August 2, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; Psalm 51:1-13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35 

      Let us pray.  Lord, as this season of the church we refer to as “ordinary” time continues to enfold us, may we find you in the routine, in the mundane, in the everyday.   We would also pray that we will be found by you in the ordinariness of life, for life is sometimes hard, and sometimes joyous, but it is often so very ordinary – just plain, simple and routine. And as a result, we sometimes find ourselves numb.  So our prayer today, O God, is that you would waken our hearts to your presence in every area of our lives. Open our eyes as we gather together today. Amen.

      Of all the flawed heroes of the Old Testament, David is perhaps the most spectacularly flawed of all, given the amount of honor the text and our tradition gives to him. He is said to be a man after God’s own heart in spite of the fact that his personal life is a model of dysfunction. Last week, in the first part of 2 Samuel, chapter 11, we watch David summon another man’s wife into his bed and then, when all attempts to trick her husband into sleeping with her to hide the fact that David has fathered her child fail, he coldly sends Uriah back to the front lines carrying the very military orders that will insure his death on the battlefield (11:14-25).

      If this isn’t bad enough, later in the story David will stand by passively as his son Amnon rapes his daughter Tamar (13:1-22) and is then murdered by Tamar’s brother Absalom, another of David’s sons (13:23-33). He will exile Absalom instead of having him executed for fratricide (13:34-38) and live to regret that decision when Absalom returns to the court only to lead a rebellion against David (14:1-19:8). He does not appear to care about the peacefulness of his successor’s rise to the throne, apparently oblivious to the fact that two of his sons, Adonijah and Solomon, are assuming they are next in line to succeed him (1 Kings 1). David eventually designates Solomon as his successor and seems unconcerned that this will inevitably lead to Adonijah’s execution by Solomon (1 Kings 2). In short, David is portrayed both as a brilliant military leader, a hugely popular charismatic figure, a man of genuine love for God and his nation, as well as an adulterer, murderer and passive abettor of horrifying violence within his own family.

      What follows the incident with David and Bathsheba’s adultery and its murderous aftermath is the famous passage known as Nathan’s Parable (2 Samuel 12). This passage is not actually a parable, however. It is what scholars call a “fictional” or “fictive legal case.” The difference between the two types of stories derives from the way they are presented. Parables are known by the hearer to be symbolic or fictional stories. Fictive legal cases, however, must be believed by the hearer to be true.

      So Nathan lays out his fictitious case of the poor man and the rich man before David as if this is an actual incident for which Nathan is coming to David for a legal judgment. There is no indication that David views this case as anything other than a real situation. It is only because David believes the story to be about someone else that he can be lured into issuing an indictment against himself.

      In 2 Samuel 12 there are many details that are not as clear in the English translation as they are in the Hebrew. The callous disregard of the rich man for the feelings and rights of the poor man are underscored by the comparative unimportance of the visitor for whom the pet lamb is slaughtered. In the Hebrew he is not said to be a visiting relative, or a person of any real importance to the rich man. He is simply a “walker” and a “person on the road.” In other words, the rich man kills his neighbor’s pet for the sake of preserving his social position through hospitality to someone he doesn’t even know or care about.

      Likewise, David destroys Uriah’s life both figuratively and literally for the sake of a transient desire to possess Uriah’s wife. As punishment for this, Nathan declares, another will take David’s wife from him, not in secret, as David took Uriah’s wife, but in public, before the eyes of the whole nation. This comes to pass in 2 Samuel 16:21-22 in another stroke of irony when David’s own son Absalom usurps his throne and sleeps with the royal harem on the rooftop of the palace – the very rooftop, in fact, from which David first sees Bathsheba and desires her (2 Samuel 11:2).

      Nathan follows his fictive case with an excoriation of David for his ingratitude toward God – spelling out the many ways in which God has made David into a man rich beyond his wildest imaginings. Like the rich man from the story, who had hundreds of sheep in comparison to the poor man’s single lamb, David has a harem full of wives, one of whom was Michal, the daughter of the previous king, and possibly a previous wife of the former king, Saul.  God has not only given David Saul’s throne and the right to rule over both Israel and Judah; he has also given David Saul’s very family.

      There is also a possible pun in verse 12:8 in the phrase “the house of Israel and Judah” could also read, “the daughters of Israel and Judah.” This would carry on the double image of David as one who had all the women in the nation at his disposal because of the fact that God had taken royal power out of the hands of Saul and given it to David. After having been given so much at God’s hand, Nathan argues, how could David have cared so little about violating God’s laws?

      Had the Levitical laws been followed, as punishment for adultery, both David and Bathsheba should have been executed (Leviticus 20:10). David should also have been executed for arranging for the murder of Uriah. Because he is repentant, however, he is not killed, but is rather made to understand that the violence he has perpetrated on the family of the innocent Uriah would rebound upon his own family. The child conceived in the adulterous union would die (2 Samuel 12:14) and forevermore, violence would dominate David’s family. Perhaps this fatal pronouncement is the reason why he is so passive in the face of his children’s later violence toward each other.

      Like so many addicts today, David didn’t think he had a problem, and he certainly didn’t want any help. It fell to Nathan the prophet to schedule a nonjudgmental confrontation and tell a tale that trapped David in his sin.

      “Just mind your own business.”  That’s the response most give when on the receiving end of unwanted advice. “Mind your own business.”   “Get off my back.  Get off my case.  Get outta my life!”

      That leads to the age-old question of “How do you help a person who doesn’t want help?” Like the person addicted to alcohol, or hooked on drugs. Whatever the dependency, some people simply don’t believe they have a problem. The only way to get them to accept reality and begin the process of recovery is to convene a confrontation.

      Professionals call it “an intervention.”

