Kid Trouble

      I had a special jacket when I was in seventh grade.  It was a bit worn.  It was a badly faded grey except in those many places where it was stained.   It had a couple of tears in the lining and a pretty good sized hole on the left sleeve where I had snagged it on a fence. It was lived-in but I loved it. 

       My mom, of course, refused to let me wear such a ratty jacket to school.  So I would leave home and walk around to the shed on the side yard.  There I would change my mom-approved jacket for the one I wanted to wear. 

       This went on for at least a week.  But then one warm day I left my jacket in art class.  I went back the next day and asked my teacher if she had seen it.  You should have seen the look on her face.  She was mortified.  She’d seen it sitting on a counter, took one look at it, and used it as a paint rag.  She offered to take me to the store right after school and buy me a new jacket.  I was obviously a child from a poor home whose parents couldn’t afford a decent jacket. 

      I had to confess.  I told her that I had other jackets at home and had worn that jacket to school in defiance of parental orders.  The fact that she had mistaken my jacket for a paint rag was proof that my mom had been right.  It was time for a new favorite jacket.

       Sometimes parents aren’t to blame for their kid’s bad choices.  My mom sure wasn’t responsible for my seventh grade fashion sense.  But sometimes they are.  King David was very much to blame.  They things he modeled came back to bite him.

       It all starts when David commits adultery with Bathsheba and then murders her husband.  The prophet Nathan tells David God’s decree: “The sword will never depart from your house.  I will raise up evil against you out of your own house.'

       This doesn’t mean that God is the cause for David’s children’s misdeeds.  God is never the source of sin.  But God will no longer protect David from the consequences of his own bad choices – including his sins as a parent. God gets out of the way and the trouble follows.  David has brewed poison in his family and it finally brings death. 

       The trouble starts with Amnon. 

       Liz Curtis Higgs writes: “Amnon sat glumly at the far end of the long banquet table, chewing on a crust of bread and glaring now and then at his father, the king, who held forth with broad gestures and grand words at the head of the table.        Even though he was the king's oldest son and heir apparent to the; throne of Israel, Amnon was plainly a troubled young man. A scowl was fixed on his dark features, and his brown eyes glowed with a certain strange light, as if a fire burned inside him. Everyone in the court of King David saw Amnon's unhappiness -- his wives, his generals, his priests, even his servants, all of them except the king himself.  

       David is clueless about his kids. But his kids are not clueless about their father – or each other.  His sons are quite glad to do what their daddy did with women. Amnon becomes fixated on the beautiful Tamar – who just happens to be his own half-sister. 

       There are a lot of terrible characters in the Bible.  I believe that Amnon is the worst.  

       Amnon wants his own sister. He becomes so frustrated he actually makes himself ill. He shares his problem with cousin Jonadab.  Jonadab is the first-runner-up to Amnon for the spot of worst person in the Bible.  He suggests rape.  He knows marriage between Amnon and Tamar is illegal.  But he suggests a way that will force David's hand. If Amnon rapes Tamar, the only thing David can do to fix the problem is to use the law of the violated virgin from Deuteronomy 22:28. If Amnon rapes Tamar, David will be faced with either putting his son to death or marrying the two. This is the kind of twisted reasoning that goes on in the palace.

       Amnon lures Tamar to his rooms on a pretense of illness.  Once she is there he grabs her. "Come, lie with me, my sister."  

        The law of God says if a half-sister and a half-brother marry, they are both to be killed. If a half-brother violates a half-sister, he is to be slain. But what does Amnon care?  His dad committed adultery and murder and got away with it. So why should Amnon observe the law of God? I'm not saying that Amnon's right, but that's his point of view.

       Tamar is genuinely shocked.  She has done nothing to trigger this or invite this. This is not a Brittany Spears "Oops, I did it again" thing with Tamar.  She really is pure.  She answers with remarkable composure, "No, my brother, do not violate me, for such a thing is not done in Israel. Do not do this disgraceful thing! As for me, where could I get rid of my reproach? And as for you, you will be like one of the fools in Israel.”  Then she sees the determined lust in his eyes.  She quickly adds: "Talk to the king.  He will not withhold me from you."  

       Now nothing in the Bible suggests that she has the smallest affection for Amnon.  She has no desire to be his wife.  But she tries to talk her brother out of raping her by holding out the hope of marriage.  Tamar uses the only weapon available to her, the weapon of words.

