Sermon – July 26, 2009
Sermon for Sunday, July 26 , 2009 First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Fools in Their Heart
2 Samuel 11: 1-15; Psalm 14; John 6: 1-21
“The fool says in his heart there is no God,” David writes, and you have to notice that
David is not saying that the fool says in his head that there is no God. The fool says it in his
heart, and we’ll look at that in a moment. We all know there are people who say in their head
that there is no God. They are atheists, aware of the concept that there is a divine being but
not buying it. They have an idea about reality which doesn’t include God.
But the fool in his heart is not about ideas. It is about actions, deeds arising from the
urges and energies which come from within. When the heart says there’s no God what that
means is that a person’s actions aren’t informed by anything but appetite, whim, or passion.
The heart has no competing allegiance to the love of God, and no competing desire to please
God. God doesn’t enter into it. It’s just what I want, and selfishness, as we all have been
learning all our lives, doesn’t lead to a life that is full, heaped-up, and overflowing. Putting
ourselves at the center isn’t what God intends for us.
So that what the psalm is talking about is not the distinction between believers and
nonbelievers, as if it were intended to make us shake our heads at atheists and think what fools
they are. The psalm is talking about a condition, the circumstance of having our lives directed
by inner instincts and desires, completely heedless of God’s reality and God’s claim on us.
That this is a universal condition, that this is everybody’s problem, is something David says a
couple of times in the psalm.
Those of us who say in our heads that there is a God have to think carefully about what
today’s scriptures show us. We see that David is aware that persons are flawed, not to be
relied upon to do what God wants, and that human beings need divine rescue from the mess
the world becomes when people do just what they feel like doing whenever the urge arises.
We see from the story of David and Bathsheba that David is correct in saying that no one is
exempt from this possibility of acting as if God didn’t exist at all, and we are reminded by the
mess into which David gets himself that a constant consciousness of God in our hearts may be
the only thing to save us from similar error and undoing.
In order to talk about David and his insight into the darker side of the human soul I want
to suggest a few things about the most famous king of Israel. We all know the story of David
and Goliath, and it is presented as a simple tale of youthful courage and resourcefulness.
David “thinks outside the box,” as it were, and finds a way to use his disadvantages to his own
advantage, and overcomes the giant Philistine. Without armor he is quicker on his feet, so can
dodge the spear thrown at him, and without experience of the usual weapons of war, he can
employ one which Goliath is not expecting.
There is also a reading-between-the-lines story ignored by the children’s Bible story
books. In it David learns that there is a considerable reward for whoever will face Goliath, and
his subsequent actions, including his strategy in combat, look less like pious innocence upheld
by the Almighty than they do like clever trickiness winning through. It’s always combined in the
story of David–one never gets the impression that he is insincere in his religion. It’s just that his
religion, like that, perhaps, of most people, doesn’t seem to have as much to do with his
choices and actions regarding other people as the children’s Bible story reader would expect.
When I think of David’s opportunistic marriage to the daughter of King Saul and his
evident lack of interest in being a good husband to her, and David’s conflicted but
nevertheless ambitious rivalry with Saul for leadership, I see a man not above being
motivated by what he thinks will turn out best for him, regardless of God’s requirements, and
so I am not astonished at what happens in the story of Bathsheba.
I don’t know if any of you saw the movie “The Apostle” which was made by, and stars,
Robert Duvall. He portrays an evangelist with lots of human faults, whose combination of selfpreservation
and self-promotion doesn’t seem entirely hypocritical because he has a variety
of personal religion which is simple, vital, and sincere. He represents a way of approaching
God which celebrates holiness and hope as an alternate reality to the disappointments and
indignities of daily living. It’s a Protestantism which expects human imperfection while
preaching against it, and which cherishes forgiveness because it accepts that people will do
wrong. The big difference between that approach to God and what we believe here is that
we feel more responsible to try to conform our behavior to the self-sacrifice and service to
others that we find the Bible commending, and we may feel a bit worse when we find
ourselves falling short of the standard we believe Christ has set. That’s the “bound to serve”
part of our church’s credo, the conviction that being Christian requires us to live differently, more
generously and helpfully and sympathetically, than we would live if it were only a matter of
what came naturally to us.
