A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
23rd October 2022
My full name is Nathaniel, which in Hebrew means ‘Gift of God’,
but you’ve probably heard of me as just ‘Nathan’,
as that’s what my friends call me.
I’ve spent most of my professional life as an advisor to the royal court,
which wasn’t exactly what I had in mind
when I set out on a religious vocation,
but sometimes the Spirit of the Lord takes into unexpected places.
For many years now I’ve had the privilege, if you could call it that,
of working alongside His Majesty King David,
which, as you might imagine, has been something of a mixed blessing.
What can I tell you about The King that you don’t already know?
Musician, poet, warrior,
lover, fighter;
deeply religious - almost fanatically so at times –
yet also a consummate politician;
man of the people, and man of God.
King David is all these things and more.
The first time I had a proper discussion with him
came shortly after one of his more religious moments,
which itself came off the back of some intense fighting.
David and 30,000 of his warriors had just recaptured the ark of the covenant
and brought it on a cart back into Israel’s safe-keeping.
David had placed it in a tent,
and started the celebration of its return
by sacrificing an ox and a calf.
He then led the celebrations himself,
dancing around the tent with wild abandon
wearing nothing but some priestly undergarments!
I think it’s fair to say that he let it all hang out,
and simply didn’t care who saw him.
Which, it turned out, was rather unfortunate,
because one of the people who saw him was Michal,
the younger daughter of David’s predecessor King Saul,
and the first of David’s wives.
I’m not sure it was ever a true love match, David and Michal,
much more of a political alliance,
and the bride price demanded of David by Saul for his daughteer
had been the rather unusual request
for a hundred Philistine foreskins!
But David had met that request, had doubled it in fact,
and had married Michal to tie Saul’s dynasty to his own.
All seemed good for a time,
but then when they thought David had died in battle,
Michal was handed over to a different husband
only to be returned to David after he became king.
To say she was unimpressed to see him
flaunting his religious fervour with gay abandon,
would be the understatement of the year…
Any positive feelings she may have had left for him
turned to disgust at that moment,
and she despised him from that day forwards.
But private disgust is one thing,
public criticism is another,
and when she tore strips off him as he returned to the palace,
the King pronounced a curse on her in the name of the Lord,
declaring that she would never bear a child;
and indeed she never did until the day she died,
and so King Saul’s line ended there.
And here we begin to see something
of the complexity of King David.
He so often seems to think that he can do no wrong,
that the end justifies the means,
that the Lord is on his side, come what may,
and will do whatever he wants.
And there is no doubt that David is the Lord’s favourite:
from his early years as a musician,
playing chords that pleased the Lord,
everyone has always been able to see
that he has the anointing of the Spirit of God,
to inspire devotion, to strike fear and terror,
to build up God’s people,
to see further than anyone else
as to what the Lord wants.
Time and again, the Lord has fought with David,
and David has fought with the Lord.
But, just between us, I can’t help but wonder
if sometimes David rather tries the Lord’s patience.
I mean, this business of cursing Michal,
surely a leader has to learn to take criticism from those close to him?
What if, one day, the king’s actions and the Lord’s will do not align?
Who will ever have the courage to speak to him,
if even those in the King’s own family
are cursed for daring to speak out?
Well, all this was in the background
to my first proper meeting with David.
The ark of the Covenant was in its tent,
and David went back to his cedar wood palace,
and the religious fervour came on him again,
and he started to feel guilt about the contrast
between his own comfortable home
and the mere tent where the Lord was living.
Clearly David was contemplating a new temple,
a permanent house for the Lord in Jerusalem,
his new capital city.
My initial reaction was to encourage this idea,
after all, surely the role of a prophet
is to strengthen the place of the Lord in the land,
and a new temple would draw worshippers from far and wide.
But then I had a dream,
and I know what you’re thinking… we’ve all had dreams,
and they’re not the most reliable way of taking decisions.
But then again, have you ever had one of those dreams
where you wake up with an unshakeable conviction
that something has settled within you whilst you slept?
Well, it was like I heard the Lord speaking,
and the thing is, God doesn’t want a temple, at least not yet.
A tent is fine for now,
because the Lord wants to be free to move with his people,
to accompany them on journeys, to go with them into battles.
And the Lord doesn’t want David to settle down either:
it’s not David’s calling to build fine palaces and temples,
he’s got more travelling, more fighting to do.
So with fear at what would happen,
and remembering the cursing of Michal,
I went to the King the next day,
and told him what I had sensed from the Lord,
I said that the house David would build for God
would not be a house of stone or wood,
but a dynasty – the house of David.
And the Lord’s words spoken through me touched the King’s heart,
and he went to the tent to speak with the Lord,
to confirm the covenant between himself and his God
that the King would continue to fight for the Lord,
and that in return his house would be established in the land
for countless generations.
And so David left his palace and went back to war,
subduing the Philistines, defeating the Moabites,
killing kings and hamstringing their chariot horses.
With terror and brilliance he established Israel,
he killed eighteen thousand Edomites in one battle,
he reigned over all Israel,
and administered justice and equity to all his people. (2 Sam 8.15)
But then, one year, David decided not to go to battle,
staying at home in his palace
and sending his commander Joab to ravage the Ammonites in his stead.
