A Royal Violation

An Orange Day Ser­mon to End Vio­lence Against Women

2 Samuel 11:1–15

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to bat­tle, David sent Joab with his offi­cers and all Israel with him; they rav­aged the Ammonites, and besieged Rab­bah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

It hap­pened, late one after­noon, when David rose from his couch and was walk­ing about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beau­ti­ful. David sent some­one to inquire about the woman. It was reported, ‘This is Bathsheba daugh­ter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hit­tite.’ So David sent mes­sen­gers to fetch her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was puri­fy­ing her­self after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman con­ceived; and she sent and told David, ‘I am pregnant.’

So David sent word to Joab, ‘Send me Uriah the Hit­tite.’ And Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab and the peo­ple fared, and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, ‘Go down to your house, and wash your feet.’ Uriah went out of the king’s house, and there fol­lowed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the entrance of the king’s house with all the ser­vants of his lord, and did not go down to his house. When they told David, ‘Uriah did not go down to his house’, David said to Uriah, ‘You have just come from a jour­ney. Why did you not go down to your house?’ Uriah said to David, ‘The ark and Israel and Judah remain in booths; and my lord Joab and the ser­vants of my lord are camp­ing in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do such a thing.’ Then David said to Uriah, ‘Remain here today also, and tomor­row I will send you back.’ So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day. On the next day, David invited him to eat and drink in his pres­ence and made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the ser­vants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.

In the morn­ing David wrote a let­ter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the let­ter he wrote, ‘Set Uriah in the fore­front of the hard­est fight­ing, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.’

The David Story: A Royal Violation

This is a dif­fi­cult text. David has been the recip­i­ent of extra­or­di­nary divine favor. He has risen from shep­herd boy to shep­herd king, respon­si­ble for the care of all God’s peo­ple. He has been promised a lin­eage of favored sons which will even­tu­ally stretch all the way to Jesus.

And he raped a woman. Attempted to con­ceal her preg­nancy. Betrayed, and mur­dered her husband.

This is not a ser­mon about how there is good in every­one, how we are all saint and sin­ner, mixed bags of good and bad, how even the worst of sin­ners can be redeemed. This is not a ser­mon about David. This is a ser­mon about how we respond to vio­lence. And in par­tic­u­lar, vio­lence against women.

For a very long time the church has responded to the vio­lence in this text by either jus­ti­fy­ing it, deny­ing it, or min­i­miz­ing it. It has been jus­ti­fied by read­ing Bathsheba as a wan­ton woman, inten­tion­ally dis­play­ing her­self and her body before the vir­ile king in an attempt to seduce him. It has been denied by claim­ing that what took place was not rape but an affair between two adults – Illicit, yes. Wrong, yes. To be con­demned, yes. But rape, no. And it has been min­i­mized by not­ing that David even­tu­ally mar­ries Bathsheba and that they have a son together who becomes the next King of Israel. A happy end­ing. There is even a tale in the Tal­mud that reads this as a love story in which David finally finds the right woman, the woman God had intended all along to be his wife – the love of his life.

What all of these strate­gies do – in jus­ti­fy­ing, deny­ing, and min­i­miz­ing – is ignore the dynam­ics of power in this story: the power of a king over his peo­ple and the power of a man over a woman. And David’s rape of Bathsheba is about both. Rape is an act of power – not sex; it involves sex, but it is not about sex. The text does bris­tle with allu­sions to sex and sex­u­al­ity. Bathsheba’s name means “fer­tile woman.” We are specif­i­cally told that her monthly period has ended. David’s attempt to cover up the result­ing preg­nancy is all about get­ting Uriah to sleep with his wife – that’s what “wash­ing his feet” means. And Uriah, the Hit­tite for­eigner, is por­trayed as an even bet­ter Hebrew than his king because he will not sleep with his wife while Ark of God and the other sol­diers are in the field of bat­tle (an allu­sion to Deuteron­omy 23:9–11). But to make the prob­lem in this story one of sex or sex­u­al­ity rather than abuse and power is to repeat the vio­lence of David against Bathsheba, the kind of vio­lence that is per­pe­trated against women all the time. And that we can­not do.

David raped Bathsheba.

