Sermon, 2021.7.25: "Signs of the Gospel"

 

Ben Miller

“Signs of the Gospel”

A sermon preached at Christ Episcopal Church (Lead, SD)

IX Sunday After Pentecost, 2021.7.25

Season After Pentecost: Proper XII (Track 1), Year B

II Samuel 11.1-15 / Psalm 14 / Ephesians 3.14-21 / John 6.1-21

I want to talk about signs today: the kinds of signs we perform, and the kinds that God performs. 

Today our Lord gives us two signs in the Gospel passage: a feeding miracle and walking on water.

It’s important to understand how miracles work in the Gospel of John. The Fourth Gospel calls the miracles of Jesus signs. They are more than magic tricks. Jesus is not like Rome, impressing the crowd with bread and circuses. Jesus intends greater things than these. 

A sign points beyond itself to something else. And that’s why John uses this terminology. Jesus’ signs aren’t about bread and circuses. His signs are not about bringing counterfeit health and wealth to the masses—he says later in this same chapter, do not work for the food that perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life (Jn 6.27). 

No, the signs of Jesus are proclamations of the Kingdom of God. They point beyond themselves to the identity of Jesus: the Word Made Flesh, who has descended to bring a Kingdom not of this world (Jn 18.36), and to be our Bread of Life, our bread in our wilderness that shall endure to eternal life (6.27). That’s why Jesus does them.

John structures the first half of his Gospel around seven of these signs—you might recall when Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding at Cana. That’s the first sign, all the way back in chapter 2. 

Well, here we are this Sunday with chapter 6, and the Lord has dropped us two more signs. It’s a two for one deal this Sunday! So we have Christ multiplying loaves and fishes for the five thousand. And then Jesus just… leaves. He withdrew again to the mountain by himself, and the disciples get in a boat, and a strong wind blows, and they see Jesus, approaching them on the water (vv. 15, 18, 19).

So Christ has given us these two divine signs: 

a meal and an appearance. 

But these are not the only signs the lectionary gives us this morning.

We have darker signs at play alongside the ones Christ performs. 

We need to talk about David and Bathsheba. 

Notice what’s at play here in today’s Old Testament passage.

Today David sits around in Jerusalem letting his military do all his dirty work for him, and he sees Bathsheba bathing on the roof, and he orchestrates the murder of her husband Uriah because he desires her so much. 

You see, II Samuel 11 today is one of the most famous Old Testament passages. It is David’s great sin. David has been God’s golden boy for so much of the Books of Samuel. But now his favor will come crashing down with this sin. The chapter ends with one of the most haunting understatements of the Bible: the thing David had done displeased the Lord. (II Sam 11.27)

And I need to emphasize here—David’s sin in this passage is not simple “adultery,” as so many preachers and section headings in Bibles put it. Think about it. Imagine you are some woman minding her own business and then the king of the nation personally approaches you and says, “I desire you for myself.” What power do you have to say no? You don’t have any. And we are all smart enough to know what to call it when you are coerced into sexual relations with somebody. That is what David did with Bathsheba. This is the dark sign of David’s appearance.

And David then does more. He orchestrates Uriah’s murder, an innocent man. He wants Bathsheba all to himself. So he plays this little game with Uriah when he invites him to his palace and tries to get him to go home, where Bathsheba is, and have sex with her so that Uriah won’t suspect that she is pregnant with someone else’s child. “Oh Uriah,” coos David, “Go home! Rest, live a little! You’ve earned it.” But Uriah has none of this. He is a man of principle and piety. Or at the least, he’s a smart guy who can smell a scheme. As you live, David, he says, and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.

You can feel David’s desperation to cover up what he’s done, calling this one random soldier to personally dine with him out of the blue. And we see this desperation increase as David first asks Uriah to go home, then makes him drunk, and finally throws up his hands and tells himself, “Well, screw it, guess I’ll just kill him.” This is the dark sign of David’s meal.

All this violence is orchestrated and schemed by David as if God does not watch and judge. The fool says in his heart, There is no God. That’s what Psalm 14 says today. The psalm is not talking about atheists who intellectually dispute God’s existence—it’s talking about people who live as if God is not out there as the Holy One who will hold evil and sin accountable. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? asked Abraham in Genesis long ago (Gen 18.25). You would have to be a fool to say no. And today, that fool is David. David today is like Adam in the Garden of Eden after eating the fruit of the tree: avoiding God.  

And like Adam, David’s sin shall bring a fall. He will curse his house with his sin. The prophet Nathan shall rebuke the king with the searing wrath of God, as the divine message is delivered: 

Now therefore 

the sword shall never depart from your house

because you have despised me

… you did [this sin] secretly

but I will do this thing in broad daylight

and before all Israel. (II Sam 12.10, 12)

David’s dynasty will be cursed. The son he had conceived in secret with Bathsheba will be stillborn (12.13–23). A scandalous royal incest will be committed (ch. 13). His sons will scheme against each other and even scheme against their father’s kingdom (chs. 13, 14, 15). And finally his favorite son Absalom will be murdered by his top general (ch. 18). All in a single generation, all under the judgement of God, to be remembered by all Israel. 

