Scripture: 2Samuel 18:5-33
This is the last Sunday we’ll be spending with David for a while, so I want to try to wrap things up as best I can, and we’ll get to the scripture reading in just a few moments. Again I need to fill in some parts of the story that it would take way too long to read, but before I do that I probably should also make a public service announcement.
If the story of David and Bathsheba seemed to you to be of marginal appropriateness for polite company on a Sunday morning, you might want to cover your ears today. If anything the story we’re dealing with this week is seamier and steamier than the one we were dealing with two weeks ago. If I were a TV news department you could accuse me of trying to boost my ratings by featuring stories of sex and violence. You don’t have to cover your ears yet. I have a few other preliminary things to say before we get back to the story. But as far as covering your ears, I’ll tell you when.
I said that I would be wrapping up the David stories as best I can, and in this case I know the best I can is not very well. We will have neglected or barely touched on lots of parts of the story that might well be worth spending some time with. And there are lots of angles a person could take in the way of how to look at these stories that we will have passed over.
Karen and Stephanie Roddy are my consultants for worship for today and the picnic Sunday coming up on September 7. Karen mentioned to me that it would be interesting to know or think about what might have been going on in Bathsheba’s mind…or heart or spirit. The story as we have it is, after all, King David’s story. There are times in the story when we don’t know what even he is thinking, and where I would like to know. What was he thinking? But it is his story. It’s told as though the narrator was sitting on his shoulder, maybe as though God were sitting on his shoulder.
How would it be different if we imagined it as Bathsheba’s story? What if we tried to hear her voice in the story? What if we tried to see her as more than just a victim of David’s lustful power? What is her attitude toward being brought into a position of privilege herself? How does she deal with the fact that terrible things have been done to her and around her and yet she ends up living in the palace, married to one king and mothering another? There are all sorts of trails we could explore by taking a seat, say, beside Bathsheba instead of by David and seeing how things look from there. Of course it’s appropriate to picture God sitting on David’s shoulder the whole time even though he didn’t seem to be much aware of it, but to use that same image, it would be well to remember that God of course was on Bathsheba’s shoulder too. And I thought that would be a great idea for a follow-up sermon, but I also found I wasn’t quite ready for it.
I mention the possibility of such a sermon because even if I’m not quite ready to give it, it’s important to be reminded that David’s is not the only story that matters and that it’s important to look at the world from the perspective of those without power, and this applies not just when we’re reading the Bible.
But now, for today, back to the story in which King David is the center of the story. We left off with Bathsheba pregnant by David, Bathsheba’s husband Uriah dead by David’s command, David told that because he showed some remorse he will live, but the child will not.
The child is born. As if to emphasize that Bathsheba is not the important person here, the story says that it was Uriah’s wife who bore a child to David, and then she disappears while David quite visibly keeps vigil over the child. He fasts, prays, prostrates himself on the ground, pleads with God to spare the child. All to no avail. At the end of a week the child dies. David instantly puts his grief behind, gets up, washes, changes clothes, goes on with life. When questioned about this, he says there’s nothing he can do to bring the child back. It’s time to get back to being king, and father. Which he does.
Bathsheba gives birth again, this time with David legitimately as the father, to a child whose name is Solomon, who will grow up to be king. But Solomon is by no means David’s only child, and this business of being king and father gets pretty complicated. (Now is the time to cover your ears.)
David’s first born son is a man named Amnon. Among David’s other children is another son, with a different mother, whose name is Absalom, and a daughter of the same mother, whose name is Tamar. So Absalom and Tamar are full siblings. Tamar is Amnon’s half sister. Amnon becomes infatuated with Tamar in quite a non-brotherly way. He becomes infatuated to such an extent that he can’t think about anything else. Day and night it’s Tamar, Tamar, Tamar, but Tamar is oblivious. So on the advice of a cousin, Amnon concocts a scheme where he will pretend to be sick and appeal to his father David to let Tamar come and attend to him, fix him some chicken soup, and things like that. But then when Tamar does come to take care of her suffering half-brother, she finds out that he has something else in mind. He invites her into bed with him, and when she refuses, he forces her. He rapes her. And then, having raped her, becomes completely uninfatuated. Scripture says he was now seized with a very great loathing for her, even greater than the lust he had before. He sends her away, even bolts the door behind her.
At this point Tamar encounters Absalom, who obviously can tell something is wrong. On questioning, she tells Absalom what has happened and Absalom becomes enraged and vows revenge. When David hears of all this he is described as being “very angry” but he doesn’t do anything about it because of his love for Amnon, his first-born. It doesn’t say anything about his love for his daughter Tamar. Absalom bides his time. For two years he bides his time, but he doesn’t forget. And finally his opportunity comes. He arranges to have a party where Amnon gets drunk and while he’s off guard and unsuspecting, Absalom’s servants attack him, and kill him.
