Being Two People At Once
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series III, Cycle B
David gets in trouble the way many other men get in trouble. Some women do also but often in a less adulterous way. Women get "twitterpated" by beauty but often think of themselves as the one who should become beautiful. I think of the movie, The Devil Wears Prada, which is the story of fascination with fashion -- the women are all hooked deeply on how they look, so deeply that they think a size six is too fat. David's issue is different but also connected: He takes the problem of his lust for Bathsheba into a conniving and deceitful way. He arranges to have the husband of his lover killed. Whether passive or active, taken upon the self or taken upon others, becoming lustful over the matter of beauty appears to be a universal matter.
What we know about David later as a man and as a king and as a leader is that he is a man of God. What we know about him from this one story is that he is a man of lust and violence. How can the same man be both men? Those of us who know ourselves know exactly how this can be. We understand. We also have a double nature. We may be very kind outside of our homes and very unkind inside. We may be lazy at work and full of energy at home. We may have a secret habit and hope that no one ever finds out. We may pose as a man of God but also have lust and also use violence. There are a great number of ways to be both good and bad at the same time -- and most of us are both.
We are people whom God both loves and chastens. We are often harder on ourselves than God is on us. I remember receiving a long letter from a writer friend of mine. He wrote the letter beautifully and said that he was no longer able to write! Unlike David, it was not his sin that clouded his vision but his virtue. Bob died a while ago at a young age. He never understood the full extent of his gifts. He ended the letter about not being able to write anymore with these lines from T. S. Eliot. He wanted to write like Eliot! He, too, had become lustful toward beauty.
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope ... for hope.
... and wait without love ... for love...
There is yet faith but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting....
Do not think for you are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be the light
And the stillness the dancing.1
Like David seeing Bathsheba from the roof, Bob saw Eliot's writing and wanted it to be his. Anything less was not good enough.
I am often surprised at how close our virtue and our sins are. The very thing that makes us good also makes us want to be better. The very appreciation of beauty that we do have makes us think our words are ugly or that we are not pretty enough. It is so hard to get things right! Once we are successful at just about anything, we are condemned to repeat our success. I know a young man who won the chess contest in his region: guess what? He lost nationally. It nearly killed him. He still played a beautiful game of chess -- but no longer knew it.
Our relationship to beauty can be, like David's, fraught with difficulties brought on by the very beauty we love! Zen Buddhists have a theory about some of this paradox. They say that praise and criticism are both sides of the same coin. In other words, we let things outside of us, things other than the grace of the Tao or God, determine what is good for us. We become averse to criticism and addicted to praise. We must be beautiful. We must win the chess contest. We must write like T. S. Eliot. We must have Bathsheba.
In a world where even something as good as religion is comfort to some and poison to others, we do come, eventually, to understand our double nature. We understand the link between virtue and vanity, the link between lust and loveliness, the strange connection between praise and criticism. We join David in having to have what we want -- rather than living by the grace of learning to want what we have. Violence is never far away.
How do we resolve this tremendous need we have for balance and self-control? By learning to want what we have, I think. Most of us want the Bathshebas or Eliots; we want what we don't have. To learn to want what we have is maturity. Maturity, however, can be very dull; when the excitement of lust is gone in a life, we are talking gray, not colorful.
Often what we need once we know how to want what we have is a method of constant reinvigoration. "Sometimes when you look up from your lot in life, you can tell it needs to be completely plowed up and replanted." Serial renovators of the world unite! Many of us are in need of constant plowing up and replanting.
We need focus if we are people spread too thin. And we may need to spread ourselves more thinly if we have become too much of a rut kind of person. Balance is the key -- as well as constantly being willing to plow up and replant. That way we don't get stuck in wanting toxic things. Joseph Campbell said it well: We have to give up the life we know if we are to receive the life being offered. New life is always being offered to us -- including how to live without Bathsheba or how to live as an ordinary chess player rather than a champion.
