Looking for Depth in a Shallow Pool

I’ve got a struggle that is peculiar to the information age. I think my GPS is eating my brain cells. Are you getting that same sense? Suzanne’s parents gave us a GPS device for Christmas last year – one of those things you stick on your windshield and that tells you how to get anywhere you want to go. They are amazing devices. They tell you the best route to take, how long it will take you to get there, whether to get in the left or right lane for the next turn, where the next bathroom is, how fast you’re going, what music you ought to be listening to, what clothes you should be wearing when you get there…all kinds of stuff. Some of them even update traffic reports and reroute you based on that.

An interesting thing happens when I use the GPS, though. The thing seems so smart – especially when we let it talk in its British accent – that I don’t trust my instincts anymore. And I can’t remember how to get to places I’ve been going all my life. “I think I just have to take Bayside up to Exmore but I better put on the GPS just to be sure.” That kind of thing happens. It’s eating my brain cells, I tell you!

We are living in the information age. We have more data at our fingertips than we have ever had before. Some of you remember with me that it used to be the case that the most impressive set of books you could have in your house was an encyclopedia – 12-20 books that contained thumbnail sketches of everything you could hope to know. It was a major investment for a household. Now, all that those books contained is accessible on the internet in a click or two. We take it for granted that we can get a review about a new car or a recipe or a quote or a news story whenever we want it.

The big word in technology circles these days is “the cloud.” The cloud is where all of our information is being stored. Not in books like your old Encylopedia Brittanica. Not on floppy disks (remember those?). Not even on your hard drive. The future is storage in cyberspace so that we upload all of our information onto the web and then access it from whatever computer or cell phone we have available to us. Our information lives in a cloud that is always around us. It’s not exactly the “cloud of witnesses” that the book of Hebrews talks about where the saints who have gone before us live. But since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of megabytes, why do we need to rely on physical storage devices, or even our own memories?

This age is amazing. We have gotten astoundingly good at replicating and processing information. But knowing things is not the same as wisdom. And we are in danger of becoming foolish. The playwright Richard Foreman says that we used to value people who could not just know things but could know what to do with what they knew. “But today,” Foreman says, “I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’…[W]e all become ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”[i]

Pancake people, spread wide and thin. That is a description of far too many of us in this day. As we live with our heads in the cloud of the Information Age, what we crave, what I crave is time spent with people who are truly wise. I want to be with people who can help me know what to do with what I have…with what we have. Dori Baker, a writer and teacher who will be with us later this month to work with our youth and our staff, says that we all need people who will listen with us for what God would have us to do. In her book, Lives to Offer, she quotes the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda who asks in one of his poems, “Who will tell me what it is that I came here to do?”[ii] It will take a wise person to help us answer that question.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” [Psalm 111:10]. That’s what our psalm of the day tells us. The fear that is spoken of here is not terror, but respect and awe in the light of God’s holiness. You remember how when the Israelites were going through the desert after being released from slavery in Egypt. Moses went up on the mountain to meet with God and to receive the Ten Commandments and the Law. God said, "I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, [again a cloud!] in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after. Set limits for the people all around, saying, 'Be careful not to go up the mountain or to touch the edge of it. Anybody who touches the mountain shall be put to death” [Exodus 19:9-12].

This fear was recognition that there is a life force so powerful in the midst of the people that it could only be approached at the risk of your life. Wisdom has something to do with this awareness that there is something beyond what we know, something that transcends our own knowledge, that needs to accounted for and listened to and respected. That’s the wisdom we see in such short supply.

When we think of wisdom in biblical terms, inevitably we end up talking about Solomon. We think of that name because of the story which we've just read this morning - the scene in which the new King Solomon asks for wisdom from God.

It's an interesting passage because the Bible seems to look at Solomon with a certain amount of ambivalence. On the one hand Solomon is revered as being at the highpoint of Israel's history as a nation. Solomon picked up where his father David left off and built Jerusalem into one of the finest capital cities in the world. Solomon was the one who imported cedars from Lebanon to furnish the new Temple he built for Yahweh, the God of Israel. Solomon began many building projects, enlarged the army and even began a navy for Israel. The wonders of King Solomon's reign were numerous. He developed a reputation for wisdom and later generations would attribute the books of Proverbs and Song of Songs to him.

That’s not all there is to the story of Solomon, though. He is also remembered as the end of the glorious united kingdom of Israel. The riches and wealth and honor he attained were short-lived and the kingdom divided after his death thanks to the heavy taxes and forced labor he imposed to build up Jerusalem.

