A King of Questionable Virtue

A sermon on 2 Samuel 11:1-15

Before we get started, I’d like to be clear that today's text from the Hebrew Scriptures focuses on themes of sexuality and violence. Addressing these issues as a faith community is important and worthwhile, but it may not be appropriate for every listener. So this is a trigger warning for those who are sensitive to discussions of sexual violence, and a parental guidance warning. I will be preaching on the story of David and Bathsheba, and this sermon is rated PG-13.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, Holy One, our rock and redeemer.  Amen.

I was in the fourth grade or so, and it was a Sunday morning at United Congregational Church in Worcester, Massachusetts. There had been a call to worship, a hymn, and a children’s sermon. We had been dismissed for Sunday school, gone to our classes, said our opening prayer, taken attendance, collected an offering for the Heifer Project. Now it was time to read the scripture and do the activity. “Who wants to read the scripture?” the teacher asked. My hand shot into the air. I was terrible at crafts, but I was a good reader. “Okay, Emily,” the teacher said, “Open your Bible and read to us starting at Exodus 19:15.” I opened my Bible and found the page. “Are you sure?” I said. “Yes,” the teacher replied. “Are you sure you’re sure?” I said, “Chapter 19 verse 15?” “Yes, I’m sure,” the teacher replied impatiently, “please read the lesson.” I could feel my face blushing and my ears burning as I stammered out the words: “and Moses told them, ‘Be ready by the day after tomorrow and don't have sexual intercourse in the meantime.’” The class erupted into laughter. That’s when my teacher interrupted. “What are you DOING?” she shrieked. We got it sorted out eventually – she had meant chapter 15, verse 19, not the other way around. That was the day I learned that the Bible sometimes talks about sex. 

And boy, does it ever. There are protocols and prohibitions; there is luscious love poetry and erotic imagery; there are stories of aging couples longing for children and young lovers on their wedding nights. And there are stories of sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct ranging from stories that are puzzlingly archaic – like Ham, whose misdeed is lost to the fog of ancient euphemisms – to stories that are horrifically relevant – like the woman of Judges 19, who is sexually assaulted and dismembered, as too many women are around the world to this day. 

Our story today of David and Bathsheba is not the most graphic or the most horrifying story of sexual misconduct in the Bible, but it speaks to our contemporary context nonetheless, especially in the ways that power, sexuality, and violence interweave and overlap in this text, as they often do in our contemporary world. 

Our text finds David in the middle of his reign, no longer the promising and idealistic youth who slew the Philistine giant Goliath, but now a wheeling-and-dealing power player who, through some combination of political savvy and divine favor has managed to ascend the throne, attain the upper hand in wars with the surrounding nations, bring the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, and win the people’s hearts. David has been able to acquire everything he has set his eyes on; in today’s reading, he sets his eyes on Bathsheba. He sees her bathing from his rooftop, he wants her, and he sends a messenger to find out who she is. 

David’s is married, but his polygamist society will not look askance at him for seeking variety. By the end of his life, he will have several wives and concubines. He is free to marry another wife, take another concubine, seek out a lover, have an affair. These things are considered neither criminal nor sinful (which are, in David’s society, essentially the same thing). Pursuing Bathsheba, however, is considered criminal and sinful for both of them. Because, in their society, men are permitted to be polygamous, but women are required to be monogamous. Adultery, in their time, is not so much about covenant, as it is about women as property; it is defined as a married woman having sexual contact outsider her marriage, or a man having sexual contact with another man’s wife. And Bathsheba is another man’s wife. Specifically, Bathsheba is the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a soldier in King David’s army, a member of the Thirty, an elite corps of soldiers who are listed by name at the end of 2 Samuel. She is Uriah’s wife, and Uriah is away fighting on King David’s behalf, while David is at home, napping and pursuing Bathsheba. 

Let us imagine, for a moment, what Bathsheba may have experienced when messengers from King David began to knock on her door. Some commentators suggest that she may have been delighted. By bathing within view of the royal roof, they suggest, she was intentionally inviting King David’s attention. Perhaps she was; such things have certainly been known to happen. But I am wary of too easily assuming that Bathsheba was trying to seduce David while she bathed in her own home. Because in our society, when a woman is harassed or assaulted, it is not uncommon to hear the assumption that she was seeking out sexual attention. “She was asking for it.” “Why was she wearing that?” “What was she doing there?” Where there is misconduct, our society too often picks apart every aspect of the victim’s behavior, reputation, and appearance rather than putting the blame on the perpetrator. It is possible Bathsheba was seeking King David’s attention; it is just as possible that she didn’t realize she was being spied on. 

