Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son!

Sermon for the 11^th Sunday after Pentecost, August 9, 2015

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot, North Dakota

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge

Readings: 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51.

“Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Marc Chagall has a beautiful painting of David at the moment he hears the news of the death of his beloved son.   This is one of those biblical passages where we realize that there may be 3000 years between us and David, the King of Israel.  But that deep grief of a father who must absorb the news of the death of a child: we understand that grief.  3000 years haven’t changed a parent’s response to that kind of tragic news. 

David didn’t have access to his son’s body.  A heap of stones had been placed on top of the body to mark its whereabouts and to keep it safe from predators.  So there was no body for David to caress.  But look at David’s face—the love and the grief.   Parents are just about undone by this kind of news.

Absalom and his father King David had had a very complicated relationship.   David had many sons, and those boys had different mothers.  One of the eldest, by the name of Amnon, once lured and sexually assaulted Absalom’s sister, Tamar.  King David heard about Amnon’s deed, but he did nothing about it.  So Absalom took matters into his own hands a few years later and threw a party for his brothers where he had Amnon killed. Word reached the King that Absalom had murdered all David’s sons.  David was so relieved when that rumor turned out to be wrong that he didn’t do much about Absalom’s act of revenge. Absalom went into exile.   David’s trusted advisor, Joab, could see how Absalom’s absence was affecting him.  It was like having lost two sons.  Joab cleverly succeeded in getting David to invite Absalom to move back to Jerusalem.  But over the course of several years, the father-son relationship remained broken.  David never invited Absalom to appear in court. 

Absalom had been one of those golden boys who seem to have everything going for them.  He was rich; his mother was beloved of the King; he was tall and strong and skilled in battle, incredibly vital and incredibly handsome.  Even his hair grew so thick and full that it was legendary.  Even his sons were handsome and his daughter beautiful.  But the relationship with his father never healed. As David aged, Absalom seized the opportunity to bring about a coup d’etat.  So David  found himself involved in a civil war, with his own favorite son on the other side; and David and the rest of his family fled Jerusalem with his military guard.  Absalom, to demonstrate his dominance over his father’s kingdom and his father’s possessions, erected a tent on the rooftop of the palace and took all ten of his father’s concubines and violated them.  Finally, David mustered his loyal troops and sent them off to fight Israel.  But before they left, he made sure that Joab, his commander, heard him say: “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom.”  The rest of the army heard this exchange and they weren’t quite sure what to make of it.  But they went off to battle.

And in the midst of what turned out to be a very terrible and ugly battle, that ranged into the forests on the mountain slopes, Absalom, tall in the saddle, with his full head of hair, somehow got himself caught in the branches of a great oak.  The narrator said, “he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on.” 

Absalom was not dead.  But when David’s men came upon him, one reported it to Joab.  “What!?!” said Joab.  “You saw him but you didn’t kill him?”  The soldier replied that he’d heard David’s words and he would not betray Absalom.  Joab, though, was a tough realist.  He knew Absalom must be killed if David’s kingdom was to survive; and so Joab stabbed him but left him living, gathering ten men, who surrounded Absalom and killed him dead.   This act left no individual with the responsibility for having dealt the final death blow.  Then they raised a cairn of stones over his body. 

The battle was over.  Joab had won the day for David.  But at what a cost!  Now somebody needed to tell David.  Joab sent a foreign soldier, not an Israelite, to give him the terrible news.  But one of David’s trusted advisors, Ahimaaz, also insisted on running to David.  David, watching from the hills, could see two men running along the plains.  He knew they had news for him about the battle.  Ahimaaz got there first.  He brought the good news that David’s forces had prevailed.  Then he started to stammer and prevaricate as David asked about Absalom.  The Cushite soldier finally arrived; King David asked him the fateful question; and, perhaps naively, the unnamed foreign soldier announced: “May the enemies of my lord the king, and all who rise up to do you harm, be like that young man” (2 Samuel 18:32).

Now David’s heart was broken. 

There is no way for David to explain or justify how he got to the place where he was, this place of death, this place that the psalmist, perhaps David himself, called “the Depths.”   “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!” says the psalm.  David cried out to God from

•          The tawdry mess with Bathsheba;
• The secret his commander knew about the death of Uriah the Hittite;
• The vengeful murder of one son, Amnon, by another,  Absalom, because he (David) didn’t     or couldn’t do anything about Tamar’s violation by his son Amnon.  
• The loneliness of the broken relationship between himself and  Absalom, this strong, handsome son, a natural born leader.
• The humiliation of departing, mourning and barefoot, from Jerusalem, the city he had made the capital of his kingdom, as angry citizens hurled rocks and curses…

It had all ended somehow in a vision that David would never get out of his head: the picture of Absalom hanging, in a tree, between heaven and earth.  That beautiful mighty body hanging there with stab wounds, beaten and broken.  That sweet boy grown into a man still loved despite their estrangement, now buried under a pile of stones and boulders. 

