2 Samuel 11:26-12:13

²⁶ When the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she made lamentation for him. ²⁷ When the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son.

But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord, 12 ¹ and theLord sent Nathan to David. He came to him, and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. ² The rich man had very many flocks and herds; ³ but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. ⁴ Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.” ⁵ Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, “As the Lordlives, the man who has done this deserves to die; ⁶ he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”

⁷ Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; ⁸ I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. ⁹ Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. ¹⁰ Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. ¹¹ Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this very sun. ¹² For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.” ¹³ David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan said to David, “Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die.

Many of you will have heard of the annual young adults conference called School of Discipleship, which is a weekend at the Naamaroo Conference Centre in Chatswood, and is effectively intense theological teaching, great worship and fellowship. At last year’s School of Discipleship conference, one of the electives on offer was entitled: “Intentional Community: why living together sucks, and why we kinda need that” (REPEAT). The leaders of that elective were talking particularly about living in an intentional Christian community house, but the sentiment of their elective title certainly rings true more generally. Being a part of a Christian community can really suck, at least, when the community is genuine and real.

It doesn’t suck so much if the Christian community looks and acts like a robotic group of Brady Bunch-esque Shiny Happy People holding hands, ever smiling, ever clapping along to worship songs, ever shaking hands, ever drinking cups of tea and chatting about the weather, and never getting remotely closer to each other than arms reach. And it is a real temptation to allow our Christian communities to stay that shallow. But the reading today from the Hebrew Scriptures give us a different way of being authentic Christian community.

David and Nathan were two close friends, and with David as king, Nathan was appointed his advisor and counsellor. He was appointed to help keep David honest, like many other Kings of the Hebrew Scriptures; Saul had Samuel, Ahab had Elijah, Hezekiah had Isaiah, Jehoiakim and Zedekiah shared Jeremiah, and so on. Nathan was David’s closest confidante. And Nathan gets straight A’s for his ability to be a niggling, painful thorn in the king’s flesh, as evidenced by today’s reading.

The story goes that randy King David fell madly in lust with the uber-babe Bathsheba, the wife of one of his army generals, Uriah. Bathsheba gets knocked up, and David, rather than fessing up to his behaviour, tries to cover it all up, first by inviting Uriah to sleep with his wife, but after that fails due to Uriah’s deep devotion to the warring soldiers, has him killed on the frontline of the war, Godfather-style. After a “suitable” period of mourning, David then proceeds to marry uber-babe and now uber-widow Bathsheba. The honeymoon has hardly started before David’s friend and advisor Nathan came around to describe a hardship case he thought David might want to do something about.

There were these two guys, Nathan begins, one of them a big-time rancher with flocks and herds aplenty, and the other the owner of just one lamb he loved so much that he could never think about it in terms of food. He had it living at home with himself and the family, and got to the point where he even let it lap milk out of his own bowl, and sleep at the foot of his bed. The lamb was dearly loved. Then one day, the rancher had a friend drop by unexpectedly for a meal, and instead of taking something out of his own overstuffed freezer, he got someone to go over and kill the poor man’s lamb, which he and his friends consumed with roast potatoes and gravy.

When Nathan finished the story, David hit the roof. He said anybody who’d pull a stunt like that ought to be taken out and shot. At the very least he ought to be made to give back four times what the lamb was worth. And who was the greedy, thieving slob of a rancher anyway, he wanted to know.

And Nathan says: “Take a look in the mirror the next time you’re near one. You are that man. You are the greedy, thieving slob of a rancher.” Nathan just royally smacked down King David: hero, beloved of God, singer of Psalms, an absolute superpower of a king, whose legacy lasted for generations. Can you imagine how that would have felt to David? In fact, I have a feeling that if the same thing happened today – if a prophet called a powerful ruler to account for having a man killed in order to cover up his own tracks – he would probably pay for it with his life… particularly because that ruler had already just shown that he would not stop at murder to protect his public image. Actually we’re seeing such a relationship right now, between prophecy and power in the Border Force Act that forbids health professionals reporting misconduct at Nauru and Manus Island. This is the world we live in. Why then does Nathan survive, and how did he get the mighty King David the powerful ruler to admit his guilt and repent?