But let’s imagine another possibility. Let us imagine that when a messenger arrives from the King, she finds herself afraid, and weighing her options. There are, of course, repercussions for accepting King David’s invitation. It would be a sin and a crime. She would be an adulteress. She might be found out. She might be stoned to death. But there may also be repercussions for refusing, because this is not a relationship of equals. As the King, David holds power over Bathsheba; as the commander of the army, David holds power over Bathsheba’s husband and also her father. What will happen to them if she refuses, provoking his anger? What will happen to her? Is this an invitation, or is it a royal summons? If she refuses, will her refusal be honored, or will the messengers return with armed guards? Even if Bathsheba goes to David’s bed willingly -- and some commentators believe that she does not, that this is clearly rape -- it is possible that she goes there reluctantly, or under duress. We do not know. The narrator does not tell us. 

Bathsheba never speaks; we never hear a word about her intentions, her emotions, her aspirations. All we ever hear from her are the three words that she sends to David by messenger: “I am pregnant.” With her husband away at battle and a baby on the way that is clearly not his, she is in a precarious situation. Whatever her feelings were about David before, she has few options now, and she chooses to appeal to him for help and protection. She calls upon David, who used his royal authority to summon her to his bed, to use that same authority to resolve her dilemma. 

For what it’s worth, David does try at first to resolve the crisis through deceit rather than violence. He calls Uriah home on furlough, and attempts to send him home to his wife, hoping that when her pregnancy becomes apparent, Uriah will assume the child is his. But Uriah’s sense of honor prevents him from indulging in the pleasures of home while his fellow soldiers are still on the field of battle. He refuses to go to his wife, and David’s plan is foiled. 

That is when David turns to violence, handing Uriah a sealed message to his commander, Joab. The message instructs Joab to put Uriah in the front of a dangerous battle, and then to have the rest of the troops draw back so that Uriah will be killed by the enemy, leaving Bathsheba widowed and protected from discovery, and David free to honorably marry her and raise “Uriah’s” child as his own. David covers up one misdeed with another, covers one abuse of power with another, perhaps greater, abuse of power. 

In our world, too, power, sexuality, and violence often overlap and interweave in ways that are confusing and toxic. How many Bathshebas are there in our contemporary world, women and men who weigh their options and reluctantly tolerate unwanted sexual attention because they are afraid to say no? How many people who make their choices out of the fear of losing a job, failing a class, being rejected by family or doubted by friends or mocked by peers? How many Davids are there in our world, men and women who coerce, manipulate, and threaten, using positions of authority, financial dependence, or threats of violence? It happens every day, in big ways and small; big ways like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. Big ways like the prevalence of child sexual abuse: one CDC study indicated that up to a quarter of adult women and a sixth of adult men experienced sexual abuse in their childhood at the hands of an adult, although data seems to suggest that that rate will be much lower for children of this era. And there are the seemingly small things that add up: the catcalls, objectifying remarks, and unwanted touches that many women experience on the sidewalks and in the subways of this city, for instance; the sexual harassment that women and men experience all too often in the workplace; the gender- and sexuality-based bullying that children experience all too often at school – seemingly small indignities that we silently accept rather than making a fuss or a scene, passively tolerate rather than risking escalation or retaliation. 

In the face of all of this, the Christian tradition’s response has been woefully inadequate. Sometimes we get it right, sure. But more often, historically, we have gotten it wrong. Sometimes the church has been complicit; churches too often try to cover up wrongdoing, concerned with public relations and liability, rather than healing for victims and accountability for perpetrators. 

Even when Christianity is not directly complicit in such abuses of power, it has too often failed to adequately address the issues. We sometimes cast sexuality in terms of black and white: do this, don’t do that, failing to address the ambiguities and complexities of real life, failing to offer an ethical framework that is adequate to the challenges that people face. If Bathsheba were sitting in the pews of our churches, would she receive a word of life, or a tirade of shame and blame? Other times the church has preached cheap grace and instantaneous forgiveness, rather than calling for accountability, repentance, and transformation. Uncomfortable and embarrassed, many churches avoid the issue altogether, retreating into silence. 

But the good news of our story today is that God is not silent. Our faith tradition holds stories like the story of David and Bathsheba in sacred trust, calling us to remember and recognize the brokenness of this world, naming and condemning the abuses of power that dehumanize, harm, and destroy, so that we may turn away from the powers and principalities of this world and toward the realm of God. We are called into communities like the church – the Body of Christ – to bear witness to a better way, where all voices are heard and power is used for the good of the whole. We are called into community to pray and hope and work for a world where God’s will of justice and righteousness is done. As we hear this story of a king of questionable virtue, we are invited to remember the fallibility of human kingdoms – even the kingdom of David! – and to seek the righteousness of the kingdom of God. 

