August 9, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

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

      Let us pray.  God of the morning, we cry to you for your mercy.  We are a people who struggle; we struggle to be faithful and to be vigilant in a world that at times continues to beat us down. We plead with you to hear our petitions out of the deep recesses of our lives. We pray that you do not judge us too harshly but show us the mercy and love that redeem and restore. We plead, and we wait.  Amen. 

      Frederick Buechner, in his autobiographical book, Telling Secrets, breaks silence about a family secret: how his teenage daughter struggled with anorexia. There came a day when he, himself, was in the depths of despair, worried sick that his daughter would never get well again. But then, in a dark night, came a message of hope, from an unusual quarter. 

      Buechner writes: “I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.” 

The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!" 

      What precisely is it in that anguished cry of such a parent who has lost such a child? That is the question. 

      The comforting memory of the time he stretched those perfectly formed fingers of his around your thumb, the time she took those first unsteady steps of hers before falling into your outstretched arms?  The time he first ran to you for comfort or smiled back at you from the limb of a tree he had just managed to climb?  The sweet smell of her downy head under your chin, the time she cried out in fear in the midst of her darkened sleep, and the bed was narrow and you sat on the edge to stroke her forehead? 

      Or was it perhaps the angry, accusing memory of when she stood there, fists clenched, hurt in her voice, tears in her eyes, defiant and unwilling to listen to anything you wanted to say?  The time he yelled at you and was gone, just slammed the door behind him and then there was silence, silence like you had never heard before? 

      Or was it simply the fact that these children of yours grew up under a broken roof which nonetheless sheltered their own failings, inviting them, forcing them to be dark themselves in order to survive?  The apple doesn't just fall close to the tree. It falls in the direction of its roots. 

      This week's continuation of the Old Testament story from the second book of Samuel is not just the story of a parent's grief, it is the complicated assessment of our emotions before the weight of memories and ghosts that come burning and thundering behind us in the offspring we bear in this world.   In the continuation of the ancient and poignant tale of King David and his sons, we hear the anguish of our own confused and confusing voice. 

      Whether or not it is true, as some have observed, that children take on their parents' bad qualities and magnify them much more readily than they adopt their good qualities.  Absalom, David's third oldest son, seemed to exemplify this observation perfectly. 

      Perhaps his being the son of a princess (3.3), David felt obliged to spoil him.  Maybe, befitting one that was raised in the lap of luxury, David impressed upon him, much like some Vineyard parents, that he was entitled to status and happiness. If the kid turned out to be a snob, we might expect that.  What is most surprising is that the young Absalom, although horribly self-absorbed, somehow learned the value of such great patience. Absalom knew how to bide his time and to wait years, if necessary, for just the right moment. 

      For example, when his baby sister Tamar, confessed to him that his big brother Amnon had raped and defiled her (13.20), Absalom cooled his heels rather than risking giving in to impulsive anger.  What didn't help matters was his father's attitude.  While David was troubled by what his first-born son had done, according to the story he didn't even reprimand Amnon.  So Absalom waited two full years before deciding to put things right himself, then invited the prince-in-waiting to a sheep-shearing party, and had Amnon murdered, thus moving himself up to next in line for the throne. 

      It proved to be the beginning of his public career and, at the same time, the beginning of the end of his relationship with his father David.   

      There was something dashing about Absalom that the public just couldn't get enough of.  Perhaps it was that magnificent head of hair of his.  Once a year he would have it trimmed, so the story goes; and the clippings tipped the scales at three and a half pounds.  Whether it was the way he dispatched his brother Amnon or set fire to cranky old Joab's hay field, all of Israel found such daring-do irresistible.  Absalom began to see that the throne was his for the taking if he just played his cards right and bided his time.  He did; and when the moment finally came about half of the country was already behind him. 

      We don’t really know what was going on in the mind of David all those years.  Letting Absalom know that he should stay away from the palace until he got over Amnon's murder, then letting him come back to Jerusalem for two full years without even so much as laying eyes on him.  Then, finally letting him back in his good graces.  Then looking the other way as Absalom laid the plans for his coup d'état right under his nose.  What was the normally shrewd David thinking as he watched this whole performance acted out before his eyes.  Absalom was as cold and calculating and ruthless a child as had ever sprung forth from his loins and David knew it.  Somehow, however, he just couldn't come to terms with it, even when his own life and the throne were on the line. 

