Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: 2 Samuel 11:1-15; John 6:1-21

Let’s talk about sin. A couple of weeks before I went to Israel, I looked way ahead at today’s lectionary and saw the story about David and Bathsheba, and thought: great story, tough stopping point, guess I’ll be preaching about sin. Yuck. And preaching on sin is tough, because this is a sermon during which I almost can’t make eye contact in case you think I’m trying to make a point. I’m not. So if I glance in your direction…nothing personal.

I should tell you – this is the first half of the David and Bathsheba story, which we’ll finish next week. But the lectionary broke it into two parts, and so it seemed like an interesting idea to preach on this. Then I saw the gospel story it was paired with, and honestly, I thought that was odd, but in the intervening weeks, this pairing has come to make sense to me.

The David and Bathsheba story is a classic sin story – David is regarded as the greatest king of Israel, but he is, like all kings, just a man with all the frailties common to man. I’m speaking of man in the generic sense. So David is in Jerusalem, and we’re told it’s “the spring of the year, when kings go out to battle” and David has stayed home, sending the army out with the generals. Who can imagine how that is making him feel? Over the hill? Ineffective? Left behind? I don’t know, but I’m guessing it’s not good. And he is by himself, and sees a beautiful woman, the wife of a solder off at war, and David - instead of discretely turning away, or going someplace else to do something else - watches her, desires her, and he summons her and has sexual relations with her. And she gets pregnant, and he gets the idea of bringing her husband home from the front, figuring that they’ll spend some intimate time together and no one will be the wiser. Except…the husband comes home and will not be intimate with his wife out of solidarity with his men at the front. So David sends him back to the front with a note to Joab, telling him to put Uriah, husband of Bathsheba, into the thick of the fighting, and then pull back from him. And that’s where this week’s episode ends. We know that David, is described several places in the Bible after this story as following God in his heart, or being a man after God’s own heart. However, as much as he may be at heart a faithful man, in this story, he has sinned again and again, spiraling out of righteousness. He’s watched a naked woman (which is not permitted), he’s committed adultery, he’s been deceitful, and he’s sent a man to be killed. How could such a thing happen and how can David possibly redeem himself? More on redemption next week.

But this week, let’s look at the sinner. Now, I want to acknowledge right up front, most churches like ours, theologically liberal churches, don’t talk a lot about sin – at least at the personal level. We are more likely to talk about social sins, such as war, greed, poverty and injustice. While liberal churches talk more about social sin than individual sin, conservative churches have tended to do the opposite. Evangelical churches have, historically, been very focused on individual sin and salvation, but have not been very interested in the social justice issues of society’s sin – the environment, fighting hunger, and so on.

The thing is – both tendencies are missing important dimensions that need to be faced. A little over two weeks ago, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, made a big splash when she described individual salvation as a heresy. Her remarks came in the opening speech of the Episcopal Church’s triennial General Convention – similar to our biennial national General Assembly. In her remarks, Bishop Schori referred to the “…great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.” She continued, “That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.” The Convention’s theme was “ubuntu” - a Zulu word that was the convention’s theme, defined as “I in you and you in me”. Jefferts described ubuntu in this way: “Ubuntu doesn’t have any “I”s in it. The I only emerges as we connect – and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others. There is no “I” without “you,” and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the one who created us.”

I probably wouldn’t have gone as far as Bishop Schori, although I think she is right. The problem is that her remarks suggest – though they do not say exactly – that all sin is collective. And this would also be a heresy. The idea that individual actions and individual choices do not have consequences would also be a distortion of the Bible, although the emphasis on community runs all the way through the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. We miss that emphasis on community, I think partly because in the English language we use the same word for both the single and plural second person. The word is You. So that if I say, “Your gifts bring glory to God,” it is the same if I am speaking to one person, as I might to Barbara Wolfman, describing her musical ability; or if I am speaking to many people, as I might in speaking to this congregation about its strength in mission.

So we miss all the places in the Bible where in the original Hebrew or Greek, the author was speaking to a group collectively, because to us in English, it sounds the same as if it were written as a message to an individual.

Now, when we are speaking of sin, many of us in the modern mainline liberal churches are uncomfortable talking about the individual dimension. It sounds very judgmental, in a way that may even strike us as hypocritical or self-righteous. But it’s something that we need to take seriously as individuals, in addition to as a society. And perhaps the key is to understand that relationality is even at the center of our individual sins – a sin is something that damages relationship: our relationship with God, our relationship with human beings, our relationship with the earth, our relationship with ourselves. That’s not an adequate definition, but it’s a good beginning.

Going back to David – his sin was against Bathsheba (in treating her as an object to satisfy him), against Uriah, against himself (as a person of integrity) and against God. You could also argue that it was against the nation of Israel because he as king abused his authority in seducing Bathsheba, and that this was a violation of trust as a ruler.

Let’s shift gears a moment and look at our other story – John’s version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Jesus is with his disciples, having crossed the Sea of Galilee by boat, and a large crowd gathers. I loved reading this story now, after my trip to Israel – we took a boat ride across the Sea of Galilee once. The Sea of Galilee is actually a large freshwater lake, about 7 miles across at its widest point. It is surrounded by hills, creating a kind of bowl shape that is very susceptible to rough winds. We stayed one week in a pilgrimage house on the Sea of Galilee, and it was a great delight for me to go swimming there several times.

