Absalom, Absalom

Today's story of David and Absalom is a story of how David's chickens came home to roost.  Now, actually, I don't know if David had any chickens.  I rather doubt it.  And why chickens coming home to roost should be a dark omen is not clear to me.  That's what chickens do at the end of the day.  They come home to roost.  There's nothing menacing about it.  It's not like the movie The Birds where ordinary sweet-looking birds start pecking poor Tippi Hedren.  Chickens are just not that scary a creature.  But that's the phrase we use to describe what happens when things you have done in the past come back to haunt you.  And if I were doing one of those modern paraphrases of the Bible I would headline this section from 2 Samuel that we read "David's Chickens Come Home to Roost."

Now that I've got that off my chest - I think it is remarkable that we have this story at all - at least in the form that we have it.  We are used to having stories of heroes with clay feet in our day.  Not that our heroes literally have clay feet.  That's another one of those phrases that...well, never mind.  You know what I mean.  If David MacCulloch, the historian, were going to write a history of Thomas Jefferson, we would expect that he would include all sorts of things about Jefferson, from the great things (Declaration of Independence!) to the not-so-great (Sally Hemmings!).  But in the ancient world what we usually get are stories that are so cleaned up that great men (and they are almost always men) are described as moving from one great and historic victory to another without ever stumbling or getting so much as hangnail.

David, however, gets the full treatment.  King David, the greatest king the nation of Israel ever had, the uniter of the nation, the establisher of Jerusalem, the man after God's own heart, the most interesting man in the world - THAT David had some issues.  We saw some of them on display last week in the story of Bathsheba where David takes a man's wife, tries to cover it up, orders the man's murder and then pretends like nothing has happened.  And when Nathan the prophet confronts him about it, we hear Nathan's ominous prophecy: "David, thus says the Lord: beware the chickens.  Beware the chickens that will come home to roost."  You know, it's a little bit different in other translations.  This is kind of my paraphrase.  But basically the idea is that because of his sins, David will suffer terrible consequences.  Besides the death of the child that Bathsheba will bear, God tells David that one day trouble will come from within his own house.  Someone in his own house will take his own wives...(yes, wives, plural - it was different back in the day)...someone from his own household will take his own wives and lie with them within full view of the nation.

Well, today's story from 2 Samuel gives us a fulfillment of that prophecy.  Absalom, David's own son, is the trouble from within his own household.  Absalom rebels against his father.  Absalom takes over the Jerusalem as David runs away.  Absalom takes his father's wives to the rooftop of the palace.  Absalom brings all the achievements to the king to nothing.

The piece of the story that we read, though, doesn't give you everything.  It gives you the ending.  The last scene of the story is David mourning over the death of his son, Absalom, after his soldiers, under the command of the general, Joab, find Absalom, caught by his hair in a tree,    (I used to get my hair caught in the trees), hanging, the Bible says, between heaven and earth, and they pierce him with spears...kill him, despite David's orders not to harm him.  When the word comes back, David cries out, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!  Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!"  And you would think that what we have is a story about grief and loss and the pain that comes when families are torn apart by rebellion and trauma.

Except the story is even more complex than that.  We have been here before with David.  He has played this scene out before.  Do you remember how he and his renegade army fought against the old King Saul?  How David had men out trying to take over the kingdom and how they did that, finally surrounding Saul and his son, Jonathan, whom David loved like a brother, on a mountain?  And when David hears that they have died he cries out, "How the mighty have fallen!...Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely!" [2 Sam. 1: 19, 23].  He does not seem to make the connection that going to war will entail death and loss.  Just like he doesn't seem to realize how sending men into battle against Absalom might lead to Absalom's death.

The relationship between David and Absalom is complicated, too.  This rebellion is not the only trouble that had arisen in his household.  Another son, Amnon, had attacked his sister, Tamar, and David had taken no action to rein in the son.  He gets angry but leaves the son alone because, the Bible says, "he loved Amnon" [2 Sam. 13:21].  Family trauma was no different then than it is now.  You and I know that the scars family members inflict on each other can be some of the deepest scars there are.  And you don't have to be a Freudian to know that trauma that is not dealt with - that does not get dealt with on the surface - will come out in other ways - in new cycles of violence and abuse.

So two years passed.  Absalom knows what his brother Amnon did to his sister Tamar.  Two full years pass and Absalom plans a feast for all the sons.  He begs the king to make sure that Amnon can come.  And after he gets Amnon good and drunk at the feast, he gives the command to his servants and they kill Amnon in front of all the brothers.  The chickens come home to roost.  Those chickens.

Absalom flees.  He stays away for 3 years until Joab - yes, that Joab, the general who will kill him - arranges for another prophet to come and tell David a story.  Just like Nathan told David a story.  This time the prophet is woman who tells a story about a man who has only two sons.  The sons get into a fight in the field one day.  It's a tragic fight.  It probably would not have ended badly except that there was no one to separate them and the one son kills the other.  The remaining son now faces the required punishment of death.  But the father will now lose both sons and the possibility of having any heir, which was very important in that society.  You have no name if you have no heir.

