[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Hi everybody, my name is Janelle Coker. I am one of the co lead ministers here, or should I say the other one?
And I'm going to go as quickly as I can today, but we have some things to talk about so let me sit down because I always said, Joey, we are continuing a series on David, a man after God's heart and today is going to be a bit of a doozy.
So if you started off with us in our discussion five weeks ago, five weeks ago, you'll know that one of our questions is was David really a God or a man after God's own heart? And for one specific thing, should we cancel him? Do you remember that for those of you that were here?
And so today we're going to talk about that incident, the incident titled David and Bathsheba. And so because this is going to have some strong themes, I want to provide a bit of a warning and that is that we are going to be talking about non consensual assaults. We're going to be talking about murder and issues that may be difficult, especially if I don't see any kiddos in here. But if your kiddo decided to stay in and you feel that that's something that they're not ready for or if you personally are like, you know what, I don't need to hear this today. It's okay. I've put some adult coloring books back in the library that have beautiful pictures. So at any point if you choose to get up and leave, no one's, no one's going to be watching.
And please do so with that I'd like to get started because as I said, we have a lot to go over.
So we are going to start in two Samuel, chapter 11 and we're going to go all the way through to mid chapter 12. So I'm not going to read all of that to you as would have happened at the time of that this story occurred. I am going to be doing it from the oral tradition and I'm going to focus on the first five verses, but we're going to go through all the way. I'm just going to very quickly get through that. I'm also going to use The David and Bathsheba story is really interesting because our Bibles, depending on the translation, have some really different terms used in our text.
And so today, I. For those terms, you may hear me use, like, three words to describe what happened or the meaning of that word. And I just wanna let you know I'm trying to use the Hebrew closely as possible to what that text said so that we can get a good idea in our mind of what's going on. Okay, are you ready?
Okay. Settling in?
Okay, I gotta settle in here. So here we go. We're gonna start with this, and I'm gonna pray after. So the story is this.
It's springtime. King David has been king for a while.
And in the spring, it was typical for kings to go to war with their men.
It was a season to go to war.
But David chose not to do so. And he put a man in charge named Joab and sent the men on their way to go fight.
And David was lounging on his bed in the evening, and he woke from sleep and decided to go walk on his roof and kind of look down at his kingdom.
And there it says that he saw a woman washing or bathing herself.
And she was, I guess, objectively beautiful. It doesn't say that David found her beautiful. It just says that she was beautiful.
From there, he decides to ask somebody in his court who she was. We don't know how much time went by before he asked who she was. But that person went and found out and found that her name was Bathsheba, that she was the daughter of Iliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.
Again, we don't know how much time passed.
But then. So it could have all happened within the night. It could have happened within several days. We really don't know.
But then he sent multiple plural messengers, deputies, king's men, people with the full authority of the kingdom to take her, get her, fetch her, retrieve her there, then when she's back in it. We know nothing about how Bathsheba feels about this. Bathsheba is a very minor character in this story.
Then it says that David lay with her.
Then there is a reference to a second washing.
Some believe that it's a reference to her first time that she was washing. However, this was called a purification, a little bit different term.
So she purified herself after the act and then went home from there. We end up hearing at some point that she sends a message back to David that she's pregnant.
David then tries to send back a note back to Joab that he needs Uriah to come home.
He tries on two occasions to get Bathsheba's husband to go home or Bathsheba's husband to go home to her.
Bathsheba's husband Uriah chooses to sleep at the gate of the king of the palace instead of going to his wife because his men were at war. And so even David's attempts to get Uriah drunk did not work. And Uriah did not go home to Bathsheba.
After which time David sent word to Joab to send Uriah to the front of the fighting lines and to have the men retreat from him so that he would be struck down and die.
That's exactly what happened. It says that Bathsheba mourned and then was taken as David's wife, to which then she had a child.
Probably around the day that she had that child, a man of God, a prophet named Nathan, came to David and told a story about a rich man and a poor man, one with many sheep and one with only one that he greatly loved. And the rich man using the poor man's sheep that he loved to serve dinner to a guest.
David becomes enraged and says, who is this man? He must pay. And Nathan says, you are that man.
That's the story.
We take Psalm 51 from this story as David writing in repentance. If you guys can throw Psalm 51 on just a bit of it, he says, David writes, for I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me against you.
You alone have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass.
Will you pray with.
God? This is a big topic.
Please be with us as we digest it, as we talk about it.
Be with those who've been harmed and are sitting here listening.
God, I believe we've all been harmed.
So be with our hearts, help us to understand, guide us and keep us.
