2 Samuel 11:1-15
Now when the spring of the year came, at the time when kings go out, David sent Joab out with his servants and all the Israelites. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah, David remained in Jerusalem.
Now when the spring of the year came, at the time when kings go out, David sent Joab out with his servants and all the Israelites. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah, David remained in Jerusalem.
One time, around sunset, David got up from his bed and walked around the roof of the palace. From the roof, he saw a woman bathing and the woman was incredibly beautiful. So David sent and inquired about her. The inquirer said, “Isn't this Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam and wife of Uriah the Hittite?”
So David sent messengers and brought her. She came to him and he lay with her. (She had just purified herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived so she sent word to him saying, “I am pregnant.”
Then David sent her message to Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the battle was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and bathe your feet.”
So Uriah went out from the palace and a doggie bag from the king was sent after him. But Uriah lay down at the palace entrance with all his master's servants and he did not go down to his house. When it was announced to David that Uriah did not go down to his house, David said to Uriah, “Haven't you just come from a distance? Why didn't you go home?”
Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah remain in rough shelters and my master Joab and my master's servants are encamped in open fields. Am I to go to my house for eating and drinking and lying with my wife? Upon your life and as your spirit lives I will not do this thing.”
David said to Uriah, “Stay here another day and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah stayed in Jerusalem that day and the next. David invited him and he ate with him and drank and David got him drunk. But in the evening he went out to lie down in his bed with his master's servants and he did not go home. So in the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote: “Position Uriah to the front in the face of the worst of the battle. Then, turn back from behind him so that he will be struck down and die.”
When I was a young reporter for WPED Radio – a station that spanned the nation with 3 powerful watts – one of my first news stories was on a new Environmental Protection Agency program to address the dangers of Leaking Underground Storage Tanks. I interviewed several gas station owners about the costs of the program and what it was going to entail for them. Then I put it all together in an expose that I cleverly titled after the acronym of the program – Leaking Underground Storage Tanks – L-U-S-T. I began the story by saying, “The EPA is trying to wipe out LUST.”
So David sent messengers and brought her. She came to him and he lay with her. (She had just purified herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived so she sent word to him saying, “I am pregnant.”
Then David sent her message to Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the battle was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and bathe your feet.”
So Uriah went out from the palace and a doggie bag from the king was sent after him. But Uriah lay down at the palace entrance with all his master's servants and he did not go down to his house. When it was announced to David that Uriah did not go down to his house, David said to Uriah, “Haven't you just come from a distance? Why didn't you go home?”
Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah remain in rough shelters and my master Joab and my master's servants are encamped in open fields. Am I to go to my house for eating and drinking and lying with my wife? Upon your life and as your spirit lives I will not do this thing.”
David said to Uriah, “Stay here another day and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah stayed in Jerusalem that day and the next. David invited him and he ate with him and drank and David got him drunk. But in the evening he went out to lie down in his bed with his master's servants and he did not go home. So in the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote: “Position Uriah to the front in the face of the worst of the battle. Then, turn back from behind him so that he will be struck down and die.”
When I was a young reporter for WPED Radio – a station that spanned the nation with 3 powerful watts – one of my first news stories was on a new Environmental Protection Agency program to address the dangers of Leaking Underground Storage Tanks. I interviewed several gas station owners about the costs of the program and what it was going to entail for them. Then I put it all together in an expose that I cleverly titled after the acronym of the program – Leaking Underground Storage Tanks – L-U-S-T. I began the story by saying, “The EPA is trying to wipe out LUST.”
If you came this morning thinking that that's the kind of lust I was going to be talking about, you're going to be sadly disappointed. But I don't think that's what you did expect. Today's the day we tackle one of the biggies of the Seven Deadly Sins. Beliefnet.com, an online site that offers articles and other faith-based information, has had a running poll going on which of the seven deadlies we struggle with the most. Greed is way down at the bottom of the list (despite the ways we explored it last week), but guess what comes in at number one? Far ahead of all the other sins, lust checked in as the primary problem for 30% of the respondents.
But in the same way that we struggled with how greed has gone mainstream in our society so that there are people who believe that greed is good for us, we could also say that our culture encourages us to think of lust as a good thing, too. After all, some would say, without lust none of us would be here. And after Dr. Freud, how can we ever look at our sexual desires in the same way? Lust is not something optional in our make-up, Freud says, it is a primary motor for our whole being. When we go looking for why we do the things we do, sublimated desire is always a prime suspect.
