The Ideal King

I'm looking at a passage of Scripture this week that I've never given any serious thought to before. Now that I'm confronted with it, I'm realizing what a rare occasion this is for me. Obviously every time I come to my sermon text each week, I know I have a lot to learn about that passage. But it is very rare, if not a completely new experience, to find myself preaching from a passage that I haven't already done some study on or heard something about. I'm sure I've read 2 Samuel 23:1-7 many times before. I've read the Bible cover to cover a couple of times and I read 1 and 2 Samuel through as a whole once or twice back at the beginning of the summer when I knew I would be preaching from both books for a few months. In spite of that, I feel like I've never read 2 Samuel 23 before today.

As a side note, this is probably one of the reasons I'm sort of a Bible nerd; there is just so much there. I think I know the Bible pretty well and yet it is just such a vast and varied collection of literature that you could spend your whole life studying it without exhausting all that God has to offer through it. This is also just one of the reasons that I preach from the lectionary. By following a series of prescribed readings of four passages of Scripture for each Sunday over a three year cycle, I am lead to passages that I would not otherwise preach. This helps our congregation's life together to be shaped by the whole of Scripture, not just my own favorite texts.

Well anyway, on to the actual passage. I'm not sure yet how all of this will coalesce into a sermon but for now this is what I am noticing about 2 Samuel 23:1-7.

My Bible titles this section "David's last song". As such, it appears to be a summary of what David hoped that his reign as king was or what he hopes that the reign of future kings will be. It's almost like David's farewell speech or a final will and testament: his last chance as king to influence the course of Israel's history with a few final words. Perhaps, in this way it is similar to the book of Deuteronomy which is a sort of farewell speech from Moses as the Israelites are poised to enter the promised land but Moses knows he will not accompany this new generation in that joyous journey. So he does all that he can to set them on the right path since he can no longer lead them; he reminds them of what God has done and how they should continue to be faithful to God as a result.

Similarly, David holds up a vision of what Israel's king should be even after he is gone. He gives this vision of the king's role authority by saying that the Spirit of the Lord has spoken through him. At the center of this kingly ideal is righteousness; that is, the king must be one who rules justly and fairly out of reverence for God. David says the king who does this will bring life to his kingdom in the same way that sunlight brings life to the grass after the rain.

Then David says in v. 5 "Truly is not my house so with God?". This seems to be an odd question since David and the writer(s) of 1 and 2 Samuel know that David's house has not been this way with God. There were times when David had abused his power as king rather than reigning righteously and David was still reaping the consequences of that action through the misconduct of his children. David himself did not live up to the ideal portrait of kingly rule which he paints in this song.

But the very next line of the song puts a different spin on things. "For He (God) has made an everlasting covenant with me (David), ordered in all things and secured; for all my salvation and all my desire, will He not indeed make it grow?" David's house being right with God doesn't seem to depend so much on what David has done as it does on what God has done. David's house is not "so with God" because David was perfect but because God has chosen David and his descendants. It is God's sovereign choice and not a mere accident of human history which has made David and his descendants to be the kings of Israel. Because of that, David holds out hope that despite his own household's imperfections, his descendants will still be "as the light of morning" to the kingdom of Israel. On the other hand, "the worthless" (a term used earlier in 2 Samuel to describe Sheba, a man who rebelled against David's reign as king) are thorns that have to be handled carefully but will be thrown out and burned up.

In short, this song is a reaffirmation of the kingly ideology that is prevalent throughout the story of David. It expresses the deeply held belief that David was not just a king but a righteous ruler put in place by a righteous God who would be faithful to Israel by keeping a descendant of King David on the throne forever and seeing to it that any who rebelled ("the worthless") against God's anointed king would be defeated.

Undoubtedly, the lectionary editors have chosen this passage for this final Sunday before Advent because it is Christ the King Sunday. Just as this passage expresses the ancient Israelite hope of what Israel's king would be, so it expresses our hope as followers of Jesus that he is God's true anointed, that he speaks for God, and that one day he will indeed reign in righteousness and that all the worthless powers that have threatened his reign as king will ultimately be defeated.