Christians read this story and can’t help but see it as a powerful foreshadowing of the events of Christ’s crucifixion. David crying, in the voice of the Psalm: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!”  God understanding and consoling David because God one day would see his own Son hanging between heaven and earth, a sacrifice that would bring about the reconciliation of heaven and earth.

We’re exactly a year past the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Like Absalom, some might say that Michael Brown was on the wrong side of the law.  And they might be right.  But an encounter with the police, certainly for someone suspected of petty theft, is not supposed to be a death sentence.  That is not justice.  That is some kind of terrible vigilantism.  Someone had to bring the news to Michael Brown’s parents.  Michael Brown’s parents could look at their son’s high school graduation picture, and remember his plans to start college and all the hopes they’d had for his future.  And you could imagine them wondering what they could have done differently to keep their beloved son safe and out of trouble.  They also were, like King David, unable to hold his bullet-ridden body.  This has also been the year when, to name a few:  Dontre Hamilton,

         Eric Garner,

                  John Crawford,

                           Ezell Ford,

                                    Dante Parker,

                                             Tanisha Anderson,

                                    Akai Gurley,

                           Twelve year old Tamir Rice, 

                  Rumain Brisbane,

         Jerame Reid,

Tony Robinson,

         Phillip White,

                  Eric Harris,

                           Walter Scott,

                                    and Freddie Gray,

all unarmed, were killed by police, or died in police custody.  Somebody had to bring the news to parents each time. 

         Each time, there was no body to cradle. (In fact, Tamir Rice’s older sister was wrestled to the ground by the very police that had killed her brother when she tried to run to his assistance.)  

         Each time, loved ones grieved that their children were in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

         Each time, someone asked, could I have done something different?  Could I have made different decisions that would have kept my child safe and out of a criminal justice system that has proved so gratuitously lethal to black lives? 

         Each time, somebody prayed and wept: 

“Michael, Michael, my son, my son!”

“Eric, Eric!  Would that I had died in your place!”

Tamir,

         Walter,

                  Freddie, my son, my son!

These are the children of our nation, they are part of our richest inheritance, our future, wantonly slaughtered.    Something is terribly wrong.  How do we as a nation move forward toward a more authentic kind of justice? 

1. We begin by grieving the loss of each precious child, created in God’s image. 

2.  We remember that each life story is complex in ways that David’s life was complex.  Motives are mixed; sinful, careless, and un-considered acts (and sinful inaction!) that may not seem too serious at the time can bring about terrible results.  As Sir Walter Scott said: “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”  

3.  And we must practice telling the truth about what happens.  King David was no saint.  And the Court history of the Kings of Israel does not hold back in showing him as courageous sometimes but passive, unwise, and ineffective at other times; as generous and justice oriented sometimes but at other times temperamental and vindictive. 

4.  We must practice telling the truth about our own country.  We are part of a nation that was founded on the terrible sin of human slavery.  Though 150 years have passed since slaves were emancipated, our nation still has a lot to answer for.  Our nation must repent, must begin to function as if “black lives matter” as much as white lives do.   Individually, we may also need to repent of the ways we who are white have taken advantage of the privileges we are hardly aware that we are accorded.  We who are white don’t fear for our life when we are stopped for a traffic violation.  We don’t fear for our children’s lives when they are caught after making the foolish choices that so many kids make in adolescence, choices that in no obvious way reflect on their prospects for the future. 

5. Finally, we remember that the justice system of the Roman Empire failed entirely to protect Jesus. It left him hanging between heaven and earth, stretching out his arms of love on the hard wood of the Cross, giving his life.  Jesus himself said, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

David wept  “Absalom, Absalom! My son, my son!”

—and he prayed,

Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!

Perhaps in the words of the psalm we may begin to find a way forward. 

Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD;

LORD, hear my voice;

         let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication.

If you, LORD, were to note what is done amiss,

         O LORD, who could stand?  (Not David, not I!)

For there is forgiveness with you;

         therefore you shall be feared.

I wait for the LORD; my soul waits for him;

         in his word is my hope.

The story of David and Absalom resonates in the heart of every parent who has news of a child’s death. It resonates in the heart of every person who has watched their child suffer. 

The Psalm we read today begins in “the depths.”  But it ends in hope and trust that even in the most terrible circumstances, God is present.  Night ends and morning comes. 

The God whose own Son would hang between earth and heaven brings hope and consolation to each person who cries from out of the depths.   After Jesus was buried in a cave, something happened.  On the third day, God raised Jesus from the dead. And somehow that resurrection brings about the reconciliation and healing of the broken world. 

And from this place of hope and forgiveness, let us heed the advice of the writer of the letter to the Ephesian Christians in our behavior towards one another.   It’s all summed up in the command to walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.