So Christians have some explaining to do when we say that lust is something that has its downsides, its dangers...even its deadliness. Jesus pointed us this way in the Sermon on the Mount. There, amongst all the other things that he taught, he went beyond the Ten Commandments in saying that there was something deeper in us than the temptation to adultery – there was lust and it could lead us astray. Sexual sins don't take up a lot of Jesus' time in the gospels. He is far more vocal about the problems we have with money, care for the poor, and humility, but when he does talk about our sexual lives he uses this dramatic language. “You have heard it said,” he says, “that you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman [and there's no reason to think he wouldn't have said the same about a man]...everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” [Matthew 5:27-28]. O my goodness. It's time to raise our hands again. After admitting to all those other deadly sins, who's got a problem with lust?
O.K., let's get straight what's at issue here. First, what is lust and secondly, why does Jesus hold up this incredibly high standard for us in relation to it, especially when it seems so at odds with the standards presented by most every automobile ad or music video we've ever seen (to take just two common examples)? First, as to what it is – we might say that lust is an exuberant, excessive approach to any number of things. We talk about a lust for power or a lust for gold. John Wesley, in encouraging his Methodists to sing, says that we should sing lustily. You can find the directions right there in the front of our hymnal.
But let's be real. Nobody's gonna look askance at you if you sing lustily – unless you're REALLY off-key. We're talking about something else here. Lust, as we're talking about it today, is about our sexuality. Simon Blackburn, who has written a book on lust, says that lust is the “enthusiastic desire, the desire that infuses the body, for sexual activity and its pleasures for their own sake.”[i] That's a pretty fair definition and it's territory that most of us are familiar with. But what is it about this well-known neighborhood that makes it a danger to us?
That brings us to the second part of the problem for Christians. Why does Jesus warn us about this? Desire is no stranger to human nature. In fact, it's there in Genesis when God tells Eve that her desire will be for her husband. It's there in Song of Songs when the lover desires his beloved. Isn't there an element of lust in these stories? Isn't it part of the way God created us that we should take pleasure in one another?
To that last question we have to say, yes. Marriage was instituted by God, not only as a means of procreating and allowing for the multiplication of the species – it was also designed to allow two people to enjoy one another, to share intensely and deeply, and that includes a sexual life. The church has not always said this very clearly. At times the church has seemed suspicious or even hostile to sexuality. Even some of my favorite ancient writers, like Saint Augustine, had some notions of sexual relations that were downright weird. But the affirmation of the goodness of this desire is right there from the beginning when God says of the man and the woman that the two should cling to each other and become one flesh [Gen. 2:24].
But we also know, because it is lived out so often among us, how easily our desires can run us right off the rails. If you’re a young person, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a sex-saturated culture, the messages we receive are all about inciting us to act on our lustful feelings, our bodies are responsive to the other bodies around us, marriage is now something that is often deferred until much later in life, your boyfriend is pressuring you, your girlfriend is pressuring you to give in, there doesn’t seem to be much downside, especially with birth control, and man, is it hard to concentrate when I’m fighting these urges that seem so…urgent. Sound familiar?
Well, don’t think I’m just talking to you today because one of the things I need to say is that lust is not just a problem of the young. It is also a problem of those of us who are older and those of us who are married. There is no age limit on temptation and it is just as easy for an adult to be carried away by desires that aren’t directed in the right ways. How often do we, as married folks, place ourselves in situations where we are alone with people of the opposite sex? The danger is there. Aren’t we just as susceptible to the messages of the culture that tell us that sex is a constant urge so why not give in? Isn’t pornography, especially with the growth of the internet pornography industry, a constant temptation and a ruinous cancer on healthy relationships and understandings of the beautiful thing that our sexual lives should be? Aren’t there stray glances and lingering fantasies that threaten to undo us? I have come to believe that sex education ought not to end with high school. We need it throughout our lives because we know, don’t we?, the dangerous road we tread. Our minds get clouded and we do stupid things and we end up hurt and hurting others. Simon Blackburn is right when he says that “living with lust is like being shackled to a lunatic.”[ii]
Our scripture lesson from 2 Samuel today is an object lesson in the devastating effects of lust, though there are some other lessons here, as well, about power and pride. It’s a story of King David, who is a heroic figure in the Hebrew Scriptures. In other places he is referred to as a man after God’s own heart. But the Bible is not content to let us think that David was above failure. In fact, he was capable of the most monstrous sins. And it all began with a leisurely stroll around the roof of the palace.
It was not unusual for him to be on the roof. That's where most people with wealth went for afternoon rests because the breezes were better up there. But there was another advantage to being on the roof for David. It allowed him to look into the courtyards below and on this particular afternoon it allowed him to see a beautiful woman taking a bath at a nearby house.
