Being Honest...

Being Honest…

A Sermon on Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11)

by Griff Martin

On the Fourth Sunday of Advent (Dec 24)

For the Beloved’s of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

Please pray with me:

Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing Resurrected reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Risen Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

Welcome to Christmas Eve. Because no text really screams Christmas Eve like this story…. load up the family that is in town for Christmas and bring them to church to hear the story of one of our Old Testament heroes, David sexually assaulting Bathsheba.

Or should we call her the wife of Uriah as she is known in Matthew’s Gospel. As if what happens to her is not already bad enough, in the genealogy we don’t even name her, she is just the wife of Uriah. Although that in and of itself is something if you really stop and ponder it. She is not the wife of David but the wife of Uriah, even though part of this entire genealogy is a Davidic statement, Matthew is making a very subtle but important theological point there.

However not naming her is far from the worst thing we have done to her…. we have struggled to deal with Bathsheba, so we have tried other ways.

We have turned her into a seductive woman who knew exactly what she was doing, a conniving woman who belongs in the series House of Cards: powerful, manipulative and willing to do whatever it took. 

Or we have tried to make her story a love story…Hear this for instance, from a popular best selling Christian romantic fiction (a sad category if I have ever heard one): “Bathsheba is a woman who longs for love, With her husband away fighting the King’s war, she battles encroaching loneliness—which makes it easy to succumb to the advances of King David. Will one night of unbridled passion destroy all she holds dear?” 

And the book has several Amazon reviews, including this gem: “a wonderful romance between two star eyed lovers.” 

And this depiction of David and Bathsheba is not new to any of us. Think back to the 1951 film starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, which is billed on its poster and trailers as “The Most Tempestuous and Forbidden of the World’s Great Love Stories.” That was the most popular and highest grossing movie of that year by the way.

And I don’t know about you, but this story is not the one I am going to be teaching my children as a great love story, one I want them to pay attention to so they can have their own great love story. 

Let’s be blunt, this is not a love story. Just look at Bathsheba in this text today… she has no lines and she is the object of all sorts of verbs. In great love stories, women have lines and they are not objects. Any story where a woman does not have a line, does not have a say, any story where a woman is solely the object of a male’s verbs is a story that the church needs to stand up against quickly because that is a story worth fighting against.

And if we have not made her the powerful manipulator or the star crossed lover, well then good chance is that we have just been silent about her. Which is what we have done with a lot of the stories of women in the Old Testament. 

Her story is too challenging. It confronts us. It’s alarming and frightening. It seems all to contemporary today. It challenges our view of David. 

And yet here right there at the start of Matthew’s Gospel…. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. So try as we may, she can’t be ignored any longer. And as I have sat with her story the past few weeks I think that is exactly why she fits in this lineage, because avoiding her is all too easy.

If this year has taught us anything surely it’s how easy it is for us as a people to look away and ignore issues…. Look at the the news this year, look at Time Magainze’s Person of the Year, the brave women of the Me Too movement, read Salyma Hayek’s oped fro meh times last week, look at the news just last week of Paul Pressler, just this week I got the most recent Christian Century with a picture of the church and the words me too and a list of things every church needs to do, including pull all the skeletons out of the closet and finally be honest. We have looked away too long.

So thank God for Bathsheba who demand more…. thank God that at the start of the lineage we are not allowed to overlook that which we would prefer to never see.

I usually share this story on Ash Wednesday but it seems appropriate for this day as well. One of the most important hospital visits I ever did was with a woman who was the mother of one of my youth. I was a youth pastor, so I was not trained in hospital visits, that was for the Senior Pastor and Pastoral Care Pastor. However it was the week of Thanksgiving and both of those pastors were going to be out of the office so I was assigned to hospital duty. We had a few members in the hospital so I made my list and I saved the youth mother for last, I knew her so I figured it would be the easiest.

The first two went as you would expect, a bit awkward and clumsy… a quick how are you (as if being in the hospital was not already the answer to that question), how can I pray for you, a quick prayer and then out of there. The Lord’s Work finished in less time than instant coffee. 

