Last
week, we saw King David’s attempt to build a temple for God, to tie God to his
regime and to his agenda by building for God a house of cedar just
like the one David himself enjoyed. God would have none of it, and then proceeded
to make an unconditional covenant with him, complete with promises that had
were not contingent on anything David had ever done or ever will do, and
topping it all off with a promise to make David a house, a sure
house that would not be withdrawn. And
the two halves of that story – David’s wanting tie God down and God’s making
the covenant with the King – oddly complement each other, and they tell a lot
about the house of David, born from the grace of God in spite of David’s
less than admirable need for control.
That
need is a characteristic of kings, perhaps even all leaders – perhaps even
pastors . . . that’s why God had warned the Israelites about kings,
although probably not about pastors . . . Samuel, the last of the judges, who’d
be out of a job if there was a king, reported a conversation he’d had
with the Almighty, and it went something like this: “These’ll be the ways of
the king: he’ll take your sons and take your daughters . . . he’ll take the
best of your fields and one-tenth of your grain. He’ll take your male and female slaves, and
the best of your cattle and donkeys . . .
he’ll take and take and take, and you’ll end up his slaves.” But the people wouldn’t listen, they said “we
gotta have a king, so he can go out and fight our battles, and we’ll be
just like all the other nations next door.”
So God gave in and after a misfire with Saul, put David in his place –
and the people were overjoyed at their shining king, their handsome,
ruddy-faced king, and he went out and smote all of Israel’s enemies, and
unified the twelve tribes for the first time in history, and ruled over them
all for forty years.
And
everything was going swimmingly until one year, at the turn of the year – when
kings go out to battle – David stayed home.
And it wasn’t militarily disastrous
or anything, he sent his best general Joab, and they still smote the
Ammonites and laid siege the city of Rabbah, but it was troubling, because
wasn’t that specifically in the kingly job-description? Didn’t they want a king to lead them
gloriously into battle like all the other nations? And now there’s a cloud on the horizon,
because it was the time when kings went out to war, but David didn’t go!
And
sure enough, idle hands are the Devil’s play-things – or something like that –
‘cause David is as bored as you can get, and he’s napping on his couch
in the middle of the afternoon, and Oprah’s over and Ellen hasn’t begun,
and it’s too early for the nightly news, and he’s pacing the parapet when he
looks down from the roof, and there she is – a vision of loveliness, washing
herself in the twilight, and she looks good to his eyes – the evening
light shining in her hair lights up her golden skin – and he’s instantly
smitten with love, or a reasonable facsimile thereof . . . so he calls his
messengers and he sends them down to find out who she is, and they come back
and tell him “It’s Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam, wife of Uriah the Hittite.” And that name . . . that name . . . it seems
to fit her. In Hebrew, Bath means
daughter, sheba means seven, which is the perfect number . . . and O my
gosh! She’s Bath-sheba, the daughter of
perfect! He has to have her!
And
he does what kings can do, he sends for her and takes her – our translation
inexplicably renders the Hebrew “took” as “get” – he sends for her and takes
her and she comes to him and he lays with her.
And was Samuel rolling in his grave?
Did God not tell him a king would take their women and anything else
they had? David takes her though she’s
someone else’s wife, though she’s purifying herself from her period . . . and
he doesn’t stop to consider another meaning
of her name, Bath-sheba means as well daughter of an-oath, daughter of
a-promise . . . and David has made a promise to the Hebrew people, and a
promise to God as well, to live by the Torah, to live by the law, and he’s
broken several laws at once, and one of the biggies, one of the main laws, is
good old commandment number ten: “Thou
shalt not desire thy neighbors wife.”
He’d promised, he’d sworn an oath to obey the law as the King of
Israel, and here he is, breaking it with the Daughter of a-promise, daughter-of-an-oath
herself . . . is that symbolic, or what?
Well. When he’s done with her, she goes back to her
house, and the wars rage on, and by-and-by she becomes pregnant – you just knew
she would, it always happens on As
Jerusalem Turns – and she sends word to David saying “I’m pregnant” and now
he’s in a panic, flailing around, trying to figure out how to cover it up, so he
sends word to General Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” and Joab sends Uriah
to David. And you may have noticed
there’s a whole lot of sending going on, and it all hinges on Bathsheba’s – for
once in those male-dominated times, where women were little more than slaves, a
woman has power over a man . . . she’s sends, she does what powerful men
usually do, and a chain-reaction of sending is the result, like dominoes
falling. She sends. then David sends –
twice! – and Joab sends, and at the end of all this sending is poor old
Uriah.
And
now the story turns morbidly funny . . . when Uriah comes to the king, David
hems and haws, circling the point like a hawk over a chicken . . . He makes small talk, beating around
the bush, trying to come up with an excuse for bringing him in. “How’s it going? Is it going all right? How’s about my man Joab? He OK?
How about the people . . . and the war?
All quiet on the Ammonite front?”
But he finally gets down to it, and I can almost see him slapping Uriah
on the back in manly comradery “Go on down to your house, now, see that pretty
little wife of yours . . . and wash your feet.” And he’s winking at him, and nudging him,
because what he’s telling Uriah to do is to have sex with his wife, that’s what
“washing your feet” means, it’s a Hebrew euphemism for sexual
intercourse . . . and now we can see David’s plot, he’s trying to get Uriah to
go down to the house and have sex with Bathsheba, so it’ll look like the baby’s
his.
