A Fourth Church Sermon by Adam H. Fronczek

August 2, 2009 | 4:00 p.m.

Between Heaven and Earth

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 42
2 Samuel 18:5–16

David was the king of Israel. Absalom was his son. In a story that has all the drama of Hollywood and all the reality of twenty-first-century political life, Absalom rebels against his father and leads a coup to take over the monarchy. Anyone who has ever balanced a job and a family or a spouse and a parent, already knows this story. Anyone who has balanced responsibilities with dreams, anyone who balanced guilt about the past with hope for a better future, knows this story as well.

Our reading in 2 Samuel 18 is David’s story, picking up where David sends his generals out into battle against his own son, Absalom.

• • •

Someone who has both a job and a family has to decide how to divide their time. Will you work eighty hours a week to advance your career, even if it means you hardly see your spouse or kids? Maybe you justify it by telling yourself that the extra money will make your family more happy than your presence at home. Alternatively, maybe you’re only spending that much time at work because you’re afraid to be laid off, and you’ve got to keep that job.

Newly married couples have to figure out how to balance the old demands of their parents with the new demands of having a spouse. How often should he call his dad? How much should she tell her mom about their financial decisions or the argument they had last night?

How much help can we give our parents when they need us? Don’t we owe everything to the people who raised us, who taught us, who put us through school? But can we meet all of our parents’ health needs without destroying our marriage in the process? Wouldn’t dad, who has Alzheimer’s, have wanted us to be happy?

In these endlessly complicated kinds of situations, we find ourselves stuck—stuck between alternatives that have no clear answers. Giving more of yourself to one thing only takes away from something else. You can’t do it all. And these stuck places don’t even have to involve other people; we can feel stuck all on our own. Maybe you take a job to make ends meet, even though it’s not really what you dream of doing, but it’s hard to change what you’re doing several years later and get back to that dream. Now you’re stuck. It’s easy to make small compromises about our personal behavior, our priorities, our definition of right and wrong. But it’s hard to wake up one day knowing that you’ve compromised too much and go back to who you used to be. Now you’re stuck. And you’d like to take the time to sit back and make some sense of it all and try to find a way out. But if you take that time, you might fall even farther behind than you already are.

But what about this—what if there is meaning and purpose and holiness all around us and we don’t see it because we’re not paying attention?

All of these stories have something in common with David’s story. David is a father. And David is a king. When his son turns against him, David has to decide where his loyalties lie, he has to weigh his job with his family obligations. How far can he go in forgiving his son? Should he value his son’s life over the lives of the soldiers he sends into battle? “Maybe Absalom is right,” says David. “Maybe I’m too old, too washed up, to be king anymore. Maybe this is all happening because of mistakes I made years ago.” There is no right answer for David, but he must make a choice. And we see the anguish of that choice in the orders he gives to his generals: “Deal gently, for my sake, with the young man, Absalom.” To paraphrase: “Go out into battle; conquer the enemy. That is my command as your king. But the enemy is my own son. So if you capture him, deal gently with him.” And with those words, David lives into the stuck feeling that he cannot have it all, that he cannot be an ideal king and an ideal father. He considers that perhaps all this is his fault. Perhaps if he had not made so many mistakes as a king or as a father, he wouldn’t be stuck in this bad place. He longs to rise up above these limitations he has and be something better, something more than he is, but here he is stuck, and when Absalom gets caught, there’s a poetic moment that shows us that this father and son, David and Absalom, are both stuck. The battle is over, and Absalom races through the forest, fleeing from his father’s men, fearing for his life, and he gets stuck in the thick branches of a tree and his mule rides on without him, and Absalom is stuck, the story says, “left hanging between heaven and earth.” Absalom is stuck, just like his father is stuck.

David’s general, Joab, arrives on the scene, and believing that this stuck place must be resolved, he takes matters into his own hands. He forgets, or rather disregards, David’s orders to “deal gently with the young man,” and he kills Absalom and sends word back to King David that his son, the enemy, Absalom, is dead. What do you think about Joab? Maybe we don’t like him because he disobeys orders, or maybe we don’t like him because he’s a murderer. I have a hunch, though, that there’s also something strangely attractive to us about Joab, because Joab makes a decision.

It is our inclination, quite often, I think, to treat the stuck places of our lives like Joab did. We value people who take control and take sides, who act as if the tension doesn’t matter, and who try to live without it. It is our inclination to want to be one of those people. It is our inclination to think that God would have us be that kind of a person, finding the right answer, resolving the situation, working hard enough to figure a way out.

But what if there’s not a way out? And what if, in our desperate searching for a way out, we’re missing out on the holiness that already surrounds us?

Think for a moment about what God does through Jesus. The whole idea of Jesus is that he hangs between heaven and earth. He is God in the form of a human being. Fully human, fully divine. Tempted like every one of us, yet without sin. Jesus lives in tension. He is as much himself at the banqueting tables of the rich as begging for food with the poor. He is the inspiring leader of a movement even though his own followers allowed him to be put to death. The miracle of Jesus isn’t that he does away with the tension but that he learns to live within it. He gives us new ways of thinking about our choices. He doesn’t look for an either-or option about earth and heaven. He takes earthly things and makes them holy.

Look at this table. Jesus’ last message to his disciples, his parting wish for us, is that we would understand how to take the ordinary things of life and make them extraordinary, make them holy. So he takes bread and wine, two of the most common things on earth, and he tells his disciples that with his blessing these simple, earthly things become a taste of heaven. He looks at bread and wine and his view of what they can be isn’t limited by anything. And Jesus, having come down from heaven to be with us, doesn’t think heaven has to wait for later. He finds a way to use bread and wine so that we can taste heaven now.

What if you thought about the tensions in your life, the stuck places, a little more like Jesus thinks about bread and wine? Could you get unstuck if you stopped trying to choose one life over another and started looking harder for the holiness in the life that you have? Could you stop feeling paralyzed by the things you’ve done in the past and start feeling capable of a better future? This is God’s promise to us, that God has created you just as you are because there is something holy inside of you.

Walter Brueggemann calls this kind of tension being “awed to heaven, rooted in earth.” We are rooted in earth because we are stuck, and many times we will continue to feel stuck. We will feel stuck by the demands of our jobs and social expectations and families. We will feel stuck by our relationships and our past decisions and our inability to make the right choice the first time every time. But we are awed to heaven because we can look truthfully at our earthly lives and say with a sense of hope, “The way it is, is not good enough. I want more.” We can see, when we look for it, the spark of the holy in so many of the regular things God has created, and when we see that spark, it gets a little easier to love the world and to love ourselves. We can try to gain a little more joy out of the job that doesn’t satisfy. If we don’t get enough time with our families, we can make the time we have a little more meaningful. We can treat our relationships with a little more honor even when they are difficult. We can look at our past mistakes and treat them as opportunities to grow and understand, not just as opportunities for regret. We can look at our lives this way, just like Jesus looks at bread and wine and sees heaven and tells us to remember him by doing likewise.

Amen.