“HE SAW HER BATHING ON THE ROOF”

II Samuel 11:1-27

St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church

Rev. Gary Paterson

July 19, 2009

So… you’ve met David the Chosen; David the Giant-Killer; David the Weeper; David the Dancer; David the Politician… and today, David the Lover… well, no, not really… rather, David the fallen.

Let me start with a poem; listen carefully, ‘cause I might ask you a question or two after. It’s written by Hugo Williams, who named it “Saturday Morning”… but I think it works just as well when you call it “Sunday Morning.” Listen…

Everyone who made love the night before

was walking around with flashing red lights

on top of their heads – a white-haired old gentleman,

a red-faced schoolboy, a pregnant woman

who smiled at me from across the street

and gave a secret little shrug

as if the flashing red light on her head

was a small price to pay for what she knew.

Now, I find myself wondering how many heads here in the congregation might have invisible red flashing lights on them? Or maybe better, how many people here wish that their heads had flashing red lights? Ohhhh… I think I can hear some sirens going off amidst all those flashing red lights, my own included, saying, “Will the minister please stop talking about sex.” But it’s difficult with a story like David and Bathsheba… lust at first sight; a little adultery; “I’m pregnant.”… a little murder. I mean, there was enough excitement in this story that Leonard Cohen slipped it into his song, “Hallelujah”… remember that second verse:

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof,

You saw her standing on the roof;

Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.

She tied you to a kitchen chair,

She broke your throne, she cut your hair,

And from your lips she drew the hallelujah.

All week long I have been reading and re-reading this story, and I keep asking myself, “Why? Why did David do it?” It’s not as if he were hurting for female company. What was it by this point? … several wives and a dozen concubines. So why one more? Why Bathsheba? A married woman, whose husband was one of his loyal soldiers! Is this a story of romance, of irresistible love… like Tristan and Iseult, or Lancelot and Guinevere… or in a slightly more tawdry way, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton? Is this a case of lightning striking… her beauty and the moonlight overthrew him, so that he would follow his passion, and risk everything. Maybe…

Or perhaps what are watching here isn’t anything more than a king’s whim. As the Hebrew suggests in its forceful lining up verbs… David saw… he sent… he took her.. and in the original, that last verb carries an energy that slides close to rape. No tortured wrestling of the conscience here! This is not love… this is the big guy’s privilege; a royal perk… like Henry VIII, Bill Clinton, the governor of South Carolina. A passing dalliance – but what’s a little adultery if you’re king? What makes it worse is that we never do really see Bathsheba… what colour was her hair? Did she cry? How did she feel when she finally spoke… “I’m pregnant?”

This is when the story moves to ugly… into a royal cover-up. It takes four times as long to describe the way to get rid of a troublesome husband as it did to portray the affair. David calls Uriah home from war; has a lovely chat, sends him on his way with a present or two, with instructions to go home and wash his feet… a lovely Hebrew euphemism for “make love to your wife.” But Uriah won’t… not while all his buddies are back at the front; “Just wouldn’t seem right, or fair,” he said. You can imagine David rolling his eyes… “What’s with this honour stuff?!” So the next evening, David invites Uriah over for a nightcap or two… and when he’s got him good and drunk, sends him home once again, with great hopes in the power of alcohol; but still no luck.

This little affair was threatening to turn into a Bathsheba-gate, a real public embarrassment. So David shrugs, with a casual, “I tried.” – and moves to Plan B. Which is not an act of passion, but rather a calculating, well thought out cover-up that only required a little bit of murder. David gives Uriah a good-bye handshake, sending the unsuspecting sap back to war, carrying a special letter to General Joab, who is all to happy to comply: “‘Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.” You can get away with murder if you’re a king, for when David gets news that his plan has succeeded and that indeed Uriah is dead, he shrugs again, “ ‘Do not let this matter trouble you, for the sword devours now one and now another…”

So what do you make of this? Doesn’t it seem a little strange that David of all people gets wrapped up in such a sordid mess; how the greatest king of Israel, the best and brightest, blessed by God beyond all imagining … how this beloved David could so break faith… could sin so baldly, so badly? Yes sin…. as the chapter ends with a cryptic, “But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD….”

