July 29, 2012 Proper 12
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
2 Samuel 11:1-15
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. 2It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. 3David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, "This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." 4So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. 5The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, "I am pregnant."
6So David sent word to Joab, "Send me Uriah the Hittite." And Joab sent Uriah to David. 7When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab and the people fared, and how the war was going. 8Then David said to Uriah, "Go down to your house, and wash your feet." Uriah went out of the king's house, and there followed him a present from the king. 9But Uriah slept at the entrance of the king's house with all the servants of his lord, and did not go down to his house. 10When they told David, "Uriah did not go down to his house," David said to Uriah, "You have just come from a journey. Why did you not go down to your house?" 11Uriah said to David, "The ark and Israel and Judah remain in booths; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do such a thing." 12Then David said to Uriah, "Remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back." So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day. On the next day, 13David invited him to eat and drink in his presence and made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.
14In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. 15In the letter he wrote, "Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die."
The last time I was in New Orleans, I was leading what, I believe, was my seventh or eighth recovery team trip working on homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina. As we rounded the corner into a what had been a middle class neighborhood before flood waters rose to about the level of the ceiling on the first floor of those houses, we were surprised to find the road blocked off by huge TV trucks and police cars.
By chance, the house we had been asked to work on was just a few doors down from the destroyed home that had been selected as the place where John Edwards would announce his candidacy for the office of the President of the United States. The work of gutting a flooded home is about the nastiest work I've ever done and it doesn't leave you looking like you should work your way into a crowd to hear a political speech.
But from a safe distance, from time to time, we took breaks to go listen to the candidate speak. Two thirty-something women on my team, both wives with young children at home, stood behind and one said, "I wonder if I could throw my panties at him from here?" And the other replied, "Let's try." Thankfully, they were kidding.
I had been attracted to Edwards because he was the only presidential candidate in history who had plainly announced that he wanted to establish a single payer health care plan in America, completely shutting out the insurance companies which are, in my opinion, the real death panels in America.... But clearly these two women saw something else in Edwards..... a handsome, articulate, millionaire who might become the president of the United States.
While these women from my former church were just inappropriately fanaticizing, evidently, there was at least one campaign staffer with similar motivations.
A lot of time has passed since then. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drug on. The world ecology is heating up and the world markets have cooled down. Banking fraud, abuses of power on Wall Street and graft in military contractors in the Middle East have made the news but have never resulted in an indictment or a trial. Billions of dollars have been lost, tens of thousands of people have died unnecessarily, and even more families have been evicted from their homes but no one is held responsible.
The government did, however, find the funds and the legal force of will to put John Edwards on trial for having an affair. That wasn't the formal charge but that's basically what it was about..... just as President Clinton was not really impeached for perjury, it was really because he had been caught lying to cover up an affair.
Our current president is using predator drone aircraft to target and kill people on his list of dangerous people, sometimes killing American citizens who have not been found guilty of a crime or even had the formality of being charged with a crime and tried in absentia. And no one in the network news agencies is even raising an objection. You can send a robot to kill an unindicted citizen from the air on the other side of the world but you better not get caught in an extra-marital dalliance or there will be serious consequences.
All of these things are elements in the story of King David and the wife of Uriah, Bathsheba. There are a lot of things you could say about this warrior king that would seem to be more grievous than that he had an affair, assuming that Bathsheba was a willing partner in the relationship..... not a detail ancient writers tended to include in their stories.
What was most crucially missing in the stories of John Edwards, Bill Clinton and the biblical account of David, was a willingness to confess that they had done something wrong..... and not something wrong in business or on the battlefield but in the bedroom..... which, though arguably not as serious as killing tens of thousands of people or evicting hundreds of thousands of families from their homes.... But it is unavoidably more personal, closer to your ego, your sense of yourself, your need to be looked up to. Edwards evidently spent a lot of money trying to hide his dalliance even though it was going to end up with a name and a birth certificate. Clinton tied up congress and way too much media time and King David not only had an innocent man killed but he involved members of his family and the military in the plot to kill an innocent man for no reason but to cover up his affair.
Let me ask you to look at this metaphorically: Through the years it has been my good fortune to know several physicians of various sorts in the congregations I have served. Medical malpractice is the bogyman that haunts every physician I have ever known even though no living physician has ever been found guilty of medical malpractice in Greene Co.
No matter how exhausted, no matter how over worked, no matter how complicated the disease or the procedure.... No physician is ever in a position to say, simply, "I made a mistake." Insurance companies, lawyers, hospital administrators and peers, all push every doctor to defend everything that they have ever done as having been the right thing to do, the only thing to be done under the circumstances.