Now taking a bath in an open courtyard in David's day was not a sensual act. Forget all the images you have of "Calgon, take me away". It was just something you had to do with whatever water containers were available. Forgive me for giving you this image, but I remember a time when I was in Mexico on a mission trip. At the men's quarters a bath meant standing in a bucket in the main courtyard of the home and pouring two buckets of cold water over you. This is the kind of bath this woman was taking. No bubble bath. No thought of luxury.
But she was naked and this was enough for David to lust after her. David acts quickly. He sends someone to find out about her and they report back that her name is Bathsheba, which is kind of a solemn name since it means something like "Daughter of an oath". She is also married. But the information does nothing to stop David. Then again what could stop David? He is the king. He immediately sends messengers to get her. What David wants, David gets.
What happens next happens in the space of one verse. There is no long seduction. There is no conversation between David and Bathsheba. Not even an introduction. It only takes four words in Hebrew to tell the tale: She came to him and he, to put it simply, takes advantage of her. Then, in the next verse, she goes back home.
That could have been the end of the story. Maybe it could have been a short interlude, at least for David, in which the great king suffered a momentary lapse in righteousness and then regained his moral standing. But, as so often happens, the brief sin leads to more complications and David begins a downward spiral. Before it’s over David has not only committed adultery but he has also added lying, greed, and murder to the list of his sins.
As David’s episode shows, lust is often a “gateway” sin. Having given ourselves over to a desire that knows no reason, that knows no boundaries, we often get dragged further and further away…away from God, yes, but also away from ourselves. We wake up one day and wonder how we got so far from home.
It’s for this reason that we return again to a theme that has run throughout these sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins – we are sinners, yes…God has a remedy for that sin in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ…we have a hard time seeing who we truly are in the light of God’s work and God’s love and God’s mercy…so…we need others to help us…to help us be accountable, to be redirected, to be oriented toward God once again. Now we might be open to having that happening in other areas of our lives. You can ask me about my prayer life, how often I’m attending worship, what I’m doing to help the needy in our community, maybe even how much I’m giving, but when we start talking about this area of my life, well, that’s…un-American! But is it un-Christian?
Lauren Winner is a young woman, now studying theology at Duke, who has written several very interesting books on her faith journey. Her latest is a book on the very un-hip topic of chastity. It’s got a provocative title – Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. At heart it’s a reaffirmation, from someone who had to reclaim a chaste life, of the value of abstinence from sex before marriage and the joyful work of being faithful in marriage. One of Lauren’s arguments is that for Christians our sexual ethics should be a matter of communal discussion. Not that we should be airing our laundry before everyone or that we should act as police, snooping into each other’s lives, but that we should seek out people, Christians, with whom to be accountable in this and every area of our life. It’s one of the ways that we would look different.
Winner says, “Christians might claim less credit-card debt if small-group members shared their bank account statements with one another. I suspect that if my best friend had permission to scrutinize my Day-timer, I would inhabit time better. Speaking to one another about our sexual selves is just one (admittedly risky) instance of a larger piece of Christian discipleship: being community with one another.”[iii] That’s a level of community most of us haven’t arrived at, but it’s a level of sharing for which we ought to be aspiring in our small groups.
Will Willimon, whom I have been quoting often in this series because of his book, Sinning Like a Christian: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins, tells the story of a student he worked with who told him about a party he had been to with a group of friends. One of these friends made a pass at him and invited him to act on his lustful impulses.
Remembering it, he said to Willimon, “I sort of surprised myself when I said, ‘No, that’s not a good idea. I walked away feeling fairly good. Overjoyed, even. I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, I’m a better Christian that I thought! I’m in a better church than I thought. My church has lots of problems, many shortcomings, but at least it’s made a relatively faithful person out of a creep like me.”[iv]
Now I know not every story ends this way. I know there are many of us who have been wounded by what they have done and what has been done to them in these situations. Our sexuality is a place where we are so vulnerable and often so hurt. What I want to be sure to say as we close this sermon is that there is always a place for redemption and a new start in God’s never-ending love. The desire that is within us for love is a love that finds its home in God. The loves of our life, the pinings and yearnings and longings of our hearts are so often misdirected but they do have a home. It is often said of those who fast as a spiritual discipline that when we are hungering, we are hungering for God. Couldn’t it also be that when we are lusting we are really seeking a truer object for our impulses? Sexual pleasures can never transform us into the people we are called to be, but they can give us a window into the real love that is waiting for us.
Chastity?! What an old-fashioned word! What a counter-cultural thing to talk about! What an opportunity to find true love! Something tells me this is not the end of this conversation. It’s only the beginning. May God be with us. Thanks be to God.
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