Peace, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, is not merely the absence of violence, but the presence of justice. So it is with the kingdom of God, and so may it be in the communities we are called to build as children of God and disciples of Christ. We are called not just to the absence of abusive power, but the presence of mutual empowerment. Not just to the absence of objectification, but to the presence of compassion. Not just to the absence of shame and blame, but to the presence of grace and respect. Not the absence of manipulation, but the presence of love; not the absence of coercion, but the presence of mutuality; not the absence of harm, but the presence of healing. These are the marks of the kingdom of God and the Body of Christ; this is the call God places on our lives and our community; this is the path on which we are invited to follow Jesus. And for that, thanks be to God. Amen.

Fearfully and Wonderfully

Sermon on 1 Corinthians 6:12-20

Smog.

Spork.

Turducken.

Brangelina.

Those words are all portmanteaux, words that blend the sounds and meanings of two words into one. Portmanteau words are fun, and funny, but they also help us to name things that are two-or-more-in-one.

My spouse and I have a portmanteau we’ve made up. This word describes the state of being so hungry that you’re likely to act cranky, or get angry for no good reason. We call this combination of hungry, cranky, and angry, “hrankgry,” H-R-A-N-K-G-R-Y as in, “I forgot to have lunch before church, so I got hrankgry during the sermon.”

I was struggling a bit to write this sermon earlier this week – I had the worst writer’s block. When I told my spouse about it, he said, “Did you eat a good breakfast? You always get writer’s block when you’re hrankgry.”

The next morning, after I ate a good breakfast, the ideas finally started to come together. As I wrote, I marveled at my own foolishness. I had forgotten that my mind and body are connected, even as I studied Paul’s words about the connections between body and soul.

Today’s epistle reading from First Corinthians is famous among biblical scholars for being confusing and obscure.

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, “The two shall be one flesh.” But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

That is pretty confusing.

Not only confusing, but a little troubling, especially the part about prostitutes. Paul sounds horrified and disgusted by prostitutes, revolted at the idea of connecting a prostitute to the body of Christ. It’s hard to imagine Jesus sharing that revulsion – Jesus, who ate with sinners and tax collectors; Jesus, whose feet were washed with the tears of a sinful woman, and dried with her hair. I have no doubt that every child of God can be welcomed joyfully into the body of Christ. But there is something important here, nonetheless.

When we study epistles, it’s important to remember that we are reading someone else’s mail. In the early days of the church, people like Paul and Peter traveled the known world, spreading the good news and starting Christian communities. They would form close relationships with these people, but eventually they’d move on, and so they would keep in touch by correspondence. Many of these letters were kept, copied, and shared, and those letters are the epistles in our bible today. One reason this passage is confusing is that we have walked into the middle of a conversation, and we’re only hearing one side of that conversation – a letter from Paul that responds to questions and concerns in a letter from the Corinthians.

We can tell from Paul’s letter that he has just read a lot of bad news about how the Corinthian Christians have been behaving. Paul opens the letter by sternly chastising the Corinthian church for their infighting, divisions, and factions. Soon after that, he is scolding them for sexual immorality. He rounds out the letter by yelling at them for the way they’re conducting communion: some people are coming early, getting drunk, and eating all the food.

For all of this bad behavior, these are the saints of Corinth. Corinth was a port city in Greece, and it was famous for its rowdy nightlife. So famous, that in the Roman Empire, getting drunk and acting lewd was known as “Corinthianizing.”

The Corinthians, living in this city famous for its licentiousness, hear the gospel of a God of grace, and eventually, some of them start to think to themselves, “Hey, we’re all set! Our God is a God of grace, and our sins have been redeemed, and that means that we can behave however we like! Party time!” This passage is Paul’s answer.

First, he quotes back what they wrote to him: “Everything is lawful.” Then he responds, “But not everything is beneficial.” He quotes it again: “Everything is lawful.” And he responds again: “But I will not be dominated by anything.” That is, nothing but God should have power over me. Again, he quotes the Corinthians: “Food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for food.” The Corinthians are advocating satisfying the appetites of the body: only souls matter, they think, so why not do what feels good for our bodies? But Paul says no. The body is not meant for fornication, he says. The word there is porneia, the word from which we get the word pornography. It’s not clear what Paul meant by porneia. In popular usage, it meant some kind of sexual immorality, but we don’t know whether it was general or specific. Is it prostitution? Is it adultery? Or, since Paul grew up Jewish, schooled in the Old Testament, is he using the word metaphorically, like the prophets who described the Israelites’ unfaithfulness and idolatry in terms of adultery and prostitution? Scholars have spilled gallons of ink trying to argue it out, most of them trying to push one agenda or another. I can’t tell you what it means for sure. But I think we’re actually better moving on to what Paul says next: the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

Part of the Corinthians’ mistake is that they imagine that the soul and the body are entirely separate things – they can do what they want with the body, they think, because it is merely a vehicle for the soul. That idea was prevalent in Greek philosophy – Platonist philosophy in particular, tended to believe that the soul was eternal, good, and unchangeable, while the body was temporary, changeable, and basically bad. In The Republic, Plato wrote that we are at our purest and most virtuous when we are least connected to our bodies. Platonist philosophy saw bodies as little more than gross, stinky houses made out of meat in which our souls were unfortunately imprisoned.

