"King David and President Taft"

Reverend Ryan Jensen

2 Samuel 11:1-15; Ps. 14; Eph. 3:14-21; John 6:1-21

July 26, 2009

Last week, Laura and I served as the adult advisors of GSPC’s Urban Mission Camp.  Joining the youth of this church were those from Black Mountain, North Carolina.  As is the way with Urban Mission Camp groups, our two churches were split into different teams so that we could each visit different sites without overwhelming any one particular agency or organization.  The team to which I was assigned included two of our youth, Jeanie Schottgen and John Jackson, along with three youth and one adult from Black Mountain.  One of the youth assigned to my group was named Taylor, and Taylor is a young man who is full of random facts and figures.  Among his achievements, Taylor was a finalist in the National Geography Bee.  It was Taylor who gave me the idea for today’s sermon title.

            As I was driving to one of our mission sites, I heard Taylor, who was seated in the back of the van, going on about President Taft, of all people.  Being that this was a pretty strange topic, I listened intently.  Well, for those of you unfamiliar with the 27^th President of the United States, it turns out that Taft was a very large fellow.  As Wikipedia confirms, President Taft was the heaviest president ever elected.  Taylor went on to point out that Taft had, at one point, become stuck in a White House bathtub.  Another internet site confirmed this fact, stating that a special tub was brought in that could accommodate four normal sized men.

            Within the context of the Urban Mission Camp, Taylor’s speech about the 27^th President was pretty humorous. That young man had me laughing throughout the whole week.  But as I was also stewing on this sermon, I began to wonder: With relation to those comments about Taft, What if King David was remembered in the same kind of way?  What if we only remembered David as the man who committed adultery with Bathsheba? 

            There are a few things that we need to understand about that story.  Placing it within the context of David’s time, David was never expected to have only one wife.  It was rather considered a symbol of political strength and authority to have a number of wives and concubines.  And as offensive as it may be for you and me, it was also the custom that a woman’s sexuality was controlled by two men: first by her father and later by her husband.  Women had very little to say when it came to the matter of relationships with other men.  This was the world in which David and Bathsheba lived.  There is nothing in this world, however, that provided a king with the right to steal away another man’s wife.  As John Calvin states in his Institutes of the Christian Religion: “Who can excuse David on grounds of ignorance when he clearly was so well versed in the law?  Did not David, who daily punished adultery and murder in his subjects, know what great crimes they were?”

So on the following day, David makes sure that Uriah has too much to drink.  Surely that would make him a little more homesick for his wife, Bathsheba.  But no, Uriah refuses to go.  David, now either desperate, angry or both, decides to change course.  Instead of attempting to cover up his sin, David decides to give new meaning to the term, passive aggressive.  We are told that he sends Uriah to the “forefront of the hardest fighting,” where soldiers will then draw away so that Uriah will be struck down and killed.  David thus becomes both an adulterer and a murderer. 

Just imagine what we could do with this story today.  Fox News, CNBC, internet sites, Facebook, Twitter and all the lines of communication would make a mockery of David.  Congress would table everything and form a committee to investigate the matter.  Sonia Sotomayor and health care reform would temporarily be forgotten.  Mark Sanford would be a distant memory.  And just as with Bernard Madoff and Michael Vick, everyone associated with King David would quickly begin the process of disassociation, cutting all ties.

            We have a way of doing this to each other.  We like to isolate that one, scandalous imperfection and proceed with character attacks and verbal stonings.  We surround individuals with the worst we have to offer, and then back away to see if the person still has the means and endurance to recover.  Well, maybe some people are deserving of such attacks and maybe they are not.  Regardless, we have a way of remembering others not for the good, but for that which annoys, frustrates, or in the case of Taft, for the things which we find amusing.  Yes, Taft was a big man.  But he also served as Governor-General of the Philippines, as Secretary of War, he improved the performance of the postal service, spent time seeking world peace, and after his presidency, Taft became Chief Justice of the United States.  He also lost 80 pounds.  Taft was a human being who both achieved much and who lacked much.  King David was no different; he was far from perfect.