But
Uriah – the Hittite, the foreigner – is loyal, and he very properly
sleeps at the king’s door with the servants, and when David hears about it –
nothing in a palace can be kept secret for very long – he’s dumbfounded,
he can’t understand why a big strong healthy guy like Uriah wouldn’t go down to
be with his wife – and doesn’t that say something about the king? When asked about it, Uriah says: “Everybody
else is camping in the field, everybody else is at war – Israel and the ark and
Judah, Joab and the servants of Joab, and shall I then go to my house, to eat
and to drink, and to lie with my wife? I
will do no such thing.”
And
. . . does David get it? Does he
understand the terrible irony, the incredible contrast between Uriah and
himself? Uriah the Hittite, Uriah the
foreigner. He’s under no covenant to the
Hebrew God, but he’s more loyal to that God than David, he’s more loyal to the
Hebrew people and his fellow soldiers.
On the one hand, there’s Uriah, who won’t eat or drink or take pleasure
with his wife, and on the other? There’s
David, who stayed home when Kings went out to war, and dallied with another
man’s wife while he was at it. Does
David get the irony? Is he
chastened by it? Does he feel
remorse? Our passage doesn’t say, but if
he does, he hides it well . . . he tries one more time to get Uriah to go to
his wife, this time the old-fashioned way – he gets him drunk . . . but even that
doesn’t work, and in the end, he resorts to violence, and orders Joab to make
sure Uriah is killed.
And
that’s kind of the way of the world, isn’t it?
In the end, the world resorts to violence. It’s always the last resort . . . didn’t want
to do it, you understand, but I had to . . . there was no other choice. David wiggles and squirms, he goes to
laughable, comic ends to avoid it, but he does it in the end, he kills Uriah
just for having a pretty wife.
And
what about that wife? What about
ol’ daughter-of-perfect, daughter-of-an-oath?
She’s often pictured as a temptress, as a Jezebel, putting on some kind
of erotic show, enticing David into sin, but if you look at the passage
carefully, you’ll see that there’s none of that in it . . . it says he saw from
the roof a woman bathing, it doesn’t say she was on a roof in plain sight,
he could just as well have seen her through an open window, or in a courtyard .
. . the palace was the highest roof around – one of the prerogatives of
being king, y’know . . .and the string
of Hebrew verbs – he sent for her, took her, she came, and he lay with her –
all have a coercive sense to them, they’re all things that the person in power
gets to do. All except one, that is . .
. it says she came to him, but how could she not? How could any woman – alone, without her
husband – say no to a king, the ultimate ruler of her life?
But
movies, TV-shows and countless sermons have all slandered Bathsheba, and with
no evidence in the scripture that I can see . . . it’s like the courts,
which still blame the woman for the rape . . . I know, it’s better now,
it doesn’t happen in the courts as much, now it happens on the internet
and on talking-head TV. Case in point, a
nineteen-year-old girl who accused a certain basketball star of sexual
misconduct – a.k.a. rape – and there were internet sites calling her a
slut, there were reports in the mainstream media of an “emotional
breakdown” in her past – all inadmissable in a court of law, but what does an
emotional breakdown have to do with man-in-the-moon marigolds, anyhow? . . . and the well-funded Kobe Bryan media
machine did its job, and there was Kobe’s beautiful wife – on national TV! – forgiving him for adultery, but it wasn’t
rape, she consented to it all, but she was only 19 – two years younger than my
daughter was at the time – and her reputation was destroyed. And you shouldn’t have worn that mini-skirt,
young lady, it was just too provocative, he just couldn’t help himself.
And
so David – far from being lured into it by a beautiful woman, bent on seduction
– commits an act of rape. That’s what we
call it when a powerful man – who commands and sends and takes – that’s
what we call it when a powerful man coerces a woman into sex.
You
know, I had a preaching professor one time, who said “always end your sermons
on an up-note, always end ‘em on grace, because that’s the gospel,
that’s what we preach, but you know?
I think that would not be faithful to this passage, because in the end,
there’s not a lot of grace in it. In the
end, it’s about sin, plain and simple . . . good-old-fashioned, personal
sin, the kind your mama warned you about . . . it’s about sin and hubris,
the feeling that you’re so powerful, so important, that God won’t let anything
bad happen to you . . . it’s the sin of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart,
blubbering on TV . . . it’s the sin of Bill Clinton, of anyone – male or female
– who abuses power, who uses his or her power over another to coerce them to do
something they don’t want to do.
And
if you think about it, it happens a lot – it happens in marriages, it
happens in business – where it’s often called good business sense – and it
happens in the church. Preachers
have used the pulpit to brow-beat congregations for millennia – of course, I
wouldn’t do such a thing – but they don’t call it a bully pulpit for
nothing.
Paul
has laundry-lists of sins, things that are of the flesh, that tear communities
apart . . . things like slander, gossip, and strife, envy, quarrels, dissensions,
and factions, and if you think about them, they’re all the result of somebody
trying to get power, or abusing that power once they have it . . . the
Sunday-school teacher who threatens to resign if he doesn’t get his way, the
gossip at the fellowship hour that gets back at his subject . . . the
big-offering-giver who uses money as a weapon . . . all these things pick at a
church, at a community, all of them erode its unity, and damage its
effectiveness. All of them do violence
to God’s order.
So my preaching
professor notwithstanding, today we end here, with the violence of rape and
murder. In the case of David, it came
from the top, just as Samuel had warned.
You give somebody – or a group of somebodies – ultimate power, and it
often ends up that way. And even though
there is grace in this story, it’ll have to wait until next week when we talk
about Nathan, the prophet who dared to tell the truth to a king, the man whose
duty to God transcended even his own life, who risked it all to be faithful to
a forgiving God. Amen.
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