The woman prophet says that she is the mother.  She begs for the life of the remaining son.  David is moved.  He declares that not one hair of the son's head will be harmed.  And you remember how Nathan stopped the show with the words, "You are the man"?  Well, now the woman says to the king, in effect, "You have convicted yourself.  How can keep your son as an outcast banished from your presence?  You know good and evil, king.  God will help you discern.  Bring your son home."

So David relents and allows Absalom to come home, but there is no true reconciliation.  David refuses to see him for two years until Absalom forces the question by setting the general Joab's field on fire and demanding an audience with the king.  That just paves the way for the rebellion that follows.

That is the tortured history of David's relationship with his son.  So when he stands there grieving and crying out, "Absalom, Absalom," we know that David may be feeling real emotions, but he has been here before and the situation is complicated by his refusal to deal with the troubles he has caused.  David has shown that he can overlook injustice, that he can not see the consequences of his actions, that he can allow his emotions to overrule his judgment.  And people suffer all around him.

Even now, as he weeps over his son, people are suffering.  His soldiers sneak back into town, having risked their lives for David and the kingdom, but ashamed because the king does not seem to care about their sacrifice or about them.  He only sees Absalom.  It takes Joab to convince him that unless he goes out to see the troops he will lose them and lose the kingdom and very likely lose his life.  So he forces himself to go and sit on the seat at the gates of Jerusalem and to observe the troops filing past him into the city.  Sitting there like a chicken come home to roost.

There are so many things going on in this story.  Some of it goes all the way back to the prophet Samuel's warning that Israel will regret having asked for a king, because the king will take the attention that ought to be devoted to God.  The king will cause misery and suffering.  The king will fail them.  So, in addition to the family drama of David and Absalom, there is the national drama of Israel and Yahweh, Israel's God.

But the perspective we want here is the theological drama.  What does God think of all this?  Surely, yes, God is disappointed by David's actions.  God demands justice and the king fails to deliver.  God expects things that David is incapable of giving sometimes.  And yet, God gives us this story.  We are the heirs of this story.  This story is our story.

We recognize ourselves in this story, don't we?  David's family could be our family because every family, even the best of families, has experienced times when there is undeserved suffering.  Parents victimize children.  Children wound their parents.  Siblings fall out.  The people who are closest to us fail us sometimes.  That's our story.  And we know it.  We journey with it.  We live through it.  It shapes who we are.

But we are baptized into another story.  You can live your whole life shaped by the twisted narrative of the broken world.  You can live your whole life armed with the sense of injustice that comes from being abandoned.  Being hurt.  Being rejected.  Being wronged.  Being the one who has wronged.  And that can be your reality.

Or...you can recognize that what happens in the Bible is the rejection of that reality.  Being baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit means that you are branded with a new name and you become part of a new story that has a new ending.  And in this narrative you are the child who has been wounded by sin who is redeemed by a love that is most clearly visible on a cross.  OK, you're a victim.  What of it?  You are a victim whose identity is redeemed by Jesus.  OK, you were abandoned.  What of it?  Christ was abandoned, too.  He went to that cross alone and he did it to show that God has never abandoned you.  OK, the monarchs and rulers of this world will fail us, our politics will disappoint us, our systems will not work like they're supposed to.  What of it?  God comes to establish a new kingdom and chooses you to be the agents of its proclamation.

I've been very distressed this week by the story of the accident up the road in which a woman struck a child who went into the road after chasing a balloon.  The death was tragic.  But the confrontation that followed was disturbing, too.  Xavier Hill, the child was African-American.  The woman in the car was white.  And in an instant the accident was caught up in all kinds of narratives that had to do with a whole lot more than a child wandering into the road.  People surrounded the car.  Racial epithets and bottles were thrown.  Friends who came to get the driver were assaulted.

The grief was compounded by grievances related to race and beliefs about each other that go back hundreds of years.  We live with those stories all the time, even if we never acknowledge them.  The legacy of racial tensions is all around us and it will continue to cause suffering until it is brought to the cross.  Until it is brought into the light of God's love.  Until we acknowledge that the best place to look for healing is not to our own conflicted hearts, but to the heart of God.  And until we talk to one another out of a deep sense of humility in the face of the wounds that are all around us.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem, not about chickens coming home to roost, but about an albatross.  In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner he talks about how he was forced to wear a dead albatross around his neck as a reminder of his crime for killing it.  The dead bird becomes a symbol of all of his guilt, all of his regret, all of his sins.  One stanza of the poem talks about how he looked to his fellow mariners.  It says:

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
about my neck was hung.

What things have you done, have we done, that would be hung around our necks?  What would be the symbol of our pain and our shame?  And what would it mean if, instead of an albatross, the cross was hung?  The cross on which we find the possibility of new life and new beginnings?

Whatever the burden is around your neck today, I pray that you will lay it down.  I pray that you will let it go.  Cling to Jesus.  Cling to the old wooden cross.  Cling to the promise of the God who loves you, who hates what sin has done to you, and who wants to make us whole.  This is the God whose son was hung to a tree, suspended between heaven and earth, who was pierced by a spear, who wept for the world, and who knows that the last word is not death but resurrection and life.  May that God give us the courage to fully embrace life and to confront those things that keep us from it.  Thanks be to God.