Scripture: 2Samuel 11:1-12:15
One Sojourner, who shall remain nameless, asked me this week, “Is it time for lust yet?” This might seem like a strange question unless you knew that I had been preaching a series of sermons drawing on the David stories and that one of those stories—several actually, but one famous one—had to do with lust and that it might be just about time for that story to come around in the preaching sequence. I have to admit that it took me just a second to figure out what she was talking about, but once I did, I was able to say—and now that you have heard the scripture for the morning, you also know—that it is indeed time for lust…sermonically speaking, that is.
But before we get to lust, let me quickly fill in the parts of the story that we’re skipping over. It won’t take long because it’s a pretty straightforward story. Those of you who were here two weeks ago know that we left off the story at the point where David was mourning the death of King Saul and the king’s son Jonathan, who happened to be David’s soul mate. Last week the scripture was taken from a relatively minor incident involving David and some holy bread and it didn’t really move the story forward, so that’s where we still are, with Saul and Jonathan dead and David in mourning.
Not for long, however. David doesn’t have a lot of time to spend working through his grief, because he moves very quickly from being essentially an outlaw, at the top of King Saul’s ten most wanted list, hiding out among his old enemies and Israel’s enemies, the Philistines, to being king, essentially just like that. This is no surprise. The reader knows that God had already decided David was going to be the next king, and although it probably didn’t matter since God’s was the only vote that counted, David was also the people’s choice. David had always been more popular than Saul, and now that Saul and his son Jonathan were dead, the way was clear for David to step in and assume the kingship.
Not only that. He could do it with clean hands and a clear conscience, since he had had nothing to do with Saul’s death. In fact when a messenger had come to tell David about Saul’s death and claimed that he himself had done in Saul, thinking this would make David happy, it turned out to be a costly mistake in judgment because David immediately has the messenger killed. And then he makes a very public lamentation over Saul and Jonathan. David sheds real tears, no doubt, for Jonathan, the love of his life, and some of his tears for Saul were probably real, since Saul was after all a tragic figure worthy of some pity, but mixed in with the real tears for Saul were probably some political tears as well. Mourning the death of the king might win over some of Saul’s supporters and in any case David wouldn’t want to seem happy about Saul’s death or too eager to take his place. So some lamentation is clearly in order, but not too much. Life goes on and there are things for the new king to do.
Like deal with the little matter that one of Saul’s generals had decided that Saul’s other son should be king instead of David, or at least co-king, and had crowned him king over the northern tribes at the same time that David was being crowned king over the southern tribes. Saul’s other son’s name was Ishbosheth, and you know that he was not meant to be the king of the future because his name is all but unpronounceable, and in any case King Ishbosheth just doesn’t have the ring to it that King David does. But for the time being David is only half a king, that is king over only half of Israel. And it takes several years and several chapters of second Samuel, to get both Ishbosheth and his general, Abner, killed off. Which does happen, again without David being implicated in any way, and again with David making a public display of grief at the funeral. The scripture describes David’s grieving after Abner’s death and then goes on to say, “All the people took notice of it, and it pleased them, just as everything King David did pleased all the people.” Then after Ishbosheth is murdered, David again makes a point of killing the people who killed him. And again all the people fall all over David in a disgusting display of hero worship and make him king over all the tribes of Israel. This is, after all, what everyone including God had wanted all along.
So David has accomplished the nearly impossible task of uniting all the tribes of Israel, who had spent many years by this time fighting each other as well as their other enemies. He has beaten down as well those other enemies, most of them, and then accomplishes one last military miracle. He captures Jerusalem, which was on a high hill, was extremely well fortified, and which had no chance of being penetrated or successfully attacked from below. Except David somehow did, routed the Jebusites, took charge of Jerusalem, made it the capital of the united kingdom of Israel. “And David,” scripture says, “became greater and greater.”
David’s great and wonderful accomplishments go on and on, but I think you get the point, and I am making myself nauseous telling you about them. They include many battles, including some particularly brutal episodes such as when David has the soldiers he has captured lie on the ground and uses a rope to measure off who will be killed—two lengths, kill them, one length, let them live.