O Absalom!

Some parts of the Bible read more like an episode of Jerry Springer than sacred scripture.

This week's sermon text (2 Samuel 18) ends with King David mourning the death of his son, Absalom. But this tragedy has been long in the making. In fact, the seeds of it were planted when David slept with Bathsheba. After being confronted by God through the prophet Nathan, David does confess his sin and as a result, Nathan proclaims that God had taken away David's sin and that he will not die. In fact, God is so gracious toward David that he does not even lose his reign as king. However, there are still consequences to David's actions. God says through Nathan that as a result of David's sin that the sword will never depart from his household and that enemies will rise up against David from his own family. We see the beginning of this in the very next chapter of 2 Samuel (13).

David's son, Absalom, had a sister named Tamar. Another son of David, Amnon, presumably a half-brother to Absalom and Tamar, is in love with Tamar. Or perhaps more accurately, he lusts after Tamar, much as his father David lusted over Bathsheba, so much so that he made himself ill over her. And like his father with Bathsheba, Amnon takes Tamar as if she were an object to be possessed. Then once he is done with her Amnon sends her away much to Tamar's disgrace. Word of what Amnon has done reaches Absalom and he hated his half-brother for what he had done to his sister.

Absalom shares some of his father's characteristics as well. Just as David developed a carefully devised scheme to deal with Uriah upon hearing of Bathsheba's pregnancy, so also Absalom does not immediately lash out against Amnon. He devises a scheme. He throws a sheep shearing party and invites all of the king's sons. He makes certain that Amnon will be there and that he becomes drunk and once he is Absalom has the sheep shearers kill Amnon.

Absalom flees the scene and keeps his distance for a while since he has murdered one of the king's sons and he does not know how the king will respond. However, the story says that "King David longed to go out to Absalom." Joab, the commander of David's army, sees this and convinces David to bring his son, Absalom, back to Jerusalem. So David recalls Absalom to Jerusalem causing to expect that perhaps there will be some form of reconciliation; maybe this will be like the story of the prodigal son. But instead, without any explanation, David never sees his son after calling him home. Absalom is allowed to live in Jerusalem but is never able to see his father, the king.

Absalom then begins to conspire against his father's reign. Every day he would spend his time at the city gate, winning over the hearts and allegiances of the people, building support at the grass roots level much as his father had done before him. After forty years, Absalom leaves Jerusalem to go to Hebron under the guise of having to fulfill a vow he made long ago. Once he is there, he has himself proclaimed as king. Absalom has begun a revolt against the reign of his own father using some his father's very own proven tactics. David flees Jerusalem in fear of the rebellion that has begun and Absalom soon takes over in the capital city.

In chapter 18, the stage is finally set for the battle between these two rival claimants to the throne who are also father and son. David is torn between his role as king and his role as father. He diligently orders his forces so that they will be successful in putting down this coup but he also asks his commanders to bring Absalom home alive if it is at all possible. David's well-trained and seasoned soldiers quickly defeat the untrained and inexperienced populist army that was supporting Absalom. A strange turn of events even makes it possible for Absalom to be to taken alive. The forest in which the battle took place was a very dense and dangerous one and as Absalom rode through it on his mule he somehow got his head stuck in some low hanging branches. He was suspended there still alive. He easily could have been taken prisoner without being killed. One of the soldiers sees Absalom and reports to Joab but instead of taking Absalom alive as the king requested, Joab puts three spears through Absalom's heart and even allows his armor bearers to continue to attack him after that. The chapter concludes with military victory but it is the personal tragedy of King David's family which really takes center stage.

If ever there were ever a passage of scripture which illustrated the destructive power of sin, this is it. David's sin with Bathsheba sets an example of selfishness, lust, scheming, manipulation, grasping at power, and a need for control that is replicated in his sons. The consequences of David's action do not end with him. It destroys his whole family.