Anyway, this story tells of a completely different experience – Jesus is out with his disciples and a crowd, and the crowd is hungry, and the disciples point out that they don’t have anywhere near the resources to feed them all. One disciple, Philip, points out that it would take a half year’s wages to feed the crowd. But another disciple, Andrew, has found a boy with 5 barley loaves and 2 fish. So Jesus sits everyone down, and the food is distributed, and there is plenty for all. Truly a miracle. Now this story and variations of it, occur in all four Gospels. Clearly it is one of the key episodes as far as defining Jesus in the early Christian community. Jesus is the one who creates miracles of abundant food for all.

In our era, with the reluctance to accept miracles at face value, often I hear this story explained as Jesus inspiring people to share. Perhaps that is what happened, which in a culture oriented to scarcity as the ancient Middle East was is pretty remarkable. Or, perhaps Jesus did multiply the loaves and fishes. In either event, the early Christian community clearly found it miraculous, because the story appears in every Gospel. Even in such a large crowd, when there isn’t enough, Jesus creates a situation in which everyone has all they need. He creates a circle of community.

In the story about David, even though he is a king, he doesn’t have enough, when he is alone.

And, in community and with Jesus, relationships are nourished. Whether there is sharing or a miraculous feeding, people are breaking bread together in an experience of abundance.

For David, who is alone, his isolation becomes an occasion of temptation in which he sins – he violates relationships.

In the 12-step recovery communities, there is an acronym: H.A.L.T. or HALT. It’s a reminder that when we are hungry, angry, lonely or tired, we are more susceptible to making choices that we would rather not make. In recent years, I have grown to know about myself that when I am tired, or lonely, in particular, I am especially vulnerable to saying things I would not say if I were not vulnerable in those ways, or I might say things in a manner that is particularly unhelpful to relationships. I learned this summer, when I was gone from the office a full month except for one day preaching, that I had allowed myself to get habitually more tired than I should be. I’ve read that many people in our culture are operating on too little sleep. Many of us also have too little margin in our lives – we crowd in too many activities, we have too many expenses, we push ourselves to the limit, and like a rubber band that is stretched too tightly, we don’t have the resilience to be able to give as easily. It makes us vulnerable to that sin-ward spiral. In this summer’s experience of time off, coupled with the retreat on clergy wellness that the Session also approved my taking this year, I think I finally realize the importance of self-care, not only for my own feeling good, but for my being good.

The thing is, about sin, that we all do it. Whether we do it because we are hungry, angry, lonely or tired, or because for whatever reason we’ve decided that what we want is more important than other people or the greater community of which we’re a part – we sin. That’s why we have a prayer of confession in worship every week. Still, if we are uncomfortable with the word sin, if it makes us think about sour-faced, straight-laced, self-righteous types wagging fingers at those who are having fun, let’s try the word brokenness – because I think it’s a fair substitute. The point is that we are not sufficient unto ourselves. We are easily broken. We need God, and we need other people. And we need a relationship with the earth And those who try to go it alone are missing some essential dimensions of wholeness: healthy relationships of mutuality and trust.

In fact, I read an article in The Christian Century magazine recently, which said the several mental health studies have documented that the United States has one of the highest rates of depression, whereas Nigeria has one of the lowest, even though the average standard of living is roughly 4 times in the U.S. what it is in Nigeria. I noticed, when I was in Tanzania two years ago, that relationships seemed to be foundational there, whereas in the United States, our individual assets – both our abilities and our material resources - are what we build our lives on. In Nigeria and Tanzania, as in ancient Israel, the tribe was the organizing unit of society – people knew they needed each other. They were part of a circle.

The church, in particular, is called to create new kinds of relationship – relationships of vulnerable authenticity and love. Again and again the Bible tells us that we are called to reconciliation – that we are to be a forgiven and forgiving people. I knew a pastor years ago who described his church as “a group of sinners who pray together”. One could also say, we are a group of broken people who find wholeness with each other in God. We are a circle of care – no one more important, each one included. The point is, we need each other and we need God and we need honesty to be whole. And we need to be continually examining ourselves, to see if we are making choices that are consistent with the needs of the whole community, and with the God who calls us into community.

Next week, we’ll talk about some R&R – repentance and reconciliation. But first we have to face sin. “All we like sheep have gone astray…” It’s a funny thing about the word sheep – it’s the same form for plural and singular – one sheep needs other sheep to be a complete sheep. Us, too. We need relationships, but because we’re all frail human beings, we often damage those relationships. But we are a community of people who know ourselves to be imperfect.

It’s hard to be vulnerable in our imperfections together. But that’s the foundation of the transformed community, the Beloved Community: a willingness to look at ourselves, in the eyes of God, to see ourselves as we really are, and to see others as they really are. When we start being honest with ourselves in this way, we will face our own brokenness, and if we are able to accept ourselves, just as we are, and just as God accepts us, then we will find ourselves being more gentle with others as well.

And then we may be able to move into that ubuntu frame of mind, a perspective that is profoundly scriptural – one in which the community is the primary reality, and our individual choices are seen in light of how they strengthen or weaken the whole. Amen.