reported to David, he tells Joab not to worry…that death in battle is indiscriminate. And he encourages his general to press forward with the siege. Bathsheba is told of her husband’s death and, after the usual and expected period of mourning, marries David and later their son is born. And that brings us up to where we started when I read from 2 Samuel.

Wow! Quentin Tarantino couldn’t have done it any better. But it’s too bad that the X-rated details of the story so capture our attention that we tend to miss the PG and even G-rated implications. That is to say…we’re so absorbed in the way it explicitly describes somebody else’s sin that we miss the way it implicitly describes our own. There are no doubt several reasons for this, but two I find particularly intriguing. Firstly, the account turns us into “virtuous voyeurs”, seeing what we normally are not expected to see and seeing it under the best of circumstances – it is, after all, a biblical tale which we must assume has been put in the scriptures for all kinds of good and godly reasons. Secondly, the beauty and melodiousness of the name of the lady helps to make it more interesting. Had this been a story of David and say, Hoglah, it wouldn’t have had the same sort of zing. But just to set the record straight: “Bath” means nothing more than “daughter of” and “sheba” means “much value”. Hence, Bathsheba, living in a time and place when boys were more valued than girls, was considered special – the pride and joy of parents who memorialized their happiness in having such a daughter through the way they named her.

Now, I am sure that I do not have to further refresh your recollection. Let it suffice for me to say that David had not only sinned, but he had committed murder in an attempt at a kingly cover-up. Cover-ups don’t always work – ask Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In this case, along comes Nathan. He accuses David…and he pulls no punches, although he begins, not by speaking directly and immediately about adultery and murder, but about the fallacy of supposing that one can occupy such a privileged status that less eminent and “important” people are obliged to support whatever is done by the one in that status. David, while not so arrogant that he believes himself to be above the law, nonetheless thinks that he can circumvent it for his own purposes and his own good. He believes that in his “specialness”, he can pretty much do and get what he wants. Again…reference here is appropriate to Nixon and Clinton (and throw in Spiro Agnew and a few others for good measure).

Nathan tells a story of his own, spinning an allegory in which he uses two characters, one rich and one poor. The rich man has pretty much everything. The poor man has only one lamb. When the rich man throws a party, instead of reducing his own substantial lamb inventory, he kills and cooks the poor man’s only resource…and serves it to his guests. What do you think of that?, asks Nathan. Not realizing the implications or recognizing himself as the villain, David is rightly and righteously outraged. Nathan lets David fume for awhile and articulate what should be done to such a scoundrel. Then he says quietly, You are the man. Notice he did not say, You da man – Nathan’s words are an accusation, not a slang way of expressing admiration. David, caught in his own decent indignation, and after being reminded by Nathan of all that God has done for him and all that he has done to Uriah, is shocked and repentant as he feels the weight and correctness of his own words from Psalm 51:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

So what does all this say to us? Are we, too, guilty of this kind of a sense of entitlement? Adultery and murder may not be among the sins that we have committed, but the words of Nathan (as well as the words of the “Nathans” of our world) are not about to let us off the hook either. When we begin to think that we, as individuals or as a particular community or nation, are special people who don’t have to live by the same rules that other people and other nations do; when we begin to think that we, as individuals or as a particular community or country, have a God-ordained right to all the global resources we desire while other communities and countries do not have the same “divine right”; when we begin to think that we, as individuals or as a particular community or nation, should have as much food and drink and shelter and medicine as we wish while others may have so little that they cannot even adequately sustain life; when we begin to think that we, as individuals or as a community or country, are owed a living by the rest of the world…then we might hear and should hear that ever-present, ever-shattering, accusation – You are the man (an accusation which ought to bring us back to reality).

Sometimes what happens in our world seems so unfair…but sooner or later a “Nathan” shows up. I don’t like to always pick on Congress, but all too often the illustrations there offered are so obvious and perfect that I just can’t help it. A recent “revelation” indicates that many of the laws which govern us just don’t seem to apply to our state and national legislators. For example: if you or I take advantage of insider trading in the Stock Market to get rich through information not available to everyone else, we will, if and when caught, go to jail. But members of Congress are allowed to do just that, although they deny they take advantage of such “specialness”. Apparently even those who serve on committees which make decisions and/or create legislation can make investments based on those decisions and legislation…and there is nothing illegal about it! So, as in one instance, a congressional leader, instrumental in determining where a highway would be built in his state, bought farmland very inexpensively in the area to be affected and made millions when the project got underway. The “Nathan” in this case was a recent “Sixty Minutes” program…and hopefully something will be done to change the situation (but I won’t hold my breath because the people doing it are the same ones making the laws allowing it…and few of them seem to have the kind of sensitive consciences that David did). By the same token…does anyone else get a lucrative pension and continued health benefits after working in a job for as little as two years? There does not seem to be anything even nearly resembling a “level playing field” as the powerful get more powerful and the powerless get more vulnerable.

But, of course, it doesn’t stop there. Let’s bring it down to where we live. We are all guilty, to some extent, of what these folks are doing on a bigger scale. Oh, to be sure, we decry their attitudes and actions, but don’t we at least sometimes also wish we could be so lucky as we envy their “success”? So at least occasionally we might try to pull the same shenanigans, although on a smaller scale. The sin that is at the root of many others is the sin of arrogance – of literally taking for granted whatever comes our way (by hook or by crook) and of assuming that we are entitled to God’s top-heavy blessings simply because we are we! So we, too, need a reminder from whatever “Nathans” come our way that such an attitude is not in keeping with what we say we perceive to be the will and way of God – the God we claim to follow and revere.

David repented of his sin. I am not sure we are always even aware of ours.

Rev. Herb Freitag