Nathan spoke truth in love to David, partly because it was his role within David’s government, and partly because they were friends. But I believe that he was able to do this mainly because they were fellow members of Yahweh’s covenantal community of love, trust and care, and both took seriously the commandments of Yahweh through Moses to love Yahweh, and love each other. It was part of their role as members of the Israelite community to be accountable to each other, and to call each other to be better people, for the sake of Yahweh. It was part of being in covenant with each other that one could speak truth in love to the other, even if that truth was deeply painful and mortifying. And more than that, David could see past being effectively shut down by his best friend, and hear Yahweh’s voice through Nathan’s admonition – that the thing he had done displeased Yahweh. And after that admonition, Nathan and David’s close friendship and partnership continued – reconciliation came after repentance.

What can we learn from this? The first thing is that we too are part of such covenantal communities: in this worship space, in our small groups, in the Uniting Church, and in the wider church catholic – the body of Christ. We have all made covenants to be faithful to such communities, in the service of the Triune God, with all that entails. Being in such communities can painfully suck. But it is our imperative, as members of these covenantal communities, to be able to speak, and hear, the truth from each other, in love. The church was never meant to be simply Shiny Happy People holding hands, because no one in the world is entirely shiny and happy. We all stuff up, and we all need to be held accountable. We all need to hear God’s voice speaking through the prophetic words of others. We need to respond to such accountability not with defensiveness, or anger, or passive-aggressiveness, or cowering in the foetal position. And we need to speak truth to our neighbours not with a sense of self-righteous anger or hypocrisy. As Tim Keller said: “truth without love is imperious self-righteousness. Love without truth is cowardly self-indulgence.” Both are selfish. We are called to speak and to respond with hearts that yearn to do God’s will, learning what we can as we go. That is what true Christian community looks like.

This story of David and Nathan also pushes us beyond the polarities that often order our thinking. We no longer remember David just as a Shiny Happy hero of the Bible. We also remember him as a murderer, adulterer and predatory king. David is both of those things, and is loved anyway. He, and we, and all members of the body of Christ, are both sinful and redeemed. In fact, we are not all that unlike David, I’m sorry to say. David’s story contains all the movements of a real relationship with God. David is a beautiful and beloved child who lives into the call issued to him. After various coming-of-age adventures, he becomes the leader of his people, living up to both his heritage and his descendants. And then he begins to believe his own press, and files for an exemption from the very Ten Commandments he triumphantly delivered to his new capital city. His power went to his head, to the extent that he was willing to kill to get the result he desired.

David needed a Nathan to show him the full horror of his actions, through a parable. When he heard the story of the poor man’s lamb, David responded from the part of his soul that was deeper and higher than self-interest. David needed a Nathan in his life, to be a good king.

This morning, I wonder who the Nathans are in your life. Who are the people who you trust will be honest with you when you are out of line, who know you well enough to see when you are messing up, and who are not afraid to put things into perspective, when you need it most? And when are you a Nathan? When do you speak truth out of love to your community of faith? When do you stand against inappropriate behaviour, or misdirected aggression, or perhaps a narrow theology?

Perhaps I’m making Christian community sound thoroughly unattractive – so why should we bother with this nonsense, if it’s going to be like continuously lancing wounds? Let me read from Ephesians, to help us understand why: “let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another.” We don’t just belong to each other in community; we are members of one another. We are dependent upon one another, as various parts of the body of Christ, so our openness and honesty is necessary for the effective functioning of the whole body, for the good of all. The debilitating diseases of the elderly remind us that the body cannot function well, if the various parts don’t communicate truthfully to one another.

So intentional community does suck sometimes. But we, as members of the body of Christ, desperately need it, with all it brings. We need Christian community that calls us to account, and provokes us to grow and learn. We need Nathans, and we need to be Nathans. The question then is how we react when such a Nathan declares that our comfortable lifestyles come at a great price, which is paid by the poor and broken of the world… when such a Nathan tells us a story about a rich ruler with much wealth, who was willing to take what little the poor peasant had, and we realize that we are that man or woman who has committed such horrifying sins against our neighbour. Perhaps we too, like David, will turn to tears, sorrow and repentance. But hear the good news. That grief is not the end. We also hope that with the help of God and the Nathans of the world, such injustices might be exposed and brought to an end once and for all. We yearn for the reconciliation of all things, not out of naiveté or blind faith, but because we hope that people like Nathan, and the God for whom they speak, will always be in our midst. That is how we embody true covenantal community, far beyond the romantic and easy. Amen.