How do we so often fail to see this in our own world today? Yes, of course, personal responsibility plays a role. Absalom's actions were not completely determined by his father. He could have chosen a different path. So also, we can choose to rise above our circumstances. But there can also be little doubt that children often pay for the sins of their parents. A father's abuse pays negative dividends in every relationship his daughter ever has. A mother's irresponsibility of even simple insecurity leaves her child without a father. A parent's lust for possessions or power leaves his or her children without any sense of value or direction in life. The list goes on. It is a story perpetuated every day in a million different ways. So often, we are not the one's who pay most dearly for our own sins.

It's not an idea that had occured to me specifically before writing this post but maybe it would be a worthy experiment. What if every time I was tempted to avoid some of my responsibilities or to allow certain images to pass before my eyes or to be selfish and arrogant rather than compassionate and humble, what if I thought of my daughter and my soon-to-be son? And I don't mean that I should think about them in the sense of what I want them to see or learn or the kind of person I am trying to teach them to be. I mean that I should think about them with the assumption that it doesn't matter if they ever see that particular action or not. It doesn't matter if they see that particular action because they always see me and at some level those actions are inseparable from who I am and therefore also vitally connected to who they will become. We can not determine the course of our children's lives but the story of David reminds us that who we are surely sets the tone for who they will be.

I Am the Sinner

A good story draws you in. It gets you involved. It provokes your passions and emotions. It moves you from spectator to participant.

Part of making that move from spectator to participant usually involves our identification with certain characters in the story. We have to be able to relate to someone within the story. The good story teller helps us to feel that character's pain and joy, to know what it is like to be in their situation, even bringing us to see ourselves in them.

Most often we find ourselves identifying with the heroes in the story; sometimes a tragic hero but the hero nonetheless. We identify with the good and honorable characters who inspire us because we believe that we must have that same good within us somewhere; that we would have their courage or their perseverance if we faced the same odds.

But it takes an especially gifted story teller to cause us to identify with the bad guy or evil villain in a story. Who reads a comic book and identifies with Doc Oc more than Spider-man? Or more darkly, who reads about the Holocaust and sees themselves in the Nazi guard rather than the Holocaust survivor? The same is true as we read the stories of scripture. As you read the stories of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees in the gospels, how often do you come away from those passages thinking "Wow, I'm really just like the Phariesees." We have erected all kinds of defenses that keep us from seeing ourselves in the evil characters of a story. We hold them at arm's length seeing in them as something other and different from us...

...unless a story teller is gifted enough to find away around those initial defenses and show us a true pictures of ourselves that we can't deny. This is precisely what the prophet Nathan does in 2 Samuel 12. (Read the whole story in 2 Samuel 11:1-12:15. You can read just Nathan's parable to David here.) Nathan tells a story which gets around David's defenses and justifications of his sin and allows him to clearly see the injustice of what he has done with Bathsheba. God's word to David through Nathan cuts through David's skewed perception of himself and allows David to see himself as God sees him. Immediately upon seeing the situation clearly, David does the only acceptable thing, he repents.

The irony is that even as we read this story; even as we hear Nathan's story deconstruct David's defenses we probably have not allowed our own walls of security to be torn down. Which character in the story did you see yourself in the most; Nathan or David? Do you imagine that you are the one who brings God's word to others or the one who needs to repent? As a pastor, there is no question that I identify with Nathan. I certainly want to imagine that I am one who always speaks God's word bolbly and prophetically to those who need to hear it, even it is someone in a position of power and influence. But as a pastor, I must also know that too often I am the one in power to whom God's word needs to be boldly and prophetically spoken. I am the one who needs God's word to pierce all my defenses. I am the sinner who needs to repent.

Of course, when we stop to think about it we know that in the Chuch we are always both. We must repent of our own sin and we must also speak God's word to the sin of our world. We are saved sinners, wounded healers, rescued rescuers. We are both Nathan and David. May God send the Church Nathans to show us where we have been as blind as David. May God lead us to repentance like David's so that we might fulfill our prophetic role like Nathan.

