Home > Sermons > June 17, 2007

Background Story

Before I read the Old Testament Lesson for today, I want to review with you the background of this particular passage – it is part of a longer story.  This story  begins with the 11th chapter of II Samuel in these words:  “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle.” But David is not doing what was expected of Kings.  He stayed home and sent his army out.  That gave him time to get into trouble.   

David was walking on the roof of his place and he looked over to another roof and discovered there a woman taking a bath.  David might have been happy just to observe this beautiful woman, but instead he sent to find out who she was.  She was Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite.  We don’t know for sure whether she answered gladly, or just because she had to – after all David was the King.  Anyway she came.

And a few weeks later, Bathsheba sends word to the King, “I am pregnant.”  

Immediately, David went into action.  He sent a message out to the battlefront where Bathsheba’s husband was fighting and asked to have him to come in.  When Uriah came home, David did everything he could to get Uriah to his own home.  First he just offered the opportunity.  Then he tried to get him drunk. But Uriah was a man of integrity.  Uriah he felt that his place was back on the battlefield and not enjoying himself at home. David’s cover scheme did not work. 

Getting desperate, David wrote to Uriah’s commanding officer, asking they withdraw from Uriah, so that he would be sure to be killed.  That scheme worked.  So this is where we pick up the reading –  

The Scripture Lesson: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15  

11: 26When the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she made lamentation for him. 27When the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord,

12:1 and the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him, and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. 2The rich man had very many flocks and herds; 3but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. 4Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.” 5Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; 6he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” 7Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; 8I 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. 9Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. 10Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife ...

13David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan said to David, “Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die. 14Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die.”

15Then Nathan went to his house. The Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it became very ill. (NRSV © Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States) 

The Model of the Arrogance of Power

This isn’t the sort of Bible story we particularly bring our children to Sunday School to learn.  Consider the abuses of power on David’s part:  He coveted his neighbor’s wife.  He slept with her.  He got her pregnant.  Those are sort of common human experiences that we can find throughout human experience.   

But this is not just any covetous and sexy guy, this is the one with ultimate power in Israel.  And so what he has done is an ultimate abuse of power.  Whether she wanted the relationship or not – Bathsheba is trapped by David’s power.  Surely she had nothing to do with the scheming and manipulating to get her husband to be David’s cover in the pregancy.  Nor in the ultimate scheme to get her husband killed.  This was David’s power at work.  

It almost seems like David will get away with it. Only his closest aides and his newest wife would know.  Who else had to know, anyway? 

Nathan Sent with a Story

But God sent the prophet Nathan with a story.  This story is often called Nathan’s parable.  It isn’t really a parable.   It’s a fictional legal case.  We might think of it as a case study, but it was presented to the King in his authority as reigning monarch.  It was in his jurisdiction.  Nathan’s story is good.  It hooks the King’s very best instincts. And David makes a summary judgement: The perpetrator deserves to die, but should at least make a four-fold restitution.

 

This is a powerful story.  Although it is fiction, it is deeply true.  David gets caught up in the truth – he believes it. He believes it so much that when he discovers it is about himself, he quickly has to admit his sin. Everything has become public.  And David and Bathsheba’s shame became the shame of the nation.  The power of the story is that it takes the masks off the abuse of power and shows it for what it is. 

Abuse of Power

David becomes a paradigm of the abuse of power.  As one in authority he had the responsibility to care for his subjects – both Uriah and Bathsheba. But David let them down. His own personal appetites blurred his vision.  The results were criminal. 

Did David have too much power?  We have heard it so often, it has become a truism: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  “William Pitt the Younger, The Earl of Chatham and British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1778,” said something like this in a speech to the UK House of Lords in 1770.  He said,  "Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it."  But “Lord Acton [a British historian] in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887 [wrote the more pointed words],  "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings).” 

Bleak as it sounds, that statement is classic Christian theology.  Christian faith says that all human beings sin and fall short of the Glory God. It is only by God’s grace that we are saved from that fall. 

God’s Grace

But that is the other half of the story.  God does not just put David aside. David continues to be God’s example of what a King should be – a pattern for Jewish and Christian Messianic thinking. 

