You notice that this sermon is part 2. Sometimes the lectionary works that way for preachers. (After these two heavy weeks with David, I am sure we will all be glad to get back to the stories of Jesus.) So to recap – last week David stayed home during the spring, which is the season when kings go to war. At home, David looked out over the palace walls to see beautiful Bathsheba in her ritual bath; he decided he must have her. Instead of conquering on the battlefield, he would conquer in the bedroom. The powerful King David sends messengers to bring Bathsheba to the palace. After David has had Bathsheba, she uses the little power she has and sends a message to the king – telling him she is pregnant.

The machinations that David and his general Joab go through to get Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, out of the way, are left out of the lectionary but feel free to read the whole story in II Samuel. To summarize, David goes into overdrive trying to create a plausible timeline for this pregnancy. Uriah is such an honorable military commander he will not sleep with his own wife until the kingdom is safe, even after David gets him drunk. The only thing left for David to do is to arrange to have Uriah killed in battle by the opposing army, the Ammonites. This creates room for the king to swoop in and protectively take the grieving widow into his own palace to comfort.

We recognized last week that this story can be a trigger for those who have experienced sexualized violence. We also recognized that even as Bathsheba speaks up for herself, she suffers more negative consequences (the death of her husband and the eventual death of her child.)

The lectionary resumes the story today, telling us that “the wife of Uriah” has properly grieved for her husband and has been moved into the palace to bear David, the king, a son.

Do you hear what the writer does here? The woman is not named; she is “the wife of Uriah.” The emphasis is on the value of Bathsheba and the wrong David has done, in taking what is properly that of another man. The wife of Uriah bears David a son; she does not even bear a son for herself. She continues to be a mere player in David’s story.

Nathan, the prophet, shows up. It is good for people of power to have advisors who do not simply agree to everything the powerful one says. People in power need prophets who can speak truth to them, even when it is a hard truth. Nathan is that person for David and subsequently that voice for David’s son, Solomon. Nathan speaks not just for himself; he speaks on behalf of God.

Nathan understands that if he comes right out and says that David has sinned, it may not go so well. But present a case for the king to judge and there is a chance that David will see where the problem lies. Nathan barely finishes the story of the rich man who takes the only sheep of the poor farmer and butchers it for the rich man’s banquet, when David is outraged. David makes an immediate judgment that the rich man should pay four times what the lamb is worth and really should be put to death for such evil actions.

Before David is finished, Nathan responds with “You are that man!” Then we imagine the proud and powerful king begin to crumple as Nathan recites all the ways that God has blessed David, bringing him from obscurity to prominence and power. David inherited everything from the King Saul including the people to rule over, the palace and all the wives that come with it. Now because of David’s sin, God will stir up evil within David’s own household. David acted in secret with Uriah’s wife but he will be humiliated in public – as his wives are taken from him.

David is remorseful; he sees that he has sinned in taking another man’s wife. Tradition has it that Psalm 51, which we read today, is what David writes when he realizes the sin he has committed. Hear these words of David:

51:4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.

51:5 Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.

Two things are curious to me in this fragment of the psalm. David names that there was something sinful about his own conception. He sees that in conceiving a child with the wife of Uriah there is sin and he connects that back to his own story, when his mother conceived him.

A little digging on the internet reveals that indeed David’s mother, probably named NItzebet, is not the same woman as the mother of his seven brothers. (One can start here and keep searching: jorkbloggen.com/2012/04/04/king-david-said-in-sin-did-my-mother-conceive-me-but-its-no-support-for-a-sinful-nature-ps-515/) Nitzebet was probably first the wife of the Ammonite king, Nahash, before she was the wife of Jesse. (And remember, it was the Ammonites that Uriah was fighting when he was killed – by them. The plot thickens.)

The family tree is uncertain but a very interesting tree it is. That Jesus, the one we call “redeemer, savior of the world, holy one, Messiah” should come from this lineage is either extremely scandalous or a comfort to the rest of us who also have sin, sexual and otherwise, in our own family trees. Let’s say it is both: scandalous and a comfort.

The other thing that catches my ear as I read this passage from Psalm 51 is that David says, Against you, you alone, have I sinned… This simple phrase outrages me in a way that catches me off guard. I have repeated this phrase many times: liturgically, devotionally, even sung it in musical settings. But this time as I read the psalm in the context of this story, I hear it differently.

Nathan clearly points to the sin that has so encompassed David’s life the past nine months, and David is remorseful. So how dare King David pray that he sinned only against God! Did he not sin against Bathsheba by raping her and forcing her to be his wife? Did he not sin against Uriah by having him killed? Did he not sin against his general Joab by forcing him to be complicit in Uriah’s death? And now there is the further humiliation and violence that will come for the other wives of David who will suffer at the hands of who knows what men in the streets, according to Nathan’s God. If David sees only that he sinned against God then David is blind.

This is the nature of power gone unchecked. David can see, after Nathan shows him, that he has done wrong but he does not see that the wrong is much bigger than just sinning against God. Yes, he sees that he should repent and ask God for forgiveness but as he closes his eyes in prayer he closes himself off from the faces of those who ultimately pay the price for his sinful behavior: Bathsheba, Uriah, Joab, his wives and the unnamed baby that will soon die.

But it is not only David that makes me angry. I wonder at a system that is oblivious to the ongoing violence that it perpetuates. Of course there are cultural issues at play here; family was understood and lived out differently 3000 years ago. But for Nathan to say that God gave David the tribes of Judah and Israel to rule, all the wives to be his own, and that God would have given David even more wives if he had wanted them… This does not make me a big fan of Nathan’s God.

