Saul & David: Envy | 2 Sam 18:20-30

Now generally, I'm not one to air familial dirty laundry from the pulpit.yeah, right. I've given you plenty of personal dirty linen, and it's nothing new, is it? All right, well, I'm about to give you some more.

This is not a happy story, I'm sorry to say. It is, in fact, tragic, but let me start from the beginning. About a year ago, my mother- and father-in-law acquired two puppies, named Hannah and Toby. They were the Platonic ideal of cute puppiness--rambunctious, playful, full of life and energy. They were a mix of shepherd and heaven knows what else. It did my heart good every time we went to visit them to see these two clowning around, chasing each other, competing for the attention of anyone who would give them a moment.

Unfortunately, my parents-in-law do not really believe in indoor dogs. So, up in Placerville, where the extremes of temperature range from 120 in the summer to well below freezing in the winter, Hannah and Toby were forced to endure. Now, I have always been a big dog person, and my dogs have always been indoor dogs. In fact, all through my childhood I was even allowed to let my dog sleep with me under the blankets. Sleeping with dogs has always been a very comfort-producing thing for me, and only really caused a problem when I got married, and Kate insisted that there was only room for two of us in the bedthis is probably more than you want to know, isn't it?

Anyway, the point is I have a great deal of difficulty with people who decide to own dogs and then turn around and treat them likeanimals or something. Dogs, I'm afraid are people, and I'll bite the first person who dares to disagree. Watching Toby and Hannah freezing their, well, tails off was personally excruciating. It became difficult for me to visit in the winter because all the time I was warm and snug inside the house, my heart was with the two furry people huddled on a filthy rug in the unheated garage for warmth.

About a month ago, we received a very distressing phone call. It seems that Toby and Hannah, who are allowed to simply roam free on my parent's-in-law's property, were visiting a neighboring puppy and playing with it. Apparently, they were playing a little rough and it turns out, injured the other puppy. I don't know how badly the other puppy was hurt. I don't think they killed it or anything. But neither Kate nor I were prepared for how her father dealt with Toby and Hannah. Now, if they were my dogs, I would have taken responsibility for their actions. I would have apologized to my neighbor and inquired to see how their own puppy was doing; I'd certainly offer to help pay for any Vet bills incurred. I would also take responsibility for Toby and Hannah's freedom, and keep them on tethers or in a properly fenced area. At the very worst, I might have decided that I was not able to adequately care for them, and found them loving and secure homes where they would be cared for and kept in a responsible manner.

Unfortunately, none of these options seemed adequate for Kate's dad. Instead, he decided the prudent thing to do was to have them killed. Kate's dad even related with pride how he had called around and gotten the cheapest price for the euthanasia. Kate let it be known how angry and disappointed in her parents she was over this immediately. I mean, if only we had known! If only someone had called the night before and said, "We're putting the dogs to sleep in the morning." We would have driven to Placerville at 3am to save them--we would have gone at the drop of a hat. These were not bad dogs; these were just puppies being puppies, in the care of humans who could not be bothered to take the proper responsibility for them before the unfortunate incident with the neighbor puppy. Dogs need to be contained, watched, protected, like the perpetual children that they are. You don't murder a child for getting into mischief; and you don't put a puppy to sleep just for being a puppy.

For days, Kate and I walked around in a kind of surreal haze, in shock, thinking about how just a day before there were two beautiful creatures enjoying to the hilt the life God had graciously bestowed upon them. And then--boom--they were gone, and the person responsible for their murder, was not only completely unrepentant, but acted as if he had done nothing wrong.

It isn't often in your life that you feel you can simply reach out and touch evil, but this is certainly one of those times. Relationships with my in-laws since then have been strained at best. Perhaps, I tell myself, this is just a cultural, or a generational thing. In the evangelical church to which my parents-in-law belong, animals are just property, to be used as men see fit. And, more's the pity, women in this system do not fare much better. It is an extension of the hierarchical model of the universe, where God is on his throne in heaven, kings and rulers govern under him, and a man is king of his own castle, with, apparently, the power of life and death at his fingertips. There is no thought in this system that a being has an intrinsic right to the life that God gave it, or that a subordinate might have a right to a voice and the same quality of life as those in power. If a child does not know his proper place, he will be beat into submission. If a wife speaks out of turn, she will be shamed into complicity. If an animal becomes problematic, why, just kill it. What's the problem?

This is certainly the paradigm from which Saul is operating in today's reading. David has become a familiar face around the royal court. He is successful on every mission Saul has sent him on. He is becoming a favorite of the people, which, to Saul's paranoid way of thinking, is dangerous indeed. David has become an unpredictable element in Saul's life, and Saul is not comfortable with this at all. In our reading today he tries to kill David himself, not once, but twice.

