Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis February 8, 2009

2 Samuel 11:1-5

“Souls Lost, Souls Found”

Scripture:

1In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. 2It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. 3David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” 4So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. 5The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”

Sermon:

Nobody sets out to lose their soul. For David, it was a leisurely stroll on his roof that exposed him to a powerful temptation. He couldn’t get the sight of this beautiful beauty out of his mind. Her husband was away in battle. He was the king, wasn’t he, and weren’t all of his subjects in some sense his? Bathsheba must be lonely. If he treated her well, she might appreciate his affections. This could be his and Bathsheba’s little secret. David didn’t see much of a problem.

But once you put your stick in the stream, you can’t control where it goes. Bathsheba got pregnant. Now that was a problem. When Uriah found out, he would demand to know who had done this to his wife. So David brought Uriah back home, ostensibly to get a report of the battle, but really to get him to sleep with his wife so he wouldn’t suspect the baby was anyone else’s. But Uriah’s loyalty to his Joab and comrades in the battlefield was so great, he wouldn’t even leave the palace and enjoy the comforts of home, even after David kept him another night and got him drunk.

I imagine David tossing and turning all night trying to figure out what to do. Can you identify with David here? The respect of his subjects as their king chosen by God was at stake. How could he hold the loyalty of his troops if they knew he had slept with the wife of a soldier who was off risking his life for the king? For the sake of his kingdom he had to solve this problem. So he did what he felt he had to do. He sent a written, sealed message by Uriah himself instructing Joab to put Uriah in the thick of the battle so he would be sure to die. And it worked. He took Bathsheba to be his wife, and he would help raise their child.

Now imagine what’s going on inside David at this point in the story. In his head, he had solved the problem pretty well, and he was ahead by one beautiful wife and a possible heir. But his stomach had a gnawing feeling of uneasiness. Instead of his times with Bathsheba being a joy, his heart felt troubled when he was with her. The judgments and decisions that he made lacked the ring of inner moral authority. He felt very far from God. These are all signs of someone who has lost their soul.

One thing I love about the stories from the Hebrew Scriptures is that the public relations people and spin doctors didn’t get hold of them before they were put in the Bible. Here’s a story about the most revered king in the history of Judaism, wrestling in a big way with the same troubling, life-sapping dilemma that any human being falls into from time to time--step by step, decision by decision, losing that vital connection to their own soul.

Now you don’t have to commit what people would call a big sin to lose your soul connection--though that is a pretty effective way to do it. In fact, you can be very “virtuous” and still lose your soul. Have you ever found yourself getting so caught up in trying to solve someone else’s problems or protect them from pain or take care of them so well that you end up putting in a closet your sense of who you are and what you need to sustain your own life? Have you ever had a job where you had to sell a piece of your soul and sell out your values to be successful--or risk losing your family’s livelihood? Have you ever tried to live out your fantasy of what a successful life should look like or your image of what a respected person should be like, only to find yourself feeling empty inside? Do you get so darn busy managing and accomplishing and doing all the things that are expected of you or that you expect of yourself, that your life becomes a series of days running on the hamster wheel but not going anywhere or doing anything that taps your true self and your life’s purpose?

Now if I’ve left you out, I’m sorry. But I’m sure you can come up with ways you lose touch with your soul, because we all do it. So why don’t we all take a moment and just be aware of how we each have lost touch with that deepest part of us that is the opening to God’s light, love, truth, wisdom, and power, and that responds to life with gratitude, authenticity, inner calm, and generosity. What in your life makes that part of you get lost?...

We can never really fully lose our soul. Even if we keep overriding it or stuff it in a lock box, it keeps gnawing at us. And if that doesn’t get our attention, God or our unguided lives will create a crisis to wake us up.

King David’s wake up call came in the form of a swift kick in the conscience by the prophet Nathan, who told David a story about a wealthy man who had lots of flocks and herds. His neighbor was a poor man who had nothing but one little lamb that was a family pet. A traveler came to the rich man seeking hospitality. The rich man didn’t want to roast one of his own sheep, so he took the pet lamb from his poor neighbor and killed it to feed his guest.

