Yesterday
Tracy and I travelled to Chicago to have lunch with our youngest son who was at
the new regional headquarters of Team Rubicon, an organization that coordinates
disaster relief all over the world. Abe
was there to coordinate a medical team headed for Mongolia which has been
overrun with Co-Vid. Heading up that
team was the Director of Emergency Services from Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Abe gave us a tour of Team Rubicon’s Chicago
facility, a converted fire station just outside of downtown Chicago. They had kept some of the original brick and
mortar, fire hoses, and, of course, a fire pole.
But on the wall, as you entered Team Rubicon’s Chicago headquarters was
their mission statement. Listed first
was a quote from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt, “Step into the arena.”[1] Roosevelt was saying that we should not be
bystanders as need shows itself and disaster strikes.
It is not to be perfect or right. Abe shared how Team Rubicon had too often been
part of colonialist mindset that it was trying to correct. This medical team was not going in to tell
Mongolian health care how to do its job.
Rather, they were there to ally themselves with the health care system
as intermediaries who would give relief for three weeks to people who were
exhausted in the second tier of care.
The people working on the front lines in Mongolia would be in charge of
care. Team Rubicon had made mistakes and
learned and continues to step into the arena.
There is no effort without error and shortcoming. But there is no failure. Failure is only data for the next effort.[2]
As Christians, we step into the arena not with
skinned knuckles but with skinned knees from having bent to care for the sick
and the dying, with sweat, dirt, and blood from travelling to the margins to
care for those outside the circles of life, and with a willingness to be
transformed ourselves. As people of
faith, we know that God has already stepped into the arena and extends a hand
toward us to join and be part of the struggle.
It was Rev. Leslie Penrose, a professor of Tracy’s
at Phillips Theological Seminary, who had learned about base communities on a
mission trip to Nicaragua in the 1980s and had returned to the States with that
experience and knowledge of how to step into the struggle. Penrose had met a man in Nicaragua who was a
gay person but could not enter the ministry because of his sexual
orientation. His story raised so many
questions for her that Penrose returned to the States and enrolled in seminary
seeking answers. A semester into her
seminary studies, a nurse asked her if she would be willing to minister to a
young man dying of AIDS who was scared and alone. “Don’t even bother,” he said, “my church has
already told me I am going to hell.”
After visiting him almost every day until he died and holding a memorial
service for him at his friends’ request, Penrose recounts that things just
exploded. She was asked to do chaplaincy
for HIV/AIDS patients—talking to them, baptizing them, making hospital visits. Nobody else seemed to be doing this ministry
in the Tulsa area. And pretty soon members
of the gay community began attending Memorial Drive United Methodist Church
where she was Associate Pastor. But the
church got threatened as they filled a whole row.
She later founded Community of Hope in a basement and
the congregation slowly grew but had to figure out a way that included hospital
beds to people struggling with HIV/AIDS could be a part of the worship.
“Across the years, we learned pretty quickly how to
do liturgy that would help us survive every time we came to church, having
somebody else die — that kind of just massive overwhelming grief that was
happening in the early ’90s,” Penrose said.
But they were willing to step into the arena, join hands with God whose
hand had been extended waiting for someone, anyone to bend their knee.
Community of Hope eventually became known as a
church that welcomed many other people who were not welcome at other
churches. But they were also brought up
on charges by a United Methodist clergy colleagues. That is how Community of Hope began as part
of the United Church of Christ. Penrose,
“I wrote a letter and said, ‘You know, I’m tired of wasting time and
energy and creative thought fighting when we could be putting that into some
wholesome kind of ministry.”[3] When we step into the arena, it is not all
rainbows and butterflies.
Traditionally,
at least as I remember the tradition taught to me, King David was the greatest
of Jewish heroes and kings. He arose
from humble origins, was anointed as a king as a young boy, slayed the giant
Goliath with his sling to “head off” the Philistines, chosen to be king by the
prophet as just a boy, forced into exile
by a king gone mad, referenced as a man of God’s own heart, and returned from
exile to rightfully claim the throne, moving the center of Israelite power to
Jerusalem, taking Israel to its status as the world’s number one superpower. As a way of asserting Jesus’s authority,
two of the Gospel writers traced Jesus’s lineage back through David. Indeed, Jesus was even born in what became
known as the city of David, Bethlehem, and Jesus is named as the Son of David. Even in popular culture, I think we know
enough of the David story that Disney used parts of it to frame the popular
movie and Broadway show, The Lion King.
