Preached August 5, 2012, at Rennie Memorial Presbyterian Church in Amelia, VA
Texts: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a
I would wager that there are few
roles less envied in the Biblical world than the role of the Prophet. The
prophet, called by God to proclaim God’s message to God’s people, has to go to
great lengths, and often put him or herself in great danger, to make sure this
message is heard. Throughout the Bible there are tales of the Prophet Isaiah
walking around naked in the streets, of Ezekiel eating the scroll containing
the Word of the Lord, and of Jeremiah being sent to prison for proclaiming a
holy message that King Jehoiakim did not want to hear. When Jesus is rejected
from Nazareth early in his ministry, he makes a remark that I imagine in that
era must have been a piece of conventional wisdom: A prophet is never accepted
in his (or her!) hometown.
The prophet Nathan has an
unappealing and potentially quite dangerous role to play in this morning's
story. King David, the highest political, military, and religious authority in
all of Israel, has committed a host of almost unspeakable sins against God and
against his fellow human beings. And Nathan, as his court prophet, has to tell
the King about the Lord's displeasure and the consequences that David's sins
will have on the rest of his life. I imagine it is with a fearful heart and
trembling feet that Nathan enters the king's chambers. Being a prophet,
declaring God's news even when it's not good news for those who will hear it,
is not an attractive task.
In fact, if there's any role less
attractive than Nathan's in this story, it's the role of David himself. David
is supposed to be the greatest king of Israel, God's anointed one, the man
after God's own heart! And yet here he stands before Nathan as a sinner - as
one who has committed rape and murder and lied to keep it covered up. David
stands before God, Nathan, and all of Israel in need of genuine repentance.
And the hard news I bring you this
morning, brothers and sisters in Christ, is that over the course of our
Christian lives, we are called at times to play both of these difficult roles:
that of Nathan, and that of David.
We may not feel like we encounter
"prophets" in the classical Biblical sense in our day and age, but
there is no doubt that the Christian calling is still a prophetic one. The
Great Ends of the Church as outlined in our own Presbyterian Book of Order
include, among others, "the proclamation of the Gospel for the salvation
of humankind, the promotion of social righteousness, and the exhibition of the
Kingdom of heaven to the world." We as Christians do not live our lives
alone, in isolated communities, separating ourselves from the world. No, we
have been called by our God and by our Lord Jesus Christ to be out in the world: loving, serving, and
making disciples of all people. Proclaiming God's love, justice, and liberation
for every single member of the great human family.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s,
the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, coined the
phrase "Speaking Truth to Power" as a call to Quakers and other
Christians to pursue peaceful alternatives to the escalating arms race of the
Cold War. They were concerned with the our foreign policy, with the way that
those in power spent so much time and energy hating our "enemies" and
building up weapons with which we might destroy them. And they spoke to those
in authority what they described as the ancient truth of Christianity that we
learned from our Lord Jesus Christ: Hatred destroys; love overcomes and
endures. The story of Resurrection. They drew especially on the Sermon on the
Mount, and they did everything in their power to encourage our nation to
develop a more Christ-like foreign policy.
Many things
have changed since the time of King David and Nathan, even since the time of
the Cold War, but the Christian call to speak truth to power remains. We live
today in a culture that says that the most important person is the not-so-holy
trinity of me, myself, and I. We as Christians are called to say no, the most
important person is my neighbor. We live in an economy that says the
bottom-line is profit. We as Christians are called to say no, the bottom-line
is people. We live in a political climate that says we must be #1, the most powerful nation on earth. But we as Christians
follow a Lord who said the last shall be first, that the one who wants to be
great among you must humble him or herself and be servant of all. Jesus did not
become Lord through military might, political prowess, or economic
entrepreneurship. Jesus became Lord through humbling himself to death, even
death on a cross.
And this is
only the beginning. I am willing to bet that each of you can think of many more
situations of power that need the truth spoken to them, ones that I haven't
named today. Continue to reflect on that, for in doing so you are imitating our
Lord Jesus, who looked out over Jerusalem and wept at the injustice he saw. And
we as Christians are called to be like Jesus, and like Nathan in our story
today, called to be the ones who speak the truth to a power that has strayed
from what is good, from the way of justice, of peace, of equality, of reverence
for God and for life.
There will
always be those, of course, who say that such a critique of our own country,
our own churches, our own way of life, is unpatriotic, unchristian, or
ungrateful. They may call us fools - idealistic, uninformed people of faith who
don't understand the reality of the world today. They may say to us, as I
imagine perhaps a few people said to Nathan, that in this world, might makes
right. They may say that certain sacrifices must be made to maintain our
economic competitiveness, or our national security. They may say that a king's
gotta do what a king's gotta do, and after all, what is one woman raped, one
man murdered, in the grand scheme of things?
And it may
be tempting to follow their advice. It's certainly the easy way out - instead
of speaking God's truth to power, simply letting power tell us what the truth
ought to be. But if we believe in the the prophets of the Lord, if we assume
that Nathan was not a fool but was in
fact a man sent by God to the King of Israel so that that King might repent, we
are faced with our own prophetic calling, and with the problem of how to be the
Nathans that our age so greatly needs.
But why do we do this? What's the
point? That's a question I think many of us ask, especially when it seems like
no one, from the newspaper editor to the President of the United States to our
sister-in-law, is taking us seriously. What are we really hoping for when we
embrace our calling to speak prophetic words of truth to power?
Is it simply to be right, to be able
to say, "I told you so?" Is it to grumble, to complain, to criticize?
Is it to pronounce judgment, to call someone out, to show that we know the will of God, and they are tragically mistaken? Is it to
make someone feel guilty for their actions, for the way they have harmed others
and the way they have strayed from God's path, a guilt that quite often we feel
like they "deserve?"
