What David Had Done (2 Samuel 12:1-15; Pentecost 19a; October 19, 2014)

What David Had Done

2 Samuel 12:1-15
Pentecost 19a
October 19, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

David the King is supposed to be one of the good guys.  He’s a hero in the Bible.  He is remembered by Israel and then by Judah as the ideal king.  When things were going badly, they hoped for a king in David’s mold.  When the figure of the Messiah begins to emerge in Jewish writing and thinking, he is seen as the heir of David, the Son of David.

To be sure, there are a couple of dissenting voices.  One of them is Jesus, himself.  In the twelfth chapter of Mark, Jesus questions the idea that the Messiah must be a descendent of David.  Another voice is in biblical story that we usually call David and Bathsheba.  It’s rather shocking, if you’re not prepared for it.  It would be like finding out that George Washington, our first President and a rather idealized figure, not only did not confess to chopping down his father’s cherry tree, but also had his staff break into the offices of his political adversaries and plant listening devices, and cheated on his wife with an intern and then lied under oath about it. 

But, of course, it isn’t that shocking to us, because we’ve heard about this story already.  Not only was there the 1951 movie starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward that has run on late-night television for three generations, now.  A quick search of Amazon.com for “David and Bathsheba” returns nearly 4000 titles.  The story has “legs.” Something about it fascinates us.  Maybe it’s the exotic setting.  Maybe it’s the political intrigue of a royal court.  Maybe it’s the sex. 

Maybe it’s because the popular version of the story fits a well-known narrative.  You know the one I mean.  Women use their beauty to attract and distract men.  And men are powerless to resist them.  Men under the sway of “womanly wiles” will do things that they know are wrong but they just can’t help it.  The narrative shows up in court rooms and in hearings on university campuses as the “she wanted it” defense.  It shows up in the abuse and scorned heaped on Monica Lewinsky.  It shows up in high school dress codes that regulate how girls dress so that the boys won’t be distracted.  It shows up in post-revolutionary Iran in the requirement for women to wear a veil in public so that young men won’t have impure thoughts.  It’s David strolling about on his rooftop in the cool of the evening who sees Bathsheba bathing and just can’t help himself.

David just can’t help it when he sees her.  He can’t help it when he stares.  He can’t help it when he asks his servants who she is.  He can’t help it when, on finding out that she is married to a man with no connections, he then sends a servant with orders to bring her to him.  He can’t help it when he takes her to his bed.  He can’t help when, after the discovery that she is pregnant, he first tries to cover up his crime by fetching Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, home from the front in the hopes that Uriah will never suspect that the slightly early full-term baby is not his, and then, when Uriah won’t cooperate, by having Uriah killed.  He just can’t help any of it.  None of it is his fault.  Because, Bathsheba is a woman.

This is the narrative that “mansplains” men behaving badly.  Eve is the one who brought death into the world.  Pandora is the bringer of troubles, her name—Pan-dora, all-gift—an exquisite irony.  Mary Magdalene is trouble; dress her in red.  Put a scarlet A on Hester Prynne’s outer garments.  David was innocent until Bathsheba came along. 

But with the help of his general who arranged for Uriah’s murder, David not only avoided a public relations nightmare.  He even positioned himself to look like the champion of the common man.  After all, Bathsheba was the pregnant wife of a dead war hero.  He is David’s chance to pose as the protector of widows and orphans as he looked after the family of Uriah the foreigner.  He was doing God’s work.   So Bathsheba came to live in the palace and when she gave birth, it was a son.  All’s well that ends well. 

However.  Isn’t that a great word sometimes?  However, “what David had done was evil in the Lord’s eyes.”  Enter Nathan, the prophet.

Now Nathan is in a bit of a pickle.  He’s a prophet and therefore has a duty to speak on God’s behalf, whether this pleases David or not.  On the other hand, David pays his salary.  So Nathan didn’t come to the king and accuse directly: “This thing you’ve been up to with Bathsheba is wrong and you are in trouble with God!”

