Peace with Justice Sunday, June 13

Sermon by Bradley Schweers

II Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15

I am honored to be a part of this service today at Druid Hills. Some people might not know, but it’s not uncommon for preachers to be “protective” of their pulpits, never allowing others to preach in “their” church. Sad but true. But not here. So thanks, Rex.

Today is Peace with Justice worship, a time to reflect on our work and God’s work in the world towards wholeness, peace, and justice. Peace with Justice to me means relationships, right relationships—between all of us in this sanctuary, this city, this country, and this unlikely and fragile spinning ball we all have to live on together. Relationships between us and our sisters and brothers, between us and our Creation. And between us and ourselves. It’s easy to think that peace and justice is out there, with others. People of all stripes—the Libertarians and the Communists—will talk about peace, talk about justice. But it’s all too often out there. There are good people who do good things, and bad people who do bad things. The polarization of our politics today is a sad testimony to our entrenched attitudes towards all who are Other. We and our people are pure—those over there are.


Which brings us to today’s Old Testament lesson. The message from II Samuel is part of an amazing story, a story unlike any other in the entire Bible.

This is the story of David. Our David, the King, the Anointed one. Christians’ and Jews’ and Muslims’ David. David the embarrassingly ecstatic Lover who danced before God with all of his might. David is Coltrane and James Brown, the artist and mediator—like all artists are: mediators—between the divine realm and us, soaring, taking us high and bringing heaven down to the rest of us. David, king of all kings, the father of the Messiah, the Son of God. Our pure, holy, sacred David.

Just Listen to David, the holy and anointed artist, the shaman, and hear him confess with his Psalm my sins to God, praying for the salvation I cannot bring to myself:

“Create in me a clean heart, Oh God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free Spirit.” (Psalm 51)

Hear David weep for you in your despair, in your dark places with no hope:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?” (Psalm 22)

And let David sing for us, to the God we want to know, we try to believe in, we long to be loved by:

O LORD, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away… You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me…. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. (Psalm 139)

Oh yes, this is David, God’s gift to God’s people.

But this is not the David of our passage. Elsewhere David is the hero, the archetype of the underdog, the shepherd-musician who slays Goliath . But not here. When King Saul’s jealousy threatened the Israelites, David stepped up as protector of the weak and the debtors. But not here.

No here is a very different David. Here David is cold and ruthless, scheming and calculating. He’s an adulterer, a murderer, likely even a rapist. Turns out, like all of us, there are many sides to David, and not all of them noble.

Let’s look at the context for our story, as told in II Samuel chapters 10-12. David is the King of Israel and Judah, a hero, righteous. A new king comes to lead the Ammonites, and David has every intention of dealing “kindly,” as we are told, with them. But war breaks out and the Ammonites flee, finally to be defeated in chapter 12. It is in the context of this battle that our story is told.

II Samuel 11 begins: ” In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him.” So it’s the time of year when kings go to battle, but King David doesn’t go. He sends his top general, Joab, to deal with the Ammonites. David is napping in the afternoon on his penthouse balcony overlooking the city. He sees the figure of a beautiful woman. He can’t see her face, but he is captivated. He’s got 5 wives already, but man, just look at her. He asks his men who this woman is and is told she is Bathsheba, wife of one of his most loyal soldiers Uriah the Hittite. Now David the military commander acts swiftly. Verse 4-5 read: “ So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, "I’m pregnant."

So David freaks out. Even for Kings, the penalty for adultery is death. So he schemes. Bathsheba was menstruating while her husband Uriah was fighting in the battle outside of Jerusalem. So there’s no way that Uriah could have gotten his wife pregnant before he left for battle. The troops are out in the field and won’t be coming back to town for some time, so David needs to get Uriah back, have him sleep with his wife, the kid will be born, everyone will be happy for the new parents, Bathsheba’s girlfriends will squeal and throw her a shower, they’ll get a car seats and diapers, and no one will suspect a thing.

So David sends for Uriah and tells him, “Uriah, buddy. How’s the war going? Look, Joab tells me you’ve been kicking some serious Ammonite butt out there. Now why don’t you go spend some time with your cute wife, kick back a little. You can head back to the fighting tomorrow.” Uriah, the loyal soldier, will have none of it. His men are in battle and he wouldn’t think of enjoying pleasure with his wife while they are in tents preparing for more combat. He won’t go to Bathsheba. The next day, David finds that he hasn’t gone, and again, insists. Uriah refuses and David gets him drunk—even a loyal soldier will start longing for his wife after a few Budweisers. But Uriah still will not abandon his troops. Uriah’s loyalty, in the end, is his downfall.