In your name we pray.
Amen.
Many years ago, Jason and I were part of a church. We were very young, in our young 20s, and it was a small church, just a non denominational church and a young woman the age of 15. I'm going to call her Jenny
[00:10:25] Speaker A: was,
[00:10:25] Speaker B: she was known for being a little salty, you know, she dressed a little cutesy.
And there was a rumor that she'd been dating a boy in the military, probably in his 20s, early 20s.
And her mom came to the pastor and said that she was pregnant.
And there were lots of rumors that flew around.
Jenny always was kind of seemed adult for her Age.
Jenny probably was asking for it.
There were some rumors that maybe she didn't feel like she could tell this older man no.
And so the time went on. Lots of rumors spread, as they do in communities.
And then Jenny decided that, you know, she'd really like to have a baby shower, that she was going to celebrate this event.
So being that the church was the big part of their community, the mom went to the pastor's wife and said, can we throw her a baby shower here?
And the pastor's wife said, well, what will that say to all the other teenage girls who might get pregnant, who might get themselves in this position?
So the way that they decided to get around that was make Jenny and her mom stand up on a Sunday morning in front of everyone and apologize for where she was.
So shocking, right?
Not unusual.
Not unusual.
This story that we're talking about with Bathsheba is an old story.
It's not the oldest one about a man forcing himself on a woman, as it starts in Genesis.
But this one is unique because of the power that David had.
So now that I've told you this story as closely as I can find it in the text, I'd like to ask a couple of questions.
So if you can put up the painting by jerome from the 1800s, how many of you were taught or believed that Bathsheba was bathing on a roof?
So about maybe 40% of you.
It would not be surprising. We have the Leonard Cohen song, He saw her bathing on the roof.
I'm no Joey.
We have filmed.
This was a painting from the 1800s where we have.
I don't know how well you could see it. We have David looking down at Bathsheba on her roof with a very fully dressed woman next to her while she seductively bathes.
This is a very Christian way of reading into this story, and it probably started around the late 1600s. We had a theologian named Richard Baxter that said this. The sin of David began by a look.
He saw Bathsheba bathing herself on her rooftop, as it is likely, or in some visible place. And he did not turn away his eyes.
It is a dangerous thing for any woman to give a man cause, to look upon her with an eye of evil lust.
Therefore, let women take heed how they lay out themselves to be looked upon or do anything which may provoke the lusts of others.
So this started early. Again, it is not a Jewish way of looking at this.
It probably started in the 1600s, when we had been taken away from kind of the general way in which the kingdom would have Been set up.
Bathsheba was mostly washing. We don't know that she was fully bathing. She could have been simply washing her hands, her feet in an enclosed courtyard, as homes would have been set up in the time, believing that no one would be able to see her. How would she know that a king that wasn't supposed to be there was even was on a roof?
Right.
But I think by over and over again raising Bathsheba up to the roof, it allows her to have some blame.
It literally raises her up closer to David's height.
So by a raise of hands, how many people had been taught that this was an adulterous affair, this was adultery?
Okay, about 50, maybe more than 50% of you.
Well, that makes sense.
Within our very Bibles, we have study concordances that are often right in the pages of our Bibles.
And I'd like to read a couple of them. I don't have the open Bible anymore, but this was from the study notes on the pages next to this story from 1975.
And this is how they described the story from a theologian's perspective. I don't know how many of you would actually read the story and then read what the smart people said about it.
Yep, David's look turned to lust and lust to adultery.
However, Bathsheba must also bear a portion of the blame.
Her carelessness in bathing on a rooftop in plain view of the palace was an act of indiscretion that provided the initial temptation.
Had she maintained proper privacy, this great tragedy might have been averted.
The study Bible from 1975, a very popular study Bible.
Did you hear any of that in the story that I told who was on the roof?
This idea of adultery came about mostly because male pastors and theologians stated that in verse four, Bathsheba did not fight against the guards who came to take her.
So let me read this again.
David sent the Hebrew word here oftentimes is rendered messengers, but again is messengers, deputies, agents, emissaries.
Because we think of messengers delivering the mail.
I love our mail person that comes.
I'm going to use what may have been more likely what we were looking at. David sent deputies from the palace and they took her.
The word took is again the closest rendering from that Hebrew. Many of your translations will say get or retrieved.
And he lay with her.
So from 1975, because study Bibles became really the thing, we continued, we started to shift a little bit.
So by the 1990s, I have our NIV Bible, Jason and mine, his mentor at the time, made him a really nice coverage Our youngest daughter pulled out many of the Ten Commandments when she was three. We thought that was funny.