When I was working on my doctorate, I was working as a chaplain in the VA hospital next door to Vanderbilt and because I lived so far away, when it was my turn to take call at night, I had to sleep in the residents' ward to be available for emergencies. Consequently, I got up and ate with them in the doctor's dining hall.
One morning, one surgeon asked his friend across the table from us, "Do you remember that guy who died on the table this morning?" And the other doctor assured him that he remembered very well. The first doctor said, "Just before he went into arrest, I felt my scalpel punch through something. Do you think I should tell the chief of surgery?" His friend dropped his fork and looked at him as if he had lost his mind and replied, "Not only should you not tell him, you shouldn't be telling me!"
I have always found that to be the most ridiculous set of rules I have ever seen. I'm a fairly clever guy... I have a lot more education than is required for my profession.... I have 32 years of experience.... And I make mistakes every single day. I forget things. I say the wrong thing. I lose my temper. I fail to edit my own writing properly. I sometimes make judgments with insufficient evidence....
Now, I'm not delivering babies or doing brain surgery back here, and if I were, I'm certain that I would be more careful.... But if we were to get the spouses of any one of our physicians in our church alone and ask them, "Is the good doctor perfect or does he or she sometimes make mistakes....?" Dr. Gill is single and so am I and sometimes it is best just not to have a potential critic too close to you but you get my meaning don't you?
It is insane to expect anyone in any profession, no matter how experienced, educated, talented and well intended to never make a mistake. It is ridiculous to assume that anyone makes it through life without a lapse in moral judgment but we set up our moral standards in a way that we don't seem to honor truthful confession.
The puritanical Christian values of at least America's media suggest when you are caught in a moral mistake, the only thing you can do is lie. I'm suggesting that there is something very unhealthy on both sides of that exchange.
The famous author of The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck, also wrote a rather less popular book about human evil entitled "The People of the Lie." The "lie" referenced in the title is probably not what you would expect. The lie that is the root of evil in the human character, Peck argues, is the insistence that we are innocent, that we have not done anything wrong.
I have argued with friends in the media that when a reporter asks the president of the United States about something as personal as their sex life that they deserve whatever lie the POTUS comes up with at that moment. There are things that should be off limits to the prying eyes of the public and if some reporter wants personal dirt on a public figure then I don't think anyone owes them a response at all.
But from David through a long line of public figures, male and female, political and religious, we find that even murder is not untenable when it comes to hiding our faults. That is how deeply rooted the lie of innocence is in our psyche. Maybe because we don't believe that forgiveness is real.... Maybe we're convinced that innocence is the only way to survive, even if it doesn't exist.
What Peck argues, and I find that it is a crucial insight into the value of having a spiritual life, is that we have to give up the pretense of innocence.
Doing that means that we have to be willing to accept forgiveness and, in turn, to be decisively forgiving. It is no surprise then, that the Lord's Prayer, which has often been described as being the perfect prayer, includes in its brief paragraph the sentence, "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us." Forgiving and being forgiven go hand in hand and it doesn't much work when you try to have one without the other.
I know that a lot of our progressive friends are surprised to see that among the few things that we have not given up from our previous traditional Christian worship, is the inclusion of a prayer of confession. I sometimes wonder myself if it is too negative, to closely wedded to the neurotic guilt of the religion from which we have emerged but every time I think about changing the description and the character of that part of our service, I am reminded of the need we have as a community and as individuals, to practice our ability to just tell the truth, to confess our sins, to own our mistakes, and to ask for forgiveness, reconciliation, and the renewal of a fresh start from our family and our faith community.
When we insist on being seen as innocent, we never let go of the wrong that hurts us. When we refuse to forgive, the burden of resentment grows so large that it will crush us.
There is an old Buddhist parable about two monks who were traveling together on a long journey. They came to a river crossing where the water had risen a couple of feet above the bridge and there was a beautiful woman wearing a traditional silk gown and stockings who stood looking at the water, perplexed as to how she could get across without ruining her expensive clothing.
The rule of in the monastery of these monks was that they were not to ever speak to, let alone touch a woman. But in those circumstances, the older monk invited the woman to sit on his shoulders and he carried her across the bridge and set her down on the other side.
The two brothers continued walking in silence for another two days, neither saying a word. As they finally approached the monastery, the younger monk asked his mentor how he was going to account for his contact with the woman. The elder monk looked as his brother and said, "Are you still carrying her on your back? I set her down two days ago."
If you are carrying resentments from some wrong that was done to you long ago, I would like to suggest to you that this would be an excellent time for you to set that burden down. If you are hiding behind a false mask of perfection or innocence, let me assure you, we already know that you're not all that and a bag of chips and we have already decided that we both forgive you and love you and we're not especially interested in hearing all of the details...... we set the job of judging you down a long time ago.
You are free. Be at peace with God and with one another.
