II Samuel 11:1-15
Rev. James R. Gorman
July 30, 2000
The great Chicago novelist Nelson Algren once remarked about Chicago, that "you cannot really love this city unless you love its alleys."
Perhaps that is true of all real love. In order to love something we need to know its hills and gullies, its curves and turns. In order to love a city we need to explore the nether lands, down by the wharf, down near the dives and the joints. You cannot love anything or anyone, really, unless you have some understanding of every aspect. To love only the best parts is to romanticize, and romantic love does not last over the long haul.
What is true about love is also true about faith. We cannot have faith until we know exactly what it is that we are having faith in. We cannot have a romanticized faith in which all is sweetness and light. For such springtime and fair-weather faith will not last through the seasons of autumn and the various winters of our discontents. Such a naive faith rarely stands the test of time.
Luckily our faith story, the story we love to tell, does not let us get away with naivete. This is a completely and undeniably historical faith in which every part of the story is told, not just the "nice" parts. The bible tells with a sometimes embarrassing honesty, the truth,the whole truth,"You really cannot love the city until you have loved its alleys." You really cannot love King David, the second and greatest king of Israel, in any genuine sense until you have heard the story about Bathsheba. The story is honestly told to the point of embarrassment these several thousand years later. This story is "more than we want to know about David and more than we can bear to understand about ourselves. We might [even] wish the story about David could be 'untold'."(1) (If you know what I mean).And nothing but the truth.
Such is the nature of a true faith which is lived out in lives of spiritual honesty. It is a faith that embraces the fullness of life, which means to include the broad highways as well as the dingy alleyways of life. This story, like few others in the Bible, reaches into the depths of our hearts and shines a revelatory light on things we'd rather not have seen much less talked about. It is an impolite story, and we are nothing if not polite.
David, King of Israel, was a good king. He rose from humble beginnings as a shepherd boy and musician to the court of King Saul to become the first king to unite all the tribes of Israel into one coherent whole. He was a poet who was the author of most of the psalms. A poet and a pious man who loved his God. He was a shepherd who thought of himself as a sheep in the fold of his God.
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . ."
David was also a man of power, and Lord Acton was absolutely right when he said that absolute power corrupts absolutely. David was a man first of all and he was susceptible to all the forces of corruption that we are heir to, with the addition of a level of money and power for his time that most of us can only imagine.
David took a mistress--someone else's wife--got her pregnant and then had her husband killed in order to cover up the sin of royalty. David breaks, in this sordid soap opera of a story, at least four of the ten commandments, perhaps five. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, Thou shalt not lie, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill. Admittedly, this is not the David I learned about as a boy, but this is a far more human and accessible David than the one we learn about in Sunday School.
These stories about David have also landed on inopportune Sundays. When one of our most treasured couples in the church had their 50th wedding anniversary some years ago, the lesson for the morning was about David's affair with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah. Someone came up to me afterwards and wondered why I didn't say something good or noble about the institution of marriage on such an auspicious day in the life of our congregation; I just explained that sometimes the preacher in me overtakes the pastor and leads me down insensitive paths.
But the point is that these stories are not sensitive stories. They are deeply human stories that tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what it means to be a biblical hero. A true hero, that is, not some romantic tale about Horatio Alger, Superman or Robin Hood.
That David could still be thought of as heroic after such stories as these is a mark of the true value of Holy Scripture. It is an honest book about real people. David's struggle is all of our struggles. For him the struggle has to do with a balance between power and humility; between the wealth and status of kingship and the poverty of his origins in the shepherding village of Bethlehem. There is a balance that every political leader must strike between commanding those under you and respecting those under you.
There were times when David struck that balance very well. There were times when he failed miserably. But when he failed, it was clear that he repented of his failure and made himself ready to bear heroically the consequences of his manifold sins--made all the more manifold because of his high office. The prophet Nathan came to him to hold him accountable for what he had done to Uriah and Uriah's wife Bathsheba. Where David the great king could have continued the sordid tale by having Nathan killed or jailed, he did not. He repented and out of his repentance came an extraordinary Psalm, the 51st. "Create in me a clean heart, O God and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence, O Lord. And renew a right spirit within me."
That, finally, is the stuff of heroism. Not sinlessness, nor moral perfection, but the willingness to repent and forgive. This is the very center of the Gospel and the center of our lives as Christians. I found it shocking the first time I heard it, that the only person in the whole of Scripture who ever was given an assurance of a place in heaven was the thief hanging next to Jesus on the cross.
David knew in his own heart the meaning of repentance and forgiveness and believed that repentance and forgiveness were at the very heart of what it means to be faithful to a loving and forgiving God. It would be the same message that John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth would preach and teach. Don't bother trying to achieve a state of sinlessness. Only God's Son can achieve that. Be willing only to seek repentance and forgive those who trespass against you.
David is heroic in the eyes of Israel because he was a man of deep compassion for all sorts and conditions of humanity, even rebellious sons, and because he was faithful to a transcendent and not altogether predictable God, and because he was able to admit his mistakes honestly, repent and start over. I believe that these three qualities feed on one another. Faithfulness to God leads one to compassion for all God has made and a right understanding of your place in God's world. David would be the last great king to embody such a faith.
The Old Testament story grows more sordid as kings lose their ability to admit that they belong to the same human race that the rest of us belong to. And thus the necessity for the story of Jesus Christ who reveals the very heart of God who, while we were yet sinners, died for us that we might reckon with our own shortcomings and turn from our way and live.
New beginnings are always possible. If they were not, then this Gospel would be a lie and life would be an endless cycle of unworthiness and guilt. Thank God that the Gospel is true and life is therefore abundant and good.
1. Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (John Knox Press, Louisville, 1990) p. 272.