So these scenes today in the Old Testament and the Gospel Scriptures, in the wisdom of today’s lectionary, are mirror images of each other.

David: the sign of his appearance to Bathsheba 

then the sign of his meal with Uriah.

Jesus: the sign of his meal with the five thousand 

then the sign of his appearance on the water.

Jesus’ meal to the five thousand was a miracle. It was a sign of the Gospel: God’s Good News of a world where no one shall be hungry and all shall be satisfied with righteousness. It was a meal that fed many and pointed to the salvation of the Word Made Flesh.

David’s meal was with a single person. And it was a sign of nothing except his own political corruption and desperation. It was a meal that only fed David’s sin.

Jesus’ appearance to the disciples on the sea was a sign of peace. With his words, It is I; do not be afraid (6.20), he reassures the disciples that he is indeed the Lord of the sea and the winds, and will make a path through any and all danger to give us that peace which the world cannot give. (Jn 14.27)

David’s appearance to Bathsheba was a sign of violence, the first domino in a line of decisions that will curse his kingdom with the kind of bloodshed that is all too familiar in this world.

I am contrasting these two kinds of signs today because we need to understand the kinds of signs we wish to perform in our lives.

Sometimes we are like David: we like to cover things up. We become consumed by desire, a lust, for an idol simply because it is pleasing to our hearts. It doesn’t need to be a woman bathing on the roof. Each one of us carries inside us this idol. Each one of us has a certain vision of ourselves inside, a certain fantasy of how much better life would be if we could only have this thing, this goal, this achievement, this quality, this whatever. And like David, we set our eyes on what we want and are willing to take it. And that’s when the compromises come in: those choices that feel so justified in the moment. They stack up, one by one. And after enough of these choices we suffer a death by a thousand cuts, and if we are lucky we wake up to it, and survey the damage, and despair. 

And this kind of self-deception, this lusting and taking in the name of one’s good intentions, becomes so dangerous when it is magnified on a collective, societal scale. Perhaps like David’s sons, some of us inherit the violent legacy of other’s sins.

Let us remember the Native children buried by Christian boarding schools, buried by racism, buried by colonialism, buried the desire to “save the man” underneath the Indian, and in so doing an entire society of white people declared, “There is no God,” and devoured the innocent like bread.

All these are some of the dark signs we perform daily, in the model of David. Individually. As a society. They are signs of death.

From where shall our peace come, if not with David? 

It comes with Christ, the son of David, the Prince of Peace. He sends us his signs.

He comes in our neediness and our hunger. And he says, I am the bread of life (John 6.35)

He comes in our distress upon the waters. And he says, It is I; do not be afraid. (6.20)

There is no dark sign we perform in our own brokenness that God does not wish to restore with light and life. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1.5)

There is no idolatry and no sinfulness that God does not yearn with all His heart to restore. 

The will of God is not that we suffer in our self-deception, but that we may be free to see the damage we have done, and repent, and rectify those things which we ought to have done, and those things which we ought not to have done.

And it’s all because He loves us. We cannot even comprehend how much God loves us and wills to heal our condition of deceit, violence, and despair.

Remember the apostle’s great prayer from Ephesians 3 today: he prays, 

that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;

that you, being rooted and grounded in love,

may have power to comprehend… 

the breadth

and length 

and height

and depth 

to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. (Eph 3.17–19)

The breadth, and length, and height, and depth. 

This is the extent of the love of God. It has no boundaries. It traverses all distances. Because nothing can separate us from the love of God (Rom 8.38–39)—

no breadth, no length, no height, no depth.

We are so loved that the Son of God descended from the heights of heaven into the depths of our worldly existence, that we may ascend to live a life that is about much more than the deceptions and violence and curses of our own making. 

And this Son lived a life of signs for our sake. He would traverse the lengths of Galilee and Jerusalem with no place to lay His head. He would display the breadth of his healing and His power. He would dive into the depths of betrayal and suffering and death. 

He would take that worldly sign of crucifixion and lift it up into a sign of salvation. 

This is, as the apostle prays, the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

So do not despair. Be not afraid. We have such tender and fragile hearts weighed by curses of our own making and those of others. There is much brokenness to rectify. But God is faithful.

Christ comes to feed us. 

He comes to assure us. 

He comes with the light of his signs. 

Have faith for Christ to dwell in your heart,

and receive his bread, 

and trust in the sign, 

that you may be filled with all the fulness of God (Eph 3.17, 19). 

Amen.

Word count: 2084