So, by the time we get to where the reading started for this morning, David is at the pinnacle of success. David is the very definition of success, has given new meaning to the idea of success. He has more power than his little shepherd’s heart could ever have dreamed of. He has more popularity than anyone would know what to do with and more adulation than could possibly be good for any human being. His name recognition is through the roof, and he doesn’t even know yet that both Jerusalem and Bethlehem will be called the city of David, that it will be believed that the messiah will come from the house of David and that the Jewish people will forever be symbolized by the star of David. But for now he can be content with being referred to as the great King David, great and getting greater every day. He is successful in every way, including—I haven’t mentioned until now—that he has more wives and consorts than any man could keep up with. He not only has more power, wealth, fame, and popularity than anyone could dream of. He also has—the Bible doesn’t say this explicitly, but it’s not hard to figure out—he has available to him an excess of sexual gratification. Which brings us back to Lust.
Actually I think lust operates at several levels in this story. There is, first of all, good old-fashioned, down to earth, ache-in-the-groin type lust. David, the story suggests, is just waking up from an afternoon nap, maybe a little groggy, is just sort of looking around wondering what’s for dinner when all of a sudden on the roof next door this beautiful woman appears, this beautiful, naked, woman and all of a sudden David is awake. The juices are flowing, and since he is the king, he has the ability to act on whatever his hormones tell him to do. So before you know it Bathsheba is in the king’s bed, and not long after that, she’s pregnant.
I don’t know about you but in my opinion good old-fashioned hormonal type lust can be a good thing, a gift from God. It can also, I think we would all agree, be not such a good thing. This is one of those cases when it is really, really not such a good thing. For a whole bunch of reasons. All sorts of people get hurt. There’s fallout of all kinds, even to future generations, in ways too complicated to get into this morning. And although much of the fallout has to do with the fact that Bathsheba became pregnant, the story makes clear, I think, that the point here is not that they should have practiced safe sex, but rather that this was a many-layered act of unfaithfulness on David’s part. Having said that much, I’m not particularly inspired to say much more than that about the hormonal lust part of the story. It seems to me important to recognize that part of the story but not to get stuck there.
There is a kind of theological subtext to what I was just talking about though. People do get hurt because of David’s lust, lots of people get hurt, but not David, at least not in any obvious way. Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband and a good man by all accounts, ends up dead. David sees to that as part of his cover-up. The baby born to Bathsheba and David ends up dead. God sees to that, since the sin cannot go unpunished. David has a moment of remorse when confronted by Nathan, but then without hardly having to say a Hail Mary, is pronounced forgiven. David says “I have sinned.” In the very next verse Nathan says, “Now the Lord has put away your sin…but because you have scorned the Lord, the baby will die.” Then, it says, Nathan went to his house. I should hope so. If I were Nathan—innocent Uriah is already dead, I have announced that the innocent baby is going to die, but that God is putting away the sin of David as far as David is concerned—if I were Nathan I’d be ashamed and I’d want to get out of the story as fast as I could. There are issues to be raised about God’s justice here. The story could make you linger over why the innocent so often suffer from the sins of others, and I am not one to shy away from complaining to God about that or complaining about the way Biblical stories portray God sometimes. The reality of this story and of our stories is that the innocent often do suffer for the sins of others. The story implies that God arranges it that way, and I need to point that out to get it off my chest, but having done that, for today, I’ll just let that be and move on.
There’s another kind of lust in the story. David is clearly someone who has grown used to having whatever there is to be had. It is a lust maybe not so much of the groin but of the heart. As I was saying earlier when I was reviewing the story to this point, David pretty much had everything his heart could ever have imagined or desired, and more. I’m guessing that what made David so very successful, at least what often makes people very successful in this world, is an unwillingness or inability to stop, to say that’s enough, enough is enough. There is some insatiable desire—lust—built in that wants more. More power, more recognition, more praise, more money, more knowledge, more wives. It’s not always all bad. Some people channel this in creative directions. David often did. But still there is that craving for more, that Bathsheba maybe was the victim of as much as David. People who are very successful often are not content to be very successful. That’s a large part of why they are very successful, because they are not content with being successful, they must be very successful, and once they are very successful they must be extremely successful. Sexual misconduct of many kinds is often, as we all know, about not only sex but about an abuse of power. Clearly, this story is not only about David’s sexual adventures but about his abuse of power. And whatever desires or addictions may have been involved. It leads me to ask myself a kind of a desperate question: Is there any hope in this world that the powerful will not abuse their power? Is there any hope in this world to create a world where no one is powerful to that degree? And having got those questions off my chest, again I lay those questions among the many things that could be explored in this passage, and move on.
