Saga: The Story of David: What Matters Most
August 7, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
II Samuel 18:31-33


So as we hear the Scripture today I want to set it up for you. This is the moment when David discovers that his son Absalom has been killed in battle. And it’s a battle between Absalom’s army and David’s army. This is the moment when David finds out from a messenger who’s coming to tell him. Listen to him as Rev. Harper reads the morning Scripture:

Then the Cushite came; and the Cushite said, “Good tidings for my lord the king! For the Lord has vindicated you this day, delivering you from the power of all who rose up against you.” The king said to the Cushite, “Is it well with the young man Absalom?” The Cushite answered, “May the enemies of my lord the king, and all who rise up to do you harm, be like that young man.” The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he wept, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Samuel 18:31-33 NRSV)
O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel. And then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.”
That’s kind of a depressing nursery rhyme isn’t it? I don’t know why we say it to our children. I guess it goes along with the prayer, “If I should die before I wake…” One of those.
But that’s really what this story is about, honestly. The king messed up. The king was in a mess and he couldn’t put it back together again.
Now the story of Absalom spans about five chapters in the book of 2 Samuel, and I'm going to try and simplify it and leave out some of the episodes in it, but you need to catch at least the broad span of it.
If you remember at the end of our last episode, David has been confronted about his assault of Bathsheba and his murder of Bathsheba’s husband. And he has acknowledged it and owned it and as a result, his son by Bathsheba dies.Nathan says, ”The sword shall never depart from your house.”
David has a number of sons and Amnon was his oldest. And Amnon was his favorite. Amnon had a half-brother named Absalom and Absalom had a sister named Tamar, who was Amnon’s half-sister. All of them were David’s children. Amnon fell in lust with Tamar - that’s the best way I can say it. And he drew her into his chambers and forced himself upon her. To make it worse when that act was over he said to her, “You disgust to me,” and he cast her aside.
It’s about as bad as it gets, but it gets worse. Absalom, who is Tamar’s full brother, is furious and David is furious. David hears about it and he is so angry. But Amnon is his oldest and he loves Amnon so he takes no action whatsoever.
Absalom fumes, and seethes and two years go by and Absalom finally decides he must take justice into his own hands, and he kills his brother Amnon. So Amnon is dead and David hears about it and he’s furious. Absalom flees and runs away, and for three years he stays with his wife’s father.
He’s from the land of Geshur which is what is now the Golan Heights, far northeast of Israel. And he stays there. Absalom had been married off to make a treaty with the king of Geshur, and so he is married to the king's daughter. He stays there for three years, then he decides he really wants to come home. He gets Joab, the general, to intercede for him. He comes back home again and David says, “You can come back to Jerusalem but I don't want to see your face. Don't come into my presence. But you can come back home again.” So Absalom comes back home and he stays there for two more years. Then he wants finally to see David and he asks, “Can I see David?” He finally kind of tricks Joab who’s David’s general, and his key advisor into allowing him to see David. When he sees David there’s a reconciliation. David kisses him, him and you’d think that was the end of it.
But of course it’s not. For four years Absalom stays in Jerusalem there and he would go out to the city gates, and when people would come into the city Absalom would say, “What do you need?” And they’d say, “I’m here to see King David to see if he can help.” And then Absalom would say, “Ah, David’s busy. Let me help you.” So he would help all the people as they came in the city gates. Very magnanimous of him.
Well, the Scripture says that he was handsome and charismatic, and the “hearts of the people went after Absalom.” He stole the hearts of the people.
After four years he decided, “I think I ought to be king.” So he gets his father to give him permission to go off to Hebron where the people anoint him to be the new king of Israel. It’s interesting that’s where David was anointed king of Israel as well. Absalom decides he’s going to go back into Jerusalem and claim the capital and the throne and the kingdom for himself.