He also seems to have had some issues with women. Solomon was said to have 700 wives and 300 concubines. That by itself would have been problem enough - imagine being beholden to 1000 relationships! But the real problem was that each of these wives brought with them their own cultures and their own religions, since many of them were not Israelite. Each time a marriage with a foreign woman took place, the custom was to build a shrine in Jerusalem to her nation's god. So Solomon bore the blame for bringing in all of these idols and foreign gods.

The story tells us Solomon took over from his father, David, as king and his rule was firmly established. That's over in chapter two of 1 Kings. Of course, the rest of chapter 2, which we didn't read, shows us that Solomon's reign was not all that firmly established because he spends the rest of the chapter eliminating his rivals for the throne, including his older brother. But by the end of chapter 2, it really does look secure and we are told again that his rule was firmly established.

Chapter 3 opens with Solomon's first foreign marriage and it's a big one - to the daughter of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, the strongest nation on earth at the time. It's a shrewd move because it makes Israel more secure, but it also brings in the influence of foreign gods. And when verse 3 of chapter 3 comes around we're told that Solomon was a great king who loved Yahweh, the God of Israel, and who followed in the footsteps of David, his father, EXCEPT...and this is a pretty big except...except that he had a habit of offering sacrifices and incense on the high places - and not just in Jerusalem where all worship was supposed to take place.

In fact, Solomon is out making a sacrifice at one of these high places when God finds him. Or at least it seems that God finds him. It all happens in a dream and you know how mysterious dreams can be. They can seem so real and yet... That's how this dream was.

God appears to Solomon in a dream and doesn't chastise him for being in this strange place, God merely says, "What can I give you, Solomon?" This is a great dream, huh?

Many of us would be ticking off the new boat, the vacation home in Maui, the extreme makeover. But Solomon is very wise in his response, which makes us wonder if he really needed to be given the gift God gives him. Solomon remembers God's relationship with his father, David and then says, "You know, God, I'm really like a small child when I think about the shoes I'm trying to fill. I've got all these people to take care of and they look to me for justice. I'm going to need help, God."

Now Solomon may be overstating this just a little bit. He's already shown that he can be pretty shrewd in dealing with his enemies and negotiating with foreign powers. But he's right that we haven't seen yet how he will handle his role as the securer of justice for the people. And God recognizes this and is pleased.

God says to Solomon in this dream, "You didn't seek long life for yourself, you didn't seek riches for yourself, and you didn't ask for the life of your enemies" (though Solomon had already taken care of this himself). “Instead, you asked for wisdom, and because of this I will also give you what you didn’t ask for – riches and honor and long life.”

Then Solomon wakes up and realizes that it’s all been a dream. But as he wakes up we’re all left to wonder – was it just a dream or did it really mean something? Was God really talking in his dream? The only way to find out is to see how it is lived out in the world. Because ultimately wisdom is not something you can get in an instant or that you can study for and achieve on your own. It’s what you get when you direct your life toward God and turn all of your experiences that way. When Solomon did that, he really was wise. When he didn’t, he and his nation experienced pain and failure and he looked as foolish as any of us can.

Solomon is not a model citizen – just as all of Israel’s kings were flawed and broken people. But he did have this insight that the world and our responsibilities in it are far more complex than we can handle relying just on our own abilities. We need humility. We need elders – people we can look to help us put the world together. We need wisdom.

Pastor Heidi Husted says that we are currently living with a wisdom famine. As Pancake People we are starved for something meaningful and substantial in this world. “Information is fast, loud, superficial, numbing,” she says. “We can’t get away from it. Wisdom is slower, deeper, lasting, more elusive. We can begin to make our way toward wisdom by clearing out the data smog -- by fasting from TV, computer, cell phone and pocket planner long enough to talk with a friend face-to-face, read a book or simply sit still and listen for the way of wisdom.”[iii]

Are you tired of doing it on your own? Are you longing for something deeper, richer, fuller, more engaging? Solomon lifts up wisdom for us as the heart’s most fruitful desire. But that desire is only met in Jesus, who is God’s wisdom come to earth, come to show us how to die and how to live. Come to show us what it is we were sent here to do.

I want to close with a bit of wisdom from the poet Stephen Dobyns. Dobyns wrote a poem about a man in middle life who goes with his dog to the door of his house on a beautiful autumn night. In an imagined conversation the dog speaks for the man’s desire to do something crazy. To get in a car and just keep driving. To go downtown and get drunk. To tip over all the trash cans they can find. “This,” the poem says, “is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.”