Instead, Nathan told a story.  A rich man had a house guest and was therefore obligated to feed him.  But instead of feeding him from his own flock he stole a ewe lamb from a man who was so poor that this lamb was the family pet. 

David was corrupt and ruthless, but he was also a child of the Torah.  And he knew an injustice when he heard it.  And this was an injustice.  And he said so: “He must restore the ewe lamb four times over because he did this and because he had no compassion.”

“You are that man!” Nathan told him. 

This is not a story of a “helpless man, powerful seductive woman,” the narrative that informs popular imagination.  David has murdered a member of his guard and taken his wife.  Bathsheba had no power to stop David.  Although there was no overt violence, no knife to her throat, and no threats made out loud, when David’s power prevented Bathsheba from refusing his advances, meaningful consent on her part was no longer possible.  What Hollywood and popular culture have portrayed as a seduction with David as the victim, was in fact a rape and David was the perpetrator.

Nathan gives David no room for the “I couldn’t help myself” defense.  David’s problem was not in a female body bathing on a nearby rooftop.  David’s problem was the sense of entitlement between his ears and no amount of clothing on Bathsheba’s body would have fixed that.  No veil can protect a young man in Iran or anywhere else from his own thoughts.  The baggiest sweat shirt and sweat pants on his female classmate will not stop the distraction happening in the head of a male high student. 

No doubt David, like a lot of men today, would like to claim to have no responsibility, no ability to respond, no power to act.  But that just won’t wash.  Men can and do regulate how they respond to their desires.  It’s up to men to behave well.  It’s up to men to stop using women as an excuse to behave badly.  It is not the responsibility of the less powerful to control the behavior of the more powerful.  Young men in this country are fully capable of keeping their eyes on their own work and we expect them to do that.  Young men have to come to terms with their own imaginations and quit blaming young women.  Even David didn’t try out the “Boys will be boys” excuse on Nathan.  He knew that Nathan would not have it.

David recognized the wrongness he had done in the parable that Nathan told.  David acknowledged that he had sinned against God.  I wonder if he recognized that he had also sinned against Uriah and Bathsheba?  He knew that restitution was in order.  He knew that a man who stole a lamb would have to give four back to set matters to rights.  But Bathsheba was a man’s wife, not livestock, and anyway David had killed the man.  To whom would restitution be made? 

There are some things that David or anyone else for that matter can do that cannot be undone.  No repair will return things to the way they should be.  Retribution is possible, but justice is not.  David will have to live with this for the rest of his life.  And that’s what David did. 

The tradition has been kind to David, perhaps kinder than he deserved.  Perhaps because David was willing to live with this burden, he was not known for his worst deeds.  I don’t really know.  What I do know is that because we are part of a tradition that can see unflinchingly the faults even of its heroes, our faults will not prevent us from carrying this tradition on.  As God looked on David’s actions with stern compassion, so may God forgive our failure, mend our faults and restore us to the fullness of God’s life.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Dangerous Memories (Joshua 24:1-15; Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost; October 12, 2014)

Dangerous Memories

Joshua 24:1-15
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 12, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

So far in our journey through the long arc of the Bible’s story line we have been with Noah through the destruction and recreation of the world, with Abraham and Sarah as they are called to be God’s people, with Joseph as he preserved Abraham’s legacy in the face of famine, with Moses as God brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt, and with the Israelites as they are set on the path that would lead them to life as God dreams of it for them. 

Along the way, there have been some changes.  The story is taking on the shape of what feels almost like ordinary history with the difference of course that this story has the God Yahweh as its leading character, while in our histories God is not reckoned as a character at all.  The people are changing as they begin to come to grips with what it means to be God’s covenant people, not always a pleasant process for them or for us.  Even God is changing, at least within the horizon of the story.  In the episode with Noah and the flood, God becomes more realistic about what can be expected from humankind.  We are flawed and, if the choice is between living with us or destroying us, God has decided to live with us.  God is still passionately committed to justice.  God will hear the cries of the afflicted, God will know their misery, God will intervene to save.  But in the midst of this commitment we could say that God is now a little sadder but wiser, a little less naive.