It’s instructive to take a look at the Biblical re-telling of the David Story. Maybe you didn’t know that there’s a second, later version of what happened to David… one that’s slightly more cleaned-up; the official history if you wish. I Chronicles, chapter 20… just take a read sometime…the whole episode with Bathsheba and Uriah gets censored out, disappeared. Sort of like trying to talk about Ted Kennedy but forgetting to mention Chappaquiddick. But Israel was smart enough to keep the truer version of events as well. That’s what I like about the Bible -- it tells it like it happened. As if to say, even the best of us is flawed, falls flat on his face; breaks commandments; does what is displeasing to the LORD. None of us is perfect; not even David; especially not David. In some ways this almost feels like a re-telling of the Adam and Eve story. David knew that what he was choosing to do was wrong; he knew there would be consequences, most of which he couldn’t predict, but most of which looked bad. David is us; we’re David… chosen, gifted, blessed… and we mess up.

But I’m still left asking, “Why?” Why did he do it? Why choose a path that would bring so much pain and death? You begin to wonder if we are ruled by our instinctual, animal nature… sex is one powerful motivator. This week I turned for a little advice on all this sex stuff from the advice columnist, Dan Savage… not my usual source for sermon inspiration. And if you don’t know why I’m cringing slightly, don’t go looking. But there was this one letter… a young fellow with major problems. And Dan launched in… creatures have been having sex for over 850 million years; and when homo sapiens started emerging a few million years ago, well … it was just human nature. Religion arrived a long time after that. So, says Dan, “When sexuality and human nature collide with religion, religion always loses. Always!”

I actually read one Biblical commentator who wanted to blame Bathsheba… it was at least partly her fault, you know; bathing on the roof like that, deliberately flaunting her body, luring David, seducing him… so that he just couldn’t resist. “If you’d seen what she was wearing, your Honour.” Or, “He made a pass at me.” You know how it goes… blame the victim.

But maybe the implicit “Why?” of this story of David and Bathsheba and Uriah is best answered by talking about power. Who has it? How do they use it? Justly, fairly… to govern well, bringing peace and justice and harmony? Or do they use it for themselves!! What happens when you start taking power as your right, a privilege? What’s the old saying, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This is a story about a king whose power goes to his head; who forgets his real self; it’s a story about any of us who think we deserve more than our neighbour, that somehow we’ve “earned” it. And, thank you very much, we’ll just go right on ahead and take it.

I remember a time back, when my spouse Tim Stevenson was a cabinet minister in the New Democrat provincial government, with Ujjal Dosanjh as premier. He described his first day at the office… as he opened the door and stepped, everyone jumped to their feet, “Good morning, Mr. Minister; glad to see you, sir.” “Relax, why don’t you? And you can call me Tim.” But they didn’t; they couldn’t; they were honouring the office, respecting the function. Every time Tim entered, up they got. After a while, said Tim, you got used to it. In fact, it felt rather nice. Re-affirming; made a man feel important. Indeed…. “Just don’t expect it at home,” said I. And we both laughed…but suddenly aware of power’s seductive lure. Power; social structures; the temptation to confuse oneself with the authority of a position; the temptation to use power to indulge yourself… perks, privilege, pleasure.

The Biblical story doesn’t offer any final explanation; a mixture of motives is suggested. Sometimes it just seems to happen, as one lie leads to another, to growing deceptions, and necessary cover-ups; it’s a little bit like that classic story of grappling with the “tar baby”; once you touch the “forbidden fruit” it get’s stickier and stickier, and you just can’t seem to get un-entangled. Go talk to some of the traders on Wall Street, no? Motives are one thing… but the choices stand on their own. Actions are taken; consequences will follow.

In dong some background reading for this sermon I came across an intriguing phrase (and I apologize for having lost the source)… the theology of failure. How do we understand the reality that all of us will give in to temptation, mess up, hurt others; how all of us will experience failure; how all of us are entangled with … here it comes… sin? Now I don’t want this sermon to turn into a guilt-fest, with the minister shaking his finger, and exploring a long list of racy mis-doings. Cause I don’t know what’s been happening in your life; and frankly, I have enough to do with examining my own conduct. And indeed, probably most of us are carrying more than enough guilt already; the last thing you need on a beautiful Sunday morning is a few more pounds of guilt to add to the load.