But the man is caught up in his sense of loss and in his sense of limitation. He feels his memories slipping away and the weight of his years. The dog says, “Let’s pick up some girls. Let’s go dig holes. Let’s go down to the diner and sniff people’s legs. Let’s stuff ourselves on burgers.”

Finally, though the man doesn’t listen to the dog. He doesn’t run off. He just goes back into the house with the dog to make a sandwich. The poem ends like this:

And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s

wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator

as if into the place where the answers are kept –

the ones telling why you get up in the morning

and how it is possible to sleep at night,

answers to what comes next and how to like it.[iv]

Here’s the good news, brothers and sisters. The answers to life are not in the back of your refrigerator. You do not have to be a pancake person. The answers to what comes next have been given to us by a God who has conquered death and has called us forth to life. The adventure is not over; it has only just begun. Jesus is calling you to a journey of more than just what you know or even what you can do. Jesus is calling you a journey of wisdom. Are you going to walk with him? Thanks be to God.

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14

Then David lay down with his ancestors and was buried in the city of David. The years which David had reigned over Israel were forty - seven years reigning in Hebron, and in Jerusalem thirty-three years. Then Solomon sat on the throne of David, his father, and his rule was firmly established...

Solomon loved YHWH by walking in the established customs of David, his father, except that in the high places he sacrificed and offered incense.

The king went to Gibeon to offer sacrifices there, for that was the greatest high place; Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. At Gibeon YHWH appeared to Solomon in a dream during the night and Elohim said, "Ask what I should give you."

Solomon said, "You made with your servant David, my father, great loyalty because he walked before you in faithfulness and rectitude and uprightness of heart toward you; you have preserved for him this great loyalty and have given him a son to sit on his throne this very day.

"Now YHWH, my God, you have made your servant king in the place of David, my father, and I am a small child and do not know even how to go out and come in. Your servant is in the midst of your people whom you chose, a great people who cannot be numbered nor counted. So give your servant a heart attentive to giving justice to your people and to distinguishing between good and evil; for who can give justice to your great people?"

This thing was good in the eyes of Adonai because Solomon asked for this thing. Elohim said to him, "Because you sought this thing and did not seek for yourself many years and did not seek for yourself riches and did not seek the life of your enemies, but sought for yourself discernment in being attentive to justice, look, I will do according to your word. Look, I will give you a wise and discerning heart so that there will not have been anyone like you before you and after you there will not arise anyone like you. Also what you have not asked for, I will give you - both riches and honor - so that no other king will be like you in your lifetime. And if you walk in my paths, obeying my commands and statutes, as David, your father, walked, then I will lengthen your years."

---

[i] Richard Foreman, “The Pancake People, or, ‘The Gods are Pounding My Head,’” Edge: The Third Culture, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/foreman05/foreman05_index.html.

[ii] Dori Grinenko Baker & Joyce Ann Mercer, Lives to Offer: Accompanying Youth on Their Vocational Quests, [The Pilgrim Press: Cleveland, 2007].

[iii] Heidi Husted, The Christian Century, August 2-9, 2000, p. 790, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1985.

[iv] Stephen Dobyns, "How To Like It," from Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992, (Viking, 1994).

Learning How to Grieve for the Wayward

There is more to the story, you know. This reading from 2 Samuel? It’s much longer and it has a whole lot more strange names, much harder to say than Ahimaaz son of Zadok. (By the way, I get asked this a lot, but there I consider that there is NO correct way to say hard Hebrew names. Unless you’re going to get into the whole throat-clearing thing to say names like Melchizadek, you’re just going to have to resign yourself to the notion that your always going to speak Hebrew with an American accent. And asking me won’t help because I fake it when I read these names!)

So, as I was saying, there’s a lot more to this story. What we heard is King David, the same King David we saw last week being confronted with his sin with Bathsheba, getting the news that his son, Absalom, has been killed by his troops and his grief at hearing of his death. What you don’t hear in the brief version is WHY Absalom was killed.

Absalom was trying to overthrow his father. Absalom was a revolutionary, a threat to the kingdom, a ne’er-do-well, a subversive, a terrorist. He had sacked the palace, raped his father’s concubines, taken over Jerusalem, the capital city. No leader in their right mind would have let him get away with what he was doing.

