John Mark Jones - "The Fall of the House of David" (August 13, 2000)
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Transcript
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- | Let us pray. | 0:27 |
O Lord, may the words of my mouth | 0:35 | |
and the meditations of all of our hearts | 0:37 | |
be acceptable in Your sight, for truly You are | 0:41 | |
our strength and our redeemer, amen. | 0:46 | |
I am 42 years old. | 0:58 | |
I have a daughter who is 10 years old. | 1:04 | |
Not long after we moved to Bishopville, | 1:09 | |
a little more than three years ago, | 1:11 | |
I was talking with a good friend of mine | 1:12 | |
who was also my age, he has three daughters. | 1:14 | |
They are 16, 11, | 1:21 | |
and six years old. | 1:26 | |
We were remarking the | 1:30 | |
rate at which our daughters were growing. | 1:35 | |
Our children grow so quickly, they shoot up before our eyes | 1:40 | |
and we hardly recognize that time has passed. | 1:44 | |
As the conversation continued, one of us, | 1:50 | |
I don't remember which one, one of us | 1:53 | |
wondered aloud what kind of young men | 1:56 | |
our daughters would be attracted to. | 2:01 | |
And then Bob said, "You know, it's quite possible | 2:07 | |
"that our daughters will fall in love | 2:10 | |
"with young men who are like their fathers." | 2:13 | |
And when Bob said that, we both winced. | 2:21 | |
(audience laughs) | 2:26 | |
Neither one of us said anything, | 2:31 | |
but the thought was something like "Oh God, | 2:32 | |
"I hope our daughters fall in love with men | 2:38 | |
"who are better than their fathers." | 2:41 | |
Now that is not to say that Bob and I | 2:46 | |
think poorly of ourselves or of each other, | 2:48 | |
it is to say, however, that we know ourselves. | 2:53 | |
And we remember with some embarrassment | 2:58 | |
what we were like as adolescents. | 3:02 | |
Heaven forbid our daughters should fall | 3:07 | |
in love with maniacs, which is | 3:09 | |
an apt description of us as teenagers. | 3:14 | |
Fathers of daughters spend a great deal of time | 3:19 | |
repenting of the sins of their youth. | 3:22 | |
I don't know what it's like for fathers of sons. | 3:26 | |
But this is the way it is for fathers | 3:31 | |
who live with a household of women. | 3:33 | |
Interestingly enough, I revisited this topic of conversation | 3:38 | |
several weeks ago with my daughter, Spencer, | 3:43 | |
who said to me, as we were driving, | 3:46 | |
"You know, Dad, in a few years, | 3:50 | |
"when I'm in high school and I date someone, | 3:52 | |
"I'll bet that boy will be like you." | 3:55 | |
And I thought, "So help me God. | 3:59 | |
(audience laughs) | 4:03 | |
"I'll kill him." | ||
It's probably not any easier for fathers of sons. | 4:11 | |
The greater truth, surely, is that we all want | 4:16 | |
the best for our children. | 4:19 | |
We often wish, futilely, that they will not | 4:23 | |
make the mistakes that we have made. | 4:27 | |
We hope that somehow they will be | 4:30 | |
of sounder character than we have been. | 4:33 | |
Mainly, we want them to be safe and happy. | 4:37 | |
And we want them to know that we love them very much. | 4:43 | |
Well these are some of the thoughts I have | 4:48 | |
every time I read the story of David. | 4:51 | |
I doubt you know anyone whose family history | 4:56 | |
is as tragic as David's was. | 5:00 | |
The fall of the house of David begins several chapters | 5:04 | |
before the text we read this morning. | 5:07 | |
You know the story. | 5:11 | |
David takes the wife of Uriah, | 5:15 | |
she conceives. | 5:19 | |
David tries to cover his sin by murdering Uriah, | 5:22 | |
he has him placed at the forefront of battle, | 5:28 | |
