Remember the first story we heard in which David had an active role? It was the story of David and Goliath. Young David, ruddy and handsome, showed up on the front lines of battle and with nothing more than a slingshot and a stone, defeated the giant Goliath -- a giant who had all of Israel’s army, including King Saul, paralyzed with fear. That was just the beginning of David’s youth and young adulthood, which was characterized by nonstop action: running from Saul, leading armies in victory after victory, becoming king over Israel, bringing the Ark of God to Jerusalem, building a palace, filling it with wives and children, leading more victorious battles over Israel’s enemies. When I think of David during this period in his life, I think of Matt Damon in the Bourne Identity movies, constantly on the move, using his intellect and physical power to escape his would-be captors time and again. Or I think of Barack Obama, cool, calm, and collected; able to think on his feet, handsome and fit, surrounded by wise advisors, flanked by a beautiful wife and daughters. Like these men, David was in the prime of his life, and even though he faced constant challenges, life was exciting. It was full of action. There was always more to do than David could get done, and that’s how he liked it. He was the man every man in his kingdom wanted to be: smart, strong, handsome, and faithful to God. What a testament to his faith, that through it all, David maintained a firm hold on his awareness that everything he had came from God and that God -- not David -- deserved the glory.
But then, gradually, one winter, it happened as it happens to us all! His stomach started to pooch out in a way it never had before. His jaw line, always so firm, started to soften. When he put on his armor, it felt tight in places, uncomfortable. And, frankly, after riding his horse for just a short period of time, he’d get these nagging aches and pain. The thought of riding into battle suddenly held little appeal, especially when he imagined sleeping night after night in a tent with just a thin blanket between his body and the ground. For the first time in his life, David didn’t want adventure. He wanted to stay home. So when spring finally came and the mud had dried up enough for armies to travel the roads and defend their territory, David stayed behind. But just to remind everyone who was the king, he sent his army out, told them where to go and what to do, claimed his authority so that they would remember who was in charge.
David had never been home in the springtime before and he quickly discovered that without the company of his advisors and his soldiers, there wasn’t much to do. There were wives and concubines, but that was nothing new. After just a few days, David found himself deeply, profoundly, utterly bored.
And so one day he wandered onto his roof, from which he had a view of the courtyards of the surrounding houses. That’s when he saw her. A young woman, bathing her strong, slender, youthful body, oblivious to the rest of the world. That’s what David wanted, that’s what David needed to feel young again, to give his life meaning. Just seeing her gave David a renewed sense of need, of purpose. Now he had something to do, a goal to pursue. And David springs into action. He finds out who she is, he sends for her, and he takes her to his bed, hoping, in that encounter, however brief, to feel young again.
Maybe, for a moment, he did. But what really made him feel young again was when he received word, a few weeks later, that Bathsheeba was pregnant. Now the king had more than a purpose. Now he had something to make him feel motivated, inspired, powerful: now he had a big problem that had to be solved and fast. As stressful as it may have been, it made him feel like a king again. And, boy, did he act like one. He brainstormed the perfect cover-up, sending for Uriah who would surely want to make love to his beautiful wife while he was home from the battlefield, creating the illusion that he was the father of her child. What David didn’t bargain for was that Uriah was a good man, thoughtful of others, loyal to his troops. Uriah refused to enjoy the comforts of home while his soldiers slept on the ground of the battlefield. David, on the other hand, could think only of himself. He sent Uriah back to the battlefield carrying in his own hands the directive that would end his life. David just kept on scheming. Why? Because it felt good! He felt in charge, full of purpose. He felt young again. He felt like a king. He felt like the king.
As the sense of his own power overcame his mind like a drug, David forgot something. When he was young, his drug of choice wasn’t his own power. It was his firm belief in God’s power. It was the comfort he took knowing that no matter what challenge confronted him, he could face it head on because God was with him and God was in charge. The rush he felt now obscured that. God, what God? David had the power now, power to seduce, to deceive, to kill. He felt young, invincible, immortal. He felt like a god. He felt like the God.
******
Over the course of one hundred days in the spring of 1994, nearly a million Tutsis, the minority group in the African country of Rwanda, were massacred by members of the Hutu majority. The killers acted on orders from the Hutu government, which adhered to an ideology known as Hutu Power. No one was spared. Men, women, infants, children, teenagers, the elderly; Hutus even killed members of their own extended families who were Tutsi.
Philip Gourevitch, a reporter, visited Rwanda several times in the fifteen years after the slaughter of the Tutsis. He got to know a Hutu named Girumuhatse, and he got to know him well enough to ask him very personal questions about his involvement in the killings. Girumuhatse had publicly confessed to killing no less than eleven people. At one point, Philip asked him whether he had enjoyed the killings.
“Yes,” Girumuhatse answered. “For me it became a pleasure to kill. The first time, it’s to please the government. After that, I developed a taste for it. I hunted and caught and killed with real enthusiasm. It was work, but work that I enjoyed. It wasn’t like working for the government. It was like doing your own true job--like working for myself. I was very, very excited when I killed. I remember each killing. Yes, I woke every morning excited to go into the bush. It was the hunt--the human hunt...The genocide was like a festival. At day’s end, or anytime there was an occasion, we took a cow from the Tutsis, and slaughtered it and grilled it and drank beer. There were no limits anymore. It was a festival. We celebrated.”(1)
Granted, this example is extreme, but when I read it I couldn’t help but think of David. The way Girumuhatse felt when he murdered his fellow citizens must have been similar to the way David felt when he glimpsed Bathsheeba and knew, for the first time in a long time, what he had to do. Then when he found out she was pregnant, that feeling, that sense of purpose, just grew stronger and stronger until Uriah was dead in the ground and Bathsheeba, large with new life, was officially a wife of the king.