When I entered her room though I was more comfortable. She was alone, the family had run to grab dinner and change clothes so I sat down next to her. She reached over and took my hand and said thanks for being here and we began to chat… we talked about her kids, she asked about Abby, we talked about her job and then she looked at me and said, ‘Can we talk about why I am here?” I replied, “Absolutely… I know being sick is hard and I know how scary this is….” and then she stopped me with these words “Griff we know each other better than this, you are my pastor and I need you to call this by name. Call it cancer. Everyone else calls it sick or something else, I need you to name it for me. Only by naming it can I face it.”

It was the greatest pastoral counseling advice I ever got. Only by naming it can we face it.

In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, “if we don’t know how to speak of sin then there is a very real chance that we won’t know how to speak of grace…. speaking of sin may be our only hope.”

Bathsheba names it for us.

Lust. Pride Power. Control. Manipulation. Violence. Lies. Selfishness. Brokenness. Sin. There it is, the word. 

This must be the hardest story that Mary taught Jesus. David was King, the King, and there was great admiration for him (in the words of Walter Brueggeman, “David was so irresistible even God could not resist him”), this story challenged all that. This story was hard for a mother to teach her son. But it was important because this story was a catalyst for Jesus.

You see I think in the bigger narrative Bathsheba is a turning point in the grand story, the epic love story of God and our world. It’s here when God sees what David can do, it’s here that God knows something new is needed, that we as humanity are never going to be able to grasp God on our own, that we can’t heal our brokenness, that we can’t overcome our sin, that we can’t deal with our woundedness on our own. That we were in a down spiral of our own making and we needed something else. 

We needed God in human form. We needed incarnation. We were only going to get this if someone lived it out in front of us. That we needed a walking, talking, breathing, bleeding God. That the only thing that could save us from ourselves was a God who looked a lot like us. As Anna Carter Florence said here a few weeks ago, “Is the Incarnation anything more than God deciding to share our verbs with us?”

Bathsheba reminds Jesus of his mission: help us to live into a better way, stand up for those no one else will stand up for, name the things no one wants to name but are destroying us, help us deal with our sin, brokenness and woundedness. 

Which means that even though I joked at the beginning that there are probably other more appropriate texts for Christmas Eve, maybe this actually is because this makes us face ourselves in a real and authentic way. Maybe Bathsheba needs a place in the nativity scene… the wrong done to her finally being made right.

Maybe this is why Advent always begins with John the Baptist and with our crazy cousin yelling about preparing the way and about our sin. You can’t get to the tomb without Calvary but maybe we should not head to the manger without Calvary either. 

Maybe before we hear the cry of the newborn King we need to think about that which we need to name, to sit in our sin, to be in our brokenness, to see our wounds, to look around our souls and our world and to be honest about the need for this babe.

It’s facing the words of Julian of Norwich that “our failing is dreadful our falling is shameful, and our dying is sorrowful.” 

Bathsheba is the reality we have to face so that we can celebrate the Christ Child. 

My favorite carol names this reality and I am hearing it anew this year, O Holy Night…. Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till he appeared and the soul felt it’s worth…. and then the second verse (my favorite):

Truly he taught us to love one another

His law is love and his gospel is peace

Chains shall we break for the slave is our brother

And in his name all oppression shall cease

One of the most healing experiences of my life happened late one night with a friend when I was just being awful and he called me out on it and then he said we are going to sit here until you tell me exactly what is going on, come clean. And I did, I told him all the ugliness- the worry and anxiety, the sin and brokenness, where I was wounded… and then he said good now we can move on and I can help you.

Bathsheba names it for us. We must see her because when we leave out those things we don’t want to talk abut, when we delete the horrible ugly parts, when we pass by that which we would rather ignore, when we choose to avoid those on the margin, when we just bring the shiny happy parts… we are not being real.

And if we are not being real as we approach Bethlehem then we will miss the whole story. We don’t come singing carols of joy, we come with a song of mourning and lament because “narrow is the gated difficult is the way that leads to life.”

A path of honesty and vulnerability, a road named Salvation with our God who was born in human form for the real us. So may bring all of ourselves to the manger because Jesus wants to save all of us.