I cannot believe that the God
revealed in Jesus Christ would send prophets into the world for any of those
purposes. Look to our New Testament reading this morning, from Ephesians. We
often call the prophetic task "speaking truth to power," and that's a
good way to put it, those are faithful, powerful, Gospel words. But look what
it says in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 15. The author says this a little
differently; he or she calls it "speaking the truth in love."
"Speaking the truth in love," it says. That changes
things a little, doesn't it? The truth we speak must never be vindictive, must
never be judgment for judgment's sake. What we say and what we do must always
be done in genuine love of God and neighbor. Verse 25 adds more. It reads,
"Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors,
for we are members of one another." Our call to prophetic speech and
action is not so that we can complain, criticize, and be holier-than-thou. We
speak the truth to one another in love because we are all members of the body
of Christ; and in Christ, we are members of one another. We speak the truth in
love because in Jesus Christ, my life is inextricably tied up with yours and
with the life of every person on God's great earth.
Our
prophetic calling to speak the truth in love means we must remind the church
and the world that Christians are not a people who proclaim "Every man for
himself; every woman for herself." We're not even a people who say
"You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." We have learned from our
Lord Jesus Christ that we are to be people who turn the other cheek. Instead of
hating our enemies, vilifying our enemies, stereotyping them and bombing the
places where those we call "enemies" live, we are a people called to
love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us. Scripture has taught us
that we are one body, members of one another, and that when one member suffers,
every other member suffers with it. When one child goes hungry, we all go
hungry. When one person is in prison, we all are in prison. When one man or
woman is killed in a drone strike, we all suffer that same death.
And when we
speak the truth in love to our brothers and sisters in this one human family,
we don't do so for the sake of judgment, of condemnation. Judgment and
finger-pointing only beget anger and defensiveness. And we know that God's
Kingdom and God's purposes cannot be brought in by anger.
Nor do we
speak the truth in love in order to produce guilt. Guilt is static, a paralyzing
emotion. It is directed toward the past. It causes us to regret and truly feel
the pain of what we have done wrong - but it changes nothing about the future. No,
when we speak the truth in love, we do not do it for the sake of guilt.
When we
speak the truth, God's truth, in love, what we seek is repentance.
Repentance
is a changed way of life, a commitment to a future free of the brokenness that
mars the past. Repentance is trusting that with God's grace acting in us, such
a future is possible. The word repentance, in Hebrew, comes from the word to
turn, or to return. When we repent, we turn away
from the sins of our past and turn toward
God and the life-giving path of love and justice that God has prepared for us.
The reason why
King David is in fact exemplary in
our text this morning, despite his behavior in the preceding chapter, is the
way he models repentance. Neither guilt nor anger nor defensiveness can change
anything for David. Repentance is the only way to move forward. King David
opens himself to a changed way of life, to leaving behind his sinfulness and
brokenness and moving in a new direction.
David's sin
is still real, and the consequences of that sin are real. And I think David
understands that. The rest of the book of Second Samuel and the beginning of
First Kings will tell the heartbreaking story of how Nathan's prophesy that we heard
this morning comes true. Of how, because of David's sins of rape and murder,
that same violence comes to rule in his family, and the sword does not depart
from his house. In the very next chapter, David's son Amnon will rape his
sister, Tamar. And then David's other son Absalom will murder Amnon to revenge
the rape of Tamar. And Absalom will start a rebellion, and he too will be
killed. And we will hear the famous
words of King David mourning his son, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son
Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
Yes,
David's sins are real, and the consequences of his sins will become so real he will
hardly be able to bear them. But David hears Nathan's words, hears him speaking
the truth in love, and he knows that in God's truth, in God's paths of
righteousness, there is hope for the future. And he turns back to God, and he
repents.
And so it is with us. In the course
of our Christian lives, there will be times when find ourselves called to be
Nathan, to speak the truth in love to people in power and to our neighbors. But
other times, perhaps many more times, we will find ourselves called to be
David. To hear God's truth spoken to us and to realize that we have gone
astray, have sinned against God and neighbor.
We don't get to choose which role we
get to play. Most likely, we will find ourselves going back and forth. In the words of the theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr: "We must fight their falsehood with our truth, but we
must also fight the falsehood in our truth."
We make think what we're doing is right. We may think it doesn't matter one way
or the other. We may not really even be thinking at all. But at some point, we
will find ourselves looking into the mirrors of our lives, or of Scripture, or
of those precious people who speak the truth in love to us, and hear the words that Nathan spoke to David. "You are the woman. You are the man."
In these moments, when we are called
to be David, we too will need to remember that our response can be more than
weeping and wailing, more than regret and guilt, more than admitting our sins
and begging for forgiveness. God's forgiveness and grace will already be there
- they were there all along. Our response can be repentance. A turning back to
God. A change in the way we live. A commitment to a future lived in the
fullness of God's grace. And the humility to know that when we fail again, and
we will fail again, that God's grace
will be there, as it always is.
I pray for us today that God will
grant us the wisdom to know when we are called to be Nathan, and when we are
called to be David.
I pray that when we are called to be
Nathan, God will give us the courage to speak the truth to power, and to speak
that truth in love. I pray that we will remember that we are one body, one
human family, and that the well-being of one member of that body is of utmost
concern to us all.
I pray that when we are called to be
David, God will give us the humility to open our ears and our hearts to those
around us who are speaking the truth in love. I pray that we will turn back to
God in repentance. I pray that we will know we are forgiven by God's boundless
grace, and that because of that grace
we will earnestly seek to follow Jesus' command to go, and sin no more.
And I pray that we shall continue
this cycle of speaking God's truth to others and hearing God's truth spoken to
us as long as we all shall live. Amen.
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