Proper
12, 2015 (Year B)
Father Adam Trambley
July 26, 2015 St.John’s Sharon
The first reading today details King David’s adulterous
summoning of Bathsheba and the subsequent killing of her husband. In the coming weeks we’ll hear some of the
tragic and disastrous results of these decisions that will echo onward for
generations. This morning’s passage shows
us the smaller bad decisions that snowballed into these more monumental and
more monstrous sins.
It begins: “In the spring of the year, the time when kings
go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel…But David
remained in Jerusalem.” Here’s David’s
first mistake – he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. When the Israelites demanded a king, one of
the basic elements of the job description was someone to “go out before us and
fight our battles” (1 Sam 8:20b). David
was on his couch all afternoon, instead of going out into battle against the
Ammonites. I’m sure he had a good
excuse, but it wasn’t good enough. Not
only was he not at the battle where he was supposed to be, he was also back in
Jerusalem, by himself, with all the soldiers wives, where he was not supposed
to be.
Then David goes up on the roof. Lots of things happened on the rooftops of
ancient Israel because air conditioned hadn’t been invented yet, and because
people often had to keep their animals inside on the first floor. If you wanted to feel the breeze, go on the
roof. Being King, David’s roof was
probably higher than the surrounding houses, so he could see over curtains or
other things that might have been set up.
Scripture tells us, “he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was
very beautiful.” Here’s David’s second
mistake. He does not practice what was
called in the old days “custody of the eyes”.
Notice how scripture reads.
First, he saw a woman bathing.
Then it says the woman was very beautiful. David could have seen someone bathing,
decided to respect her privacy, do the mature things, and go to the other side
of the roof to think about whatever matters of state he should have been
dealing with. He doesn’t. He sees a woman bathing and decides to pay
attention – a basic human instinct, but not necessarily a good one. Remember when Jesus talks about looking at
someone with lust as committing adultery in your heart? Here’s where David’s heart commits adultery,
soon to be followed by the rest of him. He could have seen a woman bathing and
thought, “How nice that my subjects appreciate good hygiene,” and moved on. Instead he thought, “Oo la la, get me the
royal binoculars!” This point is
important for us because we have entire sections of the entertainment and
advertising industry today that are devoted to convincing us to look lustfully
at whatever they are showing. We’re
losing a sense of why we should not be taking in as much eye candy as possible,
but David here provides a good reminder.
Not only should people be able to bathe without being ogled, what begins
with adultery in the heart can move into other areas of our lives all too
easily.
Then, the Bible says, “David sent someone to inquire about
the woman.” He googled her. Who is she? Is she married? Does she have a
thing for royal war heroes? Again, none
of this is his business, or at the very least, once he hears that she is the
wife of Uriah the Hittite, he should let the matter lie lest he has to lie
about the matter.
So David sends messengers to get her. Obviously she has no say in this. The King sends for you while your husband the
soldier who works for the King is out of town.
David’s little sins have now cascaded into huge ones.
I can’t help but wonder here if Uriah being a Hittite
instead of an Israelite mattered. Did
being a from a different group of people, even though he was a very loyal and
good soldier, make David take Uriah’s marriage and his life less
seriously? Certainly everything David
does could have been done to an Israelite. Still, we should be aware of the
subtle ways that racism can placate our consciences when we are considering
doing bad things. Anything in our head
or hearts that lets us see someone else as less than a full human being or a
full child of God is a lie straight from hell that makes it easier for us to
sin against them. Would David have done
the same to Judah the Israelite’s wife?
We don’t know, but we need to be extra vigilant in situations where racism
could play a role in our own activities.
When Bathsheba finds out that she is pregnant, David’s tryst
is in danger of becoming public. He calls Uriah home to provide cover. Whether Uriah is such a straight arrow of
military devotion that he refuses to go see his wife, or if he is shrewd enough
to know exactly what is going on and so he refuses to go see his wife, we don’t
really know. David has to up the ante,
trying to get Uriah drunk so that he can manipulate him more easily. While seemingly minor compared to adultery
and murder, both getting someone drunk and trying to manipulate them fall into
the sin category, and David keeps piling on.
When Uriah still refused to go home for the night, David sends a letter
to Joab telling him to have Uriah killed in battle. If anyone needs me to preach more on that
point, I can, but I assume you all know how wrong this order is on so many
levels.
Now part of why I want to talk about this huge tragedy
brought on by a person who is dearly loved by God is because the Body of Christ
in this area has had our own huge tragedy this weekend. For those of you who don’t know, Pastor Larry
Haynes of Grace Chapel committed suicide on Thursday evening. Pastor Larry has touched numerous lives in a
number of area churches, and was instrumental in the Community Foundation and
in helping numerous community projects ranging from Waterfire to West Hill
Ministries. He was a beloved child of
God, a leader in the local Christian and wider community, and, like David and
like us all, he was a man with his own demons to face. I urge you to pray for him, his family, Grace
Chapel, and our wider community at this time.