In our rush to get through the whole of the biblical story, we have skipped over quite a bit.  Several times in their journey across the desert, the Israelites disappoint God.  They don’t really understand what has happened to them.  They are afraid and anxious.  From time to time they want to call off the whole thing and go home, and by home they still mean Egypt.  They are stubborn.  They complain a lot.  They want gods they can see.  They want a religion that “works,” that gets them what they need and want without all the demands God has placed on them to seek justice and that sort of thing.  They spend a entire generation wandering in the unsettled country south and east of Palestine learning what it means to be God’s people.

Before they are quite ready, they find themselves camped on the east side of the Jordan River about to enter the land of promise by force.  The Book of Joshua is an account of their conquest and settling of the land of Canaan.  Our text this morning is set at Shechem in the middle of their new home.  Joshua reminds them of their history and of some of the ways that God has been with them.  For Joshua this history means that they have to make a choice about the gods they will serve.  They have served the “gods beyond the River,” that is, the Euphrates, and the gods of Egypt.  There are also gods in the land they have settled.  All these are available and tempting because they offer just what the people have wanted: a technology to control the invisible world, to guarantee harvests and prosperity, without all the fuss over justice.

But, as Joshua reminds them, Yahweh, the God who delivered them from Egypt and gave them their new land, has been faithful.  Yahweh requires their faithfulness in return.  God requires a decision of them.

This is a great story, one that is always timely.  Certainly, in the midst of the pressures of life, of working at our jobs, caring for children, running the family taxi service, attending countless athletic events and recitals, helping with homework, and even serving our community and especially those in it who are struggling to care for themselves, we can forget that the center of it all is supposed to be our God and our relation with God and each other.  So this story could be, and often is, a reminder to remember who and whose we are and to recommit ourselves to being that people.

But there is a problem in this story.  This text remembers that it is God who has given the Israelites this land, rescued them from slavery, led them through the wilderness, and settled them in the land of promise.  But this text also reminds them and us that the land they have been given was not empty.  There was someone already living in it.  There were towns and walled cities.  There were vineyards and olive orchards.  There were people, ordinary people going about their business, getting married, having children, earning their living, singing and dancing with their friends, visiting neighbors, doing and all of the ordinary things that ordinary people do.

According to the story in Joshua they were all killed.  All of them: the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.  They were all killed.  Their mere presence was counted as an abomination to God, and therefore, of course, to God’s people.  In the conquest and settlement, there was no mercy shown to the people who by the accident of history happened to be in the land promised to Abraham, to Sarah, and to their descendants. 

In this story is not only a tale of the children of a band of escaped slaves who, against all the odds, were set free from Egypt and, again, against all the odds, found themselves in a land that was not theirs, living in towns they had not built, eating and drinking from vineyards and olive orchards they had not planted.  This is the story of a great reversal.  Escaped slaves defeat an empire.  Weakness wins against strength.  In later parts of this story, the hungry will be fed, the lame walk, the deaf speak and hear, the blind see, the dead raised from the grave.  And the rich will be sent empty away.

This story is that story, the story of deliverance from slavery, of return after exile, and of resurrection from the dead.

But it is another story as well.  It is a story of holy war, of ethnic cleansing, of genocide.  It is a story that has provided the script for atrocities even in our own times.