It says this.
Sexual relations outside of marriage is sin.
No office or position.
Sorry, this is very small.
Exempts a person.
Adultery was forbidden.
I wondered if adultery may have meant something different than what I thought it meant. So I'd just like to read to you the definition.
Adultery is voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone who is not their spouse.
So now we reach the 2000s, and a lot of these commentaries are starting to get well. Actually, there are more women coming in who are being theologians, quite frankly.
And so where we are really even today, for the most part, unless in our study Bible specifically, is the ones that was my daughter's study Bible from the mid-2000s. And I think her commentary is really interesting because starts off with commenting on 11 1, David was not where he was supposed to be. And if he was where he was supposed to be, they would never happen.
And then guess who? What happens?
They move right to verse five.
They just don't mention what happened with Bathsheba at all.
This is really sad.
We find tropes written in the commentary of the very scripture that we're told teaches us who God is.
So I'm going to read this bit that I wrote because I want to get it out.
If you are here during our introduction of this series, you'll know that Jason and I sat up here and talked and I said I was angry that I thought David should be canceled for this.
Psalm 51 even makes me angry. It is, I sinned against you and you alone.
The truth is, this is not just David I was angry at. I was angry at God because since I was in second grade, I have been voraciously reading these stories and reading the commentary and believing that people smarter than myself knew what was what. And for God's sakes, I didn't ever want to be Bathsheba bathing on a roof, one of those women.
So I still have questions. Jason is going to preach next week about more about David and where this went. I still have questions.
I'm still working through it.
But the truth is, is I think I'm working through a little bit more about not why this text is here, but what we have done with it, how we have read it.
Our scripture does something remarkable.
It tells the truth about our hero. David doesn't mince words.
It doesn't project anything.
It just tells the story.
I think our Bible is brave to let David, a hero, in this instance, become a villain.
But I don't think we're often willing to let our heroes become villains.
We're afraid to tell the truth.
So much so that even though we know better, we just may not comment on it at all. As my daughter's study Bible shows, we soften what powerful people have done.
We protect their reputations.
We call things like abuse an affair.
We call exploitation a moral failure.
We examine the clothing, the motives, their sexuality, their behavior.
We ask, what was Bathsheba doing on the roof? She must have been on the roof even though our text never placed her there in the first place.
Because the truth is that blaming her feels safer than confronting what David did.
We've watched churches protect clergy while scrutinizing those who accused them.
We have seen it in the decades of sexual abuse concealed in the Catholic Church.
We've seen it in the Southern Baptist Church, where their convention just this year doubled down on women like myself being sinful people for being here.
While sexual assault of women and children is pervasive throughout the church.
If you've watched Death of a Pastor's Wife, you might have wondered, how did Micah Miller's story happen?
Why did people continue to follow that pastor?
We're obsessed with power.
Natalie, you read something that our church came to. So for those of you that are new and weren't here last year, last year we went through and appreciative inquiry and we listened to all the things you said about the church, where you wanted to go and who you wanted to be. And then one of our lovely congregants, Ron, put that all into data and we used that data with exact words and this purpose statement came about.
We are a community seeking to reclaim Christianity as a movement of love and liberation, grounded in the belief that every person is made in the image of God.
What does it mean to reclaim Christianity?
I think it's time to be honest about what is written here, so I'm going to say it right now.
If we cannot say that David raped Bathsheba, we cannot be honest about our government.
We cannot be honest about something that may have happened to a friend.
We cannot be honest about femicide.
We cannot be honest about why women are leaving Christianity at incredible rates. Because when we read this, we know.
So if we want to reclaim Christianity and believe that every person is made in the image of God, we can't just omit this.
We must be honest about it.
Bathsheba was described by Nathan the religious prophet as a lamb.
If you have been walking as a Christian for long, you know that in First Peter, Jesus is also described as a lamb.
We wanted to know whether Bathsheba was blameless or not.
She was put right next to the Lamb of God, sinless at that moment.
So I don't have a lot of, like, personal ways in which we're going to feel good today.
This doesn't feel good.
What's happening in our churches, in our government, in the way in which we continue to allow women and children to be marginalized in order for power to remain is not okay.
And I don't think our text said it was okay either.
Will you pray with me?
God, this was hard. It's.
It hits in so many ways.
Thank you for allowing us to have a space where we can talk about it.
We are hungry for power. It is a system and principality that we constantly try to pander to, all of us do.
Help us to learn your way.
Help us to see those in need, those that are brought low.
Help us to make amends. Help us to reclaim Christianity with truth.
In your name we pray.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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