When David heard this, he cried, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!” Nathan looked him squarely in the eye and said, “You are the man!”

David got it. “I have sinned against the Lord,” he said.

David is said to have written Psalm 51, which in part reads:

1Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

2Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. 3For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

6You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

10Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

11Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.

12Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

17The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

David laid his whole self open to God--his guilt, his broken spirit, and his need to be reunited to God through God’s forgiving grace. It was by saying his truth humbly and fully that David re-entered God’s grace. And despite all his faults, David became a symbol of leadership rather than lawlessness.

The most basic definition of sin is separation from God. To find our way back home to God and to our soul, we always have to follow the path of the truth. The truth will ultimately always lead us back to our soul and back to God, because God is the ultimate truth of all that is, and our soul is the deepest truth of who we are.

When we have violated someone or ourselves, there is no way back home but to tell the truth of what we have done, take responsibility for it, and make what amends we can. This is usually hard and humbling. But the good news is that there is no sin so deep or dark that we can’t be released from it by naming it, claiming it, and asking for God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of those we have wronged.

We are here in this world not to do everything perfectly, but to hone our heart, mind and spirit as we wrestle with the challenges and temptations and hardships of life, and overcome them with faith, hope, courage, and love. God expects us to wobble as we learn to walk, to stumble as we learn to run, to falter as we learn to fly. But each time we make a mistake, we acknowledge it so we can learn from it, and get up and try again. God’s forgiveness is boundless, but it does us no good unless we look at ourselves honestly, and admit that we need it, learn from our mistakes, and apply what we’ve learned as we move forward in our lives.

And our Ash Wednesday service coming up February 25 is designed to help us cleanse and restore our souls as we write down, release to God, and burn into ashes whatever is separating our soul from God. I hope you join us in this ancient soul-building ritual.

But what if our separation from God and our soul isn’t because of some specific sin that we’ve committed? What if our soul has just gotten lost in the stresses and preoccupations and compromises of everyday life, and we don’t know how to find it? Let me share with you some things that are helpful to me, besides coming to church here at HUCC, which always awakens my soul.

The first set of things we can do involves moving outward from our small, self-centered, self-absorbed ego-based thoughts and feelings, out to something bigger than ourselves.

Tuning into the beauty, wonder, and awesomeness of God’s Creation is one way of feeding our souls, and we’ll be doing that on our Lenten Retreat at the Abbey of the Genesee March 13-14.

Expanding our hearts to include other people and other kind people and practicing loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, helps create pockets of God’s realm where our soul can feel at home. Creating that kind of home for our souls is what we’re about here at HUCC.

Offering our gifts to a higher purpose, a project, or a cause that we believe in reorients our energies from acquiring from the world to giving to the world and engages our souls’ passion and purpose.

Not only can we find our souls by expanding outwards, but also by turning inwards. Reading the Bible and inspirational literature reflectively and listening for God’s whispers and nudges can awaken the highest and deepest parts of ourselves. Laura O’Shaughnessy will be leading a Lenten Bible study that will help person experience and relate to different aspects of Jesus, which will be great food for the soul.

When I feel my soul is getting lost because of a difficult situation, it’s very helpful for me to write down all the things I’m feeling--just write and write until I have brought everything that’s stewing inside into the light of awareness. Just being with myself in that kind of all-embracing awareness and praying for God’s comfort and guidance, can make me feel whole and feel a deep connection to God.

To go through life without connecting to our soul deprives us of our soul’s guidance, inspiration, hope, deep peace, and sustaining power. And to go through life without connecting with our soul deprives our soul of its purpose to bring heaven’s gifts into this mortal world.

So where is your soul today? Has it gotten lost along the way? It’s truly right there within you, waiting for you to come back home and discovers its freedom, joy, peace and power. In this time of silence, ask your soul what you need to do today to come home to yourself and come home to God.