But Paul says a resounding “no” to the idea that bodies are an inconvenient, irrelevant coincidence. “The body is for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.” God created bodies, God came to us in a body, and the crucified Christ was resurrected in a body. Bodies matter to God, Paul declares. They are not just temporary houses for our eternal souls.

Today’s Psalm points us towards a more faithful way of thinking about human bodies: it speaks of a God who knows us, body and soul, “knitting us together in the womb.” It proclaims that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” This is the tradition from which Paul speaks when he declares to the Corinthians that how we use our bodies matters profoundly.

This weekend we remember the legacy of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. While he was in prison for his work, Dr. King wrote one of his greatest works, the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In this letter, King spoke out against complacent churches which, he writes, “commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.” The legacy of Martin Luther King reminds us that injustice perpetrated against bodies has deep effects on the souls of the oppressed and the oppressor alike.

Because we are fearfully and wonderfully made, there are intricate links between our physical bodies and our internal states, links that we feel in big ways and in small. When our minds our troubled, we feel it in our bodies – in headaches or sore backs. Hunger can make us cranky. A time of prayer can relax our shoulders. A brisk walk can lift our spirits. An hour of yoga can help us feel a deep sense of spiritual peace.

We shape our relationships through physical touch, from handshakes and hugs during the passing of the peace, to lovers embracing. As a mother and infant fall asleep together, their heart rates synchronize. The body is more than a place where the soul lives; our inner and outer selves are deeply connected. It’s how we are made. And so what we do with our bodies, honoring or harming them, using them to honor or to harm, does matter.

It is true, Paul acknowledges, that everything is lawful. That is to say, our God is a God of grace who comes to us despite every sin, flaw, or shortcoming. There is no rulebook we have to play by in order to earn God’s love. God’s love is not quid pro quo; it is freely given to us, no matter what. Paul urges the Corinthians to see this surpassing grace not as an excuse for doing harm, but as an encouragement toward deeper faithfulness. He urges us to glorify God by honoring God’s creation, our bodies – and, I would add, not only our own bodies, but also the bodies of others.

Paul’s words to the Corinthians focus on sexual intimacy as a way that we can either glorify God or do harm. I don’t know what Paul means by porneia, but I do believe that God delights in expressions of sexuality that are loving, honest, mutual and respectful, and I believe that God does not delight in expressions of sexuality that harm, oppress, or objectify. But the words “everything is lawful, but not everything is beneficial” have implications far beyond sexuality. What would it mean to try to delight God through how we eat? How we use our time? How we spend our money?

The Iona Community is a community of Christians in Scotland. Members of that community commit to being accountable to one another for how they spend their money. Not just pledging – what percent, before or after tax, blah blah blah. No, how they spend all of their money. Periodically, the community gathers with their checkbooks and bank statements to discuss whether their financial decisions are reflections of their Christian faith. Are they spending more on luxuries or on feeding the hungry? Does their use of money reflect their commitment to caring for the earth? Do they avoid supporting corporations that use slave labor? Would God take delight in the ways they spend money? God will love us if we squander every cent of our money on fancy gadgets and expensive clothing – everything is lawful. But not everything is beneficial – thoughtful, faithful use of the blessings we have from God will deepen our faith and delight God’s heart.

We are not just souls housed inside of bodies, Paul says. We are portmanteau people; our souls and bodies are blended and bound up and knitted together. When our souls are well, we can feel it in our bodies; honoring bodies can buoy up souls. Our God is a God of grace – there is nothing we can do, body or soul, that will separate us from the love of God. But Paul invites us to go deeper than that: to remember that bodies matter. To remember that we are created by God, fearfully and wonderfully made. We are invited to respond to God’s love with everything we have: with our hands and feet and minds and heart and voices. With our time and money and skills and words and actions. We won’t live perfectly today, and probably not tomorrow either. And that is fine, because nothing can separate us from the love of God, who came to us in Christ, and who loves us beyond our wildest dreams, and who created us fearfully and wonderfully.
Thanks be to God.