So David sends out his army under his most trusted leader, Joab, to deal with Absalom, but his last words to Joab as he leaves are, “Joab, for my sake, deal gently with Absalom, because he’s just a young man.”

Joab has other ideas though. He’s a military man used to dealing with missions in clear and effective ways so as to leave no ambiguity about who won. So Joab and his troops crush the rebellion.

In the midst of all of this, Absalom is riding away from the battle on a mule and somehow gets his head caught between the limbs of an oak tree so that he is hanging there, stuck, helpless, and vulnerable. One of Joab’s men sees Absalom hanging in the tree and runs to tell him. Joab says, “Why didn’t you kill him?”

The man says, “I…I couldn’t do that. The king said to deal gently with Absalom. He is the king’s son. Besides, if I had done that, you would have done nothing to defend me before the king.” The man seems to trust Joab less than David does.

So Joab says, “I see I’ll have to take care of this myself.” He goes out to the tree, sees Absalom there, takes three spears and pierces him through the heart. And for good measure ten of his men then make sure that he is dead. Joab buries his body in a pit and the next day sends word to the king. That’s the section we read just now.

After this section we hear how Joab receives word that the king is in mourning and he decides to go set the king straight. He comes in and says, “King, you are shaming your officers and your troops. People gave up their sons and daughters so that they could remove this threat from you and our land. People gave up their lives. And you are weeping because we were victorious? If you don’t go out there and address the troops they will all be gone by morning. They feel like you love the enemy more than them.”

You can see Joab’s point can’t you? David is weeping and mourning for the leader of the opposing forces. It would be like an American leader weeping if U.S. troops were to kill Osama bin Laden. The world can’t work right with expressions of grief like this. Even if it is your son who was killed. So David goes out to the troops and Joab, the ruthless general, is vindicated.

But there had to be a cry of grief. There had to be a moment when the story stopped. And the story from this point on is a tale of violence and revenge. What if the story had turned on David’s pain and on a different ethic and not on Joab’s vengeance?

Now hear me out. Mourning does not mean that we curl up in a fetal position and do nothing. Grief does not mean that we do not seek to end what harm we can and resist what evil we may. But Christian grief, with all of its questions and all of its trembling in the face of death and loss, comes back around to some central affirmations. Like—God is good. Like—God created the world and all that is within it good. Like—the task given to human beings is to tend and to protect and to love. Like—yes we are weak and vulnerable and that’s part of what it means to be made good. Like—yes we are weak, but that’s not all we are and we have incredible potential to live creatively, fully, and with protection and justice for the vulnerable. Like—Christ came to break down barriers and open up doors and maybe even because of grief we see how that work is never ending. Like—there is a place where all that is lost finds its end and purpose, even if we can’t see it. And all is never really lost.

There is a lot to grieve over in this world. This week we were in Northern Virginia in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, but even there we discovered that all is not right. Driving in we saw people standing at intersections with their hats out hoping for some change. One of our youth talked about her surprise and her disturbance at seeing homelessness in such a public way.

Later in the week, Laura Martin, one of the students I worked with when I was a campus minister, came to talk with us about her work in New Hope Housing, an organization that reaches out to some of the most challenging cases of homelessness and she talked about looking at them with Jesus eyes, seeing in them the folks we are called to serve. She does her work with such great concern for maintaining the dignity of the lost and the mentally ill and the disconnected.

Then there was Bruen Chapel UMC, the church where we were doing Vacation Bible School. As the neighborhood around the church has changed dramatically there are a lot of folks who feel the pain – the long-time members who wonder what has happened to the community around them, the young people who struggle with their schedules and the expectations of their lifestyles and who wonder what relevance the church might have, and the new immigrants – many of them Korean and Asian – who are not sure how they fit in to this new community, much less a United Methodist Church like Bruen Chapel.

You don’t have to go off to Bruen Chapel to find things to grieve over. We experience them here as well. But we have a distinctive way that we are told to grieve. David’s story gives us a model of a father who feels the pain of losing a wayward son but who did not want to respond with vengeance but instead with restraint and love. His cry of loss is familiar to any of us who have been with a family going through grief. When he hears that his son has been killed he cries out: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

We have a gospel story that offers us an even more extreme model. In Luke Jesus tells the story of a father who lost a son when the son demanded his share of the inheritance before his father even died. When he was given his share, he goes off to a far country where he squanders it in loose living.

The son realizes how destitute he is and he decides to return home, believing that his father will meet him with punishment and scorn, but perhaps he will at least give him work and something to eat. It’s a valid expectation. The son had done a stupid, disrespectful, foolish thing. We would not question a father who met the wayward son with stern disapproval and punishment.

