Remained
2 Samuel 11:1-15
Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "Remained"
This is an uncomfortable story, on many levels. At first, it makes us uncomfortable because it has to with sex. Then it makes us uncomfortable because it isn’t just sex, it’s adultery. But then we get uncomfortable because we recognize that it isn’t just adultery, it’s something far darker- a coercive if not downright forced abuse of power. If all of that weren’t bad enough, our discomfort is compounded by the cover-up. An attempt at deceit. And when that fails, a plot to commit murder. To be honest it sounds like something that Keith Morrison should be talking about on an episode of Dateline, not something you come to church to hear on a Sunday morning. This is the David story that we don’t usually learn as kids in Sunday school. Although my family did have a VHS tape back in the day of the Veggie Tales version featuring a king and a rubber ducky. It didn’t pack the same emotional punch as the biblical version, but it did get one thing about the story right, which is the way in which Bathsheba is dehumanized by what happens, the way in which David regards her as nothing more than the beautiful object of his desire, rather than a human being who might have agency and desire of her own. Like I said, it’s uncomfortable. Maybe all the more so because for as old as this story is, it sounds all too familiar. But let’s back up.
Because the tragedy of this story doesn’t begin in a bedchamber, or even on a rooftop. Things like this rarely do. No, it begins the moment David has everything he could possibly want. He has the crown, not only as King of Judah, but of Israel as well. He has united the kingdoms. He has defeated his enemies in the surrounding nations. He not only has the love of his people, he has the anointing of God and a covenant promise to make sure forever his family name, the House of David. He had ascended to such heights of power and privilege that he no longer felt it necessary to lead Israel to battle as he once had. It wasn’t that he suddenly experienced a crisis of conscience, that he somehow morally objected all of the sudden to the prospect of battle. It’s just that he didn’t really have to, and he didn’t want to. So, he sent everyone else instead. What’s the harm? It all worked out. They didn’t need him. The Ammonites were defeated. The army besieged Rabbah. David has risen from shepherd boy to king. He was enjoying not only the fruits of his labor, but the privileged comfort of his lofty position. To borrow a line from the Rogers and Hammerstein classic Oklahoma, “he’d gone about as far as you can go.”
He is also alone. Did you notice? He’s sent everyone away, and he is left on that rooftop to his own devices. In the creation stories of Genesis, as God speaks the cosmos into existence, at each turn God recognizes and names it good. Light and dark, good. Sea and Sky, good. Water and land, good. Sun and moon, good. Birds and fish, good. Plants and animals, good. But in the second story, when God forms the human creature from the dust of the earth and breathes the breath of life into its nostrils, God places that lone human in a garden with everything they could possibly want (not unlike David on that rooftop) and what does God observe? For the first time in all of creation, it is NOT GOOD. It is not good for this person to be alone. On top of the world, sure. But so very alone. In fact, it’s striking isn’t it that for the first time in a story where at every turn, at every success David has we are reminded that God was with him; but not here, it would appear. Not now. Or rather could it be the case that as soon as David seems to have it all, he forgets God. We should have seen it coming. When he tried to bring the ark into the city, but made it as much about him as it was about God. When he decided what he could make for God in building a temple, instead of listening to what God would make of him and all of Israel. Or maybe he hears the words of God’s promised favor to mean that in addition to being above the laws of humanity, he was above the laws of God and could do whatever he darned well pleased.
So, maybe it’s a good thing that this passage makes us a little uncomfortable. Because if this story teaches us anything, it’s that we are never more at risk of forgetting who we are and whose we are as when get so comfortable that we stop trying and stop listening. Our souls are never more at risk than when we’re on top and begin to believe that we got there on our own. We are never more prone to the sin that is lurking at our door than when stop trusting God and decide to take matters into our own hands. The risk doesn’t come from the hands of an angry or judgmental God. The risk comes from the dark recesses of an idle heart. Because the purpose of God’s law is not to catch us out. The purpose of God’s law, God’s Word is to protect us from our own self-destructive tendencies, and to restore us when we do make a mess of things.
And does David ever make a mess of things. Some may speculate about Bathsheba’s role in the affair. After all, they’ll quip, it takes two to tango. But that isn’t quite how this plays out. A voyeur spies on her from above as she is engaged in a ritual cleansing prescribed by the law. The next thing she knows the king’s men knock on her door telling her she’s been summoned for a royal audience before the king. Is she supposed to refuse the king? When she arrives, the king takes her to his bedchamber. Is she supposed to fight off the king? As soon as he’s done with her, he sends her back home. And just because a woman complies with the coercion of a man far more powerful than her in no way means that such compliance is consensual. An encounter like this doesn’t have to be violent for it to be considered assault. And if there was any question about David’s guilt in using his power to do what he did, that question is answered by what comes next. Because when Bathsheba finally speaks for the first time in this story it is to inform the King that she is pregnant. And David does everything that he can think of to hide his sin. Again, going back to the garden, when the man and the woman eat the one thing they’re forbidden to eat, when they eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, they hide themselves first from one another, and then from God. When we feel we have to hide any evidence of our guilt from God or anyone else, when do all we can to conceal our actions, we can be fairly certain that we have wandered far from God and into dangerously destructive territory.
Bathsheba’s husband Uriah, the foreigner, the immigrant, is summoned back. But he won’t be comfortable. David tries to send Uriah home to Bathsheba so she can pass the baby off as his, but Uriah won’t take comfort with his wife while his commander and fellow soldiers are sleeping in open fields and the Ark of God resides in a booth. He refuses to let David make him comfortable. Even when David tries to get him drunk, he holds to his principles. And it gets him killed.
It gets him killed because when Paul writes that the wages of sin are death, he isn’t just talking about the person who sins. The story of David’s fall is a story about how sin is never self-contained. It often destroys whatever it touches, even those like Bathsheba and Uriah, and ultimately the child that is conceived, who are innocent. It preys upon those who are powerless to stop it- women, children, foreign immigrants. Comfortable, alone, entitled by power and privilege to take whatever it wants, remaining behind while others fight in its stead; sin is the source of our self-imposed destruction. It alienates us from God and those around us as it tries to conceal its guilt. It is a tale as old as time. It doesn’t matter how good, or right, or blessed we may believe ourselves to be, when we are blinded by comfort and power it can isolate us in ways we can’t see. Treating women as objects, foreigners as disposable, and God as a footnote. Not even someone like David, a man after God’s own heart is immune. And neither are we.