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."

---

[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.