Still another kind of lust. I may be reading into the story here, but I sense in David a kind of yearning to fill some empty space inside. Here he is. We are told at the beginning of the chapter that it’s the time of year when kings go off to war. It sounds a bit like sport, doesn’t it, the time of year for deer hunting, or for war? In any case, David, the ultimate war hero, is not off to war, where kings are supposed to be at this time of year, but still a young man, in the prime of his life, is here in his castle taking afternoon naps. That’s great. He’s paid his dues. He’s fought enough battles, risked his life many times over. It’s good that he can now send other people off to war for him. But I’m thinking that David feels a void in his life. I’m thinking he subconsciously thinks that Bathsheba is going to fill that void. But of course David, like most of us most of the time, doesn’t understand that that’s what he’s doing and even if he did wouldn’t know exactly what would fill that void. It’s just that there’s some strong but mysterious yearning—lust, if you will—that he doesn’t know how to deal with. Maybe this reading of the story is too modern and existential and a bit clichéd, filling the emptiness inside. But cliché or no, there is such a thing as emptiness, and there are voids inside us that need to be filled or somehow addressed. And anyhow, these last two forms of lust certainly ought to occasion the thought that success for those who aspire to it is quite often disappointing when it arrives. It just doesn’t give what we thought it would or think it should. For David, and for all sorts of people less “successful” than David, it is a question worth reflecting on: what we mean by success and whether it’s in the end a helpful concept at all. I put that on the table too, as one avenue of reflection this story could lead us down.
I have two more, just two for now. There’s a verse tucked in to the middle of the passage where after David’s scheme to have Uriah killed in battle works, and a messenger brings word to David that Uriah is dead, David tells the messenger to take word back to Joab, the commander of the forces, and say to him: “Don’t let this matter trouble you.” Don’t let this trouble you. People get killed all the time. Besides this is war. People are supposed to killed. So, this is not important. Don’t let it trouble you. Which strikes me as being a central spiritual question in this passage. What is it we allow to trouble us? Well, it wasn’t a question for David. He thought he had it taken care of, until God entered the picture and essentially said, “well it may not trouble you, but it troubles me”. Suggesting to the reader that there is a question here. What suffering, or whose suffering, is worthy of attention? What trouble troubles us? Commentators often point out that David broke three of the ten commandments in rapid succession. He coveted, he adultered, and he killed. But the moral issues in the story go far beyond those three things, and have to do in large part with what we allow to occupy our minds. It’s a choice we make all the time, what will trouble us, and what we will choose to ignore or not allow into full consciousness. Not that there are clear or satisfactory answers as to how we should answer the questions, but there are questions. What do I allow to trouble me?
And then finally there is the positive encouragement we do receive from Nathan in this story. He does, unhappily I hope, bring disturbing news from God that the baby will die because of David’s sin and that David will pretty much get off on this one. But Nathan does not only cleverly hold up a mirror for David to see himself in so that he can at least see that he has done something wrong. Nathan invites David, and by implication us, to step into another person’s shoes, to listen to another person’s story. As someone has said, “The law commands ‘you shall not steal’. The story commands, ‘you shall imagine the feelings of the one from whom you steal.’” In other words you shall acknowledge the other as a human being. We presume, we hope that this is what happened to David. Not just that he saw the error of his ways, but that he began to feel as Uriah might have felt, began to see Uriah as a brother.
These are hardly new thoughts, the idea of being aware of what we allow to trouble us and perhaps directing out attention to neglected places, the idea of listening to another’s story and trying as best we are able from within our own skin to let the other’s life become as real to us as our own. They are not new thoughts to me. But I pray God to keep them firmly in place in my head and heart, so that I don’t forget. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 10, 2003