King David, it says, on hearing this, wept bitterly. He grieves for Amnon, and he is angry at Absalom, so angry that Absalom goes off to live with his mother’s relatives, essentially going into exile. Three years pass. David’s grief for Amnon gradually dies down and he begins to grieve for Absalom, who has also been effectively lost to him. He begins to wish for Absalom to come home. But can’t quite get over the hump. Absalom after all did kill Amnon and has never shown an ounce of regret. But with the help of a woman who intervenes on behalf of Absalom, David finally agrees to let Absalom come home, almost. He allows him to come back to Jerusalem, but he still refuses to see him. For two years he makes him live in a house outside the city, until finally the king and his son are reunited. There is an emotional reunion with tears and kisses.
That would maybe be a heartwarming ending to the story, but you know better by this time. This is not a heartwarming story. No sooner are David and Absalom reunited than Absalom begins to plot a coup, against his own father. David is aging and maybe a little burned out. He tends to spend his days in his castle where he can be safe and comfortable. While David holes up in the castle, Absalom is out on the streets and in the countryside, talking to people, bad-mouthing David and gathering support for his own leadership. He does all this so successfully that he eventually gets himself proclaimed king in exile at Hebron, which had been David’s original capital, a kind of in your face move. Then Absalom begins to march on Jerusalem. David, perhaps unwilling to fight his own son, perhaps thinking he would lose, abandons the city and goes into hiding.
The condensed version of what happens next is that Absalom takes control of the palace, rapes the kings wives to prove that he has taken the king’s place, and gets ready to go after his father, with the intention of killing him. If I told you the non-condensed version of what happened it would sound even more like a plot summary of some soap opera than it already does.
But David is ready too. He is about to make one last stand. He gathers his generals, and finally we are at the point where this morning’s scripture picks up. Let’s listen to the scripture and then sing a hymn before we go on.
…
I wanted to take time to sing a hymn as well as listen to scripture before I finished the sermon for a couple of reasons. I don’t know if you will feel this the same way I do, but I have been spending some time with this scripture—you don’t have any particular reason to do that, but I’ve been spending some time with the scripture, and I’ve been feeling burdened by it. Burdened not in the sense of having something laid on your conscience in a constructive way, but just burdened by it in a heavy way.
David and Jonathan I said was a sad story. After that, the rest of the story has been, for me, not so much sad as oppressive. Scripture is not supposed to be that way. Scripture is supposed to enlighten or inspire or maybe challenge in a constructive sort of way, not burden us with its bleakness. That’s what I’ve been feeling about these portions of 2Samuel—it’s pretty raw stuff, pretty bleak. Now, of course, you can always just cover your ears, pay no attention, and avoid being burdened that way. But if we’re going to pay attention to the scripture, it’s going to burden us sometimes, and this is one of those times.
So I felt the need to stop after I finished with the story this morning and just sort of take a deep breath, wash my hands, do something spiritual, like sing a spiritual, to get myself in a different frame of mind. Did you notice, by the way, that I didn’t mention God very much as I was telling the story, or maybe not at all? That’s not me. That’s not the way I chose to tell the story. That’s the Bible. That’s the way the Bible tells the story, without God.
O.k. Deep breath. What do we do with material like this? Do you detect a role model anywhere in the area? Do you see anyone in this story to admire even a little bit? It’s pretty tough to find heroes here, though lots of times David is made out to be one. The trouble, for me, is that in order to make a hero out of David you have to ignore a whole lot of “stuff”. And that is what a lot of people do when they deal with these passages. They ignore a whole lot of stuff and focus on those few moments that offer us something constructive—like maybe when David, with the help of the prophet Nathan has a moment of lucidity about what he has done, or when after years of separation and bitterness he and Absalom are finally reunited, or when he grieves for the son who wished him harm. And so the desperate preacher has some few words he or she can seize on to talk about self-knowledge or insight or forgiveness or grief. Most of the time they do that, however, as though all the rest of that shabbiness is not there. I don’t mean to be too hard on people who do that. I’m talking about myself. I’ve done it too. But that shabbiness is there, and it’s been getting me down. Everywhere you turn sexual violence, violence of every kind, murderous plots, lies, lust, revenge, betrayal, selfishness, absence of conscience, absence of compassion, absence of God.
