Sermon: "Enough," Twenty-Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, November 10, 2024

David and the Prophet Nathan

Scripture: 2 Samuel 11:1-15
Preacher: Rev. Ryan Slifka

Here we are again in Second Samuel. Up to this point, King David has been on a what they call in hockey at “hot streak.”

He’s gone from simple shepherd boy to King of the kingdom. Overthrown a giant, evaded assassination, and crushed most of Israel’s enemies. Won victory after victory for his people. There’s still a war on, but he no longer has to do the dirty work in the battle field. After those years of constant vigilance he’s able to relax. We find him drifting off in today’s scripture, on his palace’s fabulous roof-top patio. Only to wake up after a leisurely early afternoon nap.

This is the climax of David’s career. Power and prestige. Fame and fortune. Wealth and status. He has everything anyone could ever need. Anything anyone could ever want.

And yet, for the man who seemingly has everything, everything apparently isn’t enough.

He awakes from his nap, takes a stretch something catches his eye. Someone, actually. From the roof’s ledge he spies this very beautiful woman named Bathsheba. One Reformation-era commentator says that Bathsheba’s “beauty inflamed him, and his eyes were the gateway to his heart.” He sees her and everything in him wants her.

We don’t know how Bathsheba feels about it, whether this is what she wants or if she’s coerced. That’s because Bathsheba’s opinion in the matter is irrelevant—David is the king. So he sends for her, she comes to him, and he takes her.

Problem is that they are both married. Even bigger problem is Bathsheba returns to him with a positive pregnancy text. And the worst part is that she’s married to Uriah, David’s best friend. Meaning that David has not only committed adultery, he’s done it with his best friend’s wife, his best friend who happens to be away on the front-line fighting in David’s war. And the baby is proof. Inescapable proof.

This is a bad situation, so David tries to fix it. First he brings Uriah back from the front lines to maybe give the impression that he’s the father. “Take a load off” says David. “Go down to your house and ‘wash your feet’” if ya know what I’m sayin’.” Doesn’t work, though. “I couldn’t possibly rest while my king’s war is on.” He refuses not only loyalty to David buy also because Uriah’s following another command from Deuteronomy. Not to sleep with a woman while on the battle front. I mean, while David’s betrayed this guy, this guy clings to his integrity and his loyalty towards David.

The easy way doesn’t work. So David does it the hard way. He sends his best friend back to the front lines, bearing a note to his general, Joab. One that basically says put him in harm’s way. But make it look like an accident.’” And Joab does. Uriah, along with a company of other soldiers are cut down. Just to keep David’s secret safe. And so he can be free and clear to marry Bathsheba’s wife. And avoid the scandal.

For the man who seemingly has everything, apparently everything isn’t enough. I mean, the guy’s on the hook for at least four of the ten commandments—no adultery, no coveting, no stealing, and with sending Uriah off to die that’s no killing, too. David has everything anyone could ever want or need, but David still wants more. And he’s willing to blow up his entire life and destroy everyone else’s lives to get it.

Now, it doesn’t take much for us to put ourselves in David’s shoes. It’s a rather common experience to have such a deep desire that it overrides our sense of what’s right and wrong. One that causes us to hurt people we love and care for. And even blow up our lives. That we do ever more insidious and dishonest things to cover it all up.

Some women, but many men understand David’s particular desire—sex. That even in cases where we’re happily married, love our kids, have everything we want, somehow we just want more. And it might not even be the act of physical infidelity anymore, but the virtual world. Which actually has the effect of making us want even more. More often than not, though, we end up with less. Hurting the ones we love most, who love us the most, and losing the only thing we had in the first place.

But it’s not just sex, though sex can be both powerful and dangerous. It’s just about anything. One of my favourite writers from Mockingbird Ministries, David Zahl, calls this search the search for “enoughness.”[ii] We go after money, promotions. Exercise, the drive for perfection, our need to please an unpleasable parent. I mean, anger can even be that for us. Like, we can just be filled with so much resentment and rage that perversely the only thing that satisfies us momentarily is just more resentment and rage. But then we need more and more. And of course, the most obvious, judging by our own streets is drugs. We head down a certain path, and our need just becomes greater and greater and greater. And we’re willing to throw everything away to get it.

And really, this is at the heart of what Christians call sin. Adam and Eve could have had the fruit of any tree from the garden. But they still wanted more. The one tree they couldn’t have. And so they lost the garden itself.

Like David, no matter what we have, we want more, and we’ll stop at anything to get it. Even if it costs us everything dear to us. Because there’s nothing that can satisfied our need for enough.

There’s nothing that can satisfy that need in us. Well, that’s not really true. Nothing on this earth can.

You know, usually when we look at this scripture we concentrate on David and his misdeeds. But we tend to leave Uriah on the floor. But remember how Uriah refuses to “wash his feet” when he’s home, because it’d be a violation of God’s law? Like, wasn’t he suspicious that he was brought back from the battle line just for this? Some scholars speculate that he had to have known something. Unlike David whose appetites are insatiable, destroying everybody in his path, Uriah’s disciplined, loyal, able to control himself and sacrifice in ways David isn’t able. Unlike David, he’s got enough.