Sex­ual vio­lence affects every woman’s life. In the two min­utes that have passed since this ser­mon began, eight women have been injured in their homes by their hus­bands or boyfriends.[1]

Women and chil­dren are con­sid­er­ably less safe in the home than any­where else. Bat­ter­ing is the major cause of injury to adult women. Mar­i­tal rape is the most com­mon kind of assault there is. One in three Amer­i­can girls before eigh­teen years and one in seven boys are sex­u­ally abused. It is esti­mated that a woman is raped in the United States every two min­utes. Bat­ter­ing is a major cause of home­less­ness for women and chil­dren. At least forty per­cent of home­less women are women who were abused by their part­ners, and left. They now face vio­lence on the street rather than bat­ter­ing in their home.[2]

This is intol­er­a­ble. But it is real­ity. Every day. One rea­son it per­sists is that we do not talk about it.

Today is this month’s Orange Day. Orange Day is part of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s UNiTE to End Vio­lence against Women cam­paign which aims to pre­vent and elim­i­nate vio­lence against women and girls in all parts of the world. The UNiTE cam­paign pro­claims the 25th of every month as Orange Day, aim­ing to raise aware­ness about the issue of vio­lence against women and girls, not only once a year on Novem­ber 25th (the Inter­na­tional Day to End Vio­lence against Women), but every month! The intent is not just to wear some­thing orange, but to do (or com­mit to doing) some­thing con­crete. My com­mit­ment was to begin this sermon.

Two years ago, the 219^th Gen­eral Assem­bly of the Pres­by­ter­ian Church pro­claimed that

In light of the many forms of vio­lence per­pet­u­ated against women, [we con­demn] vio­lence against women in all forms and under all cir­cum­stances as vio­la­tions of God’s will for women and men, whether that vio­lence is per­pet­u­ated by a stranger or by an inti­mate part­ner, and [we com­mend and encour­age] all per­sons who pro­vide shel­ter, coun­sel­ing, and other forms of assis­tance for women expe­ri­enc­ing coer­cion and violence.

Of course sadly some of this coun­sel­ing advo­cates that women return to abu­sive rela­tion­ships. Even today, with increased aware­ness of vio­lence against women, too many pas­tors of Chris­t­ian churches encour­age women to return to their abusers and “turn the other cheek.” I want to say clearly, that this is not the gospel.  God does not intend for women or chil­dren or any­one who is vul­ner­a­ble to be sub­jected to the vio­lent power of another per­son. And if you are sit­ting here and have been raped or vio­lated, I want to say to you “God loves you. Know that you were made in God’s image and that image has not been taken from you. Instead, let us keep in mind another say­ing of Jesus, ‘the truth shall set you free.’” I declare this church to be safe space for any woman who is abused.

Pro­claim­ing this ‘good news’ is some­thing every con­gre­ga­tion can do. Many churches make the num­bers of abuse and rape hot­lines avail­able on their bul­letin boards (we do) and web­sites, and have refer­ral infor­ma­tion to expe­ri­enced coun­selors. Oth­ers col­lect those lit­tle soaps, lotions and sham­poos we all get at hotels and donate them to women’s shel­ters. As a result, mem­bers are reminded that vio­lence against women is an ongo­ing prob­lem each time they travel for busi­ness or plea­sure. I know I pray about domes­tic vio­lence every year on Super Bowl Sun­day, which has the high­est inci­dence of vio­lence against women in the entire year. There are cer­tainly other things we could do as a con­gre­ga­tion, and I wel­come your ideas.

But hav­ing said that the prob­lem of vio­lence against women, in this text and in our cul­ture, is one of power, par­tic­u­larly male power, I do want to say that one rea­son we don’t talk about it is that we don’t talk about sex and sex­u­al­ity. Oh, I know there is a lot of sex ‘out there’ in our cul­ture, almost to the point where it seems we are sur­rounded by lit­tle else. But just because sex is used in adver­tis­ing, appears in movies, is sung about in pop songs and sat­u­rates our lan­guage, does not mean that we are good at talk­ing about what it means to be embod­ied crea­tures, to have bod­ies that feel plea­sure and pain, which can be hurt and healed, can be both abused and excited. Moth­er­hood, for exam­ple, is not just a feel­ing of love for a child but a phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence (and some­times ordeal). We don’t have enough litur­gies and hymns that speak to this HUGE part of our lives, which means we lack lan­guage to talk about the phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence of both sin and redemption.

