“Living
Too Easy”
July
30,2006
First
Presbyterian Church Carson City
Rev.
Bruce Kochsmeier
The last
time we were with David he was in a defining moment; a young man after God’s
heart was facing a giant who symbolized impossible odds.
Except David knew that stepping forward in God’s name carried no odds.
He knew that no matter what happened he couldn’t lose, for to fight for
God; to stand up for what God calls us to do is victory in itself.
Now,
fast-forward some years. David has
become King. He has vanquished not
only the giant but nations and Israel is thriving.
David isn’t even going to battle and yet he is in this passage so
utterly defeated. As one wise
commentator has said, “This narrative is more than we want to know about David
and more than we can bear to understand about ourselves.”
It is so hard to understand until we see ourselves; our human condition
like David. We might want to say,
“But I haven’t been adulterous” or “I haven’t had anyone killed.”
But the specifics of the sin aren’t the story.
When we become victorious; when we think we have gained control of a
situation we can become so subtly complacent, thinking, “Whew, I am good.”
Or maybe like David we’ve been exceedingly hard working and devoted,
but we get tired and we want to push the “easy button” so we compromise a
shade on what we know is right for us because…well because we want to FEEL
good and from there it all starts to fall apart.
How
could a man so good, a man who so loved God fall so far as to throw away his
prized possession; his relationship with God and destroy the lives of two people
and in many ways his family and even his nation?
By living too easy, by trusting his feelings, by believing it wouldn’t
matter, by believing the illusion that having Bathsheba would make him whole.
How
did this happen to David? It
began with four words, “David stayed in Jerusalem”.
The point is that he let someone do his fighting for him.
It just doesn’t work this way. It
isn’t supposed to. David knew
this. He knew that he had to face Goliath. No one could do it for him.
He couldn’t wear the King’s armor, but he had to do it in reliance
upon the God to whom he belonged. He
had to do it in the power of THE ONE who whose power alone could conquer.
And when he didn’t he was conquered.
And we will be too. And it
will be just as devastating, but he power of evil will make it seem like nothing
in the eyes of the world; in our own ability to justify.
But that how evil kills us. It
sucks the life out of the very best thing we have until subtly there is nothing
left. The best thing David had was
relationship with God and he subtly let the life of this relationship be
poisoned by relying upon himself.
It
occurred to me this week as I rode my motorcycle up the California coastline,
that what happened to David is what can happen to us.
He took his eye off the road. Wednesday
morning I was riding north through the densest fog I can remember.
I had Highway 1 to myself and normally I would have been clipping through
the turns trying to drag my toe and stay off the brakes, but not in this soup.
Just south of a village there was a flagger stopping traffic.
After a few moments he sent me through and I came upon the biggest tow
truck I’ve ever seen. It had huge cables stretched down the 200-foot cliff toward
the ocean. The search and rescue
team was there. Cal Trans was there
and as I rode by they looked at me and shook their heads. In the fog or dark or both a car had come into a tight turn
with no guardrail and sailed off the cliff down to the ocean.
I didn’t see it happen. Maybe
they were simply going faster than the road could handle.
Maybe they took their eyes off the road just for second, but they had
been lulled into thinking they didn’t have to do it the right way.
It likely cost a life. We
can do the same thing spiritually. God
wants us to stay involved because he knows that staying involved will save our
lives.
We
need to stay involved a lot of the time because others are not.
The other day I was coming down Robinson street on my motorcycle and
watched a person run right through a stop sign, stopping only in the middle of
the street when the driver would have hit me…except I was watching out for the
other person and for myself. The
person was on the phone. Of course
I couldn’t be seen. The phone up
the side of the face blocked the person’s peripheral vision!
The reason God calls us to stay devoted to him is because others are not
and we need to be devoted for them and for ourselves. It
really is a matter of life and death and we can’t trust others to do our
devotion for us no matter WHO they are. The
king summoned Bathsheba, but she couldn’t trust him beyond this.
She was not keeping her eye on the road.
Could she have said “No”? It
might have been terribly hard and costly, but yes she could have. The same is true for us in our Christian devotion.
There are times every day we have to say “No” to things so we can say
a true and unwavering “Yes” to God. (Money,
values, time,)
The other thing that went very wrong is that David lost his slingshot…recreationally and spiritually – he needed a safe diversion, but he also needed to be doing battle with principalities and powers. He also needed to keep it simple. He didn’t and it killed his spirit. David needed to keep alive his covenant relationship covenant with God. We don’t know how David got to this point of weakness. Did he get bored? Was he burned out with leadership? I don’t know, but I do know that it is precisely when living gets hard and we want it easy that God is inviting us to the richest times of knowing the power of his provision and reality. We just want it too easy.
Do
you know why David took Bathsheba? Because
he could; because he was the king. Do
you know why we do the things that kill us?
Because we can. Not because
they are right or good, but simply because we can; because there is no
guardrail, because it doesn’t seem like it will matter, but it does.
There are so many times it would seem that compromise won’t hurt us and
at times it doesn’t seem to, but what I does is condition us to the point that
we continue until it kills us spiritually.
David
was trusting his feelings rather than trusting God.
He knew this wasn’t right. He
knew his place was with the troops up on the front line. How ironic that Uriah, not even a Jew, the man whose wife and
life were stolen by David, wanted what David had shown him.
He wanted to be back on the line with his men, being responsible.
And
this is the key lesson for each of us in this tragic story.
Responsibly, not ease of life is what makes life meaningful.
Doing the right thing by God’s grace and not simply our own abilities
is what leads us to wholeness. Please
listen to these powerful words about this key of responsibility written by
Antoine de St. Exupery of a friend.
“His
moral greatness consists in his sense of responsibility.
He knew that he was responsible for himself, for his mission, for the
fulfillment of the hopes of his comrades. He
was holding in his hands their sorrow and their joy.
He was responsible for that new element which the living were
constructing and in which he as a participant.
Responsible, in as much as his work contributed to it, for the fate of
those men.”
“He
was one among those bold and generous men who had taken upon themselves the task
of spreading their foliage over bold and generous horizons.
To be a man, (a woman) is, precisely, to be responsible.
It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery.
It is to take pride in a victory won by one’s comrades.
It is to feel, when setting one’s stone, that one is contributing to
the building of the world.”
David
knew this about responsibility. We
do too. But he and we dare to think
that we are not connected to one another and we do so at the expense of the
greater mission and to meaning itself in our own lives.
What would have happened if in that moment David had prayed?
But he didn’t. He needed to take himself out of the game.
It was too much power. He
needed to tell someone he was in trouble. That’s
what we need to do because every one of us is a leader.
We will
consider this further next Sunday, but for today we need to realize how much God
wants us to live the life Jesus died to show us.
And because he did, even and especially because we have not been always
who we have been called to be, we can get up and live as forgiven people
trusting in God’s grace for this is the most responsible thing we can do and
it is what Jesus died to give us the grace to receive.
There’s
a little chorus I’m going to have Karen teach us in days to comes, the words
of which are simply, “I’ll obey because I love you.
I’ll obey because I believe you. I’ll
obey, my life is in your hands. It’s
the way I show my love for you when feelings go away.
If it costs me everything, I’ll obey.”
God wants this for us for our sake and for his.
God wants to restore us. We have this story to show us how easy it is to
fall and how necessary it is to be restored as only God can.
This morning may we be empowered not to live too easy, but to live on the
front line with Jesus Christ. Amen.