Well, David hears about this and he realizes that the hearts of all the people have gone after Absalom, and he’s scared. So he takes the Ark of the Covenant, they leave Jerusalem and they flee out the eastern gate and walk up the Mount of Olives. It’s the same road that Jesus comes down in the Palm Sunday story. They walk up the Mount of Olives.
Absalom comes into town, into Jerusalem and he claims the kingdom. You know the way that he demonstrates that he’s the new king? He sleeps with all ten of his father’s concubines. And lest you think that’s such a terrible thing, David slept with all of Saul’s concubines as a way of claiming his kingship. It’s an interesting custom, I guess.
Anyway, he’s now legitimately the king of Israel. David sees this and he flees even faster and gets all the way to the Jordan River. Absalom decides he’s going to go after his father and he’s going to kill him because he remains a threat. So he heads out of the city after them, and David has left a spy in Absalom’s court says to David, “He’s coming after you. You’d better get across the Jordan River. Otherwise he’s going to pin you there against the river.”
So they cross the Jordan River and David holes up in a city in what is now Jordan. Absalom comes across the river into what is a very densely wooded area. It’s called the Woods of Ephraim. David divides his armies into three groups. He says, “I’m not going to go out and fight because what he really wants to do is kill me. So I’m going to stay here in the city and you all go out in three groups.” And Joab led one of the groups.
Absalom is riding through the forest and this is where it gets weird, as if it wasn’t weird already. Absalom is riding through the forest on a mule. He’s handsome and he has long hair. And his hair gets caught in one of the trees and the mule keeps going and leaves Absalom hanging there by his hair.
I hate when that happens! I hate that!
So Absalom is hanging there by his hair. Now David has said to his men, “You go out and fight the battle against Absalom’s army but if you find my son Absalom be gentle with him. Don’t kill him.”
Well, Joab comes across Absalom hanging by his hair and his soldiers say to Joab, “Hey, we've been told by King David not to kill him.” And Joab says, “David doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Then he takes his javelin and stabs Absalom three times. He stabs him three times but he still doesn’t die. So Joab says to his men, “You go ahead and kill him.” And they do.
What we read in Scripture a moment ago is the story of the messenger arriving and telling King David that his son Absalom has been killed in battle. And he grieves enormously and weeps and says, “My son! My son!”
There’s one more scene. Joab comes in to see David and he says, “Look, you’re sitting in here grieving about your son but your men - your soldiers - have been out fighting for you and risking their lives. And they think you’re more upset about Absalom’s death than you are about their casualties.”
Literally the Scripture says, “Joab said to him, ‘You hate those who love you, and love those who hate you.’” Joab tells him, “You go out there and you encourage your men.” So David goes out and sits by the gate while the armies of Israel parade by again. He goes back to Jerusalem, claims the crown again and the kingdom is reestablished.
So what does this mean for us? I must say that it isn’t really good that this fell on Children’s Choir Day. We sat with the other clergy who are preaching this sermon in our worship team. And we said, “Let’s see - is there some good news in here? Surely we can find a message!”
Here’s what I would tell you. Here are three things that jump out at me. The first is that life is messy and I think that’s the overriding message here. Life is messy.
You remember the 1970s sitcom “Happy Days” and how it always ended? Fonzie put his thumbs up and Mr. Cunningham would smile at him and roll his eyes and they would all live happily ever after. I grew up watching “Leave it To Beaver” - did a lot of you do that? After school every day you’d watch Wally and the Beave and it always ended with Wally and the Beave. And Beaver would say, “Wally, why do Mom and Dad yell at us so much?” And then Wally would say, “I don’t know, just goofy I guess.” And that it would go “Da da da da DAH! and it was all resolved. “Da da da da Dah!” All the time.
You know life isn’t that way. It’s not a sitcom. We make mistakes but they don’t just magically get fixed by the Fonz or Wally. You see, those consequences hang on.
I want you to think about this moment in David’s life. His son by Bathsheba is dead, his son Amnon is dead and has attacked and raped his sister Tamar. It has been disgraced. Absalom is dead. Jonathan his best friend is dead. Wow! What a mess my life is, I’m sure David said. All those regrets, all those things I wish I would have done. Why did I keep him away so long? Why didn’t I do something about Amnon’s attack of Tamar. Why did I push Absalom away so that he hid away for so long? Why did I make him sit here in the city and not let him see me? Maybe I could have fixed this. But I can’t fix it now. It’s too late. What a mess.
Sometimes I look at this story and one thing I find so interesting is the dynamic between David as king and David as father. Our conventional wisdom is that “Family is always more important than profession.” So if you’re making decisions, always make family come first. I don’t know if that would have worked.
See, that’s not life. You can’t always do that. Our soldiers who head off to serve their country, they leave their families behind for some period of time. And we think that’s the right thing to do because they’re doing their duty. But family has to take a second seat.
Everything isn’t all black and white - easy to decide. Life is messy. And here’s the marvelous thing about the whole thing. God is still present. We’d love to make the Bible a book of moral fables about “be good and here’s how you be good.” That’s not what the Bible is. It's a snapshot of real life. And it tells us that in the midst of real life with families that have dysfunction and are messy, and a world that is filled with messiness and dysfunction, God is still present. God is still right there.
Next week we’re going to talk about David’s death and here’s how the book of Chronicles speaks of David’s death. It’s one of my most favorite verses in all of Scripture. It says, “And David died an old man, full of days.” In other words, it says, “He lived life all the way.” Your life and my life.
If you’ve never been to that place where you look at your life and said, “Oh, my goodness, what a mess,” then count yourself blessed. Maybe still to come, who knows.
But even in the midst of those moments we decide to live life as it comes, not the way we want it to be, but as it comes, and find God’s presence in the midst of it.
Some of you know Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t know how many of you have read the book or seen the movie. It’s about her life. She’s coming out of a divorce and she goes on this adventure through the world. She travels all around the world, and has all these great adventures and learns all these things about herself. She meets a man named Felipe at the end and they fall in love and they get married and they ride off into the sunset.
It’s a wonderful story. Great story. That book came out in 2006 and in July, Elizabeth announced that she and Felipe are divorcing. Life can be messy.
Here’s what another author writes about concerning that story. It’s Danielle Trussoni who’s an author herself and who’s written a new book, I think called The Fortress. She writes, “I understand the feelings of sadness and betrayal that some of Gilbert’s readers expressed upon learning that the marriage was over. Gilbert is a writer; she constructs a fairy tale for her readers. Now she is dismantling it. As readers and human beings, we love these kinds of stories. We crave a happy ending. We crave relationships to work out elegantly without complication. But lives, unlike stories, evolve and change. As Gilbert’s devastated readers demonstrate, there is still a gap between the stories we aspire to follow and the lives we actually live. Here’s what I know now. Real life is messy. Indeed, the best, fullest lives are often lived by people who are not afraid of complication.”
God is present in the midst of our messiness. It doesn't have to end like “Happy Days” for God to be there.
Here’s the second thing I want to lift up. We can lose people we love. David lost lots of them. And so we’ve got to make a decision not to wait, not to put off saying the things we need to say, dealing with the things we need to deal with, addressing the issues we need to address.
Tom Long, the great preacher, pointed me to a book by Tracy Kidder called Old Friends. Maybe you’re read it. It’s been out a while. It’s the story of two men who live in a nursing home. One is 90 and one is in his 70s. The 90-year old’s wife has passed away and the 70-year old’s wife is still alive and she doesn’t live there. She lives somewhere else. So he would call her every night. And every night the 90-year old would tell the 70-year old “Tell her you love her!” but he never would.
He said, “Oh, that’s just not my way. She knows I love her.” The other would say, “Tell her you love her.” He never did.
She goes into a coma and he sits by her bed and says, “I love you, I love you, I love you…” He remembers a story about her dropping a frying pan early in their marriage and he cursed at her. He said, “If I could have her back for just one minute, she could drop a hundred frying pans and I wouldn’t care at all.”
Friends, don’t wait!
I love the words of the great poet T. S. Eliot, “Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage we did not take toward the door we never opened into the rose garden.” So don’t wait.
Here’s the last thing in this really painful story. When we have to look for something to count on, the one thing we can count on is God's grace, God’s love for us.
If you really think about it, everything else that David had counted on was disappearing around him. His family, his friends, even himself, his own moral compass had failed him. When everything else fails us, all we can do is hold onto God’s hand.
Some of you have been in Twelve Step groups. The basic premise is that when you reach the point that you recognize that your life is out of control and you can’t fix it. You can’t fix it and then you reach out and take God’s hand and say, “You do something with this. I give it all to you.”