       The words don’t work.  Amnon has no love that will shield Tamar from his own worst self.  Verse 1 says he loves her.  But that’s only because the Hebrew language is limited.  There isn’t a word for lust so it’s called love.  Amnon doesn't know what true love is. He has never seen it - certainly not from his father David who used women.                                                                                             

        Just as soon as Amnon starts thinking with his brain instead of his libido he shows his true heart.  He orders Tamar to get out.   She says to him, "No, because this wrong is sending me away is greater than the other wrong you have done to me.  Yet he would not listen to her.  He orders his servant to throw her out.

       "Put this woman out from me" is the usual English translation.  But what Amnon actually says is "Put this thing out from me." Tamar was nothing more than an object of perverse, momentary pleasure and she’s served her purpose.  The Bible says “The hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her.” 

       I think that Amnon recognizes the wisdom in Tamar and her inner strength and integrity.  When he looks at her he now sees his own wickedness like a dark reflection.  Tamar’s presence reminds Amnon of his own failing and evil.  So he now hates her.   He is like the alcoholic who gets drunk and then hates the bottle and breaks it – only to later go buy another bottle. Amnon is disgusted with the way that he has let himself be overcome by physical desire and has let that overwhelm anything that ever deserved to be called love.  But we have a hard time loathing ourselves. It is easier to turn someone else into the object of loathing. It is Tamar who is to blame. First she aroused his love. Then she spurned it – the tease.  Then she aroused that overwhelming physical desire – the cheap tramp. 

        You’ll be real glad to know Amnon gets killed 12 verses later.

        Tamar is wearing the dress that indicates the kind of woman she was until a short time before -- the king's virgin daughter.  She tears it the way you tear your clothes when someone dies. She smears her face with dirt the way you smear your face when someone dies.  She buries her head in her hands the way you do when you cannot face the world or life.

         He brother Absalom is the first person to see her pain. His response sets the gold standard for insensitivity. “Has Amnon been with you?”  It is a terrible euphemism!  “Well this is a family matter.  We should keep it within the family. Don’t take it to heart.  Put this experience out of your mind.” 

       As if she could. 

       David isn’t totally clueless.  Even David notices that one of his daughters had moved out, and that her mother is pretty distraught, and that his daughter herself had lost all her outgoing liveliness and turned in on herself.  David ferrets out the truth of what Amnon has done to Tamar. And he gets very angry.

       But he does nothing.  Some ancient sources like the Dead Sea Scrolls tell us why. “He would not punish his son Amnon, "Because he loved him, because he was his firstborn.”

       Anger is not always sin.  It is a human emotion capable of generating action that puts things right when they are wrong. But anger that fails to result in needed action is useless, aborted anger.

      Look at this great clip from the movie, “The Bear.”

    (clip of bear cub being chased by a cougar and then being rescued by his angry mother)

      What use is a mother bear who won’t protect her cub?  What use is a king who gets justly angry but fails to do something on the basis of it?  What use is a father who lets love for one child overcome what anger demands of another child? David's so called love for Amnon is as destructive in its own way as Amnon's so called love for Tamar.

       The men in Tamar's life all fail her. Amnon provokes her cry, Absalom silences it, and David ignores it.  When David hears of the outrage that had been committed against his daughter by his eldest son, he thunders and curses and generally makes a show of kingly temper.  But that’s all. People wait for the day when the mighty King of Israel will confront the man who has raped the king's daughter. But the day never comes.  It soon appears that David has forgotten the whole unpleasant incident.

        Last Sunday we looked at the story of Rizpah and her long, courageous vigil to keep the vultures away from the bodies of her sons.  David is certainly no Rizpah.  When he sees vultures around his children he says, “whatever.” His head is somewhere else. It has been somewhere else for a long time. He provides a fabulous palace for his umpteen wives and children. They have every material thing they want. But money can’t buy healthy children.  Things can’t heal the relationships. Amnon rapes and then hates his sister. Absalom hates his brother.  They don’t even speak for two years. 

        David seemed to forget.  But Absalom didn’t forget.  Like a Sicilian who believes that revenge is a dish best tasted cold, Absalom waits two full years before taking revenge for Tamar.  Or it may be that Tamar is an excuse for Absalom to remove Amnon as a competitor for the throne. 

       Absalom has a sheep business a few miles north of Jerusalem.  There is to be a sheep-shearing festival there. Absalom invites all the men in the royal family to come David makes a polite excuse.  Absalom presses David to send Amnon with the rest of his brothers. 