But the father…do you remember this part of the story?...the father sees his son while he is still far off and runs to meet him. Before the son is even able to blurt out the full text of his planned apology the father is calling for the signs of his sonship to be restored to him and a feast to be prepared. Why? Because the father is as foolish as the son in his wastefulness. Only the father is prodigal with his love and blessings and always seeks to bring home those who are lost, to reconcile those who are disconnected, and to bring to life those who were dead.

Sounds like a God I know. Prodigal to the end. And calling us to the same model. Not neglecting the real harm that is done. Expecting something more from the child…from us. But always responding with love and the opportunity for a new day.

So what if we responded the same? What if we found a way to keep the door open to a new day? What if we didn’t overlook the cost of sin and failure and foolishness…didn’t pretend that there was nothing to grieve over…but responded with love anyway like David and the prodigal father? Who might we be reconciled to in our lives? After all, aren’t we hoping for the same response from God that the wayward son received?

All of this calls for a countercultural love, though. There was a commercial a few years ago for a cell phone company. A guy is sitting with his friends, watching a football game, when his girlfriend calls on the cell phone. She says, “I just called to say, ‘I love you.’”

The guy looks at his friends who are watching him. He doesn’t know what to say but he obviously feels he can’t say ‘I love you’ back. It’s a guy thing. So he says, “Yeah, same to you, ditto.” She hangs up on him.

So he takes a packet of ketchup and covertly spells out “I heart U” on a fast food bag. Then he takes a picture with his camera cell phone and sends it to his girlfriend. Problem solved. Or is it?

I don’t know about you but I long to be in a community that is able to bring all of its hurts and pains to God. I long to be able to claim grief as one of God’s gifts, too, and to give it expression. And I want to be able to help my friends and my country to do grief well.

There are a lot of us who have been hurting because of losses in the last few weeks. We have family members who are going through tough times. It hurts. But it hurts because it’s supposed to.

When Jesus went to see his dead friend Lazarus, he knew the end of the story. He knew Lazarus was going to be raised. He knew that resurrection and life and restoration was the end of every story. But when Mary met him on the way to the tomb and fell at his feet, he didn’t tell her to buck up. To suck it up and take the pain. The shortest verse in the Bible says, “And Jesus wept.”

I’m not asking for a world where we all just get a hug and a tissue. I want a whole lot more than that. I want a Jesus Christ world where God is there. God is here, in the midst of pain and suffering. Reaching out from the cross with open arms to say, I am here even for this and this is not the end. Thanks be to God for tears and laughter and grief and joy. Thanks be to God.

2 Samuel 18:24-33 (NRSV)

Now David was sitting between the two gates. The sentinel went up to the roof of the gate by the wall, and when he looked up, he saw a man running alone. The sentinel shouted and told the king. The king said, "If he is alone, there are tidings in his mouth." He kept coming, and drew near.

Then the sentinel saw another man running; and the sentinel called to the gatekeeper and said, "See, another man running alone!" The king said, "He also is bringing tidings."

The sentinel said, "I think the running of the first one is like the running of Ahimaaz son of Zadok."

The king said, "He is a good man, and comes with good tidings."

Then Ahimaaz cried out to the king, "All is well!" He prostrated himself before the king with his face to the ground, and said, "Blessed be the LORD your God, who has delivered up the men who raised their hand against my lord the king."

The king said, "Is it well with the young man Absalom?"

Ahimaaz answered, "When Joab sent your servant, I saw a great tumult, but I do not know what it was."

The king said, "Turn aside, and stand here." So he turned aside, and stood still.

Then the Cushite came; and the Cushite said, "Good tidings for my lord the king! For the LORD has vindicated you this day, delivering you from the power of all who rose up against you."

The king said to the Cushite, "Is it well with the young man Absalom?"

The Cushite answered, "May the enemies of my lord the king, and all who rise up to do you harm, be like that young man."

The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!"

When Two Elephants Fight

Back in 1993, during a dark period in the history of the country of Haiti, a press team went to the White House. The leaders of a military group that had seized power were refusing to allow the democratically-elected president of the country, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, back into Haiti and they had reneged on a US-sponsored peace deal to that effect. A US military ship sent to signal support for the change was sent away from a dock by a mob. And a prominent peace activist, Randall Robinson, had gone on a hunger strike to protest the ineffectiveness of the US efforts to help.