God’s concern is not that David be perfect, but that David be repentant – that David accept and admit his sin, and seek to move beyond it.  And so it is that even through David’s sinful acts – even through his shame – God’s grace shines through. God’s grace is brought into the situation through the power of the story – the telling of the truth. 

Story in the School

A young clergyperson had been taking a powerful Old Testament course.  Nathan’s story was fresh in his mind, when a teacher he had worked with came to him. This African American teacher had devoted his life to the elementary students of the poor inner city neighborhood – particularly the boys who needed a role model.  But the large city school district was going to move him – presumably to a white school – for the sake of integration.  The teacher was devastated.  

The young clergyperson took an inspiration from the prophet Nathan. He sat down at his typewriter and banged out a letter to the school administration.  He praised the work of the teacher.   He said that he assumed that the school district would give this teacher special honors for his faithful work as a teacher and role model for the young black boys of the neighborhood.  That would be a wonderful thing for them to do. But then he wrote, the rumor is that the district is going to uproot this teacher and send him to another area of the city.  Hard to believe! 

Sometimes an inspiration like takes root.  The clergy person got no response from the school district. But the teacher almost immediately was told that he would not have to move.  And for years afterward, the teacher was convinced that the clergyperson’s letter had made all the difference.  No one will ever know.  But we do know that there is power in the story. There is power in telling the truth in a way that it will be heard. 

Arrogance of Power – Power of Story

Today I am talking abut two kinds of power. I am talking first about the arrogant power – power to abuse – wielded by those who are in positions of power.  And then I am talking about the power of the story – the power that comes even out of weakness when the truth is told.    

A Senator: There are so many stories of the arrogance of power down through the generations of human history, that it is difficult to know where to start or end.  I particularly remember the attractive young Republican Senator that I saw on stage at a large Christian youth rally in the late 1950's.  He and his wife publicly received a gift for their unborn baby. They were a picture perfect couple.  They were strongly committed Evangelical Christians. He was not a strict partisan, and crossed the aisle many times.  He seemed to be the ideal person for any state to have in Washington, DC.  But that Senator was brought down by a sexual scandal with a younger woman – a typical thing, perhaps.  But it was hard for me to imagine, based on my own recollections and the public image he had.  But the Senator succumbed to temptation – much like David in the Bible.  Perhaps his political power made him think that he was above the rules that everyone else followed. 

Clinton: And Bill Clinton was the epitome of this sort of indiscretion.  But  President Clinton, even when the story started to be told, tried to cover it up – to argue about the legal meaning of words.  He was impeached for it.  If Clinton had let the story tell the truth when it first came out, he might have saved himself and the nation a lot of shame. But Clinton, too, was filled with an arrogance of power. 

Bush: Troubling as the arrogance of power of the Senator or the former President may be, surely the arrogance of power that we now witness in Washington is of a deeper shade.  Lying to the public about the reasons for going to war is an arrogance of power (used in the 1960's by Lyndon Johnson.)  Opportunity after opportunity has been missed for the President to admit what he has done.  He remains defiantly arrogant in his power.

 

How many stories do we need to hear about extraordinary rendition of prisoners to other nations so they can be tortured on behalf of our nation?  How many stories, about the situation of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison – left in a limbo outside of the international rules of war and outside the U.S. constitutional framework? How many stories of eroded constitutional rights?  Arrogance of power– above the law!  It becomes not just the arrogant power of the presidency, but the arrogant power of the United States which we are all a part of. 

We can thank God for brave newspeople digging up the stories and for brave lawyers who tell the truth. What is the response of faith to such arrogant power? 

Churches: Churches aren’t much better at dealing with the arrogance of power than other institutions.  Look at the number of sexual scandals that have erupted in churches.  Roman Catholic scandals take stolen much of the spotlight, but the arrogance of power and clergy abuse are pretty widely distributed across the board – in all denominations – liberal and conservative.  The power of the truth springs forth as each story is told.

I can attest to the grace God – the peace – that can come over a congregation when an abuse is finally adequately addressed. It is not an easy road – not something that can happen overnight.  But it comes as the gift of God worth waiting for. 

Conclusion

We live in a world where there is always an arrogance of power.  In our public life – in our church life – in other places. The arrogant power is met with the grace of God.  Often that grace comes through story – through telling the truth.  

Thanks be to God for the stories of truth and people who tell them.   

Amen.