There’s a point to the story when David gets to the top of the Mount of Olives, and he’s trying to decide what to do. He has the Ark of the Covenant with him and he says to the priest, Zadok, “You take the Ark of the Covenant back into Jerusalem and if it’s God’s purpose that I should be king, great. And if it’s God’s purpose that Absalom should be king, great. God will do with me as he sees fit. I give it up. I can’t fix this.”
And in that moment he reaches out and takes God’s hand.
There are two Psalms that were traditionally thought to have been written in response to this mess with Absalom. One is Psalm 3 and the other is Psalm 25. This is part of Psalm 25: “My eyes are ever toward the Lord for he will pluck my feet out of the net. Turn to me and be gracious to me for I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart and bring me out of my distress. Consider my affliction and my trouble and forgive all my sin.” He’s saying, “I don’t know, God, my life is a mess and I suspect I’ve made a mess of it. Just save me.”
We can count on God’s grace.
David reaches this point in his life and he gets a little taste of something. He realizes that his love for Absalom has a hint of God’s love for us. Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite authors, says it this way: “If David could have done the boy’s dying for him, he would have done it. If he could have paid the price of the boy’s betrayal of him, he would have paid it. If he could have given his own life to make the boy alive again, he would have given it. But even a king can’t do that. As later history was to prove, it takes a God.”
It takes a God who loves us so much that he would die for us. That’s the God we put our hand into when our life reaches that point where we can’t fix it anymore.

Let’s pray. Lord God, life can be really messy. As much as we wish it was like a “Leave it to Beaver” television show it’s so much more difficult than that. And yet you are present in the midst of all of it. And we thank you, God. We thank you that you have given us your Scripture that we might see a snapshot of real life and know that you will not give up on us. So God, we put our hand in your hand and we trust you. Save us from the net. Lead us in the right paths. In the name of Christ. Amen.