Consider the butterfly. These insects know a lot about becoming new and remaining colorful without descending into lust and violence.
In An Obsession With Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair With A Singular Insect, Sharman Apt Russell, says this about butterflies: "A bag of goo crawls on a leaf, obsessed with eating. It hangs upside down. It becomes something else. A butterfly is born, a bit of blue heaven, a jazzy design. It is a gesture of beauty almost too casual."
Becoming new is a gesture of beauty almost too casual. It is a set of incremental steps in learning to want what we have rather than becoming the prisoner of our own desires. Do we really need a full sabbatical to do it? Do we really need a long vacation to become new or can we put in place very quiet simple rituals that allow us to be who we are slowly? This casual way is about style but not just style. It is not about how old we are or how young we are. We are the right age for renewal, no matter our age.
Can you imagine who David might have been had he not had to have Bathsheba? Might he have slowly become a man of great cool and collectedness? Might he not have become a better king, one acquainted with lust and desire and even violence but who knew how to forswear it? God was offering David another chance even as he made the choice to take Uriah out. David missed it. The good news is that he didn't miss all his chances. He managed to serve God and find his way to casual consistent beauty. He was forgiven a terrible crime, a hideous lust. He was forgiven the way he loved beauty too much. First he had to pay the price in the death of the son he bore by Bathsheba whom he took as his wife, after murdering Uriah. But one day at a time, one story at a time.
We can receive the same power, the same forgiveness, and the same casual beauty. What is our best hope? To learn to want what we do have and stop staring at other people's roofs! The grass will always be greener on the other side of the yard. That we know. Someone will always have a more beautiful wife than we do or write better or play chess better. Those are the facts of life. Learning to love a wife because we love her, to play chess because we enjoy the game, to write the way we write (not the way Eliot writes) is a way to tame both lust and life. The very taming will release power to us. If we are not able to tame our lusts, we will be forgiven. God is much too large and God's love is much too large. However, as Saint Paul would quickly say, "Should we continue to sin in order that grace may abound?" (Romans 6:1). No -- we are to tame our lusts, to love beauty in a way that makes us more collected and beautiful. We are to tame our lusts and turn the taming into beauty. Amen.
____________
1. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (San Diego, California: Harvest Books, 1968), p. 16.
What we know about David later as a man and as a king and as a leader is that he is a man of God. What we know about him from this one story is that he is a man of lust and violence. How can the same man be both men? Those of us who know ourselves know exactly how this can be. We understand. We also have a double nature. We may be very kind outside of our homes and very unkind inside. We may be lazy at work and full of energy at home. We may have a secret habit and hope that no one ever finds out. We may pose as a man of God but also have lust and also use violence. There are a great number of ways to be both good and bad at the same time -- and most of us are both.
We are people whom God both loves and chastens. We are often harder on ourselves than God is on us. I remember receiving a long letter from a writer friend of mine. He wrote the letter beautifully and said that he was no longer able to write! Unlike David, it was not his sin that clouded his vision but his virtue. Bob died a while ago at a young age. He never understood the full extent of his gifts. He ended the letter about not being able to write anymore with these lines from T. S. Eliot. He wanted to write like Eliot! He, too, had become lustful toward beauty.
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope ... for hope.
... and wait without love ... for love...
There is yet faith but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting....
Do not think for you are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be the light
And the stillness the dancing.1
Like David seeing Bathsheba from the roof, Bob saw Eliot's writing and wanted it to be his. Anything less was not good enough.
I am often surprised at how close our virtue and our sins are. The very thing that makes us good also makes us want to be better. The very appreciation of beauty that we do have makes us think our words are ugly or that we are not pretty enough. It is so hard to get things right! Once we are successful at just about anything, we are condemned to repeat our success. I know a young man who won the chess contest in his region: guess what? He lost nationally. It nearly killed him. He still played a beautiful game of chess -- but no longer knew it.