where Uriah is killed. | 5:32 | |
And then David tries to cover his sin once more | 5:36 | |
by taking Uriah's widow into his home | 5:39 | |
and making her his wife. | 5:44 | |
The problem, of course, is that the king's duplicity | 5:48 | |
is not unnoticed by God. | 5:53 | |
So God sends to David the prophet Nathan, | 5:57 | |
and Nathan bears the news that the first child | 6:01 | |
born to Bathsheba will die. | 6:05 | |
Then, the prophet says to the king, | 6:12 | |
"Oh, don't worry ol' boy. | 6:14 | |
"The Lord has covered your sin, | 6:20 | |
you shall not die." | 6:24 | |
of course, you and I know that statement is misleading. | 6:29 | |
It is almost a lie, and we're not sure | 6:34 | |
who has spoken the lie, | 6:39 | |
Nathan or God, | 6:42 | |
but one of them has certainly | 6:46 | |
given voice to a great lie. | 6:48 | |
For any parent will tell you, any parent | 6:54 | |
who has lost a child will tell you, | 6:58 | |
that with the loss of a child, | 7:02 | |
something in the parent does die. | 7:04 | |
So a more appropriate word from Nathan to David | 7:10 | |
would have been, "David, you are dying already, | 7:13 | |
"and there's not a damn thing you can do about it." | 7:17 | |
And the tragedy is that no matter how often | 7:25 | |
you summon the specter of death, | 7:28 | |
it will not come when you desire it. | 7:33 | |
The child does die. | 7:40 | |
And when the child was alive, David fasted | 7:44 | |
and wept, pleading with God to spare the child's life, | 7:46 | |
but after the child is gone, David ceases his fasting | 7:51 | |
and weeping and he says to the people of the court, | 7:56 | |
"While my son was alive, there was yet hope. | 8:01 | |
"But now that he is gone, my fasting and weeping | 8:06 | |
"are to no avail, I cannot bring him back. | 8:11 | |
"He will not return to me, but I shall go to him." | 8:17 | |
I shall go to him. | 8:25 | |
Sounds like a death wish to me. | 8:30 | |
I would guess that David wants to die. | 8:34 | |
Any parent would gladly give his or her own life | 8:39 | |
in exchange for the life of the child. | 8:44 | |
I'm reminded of the remark made by the narrator | 8:50 | |
in the movie about Stevie Smith, | 8:52 | |
the English poet who attempted suicide. | 8:55 | |
The narrator says, "Death, that sweet and gentle friend, | 8:59 | |
"failed to respond to her summons, | 9:03 | |
life continued." | 9:07 | |
Sometimes life is harder than death. | 9:13 | |
Surely it was for David after the loss of his son. | 9:17 | |
Our text for the morning has us with David, | 9:27 | |
several years after the death of his first son. | 9:30 | |
Now he loses another son, | 9:34 | |
the stunningly handsome Absalom, | 9:38 | |
who has attempted a coup. | 9:43 | |
He wants to seize his father's crown | 9:46 | |
and be king of Israel. | 9:50 | |
But those who are loyal to David kill Absalom. | 9:52 | |
And when news of his son's death reaches David, | 9:58 | |
David cries out | 10:01 | |
"Oh my son, Absalom, my son, my son! | 10:05 | |
"Would I had died instead of you, | 10:11 | |
"oh Absalom, my son, my son." | 10:14 | |
I don't know what all is in that wretched cry, | 10:21 | |
I would guess a great deal of regret, | 10:26 | |
perhaps David is lamenting his failures as a father. | 10:29 | |
Most of us fathers do, from time to time, | 10:34 | |
lament our failures. | 10:37 | |
Perhaps there is in that cry some rage toward God. | 10:41 | |
Inevitably, we put to God the hard questions | 10:46 | |
that cannot be answered, "God, why this?" | 10:49 | |
"Why did it have to happen this way?" | 10:56 | |
"Why could I not have been the one to die, | 11:01 | |
"my child's life spared?" | 11:03 | |
Even if answers to these questions never do come, | 11:08 | |