The damning thing about all of this is that Saul somehow felt that he had a RIGHT to eliminate David from the equation. Saul's place in the divine hierarchy of being told him that he did not have to think about David's right to his own life. David's life was forfeit to the king anyway as his subject. David, in Saul's world, is a piece of property which is expendable, a pawn which he may play in any way that he pleases. To Saul, David is not his equal, and the very idea that David might, in fact, BE his equal drives him to commit homicide.

Saul does not give up easily, either. When goring him with a spear fails, Saul decides to send David into battle to let fate do his dirty work. Again, he is unsuccessful, and David returns once again triumphant. Talk about rubbing salt in an open wound!

But it appears Saul's treachery knows no end. For when the front lines of battle fail to eradicate this diminutive annoyance, Saul turns to inter-familial espionage. Saul will have David marry his daughter, and then command her to betray him to his enemies. Another perfect plan. But in order to marry the king's daughter, David will have to perform an act not unlike the trials of Hercules: he must slay one hundred Philistines, and prove it by bringing back their foreskins.

Now you have to be asking yourself, did this sound as gruesome to them back then as it does to us now? You gotta wonder, but that's an aside. The point is that not only does David fulfill this weird request, but he goes the extra mile! He brings back the foreskins of TWO hundred Philistines!

Now you would think with this experience behind him, David would have learned a little something about power and the need to treat underlings with respect. Unfortunately, becoming King does more to a person's head than adorn it with a crown. It also has a tendency to swell a couple of sizes, and often crowds out what should be some well-earned knowledge and experience. For when David became King later in Israel's history, he would be in a very similar situation to the one Saul is in in today's reading.

David later falls in love with Bathsheba, and he wants her so badly as his wife that he murders her husband just so that he could have her. Now David doesn't throw a spear at Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba's husband, but he does send him out on the front lines to battle, counting on him getting killed. Sound familiar? Too bad it didn't sound familiar to David, who had been on the other side of crown and knew what it was like to be treated as a piece of property which had become "inconvenient."

I have had the misfortune of working for people who were "the pope of their own little Rome" or "the king of their own little Israel" who exercised similar despotic power. For five years I worked for a world-famous theologian who almost systematically dismissed and ostracized people when they questioned his motives or stood up for justice in the organization he ran. I watched as this theologian's oldest and dearest friend--a friend of 33 years, no less--was dismissed and abandoned, all because this friend was a true friend and prophetically insisted that the theologian was behaving despotically. Tragically, when this theologian's autobiography was published not long after, every mention of his longtime friend had been excised.

His friend had been "inconvenient," and somehow people with power feel that they have the right to simply dispatch people who are "inconvenient." Whether the offender is marked for the throne, or a loving and trusted friend, or an even more loving and trusting animal seems to make no difference. Power turns the heart to stone, a damnable thing in the sight of God.

I am struggling with a situation myself which has some bearing upon this dilemma. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking home from my neighborhood coffeeshop and was followed home by a stray puppy. A small terrier mix, this little guy was covered with sores. Even so, he was just about the cutest puppy I had ever seen. Kate and I decided to take his picture and put up posters around the neighborhood hoping that whoever lost him would call. No one has.

But while we have been waiting, this little puppy, whom we are calling "Brendan" has been very busy indeed. He has destroyed two carpets, one basket, has uncontrollable diarrhea, chews on everything imaginable, and has cost us more than $600 in Vet bills in injuries he has given to our other dogs. At what point do we throw up our hands and say "enough! This little guy is just too inconvenient!" and take him to the pound.

In some way, I feel responsible for him because fate has chosen me to be responsible for him. On the other hand, I also know there are other options open to us. There are no-kill shelters who guarantee that a dog will be placed in a loving home. But I will not take this option without trepidation, without some internal sense of shame. I, too, know what it is like to be "the inconvenient one."

My friends, we are all "inconvenient." But we don't kill each other for it. Sometimes we abandon people or animals or even places because we cannot be bothered to face what is difficult about them. But that does not make it right. People and even animals are not property, we cannot simply discard them when they become problematic. At least we cannot do so and be righteous in God's sight. For what if God had simply abandoned us when we became "problematic?" Would we have been wiped out, like Hannah and Toby? Like Uriah the Hittite? Like Saul tried to do to David?

I am grateful that God sees our true worth, and continues to stay in relationship with us, to love us, to mold us, to take responsibility for us, even when we are "problematic" and "inconvenient." Let us go and do likewise. Amen.

Let us pray.

O God who sees not the outer surfaces of our lives,
But who beholds and encompasses every heart,
Help us to likewise encompass those who are placed in our care,
Realizing how fragile, how flawed, how "inconvenient" they can be
And yet also reveal to us at the very same moment
their inestimable beauty and worth.
Help us to do unto others as we would have them do to us,
And to forgive even as we have been forgiven.
For we ask this in the name of the one who did not see humanity
as something to be despised, but who became human for us,
to show us what being human is all about, even Jesus Christ. Amen.