            For better or worse, both men were important enough that they are still remembered, celebrated, and criticized today.  Because they were high enough on the scale of wealth of influence, we continue to remember them long after they are gone.  Most of us will not leave this kind of legacy.  Two hundred years from now, I doubt that anyone will remember anything other than my name, if that.

            Getting back to last week’s urban mission trip, I discovered that there are some who don’t need to wait for the passage of time in being forgotten.  As many of you know through your service at Coffee Club, there are some living in this very city who are generally invisible to the public at large.  The Urban Mission Campers spent time with the homeless at Coffee Club, 15 Place, and the Waterfront Rescue Mission.  Through these repeated visits and different contexts, there began to be a recognition of both faces and names.  Men and women who were once only figures that occupied park benches and street alleys began to turn into that man or woman with whom a meal was shared.  We studied the Bible and prayed with and for these individuals.  We worshipped with them and swapped stories.  As a result, it was while driving down Government Street that a youth in our van would point to someone on the street, saying “Hey look!  There’s Leonard!”  The same thing happened on Dauphin Street.  A person that we might normally cross the street to avoid instead received a smile and a greeting.  They, in a sense, became real.

will only beg for money.”  This is, of course, advice that is ethical and practical as our children are often naïve to the risks and dangers of the world.  Yet, on the other hand, we nevertheless send our youth on mission trips and out into the very places where these street people eat breakfast, lunch and dinner.  We encourage them to learn names and to go even further in telling the homeless that we care about them and will pray for them.  And for a while, we do.  But what then?  What if, a month later, we are walking down the street with our children and they spot a homeless man or woman that they know by name?  What if our urban mission camper wants to stop and talk to that person?  How comfortable or uncomfortable would we feel in that situation?  If we maintain our “don’t talk to strangers” stance, then we tell our children that the urban mission camp experience was just that: an experience. 

Experiences, as we know, are rather selfish things.  They are a one-sided opportunity. With relation to mission trips, experiences are, in my opinion, a waste of time and money.  When we have an experience with someone who looks and lives differently than we do, we have the tendency to walk away saying, “Now we know just how good we have it.  At long last, we can feel better about ourselves.”  This is not what Jesus had in mind when washed the feet of others, or when he sent his disciples out into the world.

The opposite of an experience is a relationship, where two people learn from one another.  And as I mentioned, this is the dangerous part of our Urban Mission Camps.  In challenging our youth to become missionaries, we take the risk that they will mature in very special ways.  They will learn that we all are capable of doing stupid and horrible things.  For instance, they will make the connection that little David, of David and Goliath fame, was the same man who later committed adultery and murder.  And what do they do with that?  The amazing thing is that our youth will also hold out hope that everyone is capable of repairing wrong while getting to a place of wholeness and peace.  In this hope, our youth also learn that there is often much more than meets the eye.  For instance, they will make the connection that people like President Taft, of “stuck in the bathtub” fame, really have a great deal to offer.

Because our youth learn these things, we have much to learn from our youth.  So it is that they are not the future, but sometimes the most active and visible members of the church today.  As a result, we are left with interesting questions:  “In what ways will we encourage our youth to further their call to service and mission?  In what ways will we follow them?”  Yes, it is countercultural to think that our young missionaries are the teachers and we the students, but this is no more countercultural than what Jesus calls us to do already.  As we well know, Jesus wants us to become connected with each other in breaking down those walls that Al preached about last Sunday.  When we break down walls, we will find that our literal and metaphorical neighbors are really the same messed up people that we are.  In helping to overcome these messes, Jesus calls us to become reconnected.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is constantly referred to as the Son of David. Matthew actually begins with a genealogy that traces Jesus right back to David, and Abraham before him.  There is never an account where Jesus is disassociated with his earthly ancestor, David.  The same David who was king, but also the same David who committed adultery and murder.  Jesus is intimately connected to that flawed individual in the same way that Jesus is connected to each one of us, including the homeless and everyone with whom we have become separated.