Monday, July 27, 2015

David and Bathsheba -- Little Sins Into Big Ones (2 Samuel 11:1-15)

                                                           Proper 12, 2015 (Year B)
                              2 Samuel 11:1-15;Psalm 14; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21
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.           

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Jesus Teaching and Healing -- HOSA Recognition

                                                           Proper 11 2015 (Year B)
                        2 Samuel 7:1-14; Psalm 23;Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34; 53-56
Father Adam Trambley
July 19, 2015 St.John’s Sharon
HOSA Recognition

This morning’s gospel reading is particularly appropriate for our recognition today of student leaders from Laurel Technical Institute’s chapter of the Healthcare Occupations Students of America.  I didn’t choose the passage, but it came up for this week based on our church’s three-year cycle of scripture readings.  In it, we see Jesus teaching and healing, which speaks to the work of our HOSA students, as well as to what all of us are called to do in our own ways.

Saint Mark describes how Jesus was trying to get away on a retreat with his friends, but the crowds figured out where he was going and got there first.  Jesus was so charismatic, so amazing, so sought after, that he got into a boat on one side of a small lake, and people calculated where he was going and ran around the lake on foot to meet him on the other side.  Then, when Jesus arrived, he didn’t call for his security guards or get spirited away by helicopter.  Instead, he looked at the crowd that had just gone to great lengths to invade his space, and he had compassion on them.  He saw that the people surrounding him were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach.

When Jesus saw this great crowd, his first impulse was to see them as children of God who were lost, and he wanted to help them get back on the right track.  He didn’t see them as annoyances that interrupted his “me” time with the boys.  He didn’t see them as obstacles to whatever his special evening plans were.  He didn’t see them as potential twitter followers or as consumers he could sell “Jesus Christ Palestine Tour 33AD” t-shirts to in order to fund his next ministry initiative.  Instead, he saw this loud, sweaty crowd, gathered hundreds of years before the invention of deodorant and dandruff shampoo, as people to love and to serve, so he loved them and served them.  They were like sheep without a shepherd so he decided to shepherd them.

What does it mean to be like sheep without a shepherd?   Without a shepherd, sheep don’t know how to find the grass the feeds them – they can’t make a living.  Without a shepherd, sheep don’t know how to find water that refreshes them – they can’t find real meaning in life.  Without a shepherd, sheep can’t figure out how to stay together successfully, so each one goes their own way where the young and the very old can’t be protected and the predators pick them off one by one – they can’t form healthy flocks.  But Jesus wants his sheep to have all of those things, so he taught them.    He instructed them on how to live a good life, how to live a holistic life, and how to live as part of a family and a community that is in right relationship with God and with each other, and with themselves. He taught them where the good grass is, where the streams of refreshing water are, and how to take care of each other.  He taught them the spiritual truths that provide the practical instructions on how not to get lost on any level.  He gave them the instructions of a good shepherd. 

At LTI and other schools at various levels we learn some important lessons to help us keep from getting lost, like the practical skills necessary to succeed in a chosen profession and how to make decisions that will assist those we work with.  We should take time every now and then to be grateful for the teachers and others who have formed us in ways that help us get to the green grass, and if we are studying now, we should probably pay attention. 

But we also know that some lessons can only be learned outside of an academic environment.  We all need wise mentors and other experienced shepherds to help us learn all of the lessons that Jesus would teach us.  Sometimes, if we are going to find our answers, we may even need to throw our lives into the questions, running around the lake on foot to be ready for Jesus wherever we can meet him.  Finding answers from the people who know and follow Jesus and then listening to what they tell us can take real work on our part. But I’m sure there were people who didn’t run around the lake to find Jesus that day, and when they finally got home they still didn’t know where the good grass was, where the cool waters were, or how to live a life that was good for their families, their neighbors, and themselves.  Finding and being found by the Good Shepherd is worth the effort.

After we hear that Jesus taught the crowds, we read about Jesus miraculously healing people.  Many of you are or are going into health care professions, and you know the importance of healing.  Jesus is the great physician, the ultimate healer.  In fact, he is so divine that when people even touched the hem of his garment they were healed.  I’m not sure how you code garment-hem-touching on an insurance reimbursement form, but that wasn’t really Jesus’ primary concern.  While today, miraculous healing still take place through prayer and the direct ministry of Jesus Christ in our lives, more often God brings healing through the wisdom and skill of healthcare professionals.  The modern medical work of healing remains a practical outworking of Jesus’ saving love, and the study of any healthcare discipline is a noble calling.

Healing, however, is goes beyond just medical treatment of physical cures.  In Jesus’ day, the sick were often removed from society in any number of ways, whether because of inadequate symptom management, or fear of contagion, or just plain old fear of people who were different.  By healing people, Jesus recognized that they were human and had the same dignity and were worthy of the same love as everyone else.  When Jesus healed people, they got better physically, but he also restored them to their families and their communities.  Where Jesus went, people were able to live the lives God intended for them.


Those of you in HOSA have been engaged in this deeper level of healing your community, even as you have been studying to provide specific medical care.  This commitment is really why we are recognizing you today.  You have helped poor people receive their first family Christmas portrait.  You have inspired the creativity of children and cared for them in other ways at Waterfire and the New Light Christian Education Center.  You have helped raise money for the local library so that people from all walks of life can have access to books and the internet and other means of education and betterment.  You have provided safe places to sleep at night for children lacking basic necessities like beds.  And you have assisted numerous other people in numerous other ways, some of which we will hear about later and some of which will probably never be known except to the people whose lives you’ve touched.  You have engaged in the divine work of healing, and it matters.  In a few minutes we’ll have a few formal presentations, but for now let me just say that on behalf of the wider community, St. John’s is very grateful for your work, and we are privileged to have worked alongside you and are honored to have you with us this morning.