they surely do not come the minute we address them to God. | 11:12 | |
So anger toward God is a very common response | 11:18 | |
to insufferable tragedy. | 11:22 | |
I don't know how David endured. | 11:28 | |
My guess is that after this loss, | 11:32 | |
David was a shell of the man he once was. | 11:35 | |
I do know that his pain would cripple me, | 11:41 | |
and I do not know that I would survive. | 11:43 | |
But, | 11:50 | |
you know | 11:52 | |
the story of David does not end with tragedy. | 11:55 | |
It certainly includes tragedy, and a great deal of it. | 12:00 | |
But his story is larger than that. | 12:06 | |
For David's story has much to say | 12:11 | |
about the presence of God, and about how that holy presence | 12:13 | |
works mysteriously in our shattered lives. | 12:18 | |
That little statement that Nathan makes to David, | 12:24 | |
that little statement that is almost a lie, | 12:27 | |
either from God or from Nathan, | 12:30 | |
"Oh David, the Lord has covered your sin, | 12:34 | |
"you shall not die," well death is hardly | 12:35 | |
the worst that David will endure. | 12:41 | |
The fact is, he did do some dying | 12:44 | |
when his sons lost their lives. | 12:46 | |
Nevertheless, that little statement does say something | 12:52 | |
to us about the way God is involved in our lives. | 12:55 | |
Even after we have been broken by sorrow. | 13:02 | |
How do we live in the face of inconsolable grief? | 13:09 | |
How do we carry on when life is too much for us? | 13:15 | |
Well, I do not have a neat formula | 13:22 | |
that will make your life easy, | 13:24 | |
nor do I have simple words | 13:29 | |
that will make you easy with life's misfortunes. | 13:32 | |
I would not dare tell you simply to pray to God | 13:37 | |
and that God will make all things right for you, | 13:41 | |
because that is a lie. | 13:45 | |
God will not make all things right for you, | 13:48 | |
or for me, or for anyone else. | 13:54 | |
But I will tell you that somehow, | 14:03 | |
in ways I neither understand | 14:07 | |
nor can explain adequately, | 14:11 | |
God does make God's presence known to us | 14:14 | |
in time of grief. | 14:21 | |
And somehow, God's presence sees us | 14:25 | |
through our darkest hours. | 14:29 | |
God does not remove all the pain, | 14:33 | |
ever, | 14:38 | |
and please do not believe the lie | 14:41 | |
that time will heal all of your wounds. | 14:43 | |
Time will not. | 14:46 | |
Time is neither a friend nor a healing agent. | 14:50 | |
But in ways that are as mysterious to you as they are to me, | 14:59 | |
God does give us to know joy and trust, | 15:05 | |
fulfillment and blessing, | 15:09 | |
in the moment of our most insufferable, | 15:15 | |
abject pain. | 15:19 | |
The day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, | 15:24 | |
a reporter interviewed Patrick Moynihan, | 15:29 | |
and he said to Moynihan, "How shall we carry on?" | 15:34 | |
"What will become of our country? | 15:41 | |
"What will happen to us?" | 15:45 | |
Moynihan paused for a moment, | 15:50 | |
and then he responded, | 15:54 | |
"We shall laugh again, | 15:58 | |
but we shall never be young again." | 16:02 | |
Well, that is how it is for people | 16:10 | |
like David, like you, | 16:11 | |
like me. | 16:17 | |
That is how it is for all of us | 16:20 | |
whose lives have been taken | 16:25 | |
by pain. | 16:30 | |
We shall laugh again, but we shall never be young again. | 16:33 | |
For people of faith, both the laughter | 16:41 | |
and the wisdom wrought by pain are informed | 16:45 | |
by our faith that God is present. | 16:48 | |
Perhaps not present in all the ways that we desire, | 16:54 | |
but present nonetheless | 16:59 | |
