Pentecost X

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen

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THIS IS NOT A FUN STORY TO PREACH, this story of David and Absalom. 
Ordering our worship around a lectionary means that once in a while we come
across a story like this that seems to have nothing good, nothing redeeming in it at all. 
Yet it is there demanding that we attend to it.

The story really began eleven years earlier.  Absalom was David’s third son (2 Sam. 3.1), the most comely man in all of Israel (2 Sam. 14.25), and his sister was beautiful, too.  She was Tamar.  (2 Sam. 13.1)  Her beauty so possessed and crazed David’s oldest son, Amnon, that he lured his half-sister Tamar to his quarters and raped her, a single violent sin that set all these events in motion.  David did nothing, but Absalom plotted for two years to avenge his sister.  He put a contract out on his half-brother’s life, then he fled into exile to escape his father’s wrath.  (2 Sam. 13.1-29) 

Scroll forward three years – David called Absalom back from exile, but it wasn’t a happy homecoming.  Maybe . . . maybe if David had heard Jesus tell the parable of the prodigal son; maybe if he had heard the story of a son who left his father for a far country, and when he limped home penniless, the father saw his son coming “while he was still far off,” ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.  (Luke 15.20)  Maybe things would have been different.  But David didn’t put his arms around Absalom; he shunned him.  Absalom was allowed in the city, but he was still banished from his father’s house and his father’s heart.  Only once, after two years, did David let Absalom come to him (2 Sam. 14.28, 33), but the damage was done, and the palace intrigue began.  For four years Absalom coolly and calculatedly sowed dissension among David’s people, and he “stole the hearts of the people of Israel” (2 Sam. 15.6).  When he believed his intrigue and conspiracy had made him strong enough, he touched off a revolution against his father the king.  David, now fearing for his life, left Jerusalem, climbed the Mount of Olives anguished and weeping, head covered, no shoes on his feet, mourning his lost kingdom, his lost son, even his own lost humanity. 

Even as David leaves Jerusalem, we know this won’t end well.  If Absalom is to be king, the old monarch has to die.  And if the old king is to regain his throne, the pretender must be eliminated.  It’s Shakespearean, really; inevitable war, a king squared off against his son.  David’s heart did soften toward the son he sinned against, and he told all his soldiers, for his sake, to deal gently with Absalom when they find him.  But they didn’t.  “Absalom was riding on his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak.  His head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on.”  (2 Sam. 18.9b-10)  David’s men found Absalom hanging helpless, caught by his hair in the branches of a tree, and they disregarded the orders to deal gently with him.  They pierced him with spears.  Ten men surround and kill him, throwing his body in a pit in the forest marked only by a cairn of stones.  (2 Sam. 18.17)  And David’s heart breaks.  David’s sin, upon Absalom’s sin, upon Amnon’s sin.  A story so tragic we sit before it in silence.  Like Job when he is brought up by God, we place our hands over our mouths.  (Job 40.4)

But is that all we can do?  I don’t think so.  First, we can learn that sin leaves a wake wider than we can imagine.  Like Adam, we can never know the eventual consequences of the sins we commit.  In his book about David’s life, Eugene Peterson writes about this story:

Sin fed on sin.  The rape of Tamar fed into the murder of Amnon, which fed into the hardheartedness of David.  Absalom responded to Amnon’s sin by sinning.  Then David responded to Absolom’s sin by sinning.  Absalom got rid of Amnon by killing him.  Then David got rid of Absalom by shunning him.  David lost his son Amnon because of the sin of Absalom.  David lost his son Absalom by his own sin.[1] 

Sin is complex and burns a wide path.  We can say that fundamentalists focus myopically on sin, can’t stop preaching about it, looking for it in the lives of others, railing about it on their radio stations.  But Episcopalians, by and large, don’t take sin seriously enough.  We don’t appreciate that to deliberately disobey God is no minor thing; it has vast consequences.  Sin is real, it’s pervasive, insidious and it’s lethal, and more often than not our greatest sins, our deepest betrayals, would never be possible without thousands of “little sins” paving the way. 

In 2002, the New York Times reviewed a film by Menno Meyjes called “Max,” about two young artists in the years following World War I.  Max, the main character, lost his arm in the war and became an art dealer because he couldn’t paint.  The other character, a lank-haired, marginalized bohemian, and a not-very-good artist living in Vienna, was Adolph Hitler.  The Jewish Defense League condemned the film because it portrayed the young Hitler not as a “demented monster who wasn’t human at all,” but as a man who “decided to become a monster, because he tried becoming an artist, and found that becoming a monster was easier.”  Meyjes said this to the Times just before his film opened in New York:

The key to this movie is convincing the audience that Hitler was actually going to try to paint . . . .  He couldn’t be just a straw figure.  He had to have aspirations, to yearn, to be recognizable.  The movie isn’t about Hitler’s great crimes.  The audience knows all about them already.  This is about his small sins – his emotional cowardice, his relentless self-pity, his envy, his frustration, the way he collects and nurtures offenses – because those are the sins we can see when we look in a mirror.  Hitler, like Osama and Saddam and Milosevic, obliges us by representing an uncomplicated picture of evil.  But nobody wakes up one day and slaughters thousands.  They make choices, one at a time . . . .[2]

Sin gains a small foothold and then it twists us, leaving brokenness and untold suffering in its wake.  David suffered because of sins, including his own, but the second thing we learn is that suffering didn’t wall him off from God. [3]  Listen, I know of two things that turn us into ourselves and make us completely self-focused:  One is to get everything we want; the other is to suffer.  In both cases the temptation is to put ourselves at the center of everything.  David’s suffering could have driven him to self-pity, but instead it drove him to God.  While he was fleeing Absalom, David stopped to pray.  We have his prayer, the third psalm, and it shows the heart of a man suffering and in fear – O Lord, how many are my foes!  Many are rising against me  – but a man turning for help from God – You, O Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, and the one who lifts up my head.  (Ps. 3.1-3)  Suffering touches everyone.  We get sick or the ones we love do.  They get old and they go away from us.  Friends betray us.  Relationships shatter and we find ourselves estranged.  We can’t find a job, or we hate the one we have because it robs us of any joy.  Pick up the Post today – people across the world suffer from hunger, from AIDS or cholera, from oppression or, like David, from the violence of war.  Suffering can make us abandon God because we think he has abandoned us, but David didn’t; he turned into God instead.[4]

This story teaches us about sin, about suffering, and, if we look closely enough, something of salvation because in it we can hear faint stirrings of the gospel.  You see, there once was another son who left his father.  But this son was also a king.  He went into the far country; he climbed the Mount of Olives to pray and weep, not for his sin but over the strain of dying for ours.  The same road David walked down when he left Jerusalem, this son walked up on his way into the city to die for crimes he didn’t commit.  This son was found hanging, helpless, from a tree.  And in David’s cry – O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! (2 Sam. 18.33) – can’t you hear this son’s cry from the cross – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  (Mk. 15.34)  Stories like David’s and Absalom’s are hard for us because they don’t end well.  There aren’t easy answers to sins we commit against each other, to the suffering in our world.  But if the bible tells us anything, it’s that God’s love is stronger than sin; that suffering “may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”  (Ps. 30.5)  The promise is ever-present that sin and suffering are not themselves the end.  The love of God is. 

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.