On the other hand, today’s story suggests that what happens to David happens to all of us; if the best succumb, then surely the rest of us can recognize our own moments of falling short… as the last line of today’s reading points out… a throw-away conclusion almost: “But the thing that David lad done displeased the Lord.” As if to suggest that we really do live in a moral reality; and that mis-doings carry consequences. Maybe the very act of acknowledging our propensity to indulge ourselves when we think we deserve it, or can get away with it, or at least, don’t have to think about it right at the moment…maybe that kind of truth-telling about ourselves… and others… maybe that can lead to a healthier life, a more faithful living. Maybe.

Who knows what all this calls up for you. Maybe there is a memory of illicit sex; or unsafe sex. Or let’s just skip the sexual part… and think of strained, broken, alienated relationships; or maybe it’s just moments of meanness, smallness of spirit. Maybe it’s the indifference to too many beggars in the street; or to the chemicals and garbage that are smothering the oceans and the land. This sin stuff comes in all shapes and sizes – we see, we want, we take… and to hell with the consequences. You will recognize that moment, though, when you feel life draining out of you; when you realize that the choice you have made, or avoided making… it has diminished who you are at your best, your core, your spirit. Whatever that moment is… that’s your equivalent of the David-Bathsheba-Uriah moment.

Confession is good for the soul. But it’s not confession for its own sake, confession to get off the hook; to avoid consequences. No, it’s more a matter of recognizing what we are capable of… and then choosing differently; choosing the better way. It’s not easy; but it’s what we are called to do. Recently a friend sent me an excerpt from Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees; I sent it out in “Gleanings”, (our weekly email about the upcoming Sunday service), so it may sound familiar; but it’s worth hearing again. Listen to this conversation between two of the main characters, Lily and August, after the death of August’s beloved sister May:

We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl. "There is one thing I don't get," I said. "What's that?" "How come if your favourite colour is blue, you painted your house so pink?" She laughed. "That was May's doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the colour. I had a nice tan colour in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, 'Well, this is the tackiest colour I've ever seen, and we'll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May's heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.'" "All this time I just figured you liked pink," I said. She laughed again. "You know, some things don't matter that much, Lily. Like the colour of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart -- now, that matters. The whole problem with people is --" "They don't know what matters and what doesn't," I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so. "I was going to say, the problem is they know what matters, but they don't choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters."

Choosing what matters. That’s the challenge; that’s the holy invitation. And when we are aware of our propensity to not choose well… then perhaps we will be able to do a better job of it. Maybe.

The good news for me, is that it isn’t just up to me. I know I can do a better job of choosing what matters; but I also know there are still going to be many times when… well, let’s just say I won’t be making the best decision. For whatever reason. But while the LORD might not be pleased, the LORD will also not give up on me, on any of us. It’s not a matter of cheap grace… “Oh well, God will forgive and take care of the mess; that’s his business!” But rather, there is a recognition that God doesn’t stop being involved even in the worst fallouts, offering possibilities even in the mess; there are ongoing choices to be made… and in each one of them, even when I think I am at the very bottom of the pit, well, there is still hope: in any given moment, as we live out the consequences of our previous choices and decisions, we are invited to choose what matters… in the present, in this moment. And God will be there in that moment. So, as I remember this story of David and Bathsheba, I am reminded that it is their son Solomon who will come to the throne; and it is from their offspring that four hundred years of kings will follow. From David and Bathsheba… go figure. And, I am reminded that a thousand years later, a child will be born in the town of Bethlehem, from the house of David, and he will be named Jesus; and when the family photo album gets opened, he will discover that David and Bathsheba were in fact his multi-great grandparents. It was as good an introduction as any, to the strange mystery that we humans are called over and over to choose what matters, to work at enhancing life for others and ourselves… “love your neighbour as yourself”; and we are invited to trust in the strange movements of grace, in a God who keeps working with us to bring forth strange promises. Now that brings the hallelujah to my lips. Thanks be to God.