I don’t know what had come over him,
but his enthusiasm for the battle, for the task he was anointed to do,
had gone away that year.
In its place was a listlessness,
an accidie, a longing for something different.
And this is how the whole sorry affair
with the wife of Uriah the Hittite began.
You know the story,
so I’m not going to give it words again here,
but I will say that it felt as if David was working his way
down the list of forbidden commandments given to Moses,
systematically disobeying each one in turn.
Firstly desiring his neighbour’s wife,
then committing an adulterous rape on her,
then bearing false witness against that neighbour,
and finally then murdering his neighbour in cold blood,
so that he could steal Uriah’s wife for himself.
And it wasn’t just David,
it was like the infection of deceit at the top affected everyone,
with Joab the commander of the army
playing his own politics of deception against his King
to hide his terrible decisions in the face of the enemy.
And there was I,
a prophet of the Lord,
witness to the failure of my King.
What are we to do,
when those we have over us to lead us
demonstrate themselves incompetent to the task?
What are we to do,
when the powerful lose their way,
when those who should be acting for the good of the nation
start placing their own desires ahead of their calling?
How are we to call those powers to account,
when to speak out of turn can be catastrophic.
Remember Michal?
I’d already challenged David once;
could I get away with doing it again?
But could I keep silent?
Could I stand by and watch
as one person ruined not only their own life,
but also the hopes and dreams of a whole nation.
How could I get through to the King,
how could I break through his sense of living a charmed life,
of being entitled to his position,
accountable to neither God nor man.
And then I remembered,
that some battles are won not by swords and chariots,
but by words and the truth.
And so I started to dream my story,
of a poor man, and his pet lamb.
And I summoned up my courage,
and I went to the King to hold up my mirror of words,
to ensnare him with the truth.
His ability to judge the affairs of others with equity,
became the mechanism for him judging his own actions.
And David, because he is David,
and capable of both great sin and great grace,
did not repeat on me the curse of Michal.
He allowed me to continue,
and so I cursed him in the name of the Lord.
I said, to him, Thus says the Lord:
“Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house,
for you have despised me,
and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.”
I went on, Thus says the Lord:
“I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house;
and I will take your wives before your eyes,
and give them to your neighbour,
and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this very sun.
For you did it secretly;
but I will do this thing before all Israel,
and before the sun.”
Thus says the Lord. (2 Samuel 12:10-12)
And I saw the light go out in David’s eyes,
as this mighty holy man of valour and war,
this giant-killing giant of man,
was himself slain in his soul
by the small smooth stones of my words of truth.
He confessed his sin to me,
as if I was a priest not a prophet,
and I thought that this was to be the end of the matter,
but then the Spirit of the Lord came upon me again,
and I said to the King:
Thus says the Lord:
“Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die.
Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord,
the child that is born to you shall die” (2 Sam 12.13b-14).
There has to be some balance, you see,
even for a king like David.
There are no cost-free transgressions,
sin always extracts its terrible cost on human lives.
Did God kill David’s child?
I don’t know. I hope not.
But David’s child died, never even named,
and the King now has to live with that guilt and pain
for the rest of his life.
Do you know he nearly starved himself to death
as that child lay dying?
But once it had gone,
he went to the temple to worship.
Oh, they had more children, David and Bathsheba,
even naming one of them after me,
but that lost little one,
another life added to the tally of David’s harvest of humans,
remains in my soul,
as the weak, the children, and the women
continue to suffer for the sins committed by powerful men.
How is it that David commits the sins,
yet the victims of his abuse, his child, other children,
and innocent women, are those who bear the punishment?
Is this the way the Lord works?
I would love to say ‘no’,
but somehow I feel trapped inside a story that says ‘yes’.
It feels like I’m trapped in a world
where another hand has written these rules of reward and punishment,
and I can’t escape,
because it’s a story that repeats itself down the generations,
as if the great King David’s family
is now destined for destruction and defeat
because of his great failures and destructive actions.
Did you know that his daughter Tamar
was raped by her brother Amnon?
Another story of another woman
destined to carry the shame
for the sins of her father and brother!
Why do I live in a world where the women and children are punished
for the sins of the kings and the princes,
their fathers and their brothers?
If only there were some way that this story could be rewritten,
with the Lord not as the divine equivalent to David:
warring and fighting, and punishing and rewarding.
What if we could find a way to tell this story
where the Lord suffers with the suffering,
where the Lord dies alongside
the innocent child taken before their time,
where the Lord weeps with those
who find life unbearable.
What if this story could become part of a bigger story,
enfolding the King’s life, with all its failures and glories,
into a wider narrative?
What if the house of David were not destined to destruction
but to the building of a new and better house for the Lord?
What if God is still faithful
to the covenants of Noah, Moses, Abraham, and David?
What if there were no need to keep offering the lamb of sacrifice
on the altar of forgiveness?
I wonder if I am dreaming again,
or maybe I am catching a glimpse
of a vision of a different future?
My story to the King exposed his sin,
and I wonder if other stories can do similar,
as the world as we know it,
becomes the world as we long for it to be.
Well, I offer my story this morning,
and I hope my words open for you
a path to a future of hope,
where the Lord is part of your story too.
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