Sermon Archive

Instead of reading from both the Old and the New Testaments, I have chosen to extend the Old Testament reading beyond what the lectionary specifies. For the last several weeks the recommended Old Testament readings have been about King David, one of the towering figures in the history of Israel. Last week's reading was about David's attraction to Bathsheba, his seduction of her, and his arrangement to have her husband killed in battle. Charles Amstein preached on that text last Sunday.

This morning's lectionary text contains the powerful story of the prophet Nathan's confrontation with David. David recognizes his guilt and confesses it. The lectionary text ends there. But the story goes on as we heard. According to the law of that time, David should die as an adulterer and a murderer. The prophet declares that David's life will be spared, but the child he has fathered with Bathsheba will die as the result of David's sin.

The language of the story is blunt and reflects what people of faith believed at that time. The text says, "The Lord struck the child that Uriah's wife bore to David, and it became very ill. David therefore pleaded with God for the child; David fasted, and went in and lay all night on the ground." David's friends encouraged him to eat some food to maintain his strength, but he would not. Then comes the simple sentence that is so painful to hear. "On the seventh day the child died."

We hear this story after the news reports of a crash last Sunday on the Taconic Parkway that took the lives of four children and four adults. We hear this story three days after the publication of an Op Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about a difficult birth in Pakistan after which the mother lived but the baby died. Paying for a taxi to take the mother to a hospital was an issue for the family with meager funds and the cultural view that a woman's life was less valuable than a man's life.

We hear the Biblical story at the end of a week during which a church member emailed me, asking that we pray for a family member who had been seriously injured in a mountain bike accident in Colorado. A couple of days later we learned that the young man died from his injuries. He leaves behind a wife and a twelve-year-old son as well as parents and siblings. Death usually brings sadness, and the sadness deepens when death takes the life of a child or young person.

Hearing the story of David and Bathsheba and the child their liaison produced, we need to remember that the events of the narrative occurred about three thousand years ago, and the writing of those events is at least twenty-five hundred years old. The writing reflects the faith and understanding of ancient Israel, and that faith and understanding have been refined over the centuries. One of the reasons I decided to read what the lectionary omitted is that the story illustrates the absurdity of regarding the Bible as a seamless document that can be read and understood easily. Uninformed faith can be a barrier to authentic faith. Nicholas Kristof began his column this past Thursday on the infant death in Pakistan with these words about the mother's family: "Afterwards they comforted each other with the blasphemy: 'It was God's will.'" The writer of II Samuel might have agreed. I do not.

As I have said many times from this pulpit, the Bible is a witness to people's experience of God and their understanding of God expressed in the thought patterns of their time and place. When reading the Bible we always need to sort out what is eternal and what is culturally conditioned. As you know, what is eternal for me is the truth that God is love and the derivative truth that God desires fullness of life for all people. I have elaborated on that truth many times and will not do so this morning. What I will say is that the statement God is love prevents me from believing God "struck the child" conceived by David and Bathsheba as an expression of God's mercy toward David as this morning's text declares.

I do not believe God wills the death of any child. I don't say that easily or casually. I have a high regard for Scripture, as we sometimes call the Bible. But I believe it needs to be read with intelligence and in the context of what Jesus tells us about God. It also needs to be read with a large dose of humility, with an admission that there are still a lot of things about faith and about life we don't understand in spite of all our scientific advances and intellectual achievements. I find the arrogance of religious fundamentalist to be repulsive, and I find equally repulsive the arrogance of aggressive atheists who come across as narrow-minded as their religious opposites.

There are some important truths in this morning's reading that speak to us across the centuries. Certainly the story reminds us that no-one, however highly placed, is above the moral law of the universe. Most if not all societies have agreed that murder is contrary to moral law and that there are significant boundaries around sexual behavior. The violation of accepted moral laws deserves appropriate punishment. In other words, behavior has consequences. We are not free to do whatever we want to do, especially when what we want to do inflicts pain or injury on other people. David, the epitome of goodness and greatness in the history of Israel, was a human being, and he succumbed to the temptation to act in response to a sexual urge without thinking about the consequences of his actions. Like every other human being who ever lived, David made a mistake. In the language of the Bible he sinned, and he sinned grievously.

One of the marks of David's greatness is his readiness to admit his guilt when he was confronted by the spokesperson for God, the prophet Nathan. When faced with the full reality of what he had done, David said, "I have sinned against the Lord"—which is another way of acknowledging he had broken the moral law of the universe. The Biblical record portrays David as a man of deep spiritual sensitivity. He is able to confess his guilt and trust God's forgiveness.

When Bathsheba's baby is born and goes into medical crisis, David falls on his face and pleads with God for the child's life. Some of us know what that is like. For David it meant praying and fasting and lying on the floor. But his prayers were not answered in the way he had hoped. The child died.

What follows is amazing. The record says, "David rose from the ground, washed, anointed himself, and changed his clothes. He went into the house of the Lord, and worshiped; he then went to his own house, and when he asked, they set food before him and he ate."

One of the things sorrowing people experience is well-meaning people telling them how to grieve. I know people who were told after the death of a spouse, partner, friend, child, or dearly loved pet that after a year they should be ready to move on with their life and let go of the past. There is no standard timetable for dealing with loss. People need to grieve at their own pace. For some people a year is not enough, and some people are ready to move on in less time than a year. The important part in the grief process is the moving on.

Some people have spoken about feeling their grief lifted by God or a spiritual power. Other people have had to will themselves to take up the tasks and pleasures of daily living, often with the gentle encouragement of friends or family. However it happens, the actions taken by David chart a course. He showered and shaved, went to his place of worship, allowed people to be there for him, and re-joined the community of the living.

Some time ago on a Labor Day weekend, two young men, both eighteen years of age, drowned in Little Egg Harbor near the New Jersey coast. One of them was a member of the church I was serving at the time, and the other was his best friend. I had the funeral services for both of them. I tried to stay in touch with both families as the weeks and months went by. One of the two families got professional help with the grieving process and stayed open to contact with me and other people. They were able to honor the son they loved and lost by moving on with their own lives, open to the healing power of faith and hope.

The other family, whose son had been their only child, shut themselves off from their extended family and friends. They basically withdrew from life. Within five years I had the funerals of both parents in the second family who died while only in their fifties. They didn't take their own lives; they just didn't move on and find a way to live in spite of their loss.

I am grateful that the compilers of Israel's royal history preserved this story of King David. He was completely human, fully alive in body, mind, and spirit. He walked the earth as you and I walk the earth, experiencing desire and disappointment, fulfillment, frustration, and failure, trusting that the God he had come to know would keep the promise of eternal love and eternal life.

Thanks be to God.