David
is supposed to be a man after God’s own heart—a man of justice, mercy, integrity,
and compassion. The Israelite monarchy, in its most devotional form, was
supposed to represent God’s rule on earth.
Earlier in this sermon series, I had us read Psalm 72, thought to be a
coronation or inauguration Psalm proclaimed as a new king takes leadership. That Psalm is juxtaposed with I Samuel 8
where God warns the people that all the king will do is “take away.” Psalm 72 reads
“Give the king your justice, O God. May the king judge your people with
righteousness and your poor with justice.
May the king defend the cause of the poor of the people, give
deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. For the king delivers the needy when they
call, the poor and those who have no helper.
From oppression and violence, the king redeems their life and precious
is their blood in the king’s sight.”[4]
This
juxtaposition between values and a warning over and against romantic memory of
authoritarian power and innocence requires our engagement with our faith, our Socratic
questioning, our interrogation. Does a
nation lose its soul when its values are sacrificed at the altar of romantic memory? When we cannot interrogate our past to call
for a future with more integrity, do we always end up with empty sayings like, “We
are the chosen. God blesses us,” that
forego our obligation and our responsibility?
Israel’s birth story was about a
people in slavery who were delivered from authoritarian rule—genocide, torture,
and death. This birth remembered was to
make them especially aware of the stranger or the immigrant in their
communities as they had been the stranger or the immigrants in Egypt. As David’s star ascends in the ancient Near
East, however, are values and warning traded for a romantic view of “power over”
other nations believing in Israel and therefore King David’s exceptionalism? Is David without obligation and
responsibility?
The story read for us from 2 Samuel
today begins with an ominous foreshadowing:
“In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle . . .” Where
is David? He has stayed home at the
palace. And where 1 Samuel 8 had God
reminding the people of what a king will do by repeating the words “take away,”
we learn that authoritarian power rarely gets its own hands dirty. It sends other people to do the
dirty work. Remember 1 Samuel 8? The
king will take away your children to serve in the army, the king will take away
your land and fields and make you farm it.
The king will take away your best resources and make them do his
work. The king will take away.
The story before us today is cast
using military language. Eleven times in
the story the word “send” is used and it is almost exclusively used for the
behavior of King David. In this story,
David does not do anything face to face.
He has other people do his bidding—knowing that others will keep the
chain of command. David is the master
manipulator—moving people around like chess pieces, like kings, military
dictators do.[5]
David
is sending out his troops without going himself. He sends for Bathsheba without going to her
himself. He sends for Uriah. He sends out Uriah. He sends a message to his military general,
Joab. He cuts the connections between
himself and his behavior. It is like the
movie “Wag the Dog” where the president tries to use a war in another country
to avoid his own responsibility. It is
like when President Clinton bombed two countries to avoid his behavior with
Monica Lewinsky. The abusive use of
power and violence at a national level is meant to distract us from the abusive
use of power at a personal level. We may
question the king but we don’t dare question the country.
David rapes Bathsheba and continues
his sending. She sends word she is
pregnant. He sends for Uriah, the
Hittite, her husband, a foreigner in the land, one who is also poor[6],
a person for whom David is to be an
advocate, a protector, a deliverer. If
David does not do so,
David sends Uriah to his home to have
sex with his wife to cover up David’s crime.
Uriah remembers his connections to his comrades in arms, the ark of the
covenant (a reminder of God’s deliverance from authoritarian rule in Egypt),
and Uriah will not go home while his mates are not home. David sends for Uriah again. This time David liquors him up and sends him
to his house again. Uriah refuses to
step foot in his home. So David sends
Uriah back to war, a war he will opt out of himself, with a message for his
field general Joab, “When the fighting is fierce and the chips are down, have
Uriah sent to the front lines.”