And here comes the New Testament again. Remember how we’ve been saying we always read the Old Testament with the New. And really, Uriah points forward to Jesus. Jesus, Jesus who isn’t driven by his desire to figuratively wash his own feet, but stoops to literally wash the feet of his friends. Jesus, the one who takes the posture of a servant. Jesus who, like Uriah, is loyal to his friends even in the face of betrayal and abandonment. Jesus, the one who, like Uriah, is obedient to God even unto death. Why? Not because he never had enough. But because he always trusted that with God there would always be enough. Always because he knew he had enough. He was enough. And he came to be enough for us. For you and me.

Augustine of Hippo, that great African saint, said it in the prayer I started with. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” The great renaissance philosopher Blaise Pascal said that “there is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”

Really, they’re only riffing on Jesus who said “I AM the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

That drive in us, it isn’t a bad thing. We’re made to long for more, for the infinite. It’s a good thing. Problem is that we’re searching for it, filling that hole with stuff that will never satisfy. Money sex, you name it, these are all good things, but we make a huge mistake when we believe it’ll give us that sense of enoughness. That’s how some theologians have defined what we call sin—misplaced desire. Because only the infinite God can satisfy this infinite need and desire in us for enough.

Now, I’m not saying that oh, if God finds us that we’ll feel 100% satisfied, filled up all the time. Because we won’t. That won’t happen to us this side of eternity. But God being enough is what we can cling to in our trials. That sense of being enough can sustain us through all the trials and temptations of this life. God can give our hearts that much needed rest until the kingdom of God comes in full. Until they rest in God for good.

There was a story a couple months ago about Adam Peaty, an English Olympic swimmer, who also happens to be the son-in-law of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey. Peaty was, at one time, one of the world’s top swimmers winning multiple gold medals, world records and world championships, including taking the top spot at the 2016 Rio Olympics, and the only English swimmer to ever repeat it again and defend his title in Tokyo.

Peaty was known as an incredible perfectionist, exhausting himself and burning himself out, almost not making it back to the Paris Olympics. He devoted his entire life to training and the sport. In spite of all of his fame and success, and medals, though, it was never enough. He said it always left him feeling empty. After Tokyo he sunk into depression, went on a three year drinking spiral.[iii] He ended up losing his girlfriend and the mother of his child on account of it. All for the sake of his sport.

But in the lead up to the Paris games, he met Ashley Null, a Christian theologian and chaplain to athletes. One of Null’s beliefs is that “The Christian gospel is the antidote to performance-based identity."[iv]

Peaty says that one thing Null told him was that “the gold medal is the coldest thing you’ll ever wear”. Because, “You’re expecting it to solve all your issues. And it might solve some of them, but it will not solve the majority.”

After meeting Null, Peaty underwent a conversion. One where he no longer looked to success to fill him. Where he used to say he felt “like a god in the pool”, now he’s got actual God. It’s funny because at the height of his success he described anything less than gold as a failure--well, at Paris, he apparently failed by winning silver. But when he did here’s what he said: “I’d rather have my faith...”

“I’d rather have my faith and my relationship with Jesus and come second than have gold.”[v] “I’d rather have my faith and my relationship with Jesus and come second than have gold.”

Now, I’ll be honest. I’d rather had heard he came in last and said that. But what can you do?

Like David he had everything. None of the success, the status, the fame, was enough, it was eating him alive. Destroying his life. But then he did find that enoughness he always longed for... in Jesus Christ. With Jesus, he could strive for success, yes. But he would never mistake it for the vast infinity of the Lord and his love. God gave him what a gold medal never could... herself. If we have God, it means that ultimately, we don’t need anything else. Like C.S. Lewis says, we get heaven, and we get earth and everything else thrown in.

And that’s the good news. For all of us. Whether you’re a straight-up David and it’s sex you’re driven deeply by. Or a more figurative David—money, or status, the size of your house. Whether it’s drinking or it’s drugs. Or whether you’ve just spent your life trying to win the approval of your dad. Whatever you’ve been trying to fill that God shaped soul of yours with—you're free to let it go.

You’re free to cease striving. Because only God can give you what you truly want, what you truly need. Only God can heal the sin-sick soul, only God can make the wounded whole. To quote Paul Simon from a couple decades ago: “Who’s gonna love you when your looks are gone? God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill.”

And God will. If you let him. With Jesus, you have enough. With Jesus you are enough. Because he has come to give you everything. Heaven... and everything else thrown in.

I offer this to you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[ii] See David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do About It (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019).

[iii] David Coverdale, “Britain's greatest swimmer Adam Peaty reveals how newfound faith helped him overcome alcohol's 'destructive spiral,'” Daily Mail, June 23, 2024, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-12228291/Adam-Peaty-reveals-newfound-faith-helped-overcome-alcohols-destructive-spiral.html

[iv] Emma Fowle, ”Elite sports chaplain Ashley Null: ‘The gospel is the antidote to performance-based identity’ | Interviews | Premier Christianity, in Premier Christianity, July 24, 2024.

[v] Jane Mulkerrins, “Adam Peaty: how religion and the Ramsays saved me,” The Times, August 14, 2024 https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/celebrity/article/adam-peaty-religion-holly-ramsay-qtg5q22fl