By Pastor Phil (Please feel free to email a response or question)

August 2, 2009

2 Samuel 11: 26-12: 13a; John 6: 24-35

The two settings seem so different.

David, the king at the peak of his power, meeting somewhere deep inside his palace with an advisor who is about to call him to account.

Jesus, the itinerant preacher, trying to dodge the crowds who think they might get more food out there in the Galilean countryside.

One story ends with anguish and remorse. The other one ends with words of hope. And in between is this plea of David that we sang a few minutes ago – “Turn my heart, O God. Take my pain and brokenness. Shape my life for you.”  

I imagine that somewhere in this room this morning, there are people who have experienced each of the elements in these stories. 

It may be like David, with something from the past that feels unforgiveable. 

It may be like Bathsheba, carrying the hurt of one who was betrayed. 

It may be like Nathan, finding the courage to call those who abuse their power to change their ways. 

It may be like the people on the hills in Galilee, that time when physical hunger was very real.

It may be like the people who pursued Jesus with a desire for more and material things without any thought to what their spirits needed. 

One of the things these stories are about is the search for ways to sustain ourselves, no matter what is swirling around us. They are stories of God’s love, God’s forgiveness, God’s generosity. But they are not simple stories.

Both the story of David and the story of Jesus have their roots in the readings from last Sunday, so in case you weren’t here or the details have slipped your mind, let me first set up the story of David.

The basic story is a familiar one. David is on the roof of his palace and sees Bathsheba bathing. He asks for her to be brought to his room, and – as the translation puts it, ”he lay with her.” Soon, she sends word to David that she is pregnant. After first opting for deceit – he tries unsuccessfully to get her husband, a soldier who is at war, to sleep with her so it will look like he is the father -- David then opts for murder. He arranges to have her husband killed in battle.

That’s where today’s story starts. And notice this wonderful bit of understatement: “The thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”  Ya think?

But David is the king. He can do whatever he wants. He has a long history of being ruthless, of using the women in his life for his own pleasure, of rewarding those who help him and doing away with those who get in his way.  He’s not the first powerful man to do that. Maybe not the last one, either.

It’s easy enough to manage Bathsheba. Let her mourn the death of her husband in battle, then add her to his harem so she can have their child in the palace. What then would she have to complain about?

And God?  Well, David has always managed to straighten things out with God in the past and he was pretty sure he could skate through this little problem as well.

Except that the thing David had done displeased the Lord. 

Enter Nathan, the prophet. He has had to tell David hard truths in the past, like that David would not be the one to build a glorious temple in Jerusalem. But this message was much harder. Yet Nathan had the courage to go ahead, phrasing the rebuke in a way that would lead David to see what a terrible thing he had done.

You heard the story of the rich traveler depriving the poor farmer of his favorite lamb. You heard David’s hypocritically  righteous outrage. And you heard Nathan’s chilling retort: “You are that man.”  

You heard Nathan tell David what bad things would happen as a consequence of David’s self-absorption. 

And you heard David’s moment of self-awareness: 

“I have sinned against the Lord.”

What you did not hear is the line that comes next:

“Now the Lord has put away your sin. You shall not die.”

And then in what seems like a perverse form of justice, the infant son of Bathsheba and David dies. This is the first of many sorrows that will befall David for the rest of his life – earthly consequences for selfishness, even if David himself has eluded a divine death penalty.

That’s where this story gets pretty complicated for us. That’s where it’s hard to figure out what meaning we are to draw out of this.  

In the story of David, this event really marks a turning point. Before seducing Bathsheba and ordering the death of her husband, David was steadily on the rise. From this point on, he is on the decline. 

As author Jonathan Kirsch writes in his probing biography, King David: “The house of David would come to be a snakepit of sexual relations and political conspiracy, deception and betrayals, blood feuds and blood vengeance.”  Even with his words of repentance, David’s self-absorption remains with him for the rest of his life, but it is a more chastened David than we saw before.

David did not get off scot free. He paid a huge personal price – as did so many members of his family. Is this what God’s forgiveness looks like? If so, maybe that’s not the kind of forgiveness we really want.

Let me suggest a few things here.

God’s forgiveness is not a guarantee that our life will not go well. God’s forgiveness is not a free ticket to wealth or power or popularity or health or even just a job.  

In the story of David and Nathan, God gave David his life back. Think metaphorically about that.  Maybe in the story, a thunderbolt could have shot out of the sky and killed David on the spot. But think of Nathan saying to David, yes, once again God is giving you another chance to turn your heart.

It was still up to David to decide what to do with that chance. Psalm 51 comes into play here as David’s expression of repentance, of David coming to see that when he separates himself from God, his life goes in the wrong direction with terrible consequences not only for himself, but for others as well.

The hymn we sang – “Turn My Heart” – is based on Psalm 51.  It is a Psalm of acknowledging our failures, lamenting our failures, but even more, it is a psalm of trust in God’s love and mercy. It is a prayer to the God of Second Chances. It is a psalm of transformation.

Hear these words: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me… Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.”

Sustain in me. I can’t do this alone. When I forget about you, pull me back.  When I remember that I am made in your image, then it is harder for me to act as though I am the only being that matters. 

I think that is really the key to this story of David. It is a reminder of how important it is to stay connected to God, how sustaining that connection enables us to realize that we have a connection to the people and the world around us. It’s not all just about me.

The folks to whom Jesus gave bread one day were back for more the next day.  Last week, we heard the story of Jesus asking his followers to pass around five loaves of bread and a couple of fish and the crowd learned about God’s abundance and the potential in sharing.

Today, we learn that many in the crowd thought that Jesus was about food distribution, just like the Israelites of old had relied on manna appearing in the desert each morning as they journeyed to the Promised Land. 

The bread that you eat will only sustain you for a little while, Jesus tells the crowd. Yes, you need that physical bread. But I am offering something better. 

I showed you how to share bread. Now I am showing you how I share my life with you.  I am the bread of life. That is what can sustain you beyond any one day of hunger or thirst. Let my life, my words, my willingness to forgive as God forgives, my transforming defeat and death into new life – let these things sustain you.

On those days when we feel that what we have done is ruining our lives – maybe in small ways, maybe on a grand scale – we can join David is the prayer of Psalm 51, looking for a way to reconnect with God in the midst of it all. 

And then we can gather around a table like this one to be nourished by the bread we share. The little piece of bread that we take off the plates and dip in the cup is not enough bread to sustain our stomachs for even this day. 

But as the bread of life, broken and shared in community, it can nourish our spirits, it can sustain our beings beyond all imagination.  That’s the power of what awaits us here today. Let us continue on the journey towards this table.