Our relationship to beauty can be, like David's, fraught with difficulties brought on by the very beauty we love! Zen Buddhists have a theory about some of this paradox. They say that praise and criticism are both sides of the same coin. In other words, we let things outside of us, things other than the grace of the Tao or God, determine what is good for us. We become averse to criticism and addicted to praise. We must be beautiful. We must win the chess contest. We must write like T. S. Eliot. We must have Bathsheba.
In a world where even something as good as religion is comfort to some and poison to others, we do come, eventually, to understand our double nature. We understand the link between virtue and vanity, the link between lust and loveliness, the strange connection between praise and criticism. We join David in having to have what we want -- rather than living by the grace of learning to want what we have. Violence is never far away.
How do we resolve this tremendous need we have for balance and self-control? By learning to want what we have, I think. Most of us want the Bathshebas or Eliots; we want what we don't have. To learn to want what we have is maturity. Maturity, however, can be very dull; when the excitement of lust is gone in a life, we are talking gray, not colorful.
Often what we need once we know how to want what we have is a method of constant reinvigoration. "Sometimes when you look up from your lot in life, you can tell it needs to be completely plowed up and replanted." Serial renovators of the world unite! Many of us are in need of constant plowing up and replanting.
We need focus if we are people spread too thin. And we may need to spread ourselves more thinly if we have become too much of a rut kind of person. Balance is the key -- as well as constantly being willing to plow up and replant. That way we don't get stuck in wanting toxic things. Joseph Campbell said it well: We have to give up the life we know if we are to receive the life being offered. New life is always being offered to us -- including how to live without Bathsheba or how to live as an ordinary chess player rather than a champion.
Consider the butterfly. These insects know a lot about becoming new and remaining colorful without descending into lust and violence.
In An Obsession With Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair With A Singular Insect, Sharman Apt Russell, says this about butterflies: "A bag of goo crawls on a leaf, obsessed with eating. It hangs upside down. It becomes something else. A butterfly is born, a bit of blue heaven, a jazzy design. It is a gesture of beauty almost too casual."
Becoming new is a gesture of beauty almost too casual. It is a set of incremental steps in learning to want what we have rather than becoming the prisoner of our own desires. Do we really need a full sabbatical to do it? Do we really need a long vacation to become new or can we put in place very quiet simple rituals that allow us to be who we are slowly? This casual way is about style but not just style. It is not about how old we are or how young we are. We are the right age for renewal, no matter our age.
Can you imagine who David might have been had he not had to have Bathsheba? Might he have slowly become a man of great cool and collectedness? Might he not have become a better king, one acquainted with lust and desire and even violence but who knew how to forswear it? God was offering David another chance even as he made the choice to take Uriah out. David missed it. The good news is that he didn't miss all his chances. He managed to serve God and find his way to casual consistent beauty. He was forgiven a terrible crime, a hideous lust. He was forgiven the way he loved beauty too much. First he had to pay the price in the death of the son he bore by Bathsheba whom he took as his wife, after murdering Uriah. But one day at a time, one story at a time.
We can receive the same power, the same forgiveness, and the same casual beauty. What is our best hope? To learn to want what we do have and stop staring at other people's roofs! The grass will always be greener on the other side of the yard. That we know. Someone will always have a more beautiful wife than we do or write better or play chess better. Those are the facts of life. Learning to love a wife because we love her, to play chess because we enjoy the game, to write the way we write (not the way Eliot writes) is a way to tame both lust and life. The very taming will release power to us. If we are not able to tame our lusts, we will be forgiven. God is much too large and God's love is much too large. However, as Saint Paul would quickly say, "Should we continue to sin in order that grace may abound?" (Romans 6:1). No -- we are to tame our lusts, to love beauty in a way that makes us more collected and beautiful. We are to tame our lusts and turn the taming into beauty. Amen.
____________
1. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (San Diego, California: Harvest Books, 1968), p. 16.