       You've got to be a pretty thick father not to know that one son hasn’t spoken to another son for two full years.  If David did not know that his sons were not on speaking terms, he should have known. He knows what Amnon had done to Absalom's sister.  He knows that he himself has done nothing about it.  But he agrees to send Amnon. Amnon is glad to go.  He regards the banquet as a pitiable effort by Absalom to ingratiate himself with the future king after his long and insulting silence.

        The banquet starts, and the wine flows.  Absalom gives his staff their instructions.  Amnon is killed.  

       Jack Kerouac tells a story in On the Road about a young drifter who has just been released from a prison where he served time for grand theft. To avoid sitting on the cold stone floor of his cell during a long stretch in solitary, he used a prison-issue Bible as a kind of cushion. But the jailors objected to his impiety (or, more likely, his comfort) and replaced the large Bible with "a leetle pocket-size one so big," as the chatty ex-con puts it. "Couldn't sit on it so I read the whole Bible and Testament," says the young man of his prison revelation. "You know they's some real hot things in that Bi-ble."

       Yes there are.  This story is one of the hottest.  But the story isn’t here for heat. It’s here for warning.  You can be the king of your world – your business – and be a failure at home.  And the result is a lot worse for you and the world than a failure at business could ever be. 

       Tamar disappears into her brother's house after the rape.  But Tamar does not disappear from history.  Her rape sets into motion a chain reaction of assassination, insurrection, and civil war that threatens to topple King David from the throne and continues to afflict the royal house until the very end of his days.  

       The mother of three unruly preschoolers was asked whether she would have children if she had to do it all over again.’ Sure,” she responded, “just not the same three.” 

        In the case of David’s children, they would have been better off with a different father. 

        David is a terrible model of how to treat other people.  He is an especially bad model for his sons on how to treat women.  He loves the law of God except when its gets in his way.  His kids know that. That’s the only reason Tamar can try to protect herself from Amnon by an offer of marriage. Tamar knows that David believes that rules are made to be broken – at least by David.

       David is both emotionally distant from his children and over-indulgent.  When he feels fully justifiable anger it goes nowhere.  There is a total lack of follow through.   Maybe it’s because David is too guilt-ridden over his own sexual misadventures to chastise his son for doing much the same thing.  He allows his own imperfections to freeze him into immobility at the very moment when he needs to show his authority.  It is telling that Amnon is unconcerned about the authority or even the anger of his father when he sets out to sexually exploit Tamar. His disregard is an early signal that David is no longer taken quite seriously by his own sons.

       When David fails to punish his lecherous son, the lesson that Amnon and the rest of the court learn from the whole sordid affair is that the crown prince can do anything that strikes his fancy, no matter how outrageous, because the king is too passive, too indecisive, and too indulgent of his heir to do anything about it.  So the once-mighty King David is marked as a monarch in sharp decline.

       His apparent weakness excites the ambitions of his other sons – especially Absalom who is as thoroughly ambitious as his father. Absalom draws least a couple of ominous conclusions from the rape of Tamar. First, if anyone is going to exact revenge on Amnon for Tamar, it must be Absalom himself. Second, by striking down Amnon, Absalom will put himself within striking distance of his father's throne. Once Amnon is dead, all that stands between Absalom and absolute power is the impotent and indecisive David—and Absalom is perfectly willing to take on his own father in open insurrection.

       Sin has consequences.  We can't say "I'm doing so well in this one area so it doesn’t matter if this other part of my life falls apart.  David is very successful in expanding the nation.  But his parenting was terrible.  He pays for that.  His children pay for that.  The nation pays for that.  David built a cesspool and now he has to swim in it.  So does everyone else including his daughters and sons. 

       Dr Albert Siegel, professor of psychology at Stanford wrote in the Stanford Observer some years ago, "When it comes to rearing children, every society is only twenty years away from barbarism. Twenty years is all we have to accomplish the task of civilizing the infants who are born into our midst each year. These savages know nothing of our language, our culture, our religion, our values, our customs of interpersonal relations. The infant is totally ignorant about communism, fascism, democracy, civil liberties, the rights of the minority as contrasted with the prerogatives of the majority, respect, decency, customs, conventions, and manners. The barbarian must be tamed if civilization is to survive."

       Most of you here today are outstanding barbarian tamers.  We don’t have many barbarians around here – either little ones or big ones.  But King David creates at least two barbarians.

       Don’t think this sermon doesn’t apply to you if you don’t happen to be a parent. You still have places of responsibility.  You still have places of influence.  You still have places of God-given stewardship including the stewardship of your friends.  You share a stewardship for the children of the church.  You’ve made promises at their baptism.