Now things begin to spiral out of control. David is desperate. Uriah must be taken out of the picture. David sends word to his general Joab to order Uriah to the front lines, then pull back to abandon him and make sure that he dies. The plan works. Uriah is cut down in battle—no matter that some other loyal servants of David’s die also—“Collateral Damage.” David hears word of this and knows now that he can take Bathsheba and her unborn child—which everyone will assume is Uriah’s—as his wife, and no one will be the wiser. When Bathsheba mourns the prescribed seven days, David sends for her, she becomes his wife, and they have a child. But, as our Scripture lesson today tells us, “the thing that David had done displeased the LORD. “Displeased” doesn’t actually quite capture it—a better translation would be evil—David, the anointed King, has done evil in the sight of God.

In comes Nathan. At great risk to himself—he wouldn’t be the first prophet to end up in the graveyard—Nathan entraps David with a simple story and riles up the righteous indignation of the King. How could someone with everything take the one precious thing from a poor man?

Will Willimon asserts that Nathan’s rebuke of David reveals a “collision of narratives.” David has created his narrative—royalty is his, as are power, riches, the favor of God, and vast military might. But the narrative of God is one of covenant and gift. Nathan speaks for God, saying to David: “I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master's house, and your master's wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. “ Can’t you hear a father’s cry? I loved you so much, gave you everything—and would have given you even more—why? why have you done this?! To his credit, David realizes what he has done and makes no excuses: "I have sinned against the LORD." Whether it was Nathan’s story or the reminder of all the gifts he had been given by God, David repents and is changed. David and Bathsheba’s first son dies--a troubling, troubling part of our story. And yet, from Bathsheba and David comes Solomon, the Temple-builder, just king, and wise ruler over God’s people.

In the end, David’s self-narrative returns to the covenantal narrative of God. God’s covenant with David remains, but it is tainted—the sword will always be over the house and family of David. We can see this in Palestine and Israel today, in the waters off of Gaza and in fundamentalism in all of its forms. Yet, somehow, from David the humbled one of God, comes the redemptive work of God.

It is striking how laid bare the sin of David is in our passage today. It’s an uncomfortable passage. The books of Chronicles take the easy way out and simply skip over this story in the account of David. But in II Samuel, there is not attempt to explain David’s misconduct, no sympathetic recounting of the events. Was it lust? Secret Love? An assertion of male power? A mid-life crisis—David was, after all, getting old? Interpreters speculate, but there is no speculation in the text. The text is short and direct: “the thing that David did was evil in the sight of God.” Nathan is also terse: “You are the man!” and David’s confession is equally concise and unequivocal: “I have sinned against the LORD."

Ted Smith, former preaching professor at Candler and now at Vanderbilt, comments on the raw presentation of our story today:

Acknowledging the sin of David threatens a whole worldview. It shatters a vision in which saints and sinners can be neatly divided, a vision in which God works through the good actions of good people to establish peace and justice. If David sinned, then the world is not like we thought it was.

That is exactly what this story does. We all develop stories, visions, narratives of how things in this world work. I was at Centennial Park recently, watching scores of kids laugh and play in the fountain. Have you seen the fountain, where hundreds of water jets are set into the ground along the shape of the rings, and the water spurts into the air, high and low, in complicated patterns and sequences. And I saw this one boy Command these two jets in front of him to rise—like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. He would command—and the water would come. He would command again, and nothing. But he kept commanding and commanding and eventually, sure enough, the jets obeyed him as Commander of the Water.

We all have narratives of the way this world works. We have a view that good people do good things and bad people do bad things. Just people bring justice, evil people bring evil. We might not think quite so dramatically, but we construct a vision for this world works and then we act according to that construction. I do at least.

I think Ted Smith is right that this full and troublesome story of David has great potential to open us up, to refocus our eyes and lives, to open us up to the ways that God is working in the world in the most unexpected places. Smith writes,

Preaching that tells this story in all its fullness will push us beyond the polarities that often order our thinking. It will remember David as murderer, adulterer, and predatory king as well as hero, beloved of God, and singer of psalms. It will break up the stories we tend to tell about others and ourselves, stories in which we are either good enough – not perfect, but good enough – that we have no real need of grace, or so bad that we are beyond the scope of grace. Remembering David's sin can also push us beyond the poles of cynicism and naivete in our political and institutional lives. The politics of David's court are brutal. But – often in spite of themselves, and almost always in ways the actors do not fully understand – these power politics are caught up in God's redeeming work.

There is a time to speak Truth to Power, a time to be Nathan. When our churches and denominations discriminate against people who are gay, we need to speak truth to power. When there is sex trafficking rampant in Atlanta, we need to speak truth to power. When our government spends $200,000 a MINUTE on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and yet we cut grants to poor college-bound kids, we need to speak truth to power.

But I think the story in II Samuel has something to teach us about ourselves and those around us. That is, there’s a time to acknowledge the David in all of us.