God Was With David… In Spite Of It All
A Sermon by Andrew Colman on 2 Samuel 5:1-10
The last time we discussed David, he decisively left his flock of sheep in the field to fight the Giant Goliath.
He had opted not to wear King Saul's armour, leave his sword behind, or fight the fight that everyone was expecting him to, which surely would have resulted in his demise. He took on the giant in a way that made sense to who he was, using the skills that he knew he had. And he was victorious because he went into battle not with the king's armour but by going into battle as the person that God made him to be.
David took down the giant just as he had promised King Saul just like he said he would.
So much happened between that episode and the one that we heard tonight.
In very short, Saul essentially loses his mind and has it in his mind that David wants to kill him and /take/ his place as king.
David does everything he can to show him that, while he knows he will be anointed king one day, he will not take it.
Time and again, Saul ends up in a position where David could kill him as a move towards /taking/ his kingship, and he does not do it.
The most hilarious example is when David hides from Saul in a dark cave. Saul enters the cave to relieve himself and does not see that David is close enough to cut a corner off of his cloak.
Saul leaves the cave, David comes out and shows him the corner of his cloak - and says, "See, if I wanted to kill you, this was my chance, and I did not - I took this corner to show you that I honour you as God's anointed King despite you hunting me.” And even this small essentially insignificant “attack” on Saul was too far for David.
But to Saul it, didn't matter.
David loved God and honoured God to the point where he could not bear the thought of hurting the one that God called to rule over his people despite his murderous rage against him.
Fast-forward a lot, David did become king of the tribes of Judah. Saul was killed, and so were all of the following kings of the tribes of Israel that followed Saul.
We are brought to this evening, when the Elders of the Northen Tribes of Israel come to David and ask him to be their ruler.
They said to him, "Look, we are your bone and flesh. For some time, while Saul was king over us, it was you who led out Israel and brought it in. The Lord said to you: It is you who shall be shepherd of my people Israel, you who shall be ruler over Israel.”
The shepherd boy, who left his flock in the field, attended by one of his helpers, tonight, been anointed by the Elders of Israel the Sheperd /Nagid/ a word in Hebrew that does not mean king but rather means prince, or ruler.
But not king, that word is /Melek/
In fact, Saul was annointed by Samuel as Nagid /prince/ ruler/ over Israel.
By using this word this, the Israelite Elders were actively not rejecting God, the Lord, as their king. To name David Melek, King, would be the same as lifting David up to the human understanding of Cesear who was considered by himself and his subjects a diety.
They want David to always remember who he is serving. He was chosen by God to serve and to lead God's flock.
David, my friend, you are no more than a shepherd, one who has been called to lead God's people.
And David, you are no less than a shepherd who has been called to lead God's people.
--
Now, David is a "complicated" figure. There are days when liking David because we are told that he was a man after God's own heart feels really really hard! Because he does some bad things.
In fact, in our reading tonight, right after he was named by the elders as ruler, not king, the lectionary leaves out some extremely difficult verses that speak to some of David's deep brokenness, which is never far from the surface; his pride and anger bubble up and have huge consequences.
--
And yet - we /are/ faced with the fact that he has been said to be a person after God's own heart.
The part that the lectionary left out tonight was when David took Jerusalem. The city was fortified, and the Jebusite leaders thought it was untouchable. So untouchable that they said to David that the lame and the blind would be enough to defend the city against him and his army.
Well, David did take Jerusalem and, in so doing, ordered that especially the lame and blind be killed - for it says he hated them.
It's despicable at best - to flaunt his power against the other leaders by killing the vulnerable to make some kind of point? I really don’t know.
It is important that we give David some credit here.
If we don’t we’re not only selling him short, but also not giving ourselves a chance either. A few chapters later, we meet Mephibosheth, the son of his best friend, Johnathan, who was lame in both feet. And David cared for him like a son.
Straying from the text here, but I can't imagine that David's actions at Jerusalem were very far from his mind when he saw Mephibosheth for the first time.
I Imagine that part of how lovingly David treated him was because he was his best friend's son, and another was a kind of repentance for what he'd ordered at Jerusalem that day.
A man who is one after God's own heart, who chose to let the man who hunted him live and then repented for cutting off just the corner of his cloak, will not have missed the terror of his actions that day.
But he will also have remembered that God brought his people out of the land of Egypt - the place of death - the place where death reigned supreme - and fed them manna for 40 years in the wilderness even though they railed against God and cried to go back to Egypt.
Because that is what God does. That is the story that had guided the Israelite people from the moment God led them out of Egypt. God first comes to us in the depth of our brokenness.
That is what makes God king /melek/sovereign of all. A king serves unceasingly at his own expense for the sake of each of his subjects in the broken world in which they live.
No human can do that, not even David. That is why the elders speak of him as ruler or prince - there to lead and also to be led.
This three-verse gloss, in which David takes Jerusalem, is in part here to tell us that even at our very best—even annoited as shepherds of God's people who were chosen by God to deliver God's blessing on the whole world—we can fall very hard, very fast at something as ridiculous as a childish taunt from an adversary.
But then, in the same paragraph, we are told that David grew greater and greater because God was with David.
Of course, God was with David.
Now, it didn't say that God approved of what happened at Jersusalem. It says that God was with him. God does not leave us when we make mistakes, no matter how bad they are.
God's will - for us - is always - always for us to follow his will.
There is simply nothing that disqualifies us from that. God will always draw us out of Egypt, the place where we might feel disqualified, so we can have another go at it.
So, of course, God made David to become greater and greater as David did follow his will.
And God will, as we see in David's story tonight, work to draw each of us out of the place of death in which we find ourselves and will us to do the will of God.
This is a story about the scandalous Grace of God.
Not the cheap grace of God because it is, fortunately, or unfortunately, free.
It can only be cheap if we think that there is any sum or action of our own by which we think we can acquire it at a discount.
Fortunately, for us, there is no such thing, so it can only be free, which is indeed a scandal—which is indeed the good news.
This story of David is a story that shows us what God does with sinners. Remeber that bit of credit we gave David when he got to care for Mephiboseth? The text didn’t do that until 4 chapters later. We would have had to live with the tension that that Grace was free. Which is indeed a scandal—which is indeed good news.
The Grace of God gives us the power to come back and live in newness of life day after day after day, mistake after mistake after mistake, sin of our own of of other’s making after sin after sin, again and again and again.
It’s the Scandal of Grace and it is Good News