There Uriah is killed. Joab sends word back to David that Uriah,
David’s servant, has died in battle. And
in the final act of unmitigated evil, David sends word back to Joab, absolving
Joab of responsibility, saying, “Don’t worry, my friend, this is the nature of
war. People get killed.”
Bathsheba
mourns the death of her husband, Uriah, which literally means, “The Living God
is my light.” Indeed, throughout the
story, it is Uriah the Hittite who acts as the faithful Jew. And when the appointed mourning time is over,
David sends for Bathsheba—to take her
as one of his many wives.
On
its face, this story reminds us when we wax romantic about benevolent dictators,
authoritarian rulers we paint as saviors, that there are no such things. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Empires consume. Kingdoms take. Rather than get their own hands dirty,
authoritarian rulers send.
And King David would have gotten away
with it too but for the prophet Nathan appearing before him to offer a
blistering critique of authoritarian rule through allegory. Chapter 11 ends with the words, “But the
thing David had done displeased the Living God.” God hears the blood of Uriah calling out and extends
a hand to the prophet Nathan. Nathan
steps into the arena.
So it is now that the Living God sends Nathan to
confront King David. Nathan relates the
poverty of Uriah the Hittite by describing him as a poor man. King David sees the injustice in the story
and pronounces judgment on the man who would take the little that Uriah
has. Nathan now uses King David’s own
sense of justice to say to him, “You are that man! The violence and unfaithfulness you have done
now pervades your whole family, palace, and the nation. You cannot get away from it.”
This is our story. This is our tradition. This is . . . Bible. This story valorizes the foreigner, the
immigrant, the poor and paints Uriah as the faithful Jew. This tradition declares a blistering critique
over the most romantically held king within the Jewish and Christian faith—King
David. The prophet Nathan speaks truth
to power and, once again, shares the values of a God who does not allow the
most powerful person of the world’s number one superpower to escape
accountability for his treatment of the vulnerable, his theft of the poor, and
his hypocrisy when David is said to be a man after God’s own heart. Nathan, risking life and limb, comes before
David and tells him to get right.
If our faith is to mean anything, we
should tell a story like this one to our friends, our neighbors, and our family
members who do not believe social justice is central to the Jewish and
Christian story and tradition. As the
satirist Jon Stewart was given to say, “If you don't stick to your values when
they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies.”
Once we have evangelized the people
we know, we, as a church, need to remind ourselves of the courage our faith
calls for to confront the powerful with God’s call for integrity, justice, and
treasuring of the most vulnerable among us.
God does not suggest or hint that the most powerful and wealthy are
virtuous because they are powerful and wealthy.
In fact, the Bible, through stories like these, suggests that if you are
powerful and wealthy, you fall under the eye of God’s suspicion. As a church, where will we, in full courage,
call the powerful and wealthy into account to bring about transformative
justice? How will we fully participate
in this story so that it is once again told in our lives?
For some people, the authoritarian
dictator can do no wrong. For people of
faith, the authoritarian dictator, even the most beloved in history, will be confronted
in courage to bring about God’s justice.
Let us begin. Let us step into the
arena. For God has heard the cry and
stepped into the arena and now extends a hand hoping we will take that hand in
love and courage. Amen.
[1]
Erin McCarthy, “Roosevelt’s
‘The Man in the Arena,’” Mental Floss, April 23, 2020, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/63389/roosevelts-man-arena.
[2] One of my favorite
organizing principles learned from Adrienne Maree Brown.
[3] Emily McFarlan Miller, “UMC
edges toward historic split over LGBTQ inclusion. This small church showed the
way,” Episcopal News Service, July 23, 2021. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2021/07/23/umc-edges-toward-historic-split-over-lgbtq-inclusion-this-small-church-showed-the-way/
[4] Psalm 72:1-2,4, 12, 14.
[5] Everett Fox, Give Us a
King: Samuel, Saul, and David, (New
York: Schocken Books, 1999), pp. 188-189.
[6] Hints of how poor Uriah is
are indicated by Nathan describing Uriah as having only one sheep to David’s
money. Unfortunately, even the prophet
Nathan regards Bathsheba as chattel.
