And David Becomes Goliath

2 Samuel 12:1-7

There is a neighborhood in Seattle that used to be its own little town: Ballard. It was a place full of single family homes and small businesses. It continued to have that feel even after it was annexed in 1907. In fact, it wasn’t until 2005 when the boom began that Ballard began to rapidly change. Everything began to gentrify. That was when a nearly vacant lot became the future home of a shiny new shopping mall. Barry Martin was the head of the construction project. Edith Masefield had lived the last 50 years of her 85-year life in a home on that same lot. She was the final tenant.

It seemed like a classic David and Goliath story. On the one side, we have the big, bad construction company, personified in Barry Martin. On the other side, we have Edith, the poor little old lady who was inevitably destined to be a victim of gentrification. As soon as word hit the media, reporters began showing up at Edith’s door, wanting to tell her story, offering to help. In the only surviving tape of Edith’s voice, you hear her yelling at them: “Go away! Leave me alone!” So much for that angle. On the other side, you had Barry, who came to Edith not to threaten her, but armed with his best weapon: lots of money. Edith’s house was appraised at $120,000. Barry offered her a cool one million dollars. Edith yelled through her door for him to “Get the hell out of here!”

Here’s the thing. Edith didn’t have any family to relocate near. Edith didn’t have anyone to leave her windfall of money to when she died. Edith definitely didn’t want to be a pawn in some media showcase either. Edith was an 85-year-old mystery.

So, Barry went to work on the other buildings on that block. Every day, when he would show up, he would leave Edith a card, offering to help her in any way that he could. Her habit was to leave birdseed out on the sidewalk early in the morning for the birds. If the birdseed wasn’t there, Barry would knock, just to make sure that she was okay. Some days, she wouldn’t yell at him in response. Barry began to appreciate those days.

Finally, one day, when Barry was about to leave his card, the door opened and Edith said that there actually was something that she needed. She had a hair appointment. Could he give her a ride? Barry jumped at the chance, mostly for no other reason than to actually get to talk to Edith. As they sat in the car, Barry offered up the thought that it must be hard to see Ballard change. Edith surprised him, “No…things always change!” She wasn’t angry about the change. She wasn’t even angry about the construction. All she wanted was to die in her own home. When they got back to Edith’s house that night, Barry asked if he could make her dinner. He did.

For the next year and a half, Barry made three meals a day, five days a week for Edith. He often visited on the weekends. Eventually, he even made some visits in the middle of the night when she just needed a hand. Who else was going to help her?

On June 15, 2008, Edith died. She left her house to Barry Martin, the man who would dearly miss the friend whom Edith had become. As of the most recent records that I could find, 8 years later, Edith’s house was still standing, with a Trader Joe’s on one side and an LA Fitness on the other.

The little old lady turned out to be plenty strong. She didn’t want money or fame or pity. She just wanted to die in her own home. And Goliath—our man, Barry—found far more strength in having a heart than in rolling over anyone in his path with a bulldozer.

I love that story! It would be great if people with power always had a heart, wouldn’t it. However, if that were true, I wouldn’t read about King Saul’s narcissism and think about Trump and I wouldn’t read about broken King David and think about Bill Clinton. There, I’ve said it … have I made everyone mad now?

Back to David. It would be great if he just sort of stayed the kid from Hope, Arkansas—oops, scratch that. It would be great if he could have just stayed the kid from Bethlehem. He had incredible charisma, a steely eyed will-power, a brilliant mind and seemingly limitless gifts. Everyone who met him liked him and felt like they had his undivided attention. People swooned when they heard his saxophone —sorry, harp. People loved what he wrote. King Saul did try to kill him eventually. There was that. However, he was the golden boy … sort of.

The side of David that most people don’t cover from a pulpit was that the very same quality that made him just the right guy to fight Goliath would turn out to be his fatal flaw. When he saw what he wanted, nothing got in his way. This was great if he wanted to be a great judge or he wanted to write a great Psalm or he wanted to be a great leader in battle. However, David had a tendency to get focused on the wrong things. With that same steely-eyed determination, when his heart was in the wrong place, he got whatever he wanted, too.