The press team happened upon the President, Bill Clinton, at the White House and somebody asked him about Robinson’s hunger strike. Clinton, the most powerful person in the free world and the person who had set the administration’s policies, said to the press, “I think he’s right. We ought to change our policy. It hasn’t worked.” When the most powerful man in the world thinks he’s powerless, something has gone off the tracks.[i]

Jerry Jones doesn’t act like that. Joel and I were in Dallas these past two weeks where I was teaching at the Course of Study School at Perkins, my old seminary. While we were there we went over and took a tour of the new Cowboys Stadium that is set to open for football this fall. The largest domed stadium in the world. Built Texas-sized. $1.5 billion to build…so far. You walk into the pro shop there and there are T-shirts with a picture of the stadium that says: “Ours is bigger than yours.” As if there weren’t enough reasons already for you Redskins fans to hate the Cowboys! Humility is not a Texas virtue.

They had us sit out in the bleachers while we were waiting on the tour. There above us was the world’s largest video screen – 7 stories tall and stretching for 50 yards above the ball field. At either end were the world’s largest doors – 35 foot glass doors that can be opened to allow for a more open-air feel. A retractable roof above.

They were cleaning up the field from the night before when there had been a major soccer game. And when I say “cleaning up the field” I mean rolling it up. Real sod in long strips that had been laid out on the field just for the occasion. $250,000 worth of a field for one game.

Crews were loading the grass onto large trucks to take it away to donate to charities in the area. But also down on the field was a big black automobile driving around supervising the work. Who else would drive a big black car onto the field at Cowboys Stadium? Now that Terrell Owens is gone it could only be Jerry Jones, the owner of the Cowboys.

Sure enough the car drove over in front of us and out came Jerry to speak to a knot of workers. He had the attitude of man who thinks he owns the place, which he kind of does. But there he was just trying to be one of the guys. Nobody was fooled. He’s Jerry Jones. He doesn’t live like the rest of the world. He’s arguably the most powerful man in football and he knows it.

Here’s the thing I need to say today: The first step in dealing with the power God has given us is to recognize that we have it. The next step is to recognize how we abuse it. And the third step is to look to God for how to use it rightly. That’s really all I have to say.

If you were here last week you heard Peter talk about the familiar story of David and Bathsheba. In that part of the story we saw how David became a victim of his own power and human nature, how he committed adultery and probably rape with Bathsheba, another man's wife, how he plotted to cover up the deed when she became pregnant, and how he eventually had her husband killed when his other plan failed. If the story is not only about David but about us we can see it as warning that we all fall victim to abusing the gifts God has given us and we all need to remember our vulnerability as humans to the temptation of sin.

The question lingering in the air from the part of the story read last week is probably the most important one: Where was God in all of David's sin? How would God respond to his horrible crimes? What was God feeling? What would God do?

Today’s passage from 2 Samuel is something of a response to those questions, but it is a dangerous one. It's easy to read this and focus only on the surface where God sends Nathan to confront David and David confesses his sin. But if we stop there we forget the other major character in this episode. We forget Bathsheba.

Now the surface level story is important because it tells us very clearly where God stands in this whole messy scene. Up until the end of chapter 11, which lays out how David sins and then carries out the plan to have Uriah the Hittite killed, God has been absent. But in the last verse of the chapter we are suddenly told in no uncertain terms how God feels about this: "The thing which David did was evil in God's eyes." [2 Sam. 11:27b]. No doubt about it. God is upset.

So God gets the prophet Nathan to go see David and Nathan is a good storyteller, just like Jesus. He has a great parable to tell the king. Of course, he doesn't tell David that it's a parable. Nathan presents it to him as if it's a real problem going on in another part of the kingdom and he tells it as if he wants David's advice.

Nathan then goes on to tell this tale about how there is this rich man and this poor man living in the same neighborhood. The rich man has all kinds of sheep and cattle, but the poor man only has one little ewe lamb which he had to scrape up money to buy. He raises it up as a pet - more like a member of the family, really. He lets it eat at the table with him and lets it drink from his cup - even lets it sleep with him. The poor man really loves this lamb.

One day a traveler comes to stay with the rich man. Now hospitality is a big thing, even today, in the Middle East. When you have a guest you go all out, sparing no expense. So you would always have a huge meal and slaughter an animal for a feast. It's such a big deal, and such a big responsibility, that it's even legal for you to take a neighbor's animal to use for the feast. But there are two big restrictions - you can't take your neighbor's sheep if you have some of your own, which of course the rich man does. And you can't take your neighbor's sheep if it is a pet, and, of course, the poor man's ewe is a pet.