      Ironically, it was that beautiful hair of Absalom's that proved his undoing.  He got it caught in the branches of an oak tree when his mule tried to run under it.  David's army had been chasing him down all day long and, wouldn't you know it – Absalom's old nemesis Joab found him there swaying in the breeze.  In spite of David's specific orders that not a hair on Absalom's head was to be harmed if they ever caught up to him, Joab decided to get even for Absalom's hay field caper and save the nation in one fell swoop.  With ten young armor bearers behind him, Joab ran Absalom through right where he hung and then had somebody else report the news to the king. 

      When David heard about it, the author of this richly told tale says, he cried out in his grief: 

   "O my son Absalom, my son, my son! Would I had died instead of you,

   O Absalom, my son, my son!" 

      It was deep, sincere and gut-wrenching and the most honest David ever sounded about anything.  Even when his soldiers tried to comfort him with the knowledge that Absalom’s rebellion had failed, and even when old Joab got plain testy with him for seeming to be totally ungrateful to the very men who had remained faithful to him, all David could really say was, "But he was my son!"  It was David, as conflicted as we have ever seen him, completely stripped of his own ambition and need to be in charge.  Now, at the end, there was absolutely no chance to be reconciled with a son whom he had lost such a long time ago.  That was all that mattered. 

      In our own time, the trials and tribulations of the British Royal family over the past few decades have not only endeared Queen Elizabeth to most people as a long-suffering mother.  It has also served to remind us all that this modern myth of the so called "traditional family values" is not all that it is cracked up to be.  It's not just royal families that have to endure heartache and tragedy.  So do the Ozzies and Harriets of this world, too.  We would like to think that family life ends in some happy resolution about things.  But rarely, in fact, if it ever was, is that the final act in the play.  More often than not, some things will never come together between parents and kids.  The bad things don't always get identified and punished.  The people who are supposed to set good examples don't. 

      It's not just that we wish, like David, we could during bad times stand in for our children, taking the blows that life seems to have in store for them.  It's that, sometimes, we feel those blows belong more properly to us.  We wish we could live our children's lives for them, not just to control them, but somehow to make up for our own shortcomings as parents.  But we cannot live their lives and we cannot turn back the clock.  Still, "What's gone and what's past help should be past grief," wrote Shakespeare (The Winter's Tale). The only problem is: it isn't.  How can you stop grieving for what's beloved even when it's past time for any loving thing to do? 

      In a sense, the story of David, known as the greatest of the kings of Israel, ends not in happy retirement but in anguish, with David pouring out his deep grief and regret, not only over the death of a son, but the failure of his family.  It is hard not to hear in those tear-soaked words the deep sadness of just about any parent over the state of his or her family and the high-cost of fulfilling all those parental responsibilities. 

      There is no easy moral lesson here, at least no lesson the author of 2 Samuel expects us to somehow emulate. What there is is the frank statement that both the parents and children we want are not necessarily the ones we get.  In any family, even the best of them, there are always regrets.  Things don't always turn out for the best.  Parents disappoint us.  Children don't always turn out the way we hope.  As hard as we try, we can't always get it together and we can't always make things turn out right.  Things happen.  People change.  Words get said that can never be taken back.  And our lives are forever altered. 

      I confess that I do not know where God is in all of this.  I do not know where God is when innocence is horribly betrayed or when tragedies that could have been prevented are not.  I don't know where God is when, either as parents or children, we try our level best to make things right with those whom we have disappointed and those efforts end in failure.   

      What I do know is that God was there in the cry of David that day.  And I do know that God is there whenever anybody cries out of a similar anguish of his or her own before a grief that will not be consoled.  Because I know God was there that day outside of Jerusalem when he could not live Jesus' life for him.  Because the cross does not take away the hurts we do to one another.

      The cross, just embraces them, surrounds and enfolds them with a love that lasts.  Amen.