This feeling of power, of immortality doesn’t entirely fade for David, even after Bathsheeba is his wife. He manages to keep at bay the awareness of his sin -- of all the sinful actions that started small and got bigger and bigger until a man was dead. When the prophet Nathan comes to David and tells him a story, David doesn’t even hear the parallels to his own actions. By the end, he is furious with the thieving man and -- again, eager to play God -- declares that the man should be put to death.
Nathan says to David, “You are the man.”
And just like that, the elaborate image of himself that David had erected, the idol of his own likeness he had started worshipping the moment he saw Bathsheeba and took her into his bed, that idol crumbled to the ground. At that moment, seeing himself for what he really was -- a mere mortal, capable of being overcome, undone by his sin -- at that moment, he remembers who the real King is.
*****
The early theologian Augustine of Hippo is believed to have first come up with the Latin phrase felix culpa, which translates, “O happy sin!” It may sound strange to our ears, but the point is that sin has a good side, an aspect that is even more beautiful than the sin itself is ugly. And we don’t have to read this episode in David’s life to know that sin and its consequences can be very, very ugly.
It’s a moment of exquisite pain, matched only by the feeling of intense relief. Because what is sin for any of us if not a moment or series of moments during which we think we are gods -- or, if we don’t actually think that, we act like it? We act like we are totally in charge of our lives (and all too often, the lives of others). And when it finally occurs to us that we have forgotten who is really in charge, we simultaneously remember that the One in charge is none other than the God who created us, who watches our every move, hears our every thought, witnesses the destruction we bring on ourselves and others, and -- here’s the really humbling part -- loves us still, every minute of every day. We remember that the one in charge is the God who loves us enough to bring to our attention the thing we refused to see while we made idols of ourselves: “You are the one.”
In her book Speaking of Sin, writer Barbara Brown Taylor argues that in today’s culture we have stopped speaking of sin in theological terms. We find it offensive or difficult to use the words that have enabled centuries of faithful Jews and Christians to express and understand the role of sin in their lives, words like repentance, penance, salvation, damnation. Instead we talk about sin in either legal or medical terms. In legal terms, sin is simply a set of behaviors which are forbidden or which will result in punishment. In medical terms, sin is a disease or a disability, one that all human beings have through no fault of our own. Like an illness, we are at the mercy of sin; it is not something we have any control over. But, says Taylor, neither of these models are adequate substitutes for theology, because only when we cast sin as a theological issue can we proclaim “O happy sin!” The way Taylor puts it is this: “sin is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again. There is no help for those who admit no need of help. There is no repair for those who insist that nothing is broken, and there is no hope of transformation for a world whose inhabitants accept that it is sadly but irreversibly wrecked.”(2)
In a strange way, it is this episode in David’s life that truly makes him a role model for us, because it is here, more than anywhere else in David’s story where we recognize ourselves. Do we not hear ourselves implicated when Nathan turns on David and pronounces: “You are the man!” -- shocking him (and us) out of his idolatrous reverie? And then David offers us an example of how we might respond, because instead of arguing with Nathan and denying his responsibility for the wrong he has done, instead of insisting that he needs no help, that nothing is broken, David says simply, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
What follows is anything but simple. David and Bathsheeba’s son becomes ill and David prays and repents. He doesn’t eat and -- aches and pains be damned -- he sleeps on the hard ground to show his remorse. Only after the child dies does David wash himself, change his clothes, and go to worship God. The death of his son will not be the last consequence of David’s sin: some believe that all the bad things that happen to his family right up until the Israelites are taken into exile by the Babylonians, are all the result of David’s unfaithfulness to God in this series of events. No wonder we don’t like to speak of sin. Because it is almost unbearable to think that the consequences of our actions will reverberate for the rest of our lives and the lives of the next generation.
It is almost unbearable. Except that by identifying such actions as sin we have already taken the first step toward the hard work of repentance, which as Taylor puts it, “begins with the decision...to accept our God-given place in community, and to choose a way of life that increases life for all members of that community.” When we recognize our sin, we remember who we are and who God is -- a God whose capacity for mercy is infinitely greater than our capacity for sin; a God who longs to make us new, not by erasing our sin but by helping us to see it and ourselves and the world as they really are, a God whose mercy washes us clean like the healing rain in the video we saw earlier, a God who chose to redeem the whole world by sending his son to walk among us and show us what a life without sin would look like. O happy sin indeed.
*****
During the Italian Renaissance there was a man apprenticed to a master potter, one who made exquisite pottery. The master set out one day to make a vase. He crafted it by hand, shaping it slowly and deliberately as it turned on the wheel. After glazing it and firing it in the oven, the master set the vase on a pedestal and he and the apprentice admired its beauty, which was almost indescribable. It was a thing of perfection. The master lovingly took the vase into his hands, lifted it above his head, and let it crash to the floor, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. The apprentice was horrified.
Then the master set about picking up each shard of the vase and piecing it back together. Once it was whole again, in spite of the web of cracks that covered its surface, he painted it with liquid gold. The gold seeped into every crack and when the whole vase was painted, it was even more beautiful than before, and the most exquisite thing about it was how the light bounced off those cracks, reflecting the gold. That vase became the most treasured piece of art in all the land. May we know the joy that comes when we get put back together by the Master. And may we then go forth doing the satisfying, life-giving work that shines God’s light in the world, knowing that God’s light shines brightest through our broken places. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Philip Gourevitch, A Reporter at Large, “The Life After,” The New Yorker, May 4, 2009, p. 37.
2. Taylor, Barbara Brown, Speaking of Sin. Cowley Publications 2000, p. 41.
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