Entangled in Sin's Web

You wouldn't think that shirking a little responsibility would lead to murder but that is the tragic progression of events in 2 Samuel 11.

Up to this point in the story of David he has been an incredible, examplary character. Over and over again, David places a radical faith and trust in God. David's faith has been so tremendous that he has become the very model of what it means to be the ruler of God's people. But even David is not immune to the power of sin.

This tragic story begins innocently enough. David's first error is so small that you might dismiss it as an inconsequetial introductory remark at the beginning of 2 Samuel 11. "Then it happened in the spring at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel and they destroyed the sons of Ammon and besieged Rabbah. But David stayed at Jerusalem." As king, it was David's responsibility to lead his men into battle, a task which David had successfully accomplished so many times before. But this time David shirks his responsibility, sending others to risk their lives while he remains safe and comfortable in the capital city.

Of course, this is something we've all done. At some point or another along the way, we've all abandoned some responsibility, small or great, that we've known was rightfully ours to address. Often, this irresponsibility seems innocent enough at the time. But it is this simple abdication on the part of David that allows him to be on his roof when Bathsheba is bathing. Now David's apathy quickly turns to lust and his lust quickly becomes adultery and an abuse of his kingly authority. David uses Bathsheba has an object to satisfy his needs and sends her back home.

Then come those fateful words. Bathsheba sends word to the king: "I am pregnant." Now David can not hide his sin. Everyone will know that Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, was gone to war at the time of this child's conception. People will ask questions. Word will get out. David has to do something to save his reputation. So the king calls for Uriah to come home from the battlefield and spend a night with his wife. David thinks he has the situation under control; he's devised the perfect cover up.

But David hasn't taken into consideration the kind of principled man that Uriah is; the kind of principled man that David used to be. Uriah refuses to enjoy the comforts of home as long as the rest of the king's men and the ark of the Lord are still on the battlefield. The irony is almost too much to bear; Uriah refuses to sleep with his own wife out of respect for the king who has called him home in an attempt to cover up his affair with Uriah's wife.

Once David sees that his plan has failed, his entanglement in this growing web of sin only grows greater. Uriah will meet the fate that so many principled individuals meet in the midst of unprincipled politics. He unwittingly carries his own death sentence with him in the form of a letter from David to Joab, the commander of the army, in which Joab is instructed to see to it that Uriah is killed in battle. Joab, ever David's obedient and unquestioning servant, follows his orders and sees to it that Uriah (along with several of his fellow soldiers) are killed by sending them into a stratgically suicidal position on the battlefield.

So often I watch the news and am amazed at how incredibly stupid, irresponsible, insensitive, unjust, and downright immoral our politicians can be. It seems to be the exception rather than the rule to find a public figure who is truly honorable. But then passages of scripture like this one remind me how simply and innocently these kind of things begin because the same, powerful sinful nature that is at work within them is at work within me as well. No, I haven't committed adultery or murder and there is something to be said for that. I'm not saying that our politicians or other public figures should be let off the hook because they are really no worse than any of the rest of us. They have been entrusted with a tremendous responsibility and they should face the appropriate consequences when they break that trust.

What I am saying is that when I am being truly honest with myself I know that the same motivations that led to David's tremendous sin are motivations that threaten to control my existence as well. I often have the desire to ignore my responsibilities or to consider certain tasks below me or to abuse what power I have for my own benefit. I too am tempted to treat people like objects rather than people. I too suffer from the infectious desire to look good, to have people think well of me, to avoid public humiliation, and to always be in control of my surroundings. I may not have committed adultery and murder but there is little doubt that all of those forces which led to David's adultery and murder reside somewhere deep in the recesses of my soul as well.

This is what we mean when we talk about original sin, when we talk about all of humanity being sinful. It does not mean that we are all horrible people who are just constantly sinning in everything that we do, although on certain days that may not seem to far from the truth either. It means that even in the many good things we may do there is still a certain part of our nature that is bent in on itself and our own selfish desires. If it were not for the grace of God those powerful desires would so overwhelm us that we would have no choice but to become more and more entangled in sin's web as David is in this story.