Anyway, the religion of King David seems more like the religion of Robert Duvall’s
character in “The Apostle.” David is a believer, and vigorously committed to upholding God’s
prerogatives as he understands them, especially for others– but incapable of being
transformed into a different kind of person by his relationship with God, and so accustomed to
separating, in some sense, his identity as a person and what he does in his own life, from his
relationship with God.
Well, we are all like this, no matter how we conceive our approach to God. No one is
righteous, no, not one, as the psalms say, and that includes us. Some people’s approach to
being Christian seems to emphasize more dutifulness and more pangs of conscience than
other ways of going about it, but even those folks deliberately aiming at sanctity go wrong.
When you recognize that David is something of a schemer and an opportunist you
may forget yourself and get indignant and say, “How come God loves David so much when
David is like this?” Well, be grateful that God’s love for human beings isn’t extinguished by
persons having less than ideal qualities. The good news here is that if God can love David
and keep on working with David toward some good outcome, despite David’s sins, God can
love us, too, and make our lives turn out to be useful and blessed, despite who we’ve been.
David’s affair with Bathsheba and his subsequent efforts to escape detection is a
terrible story and it’s very well told. Right from the beginning we get the storyteller’s critical
perspective. It’s the time of year when kings go forth to war and David’s general and his army
are laying siege to an enemy, but this king hasn’t gone to war. He’s stayed at his palace, with
time on his hands, and leisure to look around and get into trouble. Idle hands are the devil’s
workshop is an old saying. We don’t have to look far for evidence of its wisdom–the tabloids
are full of stories about people who make lots of money and have lots of free time and get in
one mess after another.
David is like them in that he has power. People will do what he says. He is used to
getting what he wants. That’s an awful thing about the story, the casual way in which David
takes another man’s wife and the implicit message that everyone in the story accepts,
because David is powerful, that he is entitled. Well, that’s in the tabloids, too.
The world of conscience kicks in, in an odd way, when David’s betrayal of his soldier is
going to be exposed. The crime will come to light, and David then does what he can to
conceal it. He can’t find a way to make things right, but he thinks he can devise a way to hide
his culpability, and he can’t. He’s undone by the comrade-in-arms principles of Uriah, the
refusal to take advantage when others are suffering which is the exact opposite of David’s
permission to himself to indulge his wants when others are in danger. David can’t think of
another solution to his expected loss of face than to see to it that Uriah is killed, and the faithful
soldier goes off with the order for his own death in his hand to deliver it to Joab.
I’ve already referred to the fact that there are stories in the tabloids about things like this
all the time. People with power and leisure get mixed up in squalid scenarios and would
prefer to have it hidden but it gets out. Why does it happen? Are they worse people than
we are?
Or is it simply a matter or opportunity? Is it just the case that, none of us being as
righteous as God requires, wrongdoing only waits for sufficient temptation? This is something
to take seriously.
Getting involved with another’s spouse and being driven to murder may not arise as a
possibility for you, no matter how much free time you possess and how much power you
may be given to make it happen. You may not dip into the till of your employer. You may
not damage the finish of another’s vehicle in the parking lot and leave no note offering to make
it right. Still, David’s psalm and David’s history remind us that we are capable of doing wrong,
and that we will do things which are unrighteous.
What can help us but a constant reinforcement of our belief in God’s place in our lives?
Daily prayers, practices of devotion, hours of worship, reflections on the scripture, can put God
so much in our mind that we may notice God’s presence there when temptation arises. The
other thing which we need to do is recognize ourselves as prey to temptation. David’s bad
example should put us on guard that we are not good people living in a flawed world, but
weak and fallible people contributing to the world’s being flawed, saved from great error
sometimes by the grace of God, and sometimes by our own refusal to indulge in it.