It is no accident, for example, that when the United States of America pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide against this continent’s earliest inhabitants it did so by invoking this story.  It styled itself as the new Israel and Native Americans as Canaanites who were either to be penned up on reservations or slaughtered.  Justified as holy war by Joshua, the wars of conquest in their turn became a metaphor that was still being used in the late twentieth century.  Our troops in Vietnam referred to it as “Indian Country” and General Maxwell Taylor urged escalation in order to move the “Indians” away from the “fort” so that the “settlers” could “plant corn.”  Joshua has come home to modern Israel as a pretext for the slow-motion ethnic cleansing being carried out in Gaza and the West Bank.

Joshua is a dangerous book, not just because it contains something subversive that might threaten the powers that be.  It is dangerous because it has supplied the powers that be a structure of thought to carry out atrocities.  It is one thing for an oppressed people to use this story to imagine their triumph over or at least their survival in the face of the massive military and cultural force of an empire.  It is another thing entirely for a dominating nation or empire to use it to justify its treatment of its neighbors.

So it turns out that we do indeed need to make a decision about this story.  Yes, it certainly asks us to remember who and whose we are.  But beyond that, the story asks us how we will read it.  Is it a story of the triumph of the weak over the strong sponsored by a God who liberates?  Or is it a blueprint for oppression and genocide sponsored by a God who supports the strong and betrays the weak?  In the story Joshua won’t allow for any neutral ground.  Neither will the book that bears his name.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

After the Revolution (Exodus 19:3-7; 20:1-17; Pentecost 17a; October 5, 2014)

After the Revolution

Exodus 19:3-7; 20:1-17
Pentecost 17a
October 5, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Has there ever been a time in the world when all was going well?  This time certainly isn’t it.  We haven’t quite finished one war when we seem to be sliding back into one we had thought was over.  Unemployment is down a little, but families are making less than they did ten years ago.  We have a Congress that cannot agree on the time of day or the color of the sky and we are subjected to endless political advertisements. 

In the midst of these things our lives go on.  One family struggles to come to terms with the death of a wife, mother and grandmother.  Another celebrates the birth of a granddaughter.  One couple basks in a newlywed glow and another watches, almost as spectators, as their marriage lurches toward dissolution.  One set of parents celebrates a teenager's accomplishments and another is afraid that their child is doing drugs—again.

These are just a few of the events that vary in scope from the unbearably personal to the global.  And what do we do as the church?  We gather to worship.  To some folks this looks like a form of escapism—for an hour we can deny that any of these things are happening.  But Bishop William Willamon turns this around: “...the function of Sunday worship [is] to withdraw to the real world where we are given eyes to see and ears to hear the advent of a Kingdom that the world has taught us to regard as only fantasy.”[1]  As we sing our hymns, as we gather around the table for our holy meal, the scales fall from our eyes and the wax in our ears loosens and we see and hear just a little better.  We listen carefully to the Bible, for it is here that the proclamation is clearest and most explicit.

That is the word that God speaks to us, the word that we speak into our world: the world of politics and campaigning, of endless wars and financial struggle, of life and death.  We look for good news and what do we get instead?—rules. Sure, they're good rules, rules that have stood the test of time, but they're rules just the same.  It would be okay, maybe, if we were sure that we were keeping the rules, but we're not so sure.

We wonder, for example, whether we haven't really put some other gods before God or fashioned some sort of idols to worship as being more comfortable than the living God—the Market, maybe, or Security, or Comfort.  In a world that moves 24/7 we're pretty sure that Sabbath keeping has gotten short shrift.  The next few perhaps don't cause most of us so much anxiety, unless we remember that Jesus sharpened them considerably.  If calling someone a fool is tantamount to murder, if looking with active desire at someone whom we have no right to desire is tantamount to adultery, then very few of us can claim to be innocent.  If wanting what belongs to our neighbor is outlawed, then we who live in an economy that runs on envy are probably outlaws.

The Bible can tell it to us straight, but it isn't really very good news to discover just how far short of God's standards we fall.  We already knew that, anyway.  Why rub it in?

