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Supplication Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 1, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Samuel 12:15b-23 Matthew 7:7-11
Imbedded in our prayers, imbedded in even the expletive use of God’s name in extremis, is what we believe about the One to whom we pray. Take, for example, the prayer we have prayed, in the singing of the Psalter, to the God whose presence cannot be escaped: no matter where we hide or what we think, God sees us, hears us, knows us, pursues us. Even if we should think ourselves above the conversation, before a word is on our tongue, God knows it and responds simply by being with us. Take, for another example, the prayer that is the 51st psalm: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.” The prayer is David’s “when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” The prayer’s grammar presumes God to be a God of steadfast love and abundant mercy who may choose to be merciful toward the one praying…or not. Act according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, David pleads, believing in the same breath that God is sovereign and so free with regard to his human expectations. If God should choose not to be merciful toward him now, David will confess, nevertheless, that God is a God of steadfast love and mercy. I find this humbling, having watched helplessly for decades as people quit God, variously characterizing God as a myth or a Minotaur because bad things have happened to good people. David will not quit. “Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.” I imagine him praying these words over and over again after the prophet Nathan had taken his leave. Sent with word of God’s judgment to the king’s chambers, Nathan first confirms David’s trust in God’s abundant mercy, assuring David that “God will put away your sin; you shall not die.” But Nathan says more, says that because David has utterly scorned the Lord by lying with Bathsheba and arranging for the murder of her husband, “the child that is born to you shall die.” The news could not have been worse. Still, this does not shake David’s trust in God’s steadfast love and mercy. But there is another theology at work in these words. The story is told to us by the Deuteronomist, a writer who believes in a tit-for-tat sort of God: believes that if a person is faithful to God, then blessings will abound, and if a person is sinful, then punishment will follow. We love the God of the Deuteronomist when things go well with us, because the rules are clear and we are in control. Here the Deuteronomist reports that because David sinned, “The Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it became very ill.” Truth be told, we are even Deuteronomists in those times when we are down on our luck, saying to God, “What did I do to deserve this?” The prayerful question’s operative and often unexamined theology presumes we are talking to a God who denies us the life we have longed to live because we have sinned. Who can stand? So while God may, now and again, act mercifully, the grammar of the Deuteronomist’s prayers assume God’s actions are not free: they are in lockstep response to a reliable quid pro quo, to a principle of humanly conceived fairness we believe in more than we believe in God. But David prays in defiance of the Deuteronomist because he believes otherwise about God. Painfully aware of Nathan’s prophetic word—“the child…shall die,” David nevertheless pleads with God for the child. Day and night he prays and fasts and prostrates himself on the ground. No other story in all of Scripture, save for the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, holds in solution the paradox of our praying to the God whose judgment we know and whose freedom makes us, nevertheless, pray for a merciful change of heart. On the seventh day, the child dies. The expected human reaction to such senseless tragedy is the sort of chest-heaving grief that has led many a believer to quit God in a rage or to live out the rest of their days in silence, sulking. David does neither. He rises from the ground, anoints himself with oil, changes his clothes, goes to the house of the Lord to worship, returns home and breaks his fast. His servants are dumbfounded by the theology embedded in David’s praying. “‘What is this thing you have done?’ they ask. “You fasted and wept for the child while it was alive; but when the child died, you rose and ate food?’” David responds theologically: “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept, for I said, ‘Who knows?’ The Lord may be gracious to me, and the child may live.’” David’s unshakable belief about who God is toward him, wrought in the marrow of his bones since he was a little shepherd boy roaming the Judean hills, has become a complete trust in the God with whom he has to do. That is why, on the darkest day of his life thus far, David is not left with a set of disembodied principles or values that he learned like he learned his multiplication tables. Rather David begs the God he has been talking to ever since he was a little boy to be merciful to him, a sinful man. The story itself begs the question of our own prayerful presuppositions. Who is the God we presume to beseech when we say our prayers? “Ask, and it will be given you,” says Jesus. “Search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches, finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” We hear these words and presume we may call upon a God who will intervene as we see fit. By and large, this does not seem to be the case. For all of our beseeching, we still must endure every matter under heaven: birth and death, planting and plucking up, killing and healing, breaking down and building up, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing…seeking and losing, keeping and discarding, tearing and sewing, silence and speech, love and hate, war and peace. In sum, says the preacher in Ecclesiastes, time and chance happen to us all. Ask, seek, knock all you want: apparently God’s freedom trumps God’s steadfast love and abundant mercy! But again please note that David’s beseeching, seen in this light, avails nothing. David asks; his child dies. David’s trust in the God to whom he prayed remains unshaken. David rises, washes, and goes to the Lord’s house to worship. What are we missing? In a word, we are missing the God who is God. This side of the grave, while we are recipients of the gift of mortal life—a kind of life that derives its meaning from the fact that human existence is fraught with a sense of endings—our supplications have as their true object not the miraculous outcomes we desire between birth and death, even though our desires may sometimes come to pass. Rather our “asking and seeking and knocking” are met, without fail, by God’s presence, God’s nearness, God’s being-with-us. To wit, when David’s child died, David goes into the house of the Lord to continue the conversation. The context of the conversation, according to Scripture, is the context of God’s covenant, God’s promise never to withdraw God’s steadfast love and faithfulness from us. This was the bedrock of David’s faith. God’s word to David through Nathan only days after he had become king of Israel, a word contrary to the Deuteronomists’ understanding of God, was this: “I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him….But I will not take my steadfast love from him….Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever. In accordance with all these words and with all this vision, Nathan spoke to David.” Given the defeat of Judah and Israel, the destruction of the temple, the exile into Babylon, or skipping a few thousand years, given the Holocaust, you could say that God lied. The descendents of David’s tribe have said as much down the dark corridors of history. Indeed if God is a God who is able to intervene in human history but chooses, in freedom, not to save God’s people from unspeakable evil, then opting for an ethnic identity and a set of ethical principles by which to live at least is an honest option. But others have opted to continue the conversation, descendents whose prayers refuse the Deuteronomist’s take on God in favor of the faith of David. “What about my faith in you, Master of the Universe?” asks Elie Wiesel.
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