Hesed: A Place at the King's Table

Hesed. Loyalty, loving-kindness, faithfulness, unfailing commitment; all English words used in an attempt to capture the meaning of hesed. It's got to be one of the most important words in the Old Testament. 2 Samuel 9 is a story about hesed.

Long before David had become king, he had made a promise to his close friend Jonathan. David promised Jonathan that he would always show hesed to Jonathan's descendants (1 Samuel 20:15). This was no small promise because as David was making this promise, he was in competition for the throne with Jonathan's father, Saul, the current king of Israel. To put it simply, despite Jonathan and David's friendship, David and Jonathan's descendants were bound to be political rivals as competing claimants of the throne of Israel. Nevertheless, David binds himself to Jonathan with this promise.

In 2 Samuel 9, David has completed his rise to power as the king of all Israel and Judah. While the narrator of 2 Samuel makes it clear that David was not responsible for the deaths of his political enemies, David's rise to power has still been a violent and bloody affair in which all others with a claim to the throne have been killed. Now David wants to know if there are any descendants of Jonathan to whom he might show hesed as he had promised.

It turns out there is one. He is lame in both feet. His name is Mephibosheth.

It is worth noting the order of Ziba's (David's servant) description of Mephibosheth here. We come to know Mephibosheth's disability before we even know his name. Is this because we always tend to see someone's handicap before we see them as a person? Or is it to assure David that Mephibosheth is not a real military or political threat? Or are we to hear an echo of David's own story in the description of Mephibosheth? When David is first introduced in 1 Samuel 16, like Mephibosheth, he is regarded as a "left-over" of a boy, too young to be considered important, whose name is not even mentioned until he has been anointed by Samuel. Perhaps, we are to hear some mixture of all three of these story lines intertwined together in a complicated mess of good and less honorable intentions as so often happens in real life.

In the end, David keeps his promise to Jonathan and summons Mephibosheth to his royal court. Mephibosheth must have thought this was a summons to his death. As the last living relative of David's political opponents, surely the only reason he would be summoned by the king would be for his execution. But David's covenant with Jonathan completely reverses the parameters of David's relationship to Mephibosheth. Instead of being executed, Mephibosheth is given land and servants and a place at the king's table. This is hesed: a loyalty and faithfulness so great that it relativizes all the other conditions of a relationship.

Of course, David's hesed to Jonathan through Mephibosheth is just a faint image of God's hesed to us. Like Mephibosheth before David, we come before God broken and powerless. We have no claim on this king. He owes us nothing. There is no reason that he should be generous to us... except that he has bound himself to us. And that simple fact changes everything. God has covenanted with us, he has promised us redemption and he is a God who keeps his promises no matter the costs. He is a God of hesed.

Shepherd of Sheep to Shepherd of a People

In 2 Samuel 5, the elders of Israel come to David asking him to be their king. Up to this point, David has only been king over Judah but now Abner and Ish-bosheth, the two most likely kings of Israel, have both been killed. Now David is the most reasonable option for Israel and they covenant with him to be their king.

This passage describing the coronation of David as king over all Israel and Judah is widely recognized as the end of one phase of David's story; namely, the story of his rise to power. This story began back in 1 Samuel 16 when Samuel anointed David to be king even though he was a young boy. However, as the many chapters between that story and this story show, Samuel's anointing of David did not mean an immediate rise to power. After all, David was unknown and Saul was still king. In those chapters are story after story of David trusting God and refusing to force his own schedule or agenda. For example, David more than once has an opportunity to kill Saul, his political opponent, but he refuses to do so leaving it up to God to make him king as he promised. In fact, the story clears David of any culpability in the death of any of his enemies. While this certainly does not remove the blood and violence from the story of David's rise, it does show that David did not take his anointing into his own hands. He trusts God to fulfill his promises and this chapter of 2 Samuel records that God was faithful to those promises.

