Read 2 Samuel 11.
I wanted to preach a nice, fairly traditional sermon on temptation and how to avoid it. That is a fair and relatively easy application of this text. But I couldn’t do it. I sat down at my computer to write, and I ended up just surfing the web or playing games. For two days, I tried to write the nice sermon about avoiding temptation - the expected sermon when dealing with this passage, but I just couldn’t get the words to come out.
Then, on Wednesday afternoon, I started digging into the passage again. I went online and read every sermon or article I could find on this passage. Danielle Shroyer, a pastor from Texas, knew the way to my heart when she asked: “Anybody brave enough to preach this one squarely?”
What? A controversial sermon on a difficult topic? I never do those. OK, I’m in.
The David and Bathsheba story is famous because it deals with the big three: money, sex, and power. It’s famous because it describes the messy fall of a hero. It reads like a soap opera, and that’s why we like it.
But this story isn’t just about the massive failure of one man and its many consequences - although that is the outline of the story. If David and Bathsheba were simply about adultery, then - as Tim Elliot said at lunch on Thursday - this sermon could have one simple point: “Don’t do it.”
This story is more complex and more painful than that. We are not allowed to stand at a distance as people not concerned with this story - not when we really hear it. This story is about the misconduct of a leader and the cover-up that followed. And that, unfortunately, is something we know a lot about. Just consider this very brief inventory of high profile abuse and cover-up in the past few years.
