PROPER 12B 20089
David and Bathsheba
Text: 2 Samuel 11:1-15
David and Bathsheba. This is the story they did not tell you in third grade Sunday School. This morning I am going to share a few of the thoughts that I had after reading this sad tale.
My initial thought was that this story reinforces the truth and the power of the Bible. The Bible does not hide the weakness and sin of its heroes – from Abraham, Moses, David, Peter and Paul and others. It is through normal, weak human beings that the story of God unfolds. And it is this truth that gives you and I hope. One of the central reasons that I hope that you will read the story of David is so that we can get rid of our often simplistic thinking about religion and faith. As I say over and over again, faith is not just about being nice people. Often, if all we have is a faith that has not gone beyond a few Sunday School classes, we think that being spiritual is being a good person, and by that we mean that we don’t rob or steal too much, or commit too many real bad sins.. at least in our own eyes.
But when we see one of the heroes of the Bible commit adultery and then murder to cover up his sins, and he still is a man of faith, then we must come to a deeper understanding of what the Bible teaches about faith and the spiritual life. When Jesus says that prostitutes will enter the Kingdom of heaven before good, law abiding, religious Episcopalians, we have to develop a deeper understanding of what true Biblical faith is.
I like to say that David’s story is told in all its gory detail to give me hope. If a great sinner like David has hope, then a great sinner like me.. and like you, has hope. What we learn from David, and really throughout the rest of the Bible, is that real religion is messy, because you and I are messy. The truth is, we are all flawed creatures, and we are all capable of doing both wonderful and beautiful things as well as terrible and dark things. We can love one moment and then be selfish and spiteful and hateful the next. We are all a mix of good and evil. The Apostle Paul talks about this in Romans chapter 7. He likens our struggle to a war that goes on every day in us, a war between doing what is right and good or doing what our flesh and our sinful nature wants to do. I believe that this is a war that we will be in until the day we die.
The Christian hope is that day by
day, through the help of the Spirit of God,
our spiritual side, or spiritual nature,
wins most of the battles. But as David teaches us, there are those times when we lose, and we can fall. Maybe our fall is throwing
hurtful words to our spouse or children,
maybe it is selfish behavior, or maybe
it is lying or cheating, or maybe it is
something worse, but the story of David
teaches us that true faith is not just about always winning the battle, but it also deals with how we behave when we
lose the battle and fall. As we will see as we read more about David, one of the central characteristics of a
spiritual person is the capacity to admit their sin, and accept the consequences of their sin.
Along with this is the ability to believe in and accept God’s great love and
mercy. The Apostle Paul prayed this for the new Christians in
Ephesians 3:18-19 ( NRSV ) 18I pray that you may
have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and
length and height and depth, 19and to
know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled
with all the fullness of God.
I believe that by learning about David’s life with the light of the gospel of Christ shed upon it, we gain great insight into the incredible love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. The love of Jesus for sinners is way beyond what we often think it should be, especially if we think that we are religious people. The love of Jesus encompasses even adulterers and murders, as well as drug addicts and illegal immigrants and “those people” that we cannot stand.
So again, please make an effort to read David’s story, and learn from a great sinner who also loved God. It can give you hope.
The Bathsheba story begins with this famous verse:
2 Samuel 11:1 ( NRSV ) 1In the spring of the year,
the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all
David was doing pretty well as this point in his life. He was the King. He was older and maybe a bit more mellow. He had others who could do the fighting for him. He did not have to go out to fight every battle. Life was good. And it was at this point that he got into trouble. Some commentators point out that the lesson for us is that we have to watch out and maybe even be more diligent to our spiritual lives when life is good. And, I think there is real truth here. Prosperity makes us think that we are in control of life. When we have things.. like houses and cars and a little money and health insurance.. we feel in control….. we don’t really need God for much. We can take God for granted, ignore worship and prayer and God’s direction, and thus make our own decisions without taking God into consideration. Thus we think we can do just about anything and all will be well.
David was King, and he was rich, and he was powerful, so why can’t he do what he wants to do? We are rich, and we have lots of things, and we are pretty free, so why can’t we do whatever we want to do, without worrying about God? One of the key lessons, of course, in the David story is that there are consequences to our actions. As you read the rest of the story of David from this point on you will see how drastically his life was affected. It is of course always dangerous to think that suffering or trials are a direct result of our actions, but we need to face the fact that often they are a result of our actions. A person might get lung cancer who never smoked a cigarette in their life.. and yet, it is true that if we smoke 3 packs of cigarettes a day we are more likely to get lung cancer. We can have all sorts of suffering and trials in life which are not our fault in any way, and yet, through our decisions and actions, we can also produce our own suffering and pain.
David’s decisions in this story obviously caused him much suffering and pain. Our lesson here is that what we do matters. And if we are doing well, and are comfortable in life, this does not mean that we should take our spiritual life less seriously. Maybe we should be more attentive.
One of the most powerful elements in this story is the contrast between the noble actions of Uriah, and the dark and sinful behavior of David. As is often the case, as we see on TV night after night , one sin leads to another. First David tries to cover his sin by simply having Uriah sleep with Bathsheba. But Uriah won’t go to his house and instead sleeps with the servants. His noble reasons for not going home makes the sin of David more evil and depraved. This is great literature. Listen to this again.
2 Samuel 11:10-11 ( NRSV ) 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
This is a great drama. The difference at this point between David and Uriah could not be greater.
So David tries again, getting Uriah drunk, and when that doesn’t work, he involves Joab in this sinful web and develops the plan to have Uriah killed, hoping that this will solve his problem.
The obvious lesson for us is that unless we stop and confess and face one sin, it often leads to another and then another. So we steal something and then we have to lie to cover it up. We have an affair, like David, and we have lie to hide it from our spouse. We lie about one thing, and we have to lie again and again. The only way out of this mess is to stop and face our sin and accept the consequences.
David, of course, did not do this at this point. Though we did not read the rest of the story, Joab does as David requested. He puts Uriah in the front of a battle where he will face the fiercest warriors, and Uriah is killed, most likely by an arrow from an archer shooting from the wall of the besieged city. Joab sends a messenger back to David and tells him that Uriah was killed. After a time of mourning, David takes Bathsheba as his wife. And this sad story ends with the story teller writing this:
But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord. 2 Samuel 11:27
What a classic example of understatement. Here David commits adultery and murder, involves Joab in his sin, and the writer says simply, this displeased the Lord!
Have you ever in your life really wanted to please someone.. it might have been your parent or a teacher or a coach or a spouse. And if you failed in some way, and you knew that they were not happy, you felt ashamed. I remember one time disobeying my Dad, and later finding out that he was really hurt and mad, but he never confronted me over it, and feeling really, really bad, because I knew that I had really gone too far. Sometimes displeasing someone we care about is punishment enough.
I think that this simple statement is in this story because David, in his heart, wanted to please the Lord. Deep down, in his soul, in the center of his being, his desire was to do what was right. This behavior was not consistent with the core of his being. This is why it becomes so painful to him.
In this simple line, we see that religion is a relationship with God. The closest analogy that we have is that of a loving parent to a child. We all can understand this relationship to different degrees. David, while not being a perfect child, nevertheless cared and loved his parent. His heart was in the relationship. We who are parents know that it is not perfection that we desire from our children, rather a loving and caring response to our love.
This is the truth that we learn from the life of David, and it is a very vital and important one for us to understand.
Next week we will see that David was not able to hide his behavior, and that his sin found him out. So don’t miss it!