If all scripture had to do was be true to life, then I guess you could say this story is successful in mirroring for us at least what some parts of our world look like. Undeniably, all of the things that happen in this story happen in real life. And not just the actions themselves but the pattern of what happens.
David abuses his power to have sex with Bathsheba. David’s son, Amnon, rapes Tamar. David doesn’t do anything about it, maybe, possibly, because what Amnon has done is not so different from what David himself has done. David has Bathsheba’s husband Uriah killed. Absalom has Amnon killed. David is angry, but is it so different from what he himself has done. Once upon a time David marched on Jerusalem, won a brilliant military battle, and made Jerusalem the capital of his kingdom. Years later David abandons the city, because his son Absalom is now marching on Jerusalem in order to make it the capital of his kingdom. History repeats itself. Patterns of abusiveness reproduce themselves. Violence begets violence, in families and in the world. Vicious cycles of violence spiral from one generation to the next. Sometimes a winner emerges—temporarily. But in the end everyone loses. That, to me, is a true story. It is not the whole truth, but it is a true story about the way our world is. All of the David stories together tell us this sad and burdensome truth about the way things are; they tell it mercilessly.
But we need more than truth, more than this kind of truth. We need something to point us, at least, and hopefully move us toward some better truth. There’s an image in the story, where Absalom, you remember is riding along and gets his hair caught (that’s the way it’s usually pictured because he is described at one point as having very long hair) in the branches of a tree. He gets separated from his mule, who keeps on going, so that Absalom is left hanging, as the scripture says, between heaven and earth.
Maybe the Biblical writer didn’t mean very much by that. Maybe that was just a convenient way to say that Absalom was left swinging in the breeze. But I can’t help but read something else into those words. He is left hanging, Absalom is, between heaven and earth. At this point in the story, he is a man suspended between life and death. He is hanging there literally awaiting his execution as a defeated enemy of the state, but also as a son who, in spite of everything, is still loved by his father, who has commanded that he not be harmed. He is suspended further, not just between literal life and death, but in this kind of no-man’s land where he doesn’t belong fully to the bloodstained earth that he has come from and is soon to return to with a thud. For a moment he is suspended as we all are in a way between earth and heaven, belonging fully neither to the one or the other, living in that in-between place between the truth all too vividly described in the story and that better truth we see only dimly but nevertheless have inside us.
Even this story with all its sin and sorrow, has embedded in it some deep-seated, God-given yearning of human beings to be reconciled to each other. Any way you look at it, David did some pretty awful things, and so did the people around him. I’ve tried not to gloss over that, give you some sanitized version of the story. Still, I told you that David sat at the feet of King Saul, trying to soothe his troubled soul, even though Saul could at any moment flip out and try to kill David. I didn’t tell you that on two different occasions David could have killed Saul, who after all was trying to kill him, with a single thrust of the sword, but didn’t because he somehow through it all loved Saul, loved him not just as Jonathan’s father but in a way also as his own. Then there was his love for his children—Amnon, Tamar, Absalom—not so easy to love all three of them, all at the same time. And we heard this morning of David telling his general not to hurt his son, Absalom, who was doing his best to do David in, and then when finding out that Absalom was dead after all, crying out in the universal voice of parents who lose their children, saying, “if only it could have been me”.
There are other examples, not too many, but some. The instances of love breaking through in the story are not too many, and not very prominent, but they’re there. Amid all the shabbiness, the story does speak to me of some resilient desire on the part of David to overcome his estrangement from the people around him. Mostly his impulses toward reconciliation are too little and too late, misguided and clumsy. But they’re there.
Our lives are a whole lot less shabby than what we have been reading about. Still, it takes some attention on our part to see and to honor those impulses to overcome estrangement, that ache in the spirit for reconciliation that is present in us, embedded, not always very prominently in our lives too. Our own efforts to love can sometimes be late, or little, misguided, or clumsy. But I have to believe—and the David stories do strangely remind me of this—I have to believe in that deep-seated, God-given yearning to overcome our estrangement from one another, or just our separateness, to move toward mending the brokenness, toward wholeness. I have to believe that yearning is embedded in our lives. If it is not, forget about the scriptures, the whole world will look pretty bleak.
The spiritual sings about beams of heaven. I suspect many who sing that song interpret it to be speaking of an afterlife, and maybe so. For me, the beams of heaven can also refer to those urgings toward wholeness that are so deeply a part of us but that can so easily be hidden beneath the shabbiness, the trouble, or the just plain ordinariness of our lives. The beams of heaven may lead me to a home with God in a realm beyond death. They may also lead me toward, even though ever so slowly toward, a place where human beings are no longer estranged from each other. To me, that too would be home. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 24, 2003