But maybe that isn't what's going on here.  There's more than a list of rules in this list of rules.  It's right in the beginning in what we could call the prologue, but we probably missed hearing it.  Protestants tend to be legalists, which is odd considering our legacy in the Reformation, but it's true nonetheless.  We mostly hear the rules and we either hope to measure up to God's love for us by keeping them or we use them to demonstrate how much better we're doing than whoever is “other” at the moment, you know, those people.

Yahweh is quite clear about the context for these rules.  Yahweh is clear about the relationship in which these rules are framed.  These are the words that the text tells us Moses said Yahweh had spoken: “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”  These are God's credentials, if you will.  This is what gives God the authority to make rules.  But it's even more than that.

God refers to Israel's past in Egypt.  It was a past of slavery.  The book of Exodus tells what that was like.  Israel labored to build the warehouse cities of Pithom and Rameses.  They made their own bricks from the mud along the banks of the Nile, mixing the mud with straw and letting the bricks dry in the Egyptian sun.  Pharaoh needed the warehouse cities because he was running an empire.  He sent out his armies to the south and to the northeast and they came back with plunder.  That's how empires work: they send their armies to the margins so that goods will flow to the center.  You would think that once Pharaoh had all that he could use that would be enough and the armies could come home to stay.  But that's not how empires work.  In an empire there is no such thing as “enough.”  There is only “more.”

When Pharaoh wants more, his slaves get production quotas so that supply of warehouses can keep up with the supply of plunder.  Pharaoh serves gods who know nothing about peace or rest or plenty—they are gods of war and work and worry.  When Pharaoh is anxious, all Egypt is anxious and his slaves most of all.  That was the context in which Israel cried out to Yahweh.  That was the misery that Yahweh observed.  This was the cry that Yahweh heard.  These were the sufferings that Yahweh knew.  And so Yahweh “came down,” Exodus tells us, to deliver Israel.  Yahweh sent Moses to set Israel free.  Moses confronted Pharaoh with the demands of a God Pharaoh did not know, did not serve, and did not understand.  Pharaoh was to suspend his production schedule and allow Israel time off to worship this strange God.

Pharaoh's response was to downsize.  There would be the same production schedule, the same quotas, but the Division of Straw Supply would be eliminated and Israel would have to find its own straw.  No rest, no relaxation of the production schedule, no room for worship of Moses' strange God.

So Yahweh set them free from Pharaoh and the brick quotas.  But understand something.  We hear the word freedom and we automatically think of the freedom of individuals to do whatever they want.  When someone tells us we're free, we think we're free to go where we want and do what we please.  We think it means that we're no longer accountable to anyone except ourselves.  We think it means that we have rights.  The vocabulary and the structure of this kind of thinking come from the Enlightenment that put the individual at the center of the universe beholden to no god.  In this thinking we can choose to follow the gods of Egypt, the God of Israel or no god at all.

But that's not the way it works, says Yahweh to Israel.  There are only two alternatives. The first is Pharaoh's Egypt.  If Israel chooses that alternative, it will serve the gods of Pharaoh's empire, the gods of war, work and worry.  It will live according to production schedules and quotas.

Or it can serve Yahweh, who is a God of peace, rest and plenty.  In place of the slavery that serves the ambitions of those at the top of the social order, there is genuine community.  In place of a violent struggle for survival—whether the violence is directed at others or at themselves—there is covenant.

In nearly the shortest form possible, we can see the shape of the covenant in these ten conditions for an alternative to slavery Pharaoh's Egypt and service to his gods of war, work and worry.  This is the alternative for which Yahweh brought Israel “out of the land of Egypt, out of house of slavery.”

Each of these ten conditions warrants an extended look, but there isn't time in one sermon.  So, instead of a detailed look at each, let's look at the shape of the whole.  The covenant has two dimensions, one vertical and one horizontal.  The first, vertical dimension is embodied in the first three commandments: Israel is to have no gods before Yahweh, Israel is to refrain from the practice of making its own gods, Israel is not to use Yahweh's name in vain.  Put differently, Israel has no authority to exchange Yahweh for some other gods.  As soon as it does, it ceases to be Israel.  Yahweh cannot be captured in an image or in anything that Israel fashions with its own hands.  Lastly, Yahweh will not be manipulated by Israel's use of the Name. The covenant is a relationship, not a technology for keeping Israel comfortable.