So there is no justifiable reason for the rich man to take the poor man's lamb. But he does it anyway. He takes that lamb which the poor man loved so much and fixes it up as a barbecue for his guest.

Well when David hears this story he is livid. David has a strong sense of justice. He knows how hard it is for the poor to get an even break in Israel. He swears by God and says, "As Yahweh lives, the guy who did this ought to die! I'll make him pay four times over for that sheep and for his lowdown attitude!"

But David doesn't know what he's saying. He's so caught up in the story that he can't see through it to what Nathan is really trying to say. So Nathan spells it out for him with four of the most powerful words in the Bible: You are the man.

Nathan proceeds to tell David how much God is displeased with him. David, of course, is the rich man, and God accuses him of theft and murder in his sins with Bathsheba and Uriah. Worse still, David is exposed as a hypocrite since his sense of justice doesn't extend to himself and his actions. How could he be the rich man? How could he be the one who commits injustice?

In the end Nathan pronounces God's curse which is that David himself will know the tragedy of death and murder in his family. David himself will know the pain of having his wives taken from him. All of this comes true in the rebellion of his son, Absalom.

David is led to confession as he admits to Nathan, "I have sinned against God."

God spoke powerfully to David through this story calling him to recognize his own failures and faults. God held up a mirror so that David could see himself as he really was. And in the shock of recognizing himself in the parable, David was moved to some kind of redemption, though we would be lying if we called this a happy ending. The results of his sin continue to haunt him as Bathsheba's pregnancy ends in the birth of a son who dies soon after birth.

God spoke in the call to confession. God broke through to David to let him know that he not only had power but that he had abused that power.

But my mind in this story could not turn away from a hidden figure. I wanted to hear the voice of Bathsheba here. Who is Bathsheba? What do we know about her? Does she contrive to lure David into sin? Is she an accomplice in Uriah's death? That's very unlikely since she has almost no say in anything that happens to her.

In fact, it's the fact that she has no say, no voice, no spoken words that is really most disturbing. We want to know what Bathsheba's role is. But like a shadowy figure behind a gauzy veil, Bathsheba remains a mystery to us. Her role in society is really rather shocking to us as twentieth century people who have lived through the liberating era of women's rights. She is only mentioned by name once in the story. Her husband is referred to as her owner. And David treats her as if she's property to be transferred from one possessor to the next. Even in Nathan's parable she is compared to a domestic animal.

But then I realized that this voiceless woman does have a voice in the story. It came as a shock when I heard Bathsheba speak.

It is a quick reference and if you blink you'll miss it. But back in chapter 11, just before God enters the picture, Bathsheba breaks into the story. Word came back from the battle that Uriah had been killed and when she heard it, Bathsheba wails in mourning. Like a sharp cry piercing the night air, this is a voice that interrupts the surface message and demands a closer look.

Bathsheba weeps and in this act we see the human consequences of David's sin. Some commentators pass over this quickly saying that it really doesn't reveal much since mourning was a ritual act that Bathsheba would have gone through regardless of her feelings for Uriah. But the detail is moving and not accidental, I believe. Bathsheba is feeling the pain of bearing the brunt of David's actions.

There is an old African proverb which says "When two elephants fight, it is the grass which suffers." Bathsheba suffers the results of a fight in which she plays no role. It is her husband who is murdered. It is her child, as much as David's, which dies after birth. From her hidden position the only voice left to her is the cry of grief. I believe God hears that cry and stands with the Bathshebas of the world, too.

We think we have no power. “We’re just ordinary Americans,” we say. I’m not Bill Gates. I’m not Jerry Jones. I’m not Barack Obama. But the strange thing about power is that many people who have it don’t believe that they do, or they don’t believe that they have enough. And so you get statements like Clintons in which powerful people express their feelings of powerlessness.

You were given power, though. You were given potential and capacity and capability at the moment of your birth. It’s the strangest thing God ever did – to create a world in which God doesn’t pull all the strings and determine every outcome. This is what the God of Jesus Christ does. God determines that the best way for the creation to give glory and witness to God is by making it free. That’s the power we are given – to choose to live as free creatures of the One who made us.

David’s story shows us what a mess we make of that freedom sometimes. Along with this capacity for acting like the children of God we were intended to be, we also have this strong tendency to forget that that is what we are. We fall into sin, that self-delusion that has stalked us since the Garden of Eden, and we forget.

