Episodes
Sunday Feb 02, 2014
Too Good To Be True
Sunday Feb 02, 2014
Sunday Feb 02, 2014
Rev. Dean Snyder
Psalm 51:1-19
Israel wanted a king like other nations had.
God said no. Israel pouted and complained until God let them have a king.
I want to suggest that Israel wanted more than a king. Israel wanted a hero.
Israel’s first king was a mistake. His name was Saul and he was chosen, at least in part, because he looked like a king. He was handsome and he was tall. I Sam. 9:2 says “There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he; he stood head and shoulders above everyone else.”
Handsome and tall. He looked like a king, he looked like a hero.
But he wasn’t. He turned out to be insecure and anxiety-ridden and cowardly.
This young man appeared, a boy really. A boy, not tall like a king or hero, but with ruddy checks and bright eyes, I Samuel 16 tells us. His name was David. He became Israel’s second king, their true hero. A person after God’s own heart.
Israel loved to tell stories about David … about his courage. When he was shepherd boy, yet hardly a teenager, and he tended his father’s sheep he protected the sheep by wrestling and killing with his own hands a lion and a bear.
When he was hardly more than a boy he fought a giant named Goliath and defeated him with only a slingshot and five smooth stones.
He was a musician. He was first introduced to the palace because King Saul had insomnia and awful nightmares and the only way he could sleep is if David played him to sleep with his guitar, his lyre. David was more courageous than any other man, but he was also a rock star.
Israel loved David.
When King Saul saw David’s growing popularity, Saul put David on his hit list. He determined to kill him. But David never hated Saul back. David became best friends with Saul’s son Jonathan. Twice David could have killed Saul but he did not because he honored Saul as king. David was never revengeful, never less than loyal, and never petty.
Israel loved David, a man after God’s own heart. God loves David like God has never loved another, Israel said.
David was a wise king and a smart king. Under his leadership Israel grew and grew until Israel, a nation that others had told jokes about, until Israel, always the butt of a joke, became one of the great world powers, a nation to be admired, a nation to be respected, and a nation to be feared.
David did that.
Israel finally had a true king. Israel finally had a true hero.
Then it happened. It was a story we could have read in yesterday’s newspaper. Why did it happen? We don’t know. Why do our heroes betray us?
Maybe David had a midlife crisis. Maybe David had been so successful and accomplished so much that he got bored. Maybe because everyone said God loved him in a special way that he was so special, he thought the rules did not apply to him.
Who knows why these things happen.
One day David was sitting on the roof deck of his palace where he could see out over his capital city of Jerusalem, and he saw a woman bathing. At the moment, David thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
David had a wife. In fact he had wives, we don’t know how many. He had concubines. Second Samuel tells us he had at least 10 concubines. This was biblical family values at the time. A powerful man, a hero, could have as many wives and concubines as he desired.
But suddenly David wanted this beautiful woman he saw bathing. Her name was Bathsheba. He could have as many wives and concubines as he wanted, but David could not have Bathsheba because she was already married.
He took her anyway. And she became pregnant.
Bathsheba’s husband was Uriah, a general in David’s army. David ordered Uriah to come home from battle to Jerusalem figuring that is Uriah slept with his wife Bathsheba no one would be the wiser when Bathsheba had a child 8 months later.
But Uriah was a man of honor and he refused to sleep with his wife when his soldiers back in the field were not able to go home to sleep with their wives.
So David ordered Uriah send to the head of the lines in the fiercest place of battle where he would be likely to die. Uriah obeyed orders and Uriah died in battle.
And David took the pregnant Bathsheba to be yet another one of his wives.
David had a prophet he kept on staff. Nathan was his name. He was a prophet who lived in David’s household. Today we might call him an ethics officer, I guess.
Nathan told David a story about a farmer who had many sheep, many more sheep than he would ever need. There was another farmer who had only one sheep whom he loved dearly. The farmer with many sheep wanted his neighbor’s one sheep so he killed him and took the sheep.
David was outraged. Tell me who this man is, he told Nathan, and I will have him executed.
Nathan said to David: “You are the man.”
And David for the first time in his life realized that he was a sinner. That he had committed a great sin. That he was capable of evil.
The psalm we read this morning is credited to David … it is said to be the prayer he wrote after Nathan spoke to him the words, “You are the man.”
It is a painful prayer to read:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.
Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
But David was never the same again. David never lived in the illusion of being an untarnished hero again. The Bible starts to talk about David in a new way. It begins reporting that David has the same kind of messy life we all have: Family problems and family joys; Failures and successes; Generosity and selfishness. David …and Israel… had discovered David was human.
We are looking at stories of strength and weakness in the Bible.
David was the greatest hero Israel had ever known - A brave man, an honorable man, a man without guile, a man after God’s own heart. A good man. All the superlatives.
My mother, who was a bit of a cynic, had a saying she repeated. If it is too good to be true, she’d say, it probably isn’t. David –it turned out-- was too good to be true.
God did not stop loving David. Israel did not stop loving David.
But they began loving him not as a golden boy, not as a god, not as an angel but as the flawed and glorious human being we all are,
Martin Luther, who began the Protestant reformation, taught that all of us –you and I, each of us—are both saint and sinner. We are all capable of goodness and we are all capable of selfishness and evil.
The problem happens when we begin to view ourselves or others as pure saints or pure sinners. We are each one of us both.
When we so need a hero that we turn someone into a pure saint, we will always be disappointed. When we need a hero too badly, someone to idolize and worship, whether a parent, star or priest, we will always be disappointed.
There is no one more a saint than you are. You and I are as much saint as anyone. We have the capacity to love and to sacrifice and do amazing good, caring, saving things.
Do not give your sainthood away.
And you and I are as much sinner as anyone. We have the capacity for great selfishness. We have the capacity to harm others. We have the capacity to see others hurting and not really care so long as we have a warm place to sleep and food in our bellies.
Do not give your sinner hood away. Do not turn anyone into a pure saint or into a pure sinner.
These are two ways of avoiding our own responsibilities.
Something inside us longs for a world of heroes and villains -- Superman and Lex Luther, Batman and the Riddler, Republican and Democrat, Seahawks and Broncos, America and whatever country is our enemy lately.
“Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think,” the Apostle Paul writes to the members of the church at Rome. But then he goes on to use a metaphor and the point of the metaphor is for us not to think of ourselves as worse than we ought.
Israel so badly wanted a hero that David became a cartoon, a phony to himself and others, when one day during a conversation with Nathan he stopped believing his own press. He realized that he had been a sinner from his birth. He had within him the capacity for great harm.
But he also had within himself the capacity for great good. So he could pray: “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” And he could pray: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.”
You and me too.
We debate sometimes the old doctrine of original sin. When we baptize a baby, so innocent and beautiful, we say how could we believe in original sin. The problem is that we don’t talk enough about original saintliness. They are both true – saint and sinner.
You are a saint, you sinner. You are a sinner, you saint.
Let no one make you either pure saint or sinner. Give neither your sainthood or sinner hood away.
Because, as the meal we are about to share reminds us, fullness
of life is not found in being saint or sinner but in being part of a community
where we all are forgiven and we all are honored.
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