Day: August 9, 2009

The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon at All Saints’, Leminster, 7:00pm service, Trinity IX.

“Thou art the man!”

‘You da man’, Nathan says, at least in contemporary street-talk! But what really is this story all about?

The story of David and Nathan suggests the interplay of two metaphors of understanding that belong to a theology of revelation. Scripture, we might say, is both a mirror and a window: a mirror in which we are allowed to see the truth of ourselves and a window through which we are privileged to glimpse something of the glory of God. A mirror and a window.

The story of David is not only one of the great narrative sequences in the Scriptures; it is also, as John Donne suggests, the story of Everyman. “His Person includes all states, between a shepherd and a King”, a poet and a warrior, too, we might add, one who sings and one who acts. In a way, David epitomises the whole of Israel and by extension the whole of humanity. That is partly why the Davidic lineage of Jesus is so important in the New Testament. But David epitomises the whole of Israel and the whole of our humanity, not only in its truth but also in its untruth. “His sinne includes all sinne”, Donne remarks, “we need no other Example to discover to us the slippery wayes into sin, or the penitential wayes out of sin, than …. David”.

We do not have windows into one another’s souls, as that wise woman theologian, Queen Elizabeth the First observed long ago. We hardly know ourselves. Those prerogatives belong to God and to God alone. “The Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”, it is famously said. It is actually said about David. In the story of David we are given to see the heart of David which God sees and in it we are given to see something about ourselves. In this lesson from the story of David we are given to see the mirror in which David confronts himself in his sinfulness and the window through which he sees God in his chastening mercy. The mirror which Nathan holds up is the parable which he tells the King, the parable which challenges and convicts. What has David done? Well, everything and more.

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“Now these things were our examples”

The Collect captures wonderfully the complementary nature of today’s Epistle and Gospel readings about the practice of Christian life. We pray for “the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful; that we, who cannot do any thing that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will.”

Our thinking and our doing are intimately related. What we think, what we believe, and what we know are to be realized in what we do. Our actions reveal our intentions. We are to be what we believe. We are pilgrims who know, in some fashion or other, our own incompleteness but acknowledge, too, our completeness in God through Jesus Christ. Our purpose lies in the Son’s love for the Father in the embrace of the Holy Spirit. Such an understanding impels an activity of purpose in our everyday lives. It is the note which the Gospel sounds.

The Gospel exhorts us to be prudent, not unrighteous. To be prudent means to discern the good, “such things as be rightful”, and to pursue it, “living according to thy will”. It means thinking and doing the right thing at the right time in the right way and for the right reason. It is, we may say, a tall order. The challenge is to get all those things together.

The unrighteous steward in the Gospel is simply all of us. We are all stewards – those to whom things are entrusted. It is a profoundly biblical view. Nothing we have is our own. We can only enter into what God has provided for us. Our wills and our actions apart from the will of God are never right. My ways and your ways, considered in themselves, are at best ways of self-righteousness, tinged and coloured by our own agendas and motives whether known or unknown to ourselves and to others. They are always less than the full righteousness of God; in short, they are ways of unrighteousness. I know, it seems so judgmental and negative but in our reformed understanding of things it is actually altogether positive. Why? Because it throws us into the mercies of God’s redemptive grace.

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