We do horrible things – sometimes as individuals and sometimes as a society. The choices we make lead to great suffering in this world. We injure those we love because we can’t listen to what their true hurt and their true need is. We injure our children through neglect. We injure the land and the water through pollution and how we mismanage our resources. We injure people we don’t even see or know through the political and economic decisions we make as a country.

I recently wrote an article for the United Methodist Sunday School resource FaithLink and the topic was the experience of women in the wars of the eastern Congo. It was a horrifying piece to write. Over 4 million people have died in the region in the last decade. The level of sexual violence against women and children is so terrible that when John Holmes, a United Nations official responsible for humanitarian affairs, went there and talked to women who had experienced rape and sexual slavery and then abandonment by their husbands and families, he described it as “so brutal it staggers the imagination and mocked my notions of human decency.”[ii]

We hear about these things, (or worse, we don’t), and we say, “How horrible but what does it have to do with us? We aren’t causing this problem.” No, but the reason for the fighting is that the Congo has some of the world’s richest deposits of gold, copper, diamonds, tin and coltan, a black mineral ore that is used in something most of us have – cell phones and video game systems. Couldn’t there be a Nathan telling us a parable about violence being done to women in a far-off place and then pointing the finger at us when we asked the question of what caused the violence? We are, all of us, engaged in global systems that are intertwined with sin and suffering. And we are not powerless to change them.

Here’s the good news, though. Yes, we have power and yes, we abuse that power, but we also have the ability to use it rightly. Not by figuring it out on our own. We’ve shown ourselves through the centuries to be pretty miserable at that, but by directing our capabilities toward following the only one who has come from God to show us the way – by becoming disciples of Jesus.

When David went to his knees after his confrontation with Nathan he confessed that he had sinned against God. (He had also sinned against Bathsheba but we don’t have any record of how he dealt with that.) He stopped trying to live by his own wits and passions and started to direct his life towards God. In doing that he became the King David we now remember as the greatest of Israel’s kings.

The word for that turning around to follow God is repentance. It is the justifying grace of God that moves us to recognizing who we really are and recognizing who God intends us to be. And the word for the life that follows is sanctification – being made more holy day by day as we learn from Jesus how to free ourselves from the power of sin.

You are more powerful than you ever imagined. The great question for the Christian is not: How can I do anything when I’m so messed up? The great question is: What do I do with these gifts I’ve been given to live as a free person and to serve God in the world? What are you going to do with your gifts? Thanks be to God.

2 Samuel 11:26 - 12:13a

When Uriah's wife heard that her husband, Uriah, had died, she wailed over her owner, but when the time of mourning was past, David brought her and gathered her into his house and she became his wife and she bore him a son. But the thing which David did was evil in the eyes of Yahweh.

Yahweh sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said, "There were two men in a certain village, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had sheep and cattle of a very great amount and the poor man had nothing at all except one little ewe lamb which he had bought. He raised it and it grew up with him and his children. It ate his food with him and drank from his cup and laid on his chest. It was like a daughter to him.

"Now a traveler came to the rich man but he spared his own sheep and cattle from being made into a meal for the traveler who came to him. instead he took the poor man's ewe lamb and made it into a meal for the traveler who came to him."

David's nostrils flared in great anger against the man and he said to Nathan, "As Yahweh lives, death ought to come to the man who did this! He must pay for that lamb four times over because he did this thing and did not show pity over it."

Then Nathan said to David, "You are the man. What Yahweh, God of Israel, says is this: 'I anointed you as king over Israel and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave you your master's house and your master's wives unto your chest and I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if this were too little, I would have added much more.

"'Why did you despise the word of Yahweh by doing what was evil in Yahweh's eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite by the sword and you took his wife as your own wife. You killed him by the sword of the Ammonites. Now the sword will never turn aside from your house because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to become your own wife.'

"Thus Yahweh says, 'I will raise up evil against you from your own house. I will take your wives from before your eyes and give them to someone close to you and he will lie with your wives by the light of this very sun. For you did it in secret, but I will do this thing in front of all Israel and in broad daylight.'"

David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against Yahweh."

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[i] Robert E. White, “Haiti: Policy Lost, Policy Regained,” http://www.cosmos-club.org/web/journals/1996/robertwhite.html.

[ii] John Holmes, “Congo’s Rape War,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2007, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-holmes11oct11,0,1470825,print.story.