It seems to me that this illustrates a whole other kind of power at play. When this kind of privilege and power is at work, when everyone is swimming in it, is drowning in it, there is hardly anyone left to question it. We are very often blind to the systems in which we live; we miss the injustices right in front of us because they are so common place or because they do not happen within our privileged enclaves. This is why we need prophets to speak to us, to find ways to open our eyes and ears and hearts.

So often though, prophets look like crazy people. The voices crying in the wilderness wear nothing but holey underwear, and eat bugs. Prophets  bring a message that disrupts the power structures and critique those who hold power. Because prophets are truthtellers, they are vilified and often demonized by those who are invested in holding onto power. The vilifiers are the same people who are dependent upon keeping the unjust systems and institutions in place so as to hang onto their power and positions.

It is not that every disruptive person has a message from God. And not every person who holds power is corrupt. But we do need to find ways to see clearly how the systems we create find their way toward injustice in an effort to perpetuate and save themselves. We need to hear Nathan when he speaks clearly, even if the message indicts us.

Mennonites are known around the world as peacemakers and people of justice, and yet we are just as susceptible as everyone else to being part of systemic and institutional violence. Over the years, various voices have tried to point this out to us though we usually try to ignore it until history brings the truth back around again.

Witness Dr. Vincent Harding, who worked with Mennonites in Chicago and Atlanta in the 1950s and 60s. We like to claim Dr Harding because he also worked with Martin Luther King Jr. Even though Dr. Harding pointed to the places that Mennonites allowed racism to live and flourish in the church, he was invited to address the Mennonite World Conference in Amsterdam in 1967. After naming and quoting revolutionaries around the world working for racial justice, Dr Harding says:  These men who have been driven to revolution often consider the good Christians of the West as some of their major enemies. We are part of the problem, not the solution. We live off the earnings of their land. They are paying for our comfort. Our continued acquiescence in all the benefits of Western corporate capitalism is for them a negation of all our prayers of concern and our conference statements wet with tears of pity. (http://ml.bethelks.edu/issue/vol-69/article/the-peace-witness-and-revolutionary-movements/) It was soon after this that Dr Harding left the Mennonite church, his message meeting with too much resistance. (For more about Dr Vincent Harding, see the current issue of Mennonite Life: http://ml.bethelks.edu)

Witness Dr. Felipe Hinojosa, who grew up Mennonite in Texas and is now a professor of history at Texas A & M. In his book, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture, Dr. Hinojosa chronicles the struggle it has been for Latino people to find a place in the US Mennonite Church. In a review of the book in Mennonite World Review, Isaac Villegas notes this incident:

Hinojosa recounts the Cross-Cultural Youth Convention in 1972, where nonwhite Mennonite youth gathered for worship, fellowship and discussion of what it means to be minorities within the church and country. At the convention, John Powell, Hubert Brown, Lawrence Hart and Neftali Torres, among others, challenged the youth to engage with issues of faith and identity. And the youth did come together to call upon the Mennonite church to support the work of the National Farm Worker Ministry as well as endorse the lettuce boycott. “We ask our Savior Jesus Christ to be with Cesar Chavez,” they prayed. But there was a backlash, and the youth movement and Minority Ministries Council were accused of leading the church astray with “a mixture of Christianity and Communism,” wrote a Pennsylvanian Mennonite. (http://mennoworld.org/2014/12/04/columns/despite-missteps-latinos-joined-mennonites/)

Witness Dr. Stephanie Krehbiel who has chronicled in her recent dissertation the uneasy, unjust, and she would say violent, relationship Mennonites have with LGBTQ people. She says this in an interview in the recent issue of The Mennonite magazine:

… “dialogue” and “discernment” … are practical words that have come into use to describe the ways that churches with horizontal forms of polity determine their priorities, apply their principles, and make decisions. The reason these words have become so charged, for LGBTQ Mennonites especially, is that the processes to which they refer have been abusive. “Dialogue” and “discernment” have come to mean “Straight people with institutional power will set the terms of this exchange, and LGBTQ people should feel grateful to be invited and to give straight people the chance to adjudicate their lives.” A lot of LGBTQ Mennonites who have participated in these discussions have ended up feeling quite violated by them, and as a scholar I take those claims seriously. (https://themennonite.org/opinion/qa-krehbiel-on-the-lgbtq-inclusion-movement/)

There is no shortage of evidence that institutions in general, and the church in particular, need prophets like Nathan, Vincent, Felipe and Stephanie to name the injustices that become invisible to those who hold power and privilege, to those who benefit from power and privilege. We need these prophetic voices. Sometimes we praise them for their work when we agree with their aims. Other times, when these voices threaten to disrupt our good life, we try to muffle or silence them.

One can hardly be a truth teller, noting the places where the leadership and institution are violent, corrupt and unjust and remain employed by that same institution. Prophets usually lose their jobs, even in upstanding institutions like the church or the government. (Nathan may be the exception.) It is no wonder that prophets are freelancers, wandering the wilderness, surviving on honey and bugs. It is a hazard of the prophetic task.

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The story of Nathan and David is so powerful because David is not the only one blind to his obvious sin. We too miss the ways that we sin personally and the ways that we participate in structures and systems that wound and kill.

What would it be like if those in power, ourselves included, leaned toward those voices who so clearly see the flaws we are blind to? What would it be like if David asked for forgiveness, not just from God, but from Bathsheba, from his wives, from Joab, from the people right in front of him. What if we did the same?

What if we tried to work with the truth tellers instead of pushing them out? What if we asked for eventual forgiveness from those we have marginalized with racism, sexism, heterosexism and then asked if we could  walk with them instead of walking past them? What if we all learn to be truth tellers, seeing the places where justice is needed most? Then we can all work together to bring justice “on earth, as is it in heaven.”