The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost - July 26, 2009

"David and Bathsheba"

The Rev. Tambria E. Lee

It started out like any other day on our touring bus. Folks were climbing aboard, choosing a seat, and settling in, anticipating the day’s excursion; noses were buried in guidebooks. Others were writing postcards and reading newspapers. Somewhere between the breakfast buffet and the coach our South Carolina travelers had become quite vocal. They were disgusted because their governor, in addition to refusing federal stimulus money, had apparently secretly met his soul mate in Argentina and was busy telling the rest of the free world the how, when, where and why of it all. All the way across the great pond Mark Sanford was commanding more attention than Michael Jackson’s unexpected death and our impending trip to the WWII beaches on the Normandy coast. From three rows behind me came the voice of a petite, taciturn, die-hard New Englander who bore a striking resemblance to the fictional French orphan Madeleine whose stories we read as children. “Wherever,” she said in a thick Boston accent, “does he get the idea that he has anything in common with King David?” It seems the erstwhile governor had deigned to compare himself to the biblical king in her reading material. She was having nothing of it. My ears perked up at a biblical reference and I asked for further clarification, which she provided for me in detail—from Uriah the Hittite to Bathsheba, including David’s desire to return to power as after such a great sin. “And ‘There shall come forth a root from the stump of Jesse’ over by dead body, hmmf!” she said sarcastically, making reference to David’s offspring from that illicit affair being part of the great genealogy of the Christ. I didn’t bother to remind her she had no control over it; but it left me wondering who Sanford had sacrificed on the battlefield to satisfy his quest for a soul mate and where would his progeny would take us. We managed somehow to move on from that conversation as the bus pulled out of the parking lot, but the fierceness of that morning’s dialog and its affect on others didn’t leave me. There was something fundamental going on that had nothing to do with Mark Sanford or with King David and has everything to do with you and me and how God works with us in this world.

That ‘something’ is encapsulated in a simple phrase from the Eleventh chapter of Second Samuel that you just heard read. Perhaps you noticed it? In the midst of describing the ravaging of the Ammonites and the besieging of Rabbah, the action shifts dramatically to a whisper and then you hear, “It happened, late one afternoon when David arose from his couch.” IT happened, late one afternoon, a moment when time altered and something changed and a decision was made by one man after his afternoon nap that would divert the course of human history. We don’t think of ourselves or our choices as being so pivotal, so linked—those hundreds of choices that make up a single day and how those choices affect those around us. We don’t always see how one action leads to another. There is (or could be, as they say) a domino effect in motion that soon renders much that started in our hands out of our hands—the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes for ill, if you will. We don’t see ourselves as powerful as King David or Mark Sanford or as seductive as Bathsheba; yet we might be able to catch a glimpse of the powerlessness of Bathsheba in this situation or the manipulativeness of David or the vulnerability of Uriah. We are told to live in the fullness of the moment, that this moment is all that we have and all that matters; but, alas, we do not believe it until the question is called and we realize…it happened…it really happened late one afternoon—that one thing altering our world.

Frederick Buechner sees these moments for what they are and what they aren’t, suggesting for instance that Uriah was loyal to a fault and would have gone to the front line even if he knew he had been sent there just to clear the way for Bathsheba to marry David. But Beuchner also says something more important. “When Bathsheba was at David’s bedside as he lay dying with the succession of the throne being the only thing on her mind, he was recalling that day when he first laid eyes on her. He realized that he had been thinking of the child of their child of their child a thousand years hence, the child Jesus who he could only pray would find it in his heart to think kindly someday of the beautiful girl and the improvident king who had so recklessly and so long ago been responsible for his birth in a stable and his death just outside the city walls.” (That’s taking the long way home.)

But it is home by another way. You see, don’t you, that no matter what we do, no matter what we do that we think no one sees, no matter what we get caught doing, no matter. It happens that one afternoon God so loved the world that he has spent eternity drawing it continually back to himself; so that wherever we go, God himself is there, working out our salvation, indeed the salvation of the whole world through the actions of men and women, flawed though they may be.

Resources Consulted
Synthesis
Beyond Words: Frederick Buechner