There are many exam­ples of this in our churches, includ­ing our own Pres­by­ter­ian Church, but the one that comes to mind today is the story of Sis­ter Mar­garet Far­ley. A cou­ple of years ago Far­ley, pub­lished what, for my money, is one of the best text­books avail­able on the topic of Chris­t­ian sex­u­al­ity – or embod­ied life. It is called Just Love: A Frame­work for Chris­t­ian Sex­ual Ethics. Pro­fes­sor Far­ley held the Gilbert Stark Chair in Chris­t­ian Ethics at Yale Uni­ver­sity Divin­ity School for thirty years, where she began teach­ing in 1971, and is a past pres­i­dent of the Soci­ety of Chris­t­ian Ethics and the Catholic The­o­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica. She is also a Roman Catholic Sis­ter. She has received numer­ous awards and recog­ni­tion for her work in bioethics, for her work on health care and espe­cially for her work on HIV in Africa. Nev­er­the­less her book, writ­ten in 2006, became famous last year when the Vatican’s Con­gre­ga­tion for the Doc­trine of the Faith (CDF) judged it to cause “grave harm to the faith­ful.” As Mary Hunt has writ­ten, “War, poverty, eco­cide, racism, colo­nial­ism, and sex and gen­der injus­tices of all sorts come to mind in the “grave harm” cat­e­gory.” But not a book on sex­ual ethics by a scholar of Farley’s cal­iber. In this sin­gle act of con­dem­na­tion, the all male Roman Catholic Con­gre­ga­tion for the Doc­trine of the Faith (CDF) simul­ta­ne­ously showed its desire not to talk respon­si­bly about sex and their desire to remove legit­i­macy from a woman within their power. Within 24 hours of the con­dem­na­tion, lit­er­ally overnight, Margaret’s book was pro­pelled from an Ama­zon rank­ing of 143,000 (142,982) to 16.[3] It became a best­seller. That seems about right response.

There is no good news in our story today about the rape of Bathsheba. But it is immensely good that the story is told in our Bible, because most sto­ries of rape and vio­lence against women are not told; indeed some are never told. By expos­ing the abuse of power and sex­ual vio­lence of David, Scrip­ture makes it not only pos­si­ble but imper­a­tive that we in the church talk about power and vio­lence, par­tic­u­larly against women, today. And that we rec­og­nize that our bod­ies are a pri­mary site for expe­ri­enc­ing both sin and redemp­tion. For in remem­ber­ing the vio­lence per­pe­trated upon women’s bod­ies, we are also called to ask, what would it mean instead to honor women’s bod­ies – not sim­ply to NOT do vio­lence, but to actu­ally honor women’s bod­ies. And children’s bod­ies. And men’s bodies.

The prac­tice of hon­or­ing the body is born of the con­fi­dence that our bod­ies are made in the image of God’s own goodness.

God cre­ated our bod­ies. God dwelled fully in a vul­ner­a­ble human body. In death God gath­ers us up, body and all. Through our bod­ies we par­tic­i­pate in God’s activ­ity in the world.[4]

As the place where the divine pres­ence dwells, our bod­ies are wor­thy of care and bless­ing and ought never to be degraded or exploited. In Hon­or­ing the Body: Med­i­ta­tions on a Chris­t­ian Prac­tice, Har­vard Pro­fes­sor Stephanie Paulsell writes, “The prac­tice of hon­or­ing the body chal­lenges us to remem­ber the sacred­ness of the body in every moment of our lives… In activ­i­ties that punc­tu­ate our daily lives: bathing, cloth­ing, eat­ing, work­ing, exer­cis­ing, lov­ing, suf­fer­ing.”[5] It is through such daily bod­ily acts that we might learn to live more fully into the sacred­ness of our bod­ies and the bod­ies of others.

The ser­mon hymn “Sacred the Body” was sung this sum­mer at the Church­wide Gath­er­ing of Pres­by­ter­ian Women, meet­ing in Orlando. It was com­posed by Ruth Duck and speaks pow­er­fully of the sacred­ness of human bod­ies, the ten­der care we each need and the pro­tec­tion we owe to one another. As we sing this song, let us reflect on how we indi­vid­u­ally and as a church can respond to vio­lence against women and honor the image of God bestowed on every human being.

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