and present enough. | 17:02 | |
Friends, I do wonder about my role as a father. | 17:10 | |
I lament mistakes I have made | 17:15 | |
and somehow, I'm lamenting the mistakes I'm yet to make. | 17:22 | |
This story does that to me. | 17:27 | |
But something else happens to me when I read this story, | 17:32 | |
and it is rather strange. | 17:35 | |
I read this story, and I realize just how precarious life is | 17:40 | |
and how little control we have over it. | 17:45 | |
We all would like to avoid the mistakes that David made, | 17:50 | |
we won't, and even if we did it wouldn't matter. | 17:56 | |
Our lives are not guaranteed. | 18:02 | |
You live long enough, and you are going to be crippled | 18:07 | |
by tragedy, I promise you that. | 18:09 | |
What then? | 18:14 | |
Well, about all we can do is to live with as much integrity | 18:18 | |
and strength as we can muster, | 18:21 | |
and then trust that God will see us through | 18:24 | |
those unbearable difficulties. | 18:26 | |
That also means that we put our children's lives | 18:31 | |
in the hands of God, knowing we can do | 18:33 | |
so little to protect them, knowing also | 18:36 | |
that God can do so little to protect them, | 18:41 | |
but trusting that God will reveal God's self to them | 18:48 | |
and that will be enough. | 18:54 | |
John Stapleton, retired minister | 18:59 | |
in the South Carolina Annual Conference | 19:01 | |
of the United Methodist Church, | 19:04 | |
and one of the great preachers in America, | 19:05 | |
recently told me the story of his three and a half year old | 19:10 | |
grandson, John Luke, | 19:14 | |
who fancies himself a stage actor. | 19:17 | |
One day not long ago, right after the Easter season, | 19:22 | |
three and a half year old John Luke came running | 19:26 | |
into the den and he said to his grandmother | 19:28 | |
and to his brother, "All right, Grandma, you're God." | 19:30 | |
To his brother he said, "You, you're one of the disciples." | 19:36 | |
And then he said, "I am Jesus, | 19:43 | |
okay, now, I'm dying." | 19:49 | |
And then three and a half year old John Luke, | 19:57 | |
enacts a five minute dying scene with all the moans | 19:59 | |
and groans you would expect from a three year old. | 20:04 | |
Then, as he is taking his last breath, | 20:11 | |
he falls to the floor and crawls under a chair, | 20:14 | |
which is a make believe cave, | 20:18 | |
and there he dies. | 20:22 | |
And about 15 or 30 seconds later, he crawls | 20:27 | |
out of the makeshift cave, he leaps to his feet, | 20:30 | |
and he says, "I'm risen, I'm free, | 20:35 | |
I'm free, I'm free!" | 20:41 | |
And when his grandfather told the story, he wept. | 20:50 | |
He wept because he knows that his son | 20:58 | |
will taste death long before he draws | 21:01 | |
his last mortal breath. | 21:05 | |
He wept because he knows that some good piece | 21:08 | |
of that child's wonder may be lost | 21:11 | |
when he sees the harsh realities of life as an adult. | 21:17 | |
He wept for love of his child, and for the recognition | 21:22 | |
of his own inability to protect his child, | 21:26 | |
but in the midst of all that weeping, | 21:34 | |
he felt a slow smile creep | 21:37 | |
across the contours of his face, | 21:40 | |
and he thought | 21:43 | |
"Oh my son, John Luke, | 21:48 | |
"if you can just hold on to that story, | 21:51 | |
"believing that life is stronger than death, | 21:57 | |
"and that you are free, then that is enough." | 22:00 | |
"It is enough for you, for me, | 22:06 | |
and for us all. | 22:12 | |
"Oh my son, John Luke, | 22:15 | |
my son, my son, | 22:20 | |
it is enough." | 22:25 |
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