This is a continous struggle for us as the Church. God has promised us many things and we take those promises to heart and are passionate about seeing them fulfilled. But often we forget that they are God's promises to keep, not an agenda given to us to put in place. God calls us to be obedient and to trust him, not to make his plans happen for him. Does God want his Church to grow? Of course! But he wants it to grow through the work of his Spirit and the faithful Christ-likeness of his Church, not through some marketing gimmick. Does God want justice in our world? Yes, painfully so! But not by traditional means of power and might but by his Spirit and the mercy of his people. David's rise to power as king is a reminder to us that God does not need us to make his kingdom come; he only needs us to live faithfully in anticipation of it.

What's in a house?

In 2 Samuel 7, King David desires to build a house for God. This desire seems reasonable enough. It even seems good and holy on David's part. After all, the passage says that God has given David rest from all of his enemies and David himself dwells in a luxurious palace. So it only seems right that David would want to honor God in some way and one of the normal things a king could do in the ancient world in order to honor a god was to build that god a temple. We often speak with similar language today, believing that the honor we show to our church buildings, which we sometimes refer to as God's house, is one reflection of how highly we honor God. Even the prophet Nathan seems to agree that this is a good idea. God has been with David in everything else he has done so why wouldn't God approve of a pious action like this one? It seems that David can do no wrong.

But then the passage tells us that on that very same night God told Nathan to say to David "Are you the one who should build Me a house to dwell in?" God reminds David through Nathan that he has dwelt in a tent ever since he miraculously delivered the people from their oppression in Egypt and never once did he ask anyone to build a house for him. Furthermore, God is the one who has built up David. Why does David now think that he can build up God? God seems almost angry with David for having even considered the idea of building a house for God. Why does something that appeared to be such a holy and pious act now appear to be almost offensive to God?

Consider what a house represents: permanence, stability, settling down. Jess and I will become home owners tomorrow morning and when we do our fate as a family will be that much more closely tied to the fate of this community. Owning a home is a very physical and financial demonstration that we intend to be here for a while and that the problems and prosperity of Clinton, IL will be our problems and prosperity. We already had a vested interest in this town but now we will in an even more immediate and intimate way.

David knows of all this when he proclaims that he is going to build a house for God. David knows that if he can build a temple for Yahweh in his capital city then this will in some way bind God's honor with the level of peace and prosperity that exists in Israel. What may appear to be a purely sacrificial act to the glory and honor of God may, in fact, be an attempt to tie God down, to bind God's fate with the fate of David's kingdom, even to legitimate David's reign. And God sees right through it. On the one hand, this passage portrays Yahweh as a radically free God who refuses to be limited by a building.

On the other hand, in this passage God practically gives back with one hand what he has taken with the other. God repudiates David for even a hint of trying to manipulate God by building a temple. But even as God says that he will not be held captive by a temple, he makes David another promise. God tells David that he will build a house for David, meaning not a physical structure but a dynasty of descendants who will rule over David's kingdom forever. God has turned the tables on David and instead of allowing David to build a house for God, God is going to build a house for David. Furthermore, God promises that his loving-kindness will never depart from David's descendants. The irony is that in many ways, this promise to David may be just as or even more binding on God than if David had built a temple for God. All in the same word to Nathan, God refuses to be limited by a building but promises to be eternally bound to a people.

Certainly, this is one of the most beautiful realities of the incarnation, of the Christmas story. It is so much more than an adorable little story about a new born in a manger. It is the reality that the almighty God of everything has chosen to be limited by human flesh, to be forever bound to the fate of his creation by becoming one of us. Our radically free God who is capable and free to do whatever he wants, who refuses even the hint of manipulation by his own anointed king, who will not and can not be limited by any power other than his own free choice, freely chooses to be forever constrained by the birth of this child 2000 years ago. The boundless God has forever bound himself to the fate of his people.

What can we say?

other than a humble

"Thanks be to God!"