I don’t know what series of events led up to his tragic
decision, but I would guess that, like we have seen with David, smaller bad
decisions got made that led to worse ones.
Big sins start in small ones, in part because the devil could never
successfully tempt men and women of God with big sins right off the bat. But we can get lazy or covetous or envious or
angry or any number of other things, and pretty soon we believe one half-truth
that leads to a lie which leads to a huge self-deception and before we know it
we are falling down a pit. King David’s
pit led him to adultery and murder. Pastor
Larry’s pit led to his suicide. Many of
us at various times have been in our own pits leading to our own particular
tragedies. I want to say two things
about this cascading process of snowballing suffering.
First, we need to be obedient to God and pay attention in what
may seem like small stuff. Having a
drink or two if we know we are driving home matters. So does looking at a text while behind the
wheel. So does just having an on-line
chat with someone that you don’t want your spouse to find out about. So does the small dishonesty about a work
issue, or the cheating on the test that everyone else is cheating on, or the
white lie that keeps us looking good in some social group. So does calling in sick when we’re not sick,
or taking something because no one will notice, or being selfish when we could
just as easily be generous. Sometimes
nothing bad will seem to happen from a small sin or minor omission. Then again, sometimes we get a cut on our arm
and it just heals. But sometimes we get
a cut and it gets pretty badly infected, especially if we don’t bandage and put
disinfectant on the wound. And if we get
enough cuts and ignore them, we shouldn’t be surprised when our arms turn
green. If we ignore our little sins without
the bandage of repentance and the antibiotic of forgiveness, we shouldn’t be
surprised if things get worse for us.
Forgiveness and repentance leads me to the second point I
want to make, which is that God is always with us, and is always able to come
and reach us no matter where we are, and he is willing and able to pull us out
of any pit that we have dug for ourselves.
Whether we have made a minor mistake with a little sin or hurt a lot of
people with a big one, we can always repent and turn back to God, and he will
help us out. We may have even made a
huge wreck of things with seriously unpleasant consequences, but if we ask him,
God will be with us and sustain us through even the worst situtations that we
may need to face.
If we go through the King David passage again, we can see
all sorts of places where David could have turned back to God and where God
could have helped him if he had only stopped to listen. Once he stayed home, David could have worked
on battle plans to send to Joab. Once he
saw Bathsheba from his roof, he could have gone inside and invited one of the
wives he already had to a nice romantic dinner.
Even after the adultery, he could have been honest with Uriah when he
called him back from the front lines.
Certainly that would have been a very tight spot for David. But maybe Uriah and he could have come to
some sort of agreement on how to go forward that didn’t result in murder. Even if Uriah refused, and David faced
horrible consequences like losing his crown or being stoned as an adulterer, he
probably would have preferred those outcomes to the tragedies and violence that
played out in his own family due to his next decisions. Certainly, nothing would have been easy for
David, but he could have reached out to God and received the help needed to
start over from where he was.
Eventually, he will reach out to God, but by then the situation will
have gotten much worse for Uriah, for David, for David’s family and for David’s
people.
I cannot imagine how dark things looked for Pastor Larry,
who had helped bring so many people to a deeper relationship with God and a
trust in God’s grace. I do know, though,
that the enemy works really hard at attacking people who are doing God’s work
effectively, and can make things seem much worse for them than they really are. I wish that Pastor Larry had been able to
find a way out of whatever pit he was in before it ended as it did. But I also know that even death does not take
us out of the reach of the love of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ, and that
even now God’s love can be surrounding Pastor Larry and bringing him healing
and salvation. And I know that God can
always reach us, no matter how bad things seem, no matter what we have done, no
matter how much suffering we have caused.
Every person looking at repentance in any of its forms, and repentance
includes work like getting sober, or making restitution, or being honest with
people we have hurt, every person looking at repentance can count on God’s help
to get through whatever struggles will come next. No matter how scary our future might be, we
can always ask and receive God’s help to get through it if we want to follow
his lead. Sometimes we have great
difficulty recognizing God’s hand reaching out to us, and God’s path may not be
the easy one, but God’s path will always be better for us than wherever we have
strayed.
To summarize: because the spiral downward can be so slippery
and so tragic, we need to pay attention even to the little sins where we
deceive ourselves and turn aside from obediently following God. But equally important is the sure and certain
hope that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord, and no matter what we have done, God is always waiting for us to call to
him for help so he can lead us safely home.
If we decide to follow him, he will get us home, however difficult the
path before us.