      For example, the character Christopher, on The Sopranos, the HBO drama series about a New Jersey mob family. In one episode, Christopher is running around high, again, desperately trying to score some heroin. He gets involved in a drug deal that goes awry, and ends up getting carjacked, robbed and beaten. The mobster Tony steps in and schedules an intervention.

      Why? Because Christopher’s drug habit is getting in the way of business. How can Tony trust him to whack guys that need whacked, deliver drugs, smuggle dope and launder money if he is high on crack?

      So Tony schedules a meeting. Unfortunately, it does not go very well.

      But many interventions do. Like the one in our reading from2 Samuel this morning and the verses following.  In this case, it is Nathan the prophet who calls a meeting. Nathan is the facilitator, and David – the adulterous and murderous head of the family of Jesse – is the subject of the intervention. Here’s a guy who apparently sleeps well at night, who thinks nothing of sleeping with his neighbor’s wife, and who later orders a hit on the husband, telling his hit man, Joab, “Do not let this matter trouble you, for the sword devours now one and now another” (2 Samuel 11:25). In other words, “Just forget about it!”

      Unfortunately for David, there was no way Nathan was going to forget about it.

      It fell to Nathan the prophet to schedule an intervention. The confrontation begins with the story that we heard a few moments ago. “There were two men in a certain city,” says Nathan, “the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb” (12:1-2).

      The little ewe lamb was “like a daughter” to the poor man, says Nathan. He would feed it at his table and let it drink from his very own cup. Then one day a traveler comes to visit the rich man, and the rich man decides he needs to slaughter an animal to feed his guest. Does he take an animal from his own flocks and herds to fix a meal for the traveler? Noooo! He’s got plenty of lambs to choose from, but instead he takes the poor man’s lamb and kills it and cooks it for dinner.

      David reacts with irritation and anger. “As the Lord lives,” he shouts, “the man who has done this deserves to die” (v. 5).

      Nathan quietly says to David, “You are the man!” (v. 7).

      David is so busted. He sees reality clearly for the very first time. Nathan’s intervention, which used a story as a tool of nonjudgmental confrontation, enables David to see the truth about himself and even pronounce judgment on himself. It is when he sees himself in the story that David realizes he has a problem, and begins the process of recovery. Just a few verses later, David honestly confesses, “I have sinned against the LORD” (v. 13).

      Here’s the deal. We’re too afraid today in the church to have a conversation about sin. We’re afraid to be confrontational. We’re scared of being perceived as being judgmental.

      Yet, clearly, there are times when a conversation about sin, about hurtful behavior, is in the best interest of the offending person, the aggrieved parties and the health of the church community.

      We need to develop a protocol, an intervention convention. There are times when we have to be willing to confront sin and intervene in the lives of people who are self-destructing and spiraling out of control.

      According to author Theodore Zeldin, such conversations have the power to change our lives. In his book called Conversation (New York: Hidden Spring Books, 2000), he says that “real conversation catches fire” and changes people. It involves more than sending or receiving information, and it requires that we talk in such a way that we are willing to be changed by the conversation. Zeldin believes that real conversation is at the very root of creativity, and it is even better than laws in helping to change our mind-sets.

      That is exactly what the prophet Nathan discovered. If he had simply delivered God’s anti-adultery law to David, the prophet might have been thrown out on his ear. But in a little conversation about a rich man and a poor man and a lamb, Nathan helped David to change both his mind-set and his life.

      “Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits,” observes Theodore Zeldin. “When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: They transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, and engage in new trains of thought.

      “Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards,” he concludes: “It creates new cards.” 

      So, what are the new cards we create when we engage in honest, faithful, nonjudgmental conversation with one another?

      To answer this, let’s leave Nathan the prophet and go to Jesus, the moralistic raconteur.

      New cards? There’s the card of love rather than indifference. Jesus once had a conversation with a lawyer who knew all about the law of God, and he felt that he was well on his way to eternal life by maintaining the proper boundaries between men and women, priests and Israelites, Jews and Samaritans. The gospel of Luke tells us that the lawyer wants to justify himself and his religious practices, and so he says to Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29).

      Do you remember Jesus’ response to that question?  He tells him the story of the Good Samaritan.

      The card of forgiveness rather than resentment. How often should I forgive, one person wondered, as many as seven times? No, said Jesus, “seventy-seven times” (Matthew 18:21-22).

      The card of righteousness, not self-righteousness. “Who is righteous?” asked others. It’s not the people you might expect, replied Jesus. The righteous are the tax collectors – not the Pharisees – who beat their breasts and confess their sins, trusting in God instead of in themselves (Luke 18:9-14).

      The card of justice rather than despair. Shouldn’t we just throw in the towel, since there is so much that causes us to lose heart? No, said Jesus, be like the persistent widow who keeps bringing her case to the unjust judge. Justice will come, Jesus promised, so keep on praying to God (Luke 18:1-8).

      And – to return once more to David – the card of humility rather than arrogance. The story of David’s confession and repentance is well-known.

      In every case, change occurred through meaningful conversation and confrontation. Our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic Church now understand that this conversation should have started years ago. But we don’t need to look at the problems in someone else’s family: there are no doubt situations in our own house that need to be taken care of – conversations that need to begin now.

      Left to themselves and their own devices, people tend to fall into sin – discriminating against others, failing to forgive, showing self-righteousness and giving up. We should never assume that there are not those in our congregations who haven’t walked where David walked in his hour of disobedience.

      There will be times when we must take a stand against sin, just as Nathan did. And when we make such a move, we will find that the key to a successful intervention is being objective without being callous, being judgmental without being condemning and caring without sentimentality.

      We are not called to break skulls, like Tony Soprano.  Instead, our task is to open people’s minds with a God-centered conversation, just as Nathan and Jesus did.  Amen.