The last six conditions describe the horizontal dimension, the relations within the covenant community.  The members of the covenant community of Israel are to value life, and neither take it from another, nor treat with disrespect the people who gave life to them; they are to value the commitments that they have made and that others have made, and not regard them as something to be kept when convenient and ignored when not; they are to respect the need for people to have reliable access to their possessions, not to take them away; they are to speak the truth; they are to be content with what they have, not consumed with anxiety to have more.

The most marvelous condition, though, the one that makes this covenant so wonderful, so liberating, so different from the inhuman conditions of Pharaoh's Egypt, is the fourth condition, the one at the hinge, the commandment to rest.  Here's the commandment: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.”

The two dimensions are both present here: it really is the hinge.  Why does Israel rest?  It rests because it doesn't serve gods of production.  It serves a God who rests, a God who trusts the creation, a God who has need for recovery and restoration and relief from work.  My colleagues know that I am not impressed by bragging about how long it's been since they took a day off.  I have been known to say something like, “Even God rests one day out of seven; just who do you think you are?  If God trusts the universe to take care of itself for a day, why do you imagine that you can't?”  The fact is that clergy violation of the covenant is most egregious in precisely this place.  We do it, of course, because the church is not sure whether it serves the gods of production (which we typically call things like “innovation” or “program development” or “constant availability”).  I have heard churches express pride in how hard their pastor works and in how long it's been since she took a day off.  I have never heard a congregation that was proud that its pastor honored the Sabbath.

This condition has as a horizontal dimension, too.  Even Pharaoh's Egypt had some rest.  For Pharaoh, at least.  The production schedules could be met and Pharaoh could take a day off.  Sabbath for Pharaoh, but not for his slaves.  Not so in Israel.  In Israel, the production schedules are interrupted one day a week.  One day a week no one has a quota to fill, not parents, not children, not slaves, not livestock, not even the migrant worker. No one.  God rests.  Israel rests.  Everyone in Israel rests.  Period.  The production schedules, the quotas are set aside, not for sake of coming back to work able to work harder, not for the sake of overall efficiency.  But simply because Yahweh is a God of peace and rest and confidence, rather than war and work and worry.

That's Israel's choice. It will face this choice many times.  Just before entering the land of promise, after a generation of desert wandering, Moses will set this choice before Israel once again.  In place of Pharaoh, the alternative will be Canaanite, but the choice is still between the gods of war, work and worry on the one hand and Yahweh, the God of peace, rest and confidence on the other.  Judah will face this choice in exile: the gods of Babylon or Yahweh.  Jesus will lay the same choice before his hearers: the gods of Rome and its empire or the God who clothes the lilies in glories that Solomon never knew.

And we face the same choice today.  The crazy world out there offers us the gods of war and work and worry and tells us that serving them is the only way to stay alive, the only way to have a life.  But it's Pharaoh all over again.  Yahweh, the friend of Moses, the God of Israel, the Father of Jesus, offers us a differently alternative: a covenant community and a life of peace, rest and confidence.  This is the God who sets a table in our midst and promises that each one of us will get everything we need, that none of us will be burdened with more than we need, that no one will be turned away.  This, I submit, is a truer picture of the world that God is bringing into being than any picture you will see on the evening news or read in the articles of The Wall Street Journal.  The gods of war, work and worry tell us only lies.  The truth, reality, is what you see before you and it is the good news that is announced in your hearing this day.  This is the word of God for the people of God.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1]William H. Willimon, What's Right with the Church (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 121, cited in Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching, 2^nd edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 7, emphasis added.