This was not a man who treated women well, which made him pretty much like every other man in that world. It’s just that most men did not have the means to take their chauvinism and live it large. David did. He had 8 wives whose names we know. He had numerous other wives in Jerusalem who somehow didn’t make the roster. He was known to have hundreds of concubines. (Amazingly, one internet resource I looked at said that David had hundreds of “porcupines.” I’m chalking that little bit of history up to autocorrect.) David had sons from all sorts of mothers. Who knew how many daughters were running around? In short, the notion of “conquest” was not something that was limited to the battlefield. Powerful men look for such “conquests” out of boredom, in an attempt to fill the empty space inside themselves which they have realized that power can’t fill.

Here’s the problem … when you can have any woman you want, any food you want, any drink you want, any anything that you may desire, it’s hard to keep that “stay hungry” attitude alive, right? David took Goliath down because David was lean and nimble and tough from being in the wilderness and fighting lions and bears. By now, he’s just another middle-aged guy with a paunch who doesn’t see the bulge in the mirror and hasn’t really seen his toes in a while. He’s spoiled and soft and slow and anything but resilient. He’s Goliath. He’s blind to how his own strengths have weakened him.

The sexist thing is that it is not his dalliance with all these women that brings him down. There is a woman involved, of course. But to his culture the real objection is not how he treated a woman but how he treated that woman’s husband. Let’s review for those who haven’t heard the story for a while.

David had an amazing soldier in his army whose name was Uriah. Uriah was the kind of guy who would refuse to leave the front until the battle was done. Uriah was the kind of guy who was brave beyond belief. In short, Uriah was the kind of guy who made a guy like David crazy. Be honest here … how many times do you find yourself annoyed by someone else and realize that seeing that person forces you to look at something that you would rather not look at in yourself? If David had remained a soldier and not become the king, he might well have been the purely dedicated soldier that Uriah was. Uriah didn’t have the opportunity or the means to give into every temptation in life.

In fact, it was pretty amazing that Uriah had managed to have a wife at all—and what a wife she was. He loved her with all his heart. If there had been photos back then, Uriah would have had Bathsheba’s picture in a locket and checked it in a quiet moment between battles.

One day, David, the man who could have anything he wanted, saw Bathsheba bathing on her roof—which was a pretty normal thing since the only building high enough to spy on her would have been the palace. David decides he has to have her. Mind you, this has nothing to do with loving her. He doesn’t know her at all. This is plain old, run of the mill, lust and power. She is an object. He wants to possess her. So, he does. And, because consequences are real and birth control wasn’t yet, she gets pregnant.

David’s solution? The “wise” king decides to order Uriah back from the front. That way, Uriah will sleep with Bathsheba and everyone will figure that the kid is his. Brilliant! Except for one thing … Uriah has the one thing that David doesn’t have: integrity. He refuses to sleep with his wife when his fellow soldiers can’t sleep with their wives. Ultimately, David sends Uriah back to the front with sealed orders that he should be sent into the worst of the battles. And then … a brave soldier dies to preserve the vanity of a powerful man, not the first or the last to die such a senseless death.

David, who had become a feeble, bloated Goliath of a guy, figures he’s gotten away with everything until one day, the prophet, Nathan, shows up in his court to remind him that no one ever gets away with anything. Just like the young David wound up his sling, this young prophet unwinds a story about a man who only had one sheep but loved that sheep dearly until one day a rich man came and stole that sheep. David, the very righteous judge, basically cries out, “Let me at that man.” Nathan strikes him with a blow that hits him right between the eyes: “You are that man!”

And Nathan slayed Goliath—oops, sorry, David. And David, whose head, by the grace of God, was still on his shoulders, realized that he had lost his mind and his soul and his faith, and repented. We are offered a chance to see that from ancient times, power has blinded the powerful and in that blindness, good people have been treated like objects, like conquests, like pawns.

Thank God for the Nathans and the Barrys and the Ediths of this world who show us something about what it means to live with integrity.