This past Sunday, I was blessed to have the honor to preach at St. James Lutheran Church in Grosse Pointe Farms, MI. St. James is my home congregation. They sponsored my throughout seminary and were home to both my ordination and my wedding. They are a loving and welcoming congregation and I could not ask for a better congregation to call home. Below is the sermon I preached for the celebration of their Saint Day.
Pentecost 9 - July 29, 2012
2 Samuel 11:1-15
St. James Lutheran, GPF
Have you ever known someone that you thought the world of
and believed that they would go far and do all these great things only to have
them fall into a self-destruct cycle leaving you watching and silently
screaming “no!”?
That’s how I feel when I read this story about David. You see, I am fan of David, the underdog who
went far, the psalmist and musician described as being after God’s own heart
even though he was far from perfect.
At the beginning of David’s story, he’s got a lot going for
him. He is anointed by Samuel to be the
person who would follow Saul on the throne even though he was the youngest, and
probably the most insignificant, of Jesse’s sons. Through the power and wisdom God gave him,
David defeated Goliath and was victorious on many fields of battle. David showed mercy to Saul, his nemesis, when
he had the opportunity to kill him and when Saul and Jonathan died on the field
of battle, David showed the people what it meant to truly lament a great
loss…but it gets a little rocky after that.
When David was having the Ark
of the Lord brought into Jerusalem, there’s a
snafu when he decided to have the Ark
carried on a cart instead of the poles that God said the ark had to be carried
on and a priest ends up dead after getting zapped while trying to steady the
ark on the cart. So this delayed the
arrival of the Ark into Jerusalem for three months. Once it got there, David danced with great
joy…much to the dismay of one of his wives.
Then David decided that it was time to build God a house to replace the
tent that God had been dwelling in with the Ark of the Covenant since Sinai, a
tent that allowed God to go where the people went. And while his intentions were great, in a
way…the timing wasn’t right and it seemed to be more about David than about God.
And after this, it seems that David gets back on the
straight and narrow. He was victorious
in battle over the Philistines and showed compassion to Jonathan’s last remaining
son, who had crippled feet.
And then we get to this mornings reading and as we watch the
scene play out reactions range from “bad move, David,” to “really?” to “no! don’t do it!” to “sigh” while David slides further and
further into self destruct mode. And
then we sweep the story under the rug and jump right to Nathan reading David
the riot act and David repenting.
But it’s not that easy
It’s not that easy because then we ignore the sins of
David…First, David took advantage of Bathsheba, possibly raped her, when he
should have been on the field of battle fighting with his men. Then, when Bathsheba became pregnant with
David’s child, he tried to cover it up by doing everything he could to force
Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife…ignoring the fact that when the Ark of
the Lord was present on the field of battle, soldiers were forbidden to have
sex…and when Uriah proved himself to be faithful to his requirements as a
soldier, David did the most despicable thing he could think of, he had Uriah killed
so he could take Bathsheba as his own wife and save both he and Bathsheba from
being stoned to death for their adultery.
And in all of this, the only two words that Bathsheba voices
are “I’m pregnant.” She has no voice
when David lays with her, she has no voice when her husband is killed and David
takes her as his wife…she has no voice when the child she bore as a result of
the adultery with David died. She only
gets those two words.
So, we’re faced with a story of power and privilege and what
can happen when those two things are taken advantage of.
Last week in New Orleans, the
youth that I serve in Lawrence
saw the reality of power and privilege as we drove through the 9th
ward, and as we walked down Bourbon
Street. In
the lower 9th ward, we were witness to the neglect facing the
Vietnamese neighborhood we served in, whose homes still bear the scars of
Katrina, whose doors still bear the X and codes indicating how many people were
found in the house and the condition of those people while in more affluent
parts of town you couldn’t even tell a hurricane had hit. And on Bourbon Street, we encountered women who
make their living in so called Gentleman’s clubs. Reactions to these two experiences were
completely different. In the 9th
ward, there was silence as we passed homes with mold on the exterior siding and
others without roofs. On Bourbon street,
there were gasps and one of the youth even instructed the others not to look,
inadvertently insulting the strippers we passed. In both cases we talked about power and
privilege. We talked about how a lot of
people had left New Orleans
after Katrina to restart their lives, but others had no choice but to stay in
those moldy, damaged homes. We talked
about how some women do choose to make their living by taking off their clothes
for men, but that others are trapped in the sex industry and to get out would
be to risk their lives.
It is the same power and privilege that fuels this story
about David, who though he was originally described as a man after God’s own
heart, was no man after God’s heart in these destructive acts.
But here is the thing that makes totally no sense…probably
because it’s not supposed to make sense…while God did not let David off the
hook for his sins and indiscretions, God still remained faithful to the
promises that God had already made to David.
When God revealed to David that he would not be the one to build God a
house, God also promised to give David honor, to give him a house…a dynasty, to
give him an heir who would take the throne after him. And God was faithful to these promises to a
very imperfect man. In fact, God was so
faithful to these promises that God made David to be the ancestor of one born
to an insignificant peasant girl in first century Palestine….one who would be full of grace and
truth and would truly be after God’s heart all the while causing trouble left
and right. One who would eat with the
strippers and the tax collectors, touch the unclean and heal them on the
Sabbath. One who was not afraid to call
folks out for their abuses of power and privilege and who went to the cross so
that the debts created by our sin would be forgiven and expunged from our
records.
David was an imperfect person. He was a much bigger scoundrel than we call
him on. But God showed love and
faithfulness to David and used both his gifts and his failings to bring about
something better for this world…a savior.
If you take a look at scripture, the people who God works through the
most are most often the biggest screw ups, the most broken, and the least
perfect. And it doesn’t make sense…but,
if you think about it, God doesn’t really make sense. God’s best and most fruitful works have come
from the most broken and most insignificant people, from poor widows and dirty
fisherman, from former persecutors of the church and crooked tax collectors,
from womanizing kings and unknown peasant women. Our God is a God who takes people who are
flawed and broken and uses both our gifts and our failings and makes beautiful
and amazing things grow from them. He’s
done it with you, and he’s done it with me and God will continue to work in
ways that don’t make sense to us which leaves us with only one option, to throw
our hands up in the air, to stop rationalizing and to accept God’s amazing and
radical love for us, we saints and sinners, we broken and flawed people. We children of an amazingly radical loving
God.
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