A reading of the holy gospel according to Mark. Jesus said to the crowd, this is how it is with the reign of God. A man scatters seed on the ground. He goes to bed and gets up day after day. Through it all, the seed sprouts and grows without his knowing how it happens.
The soil produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, finally the ripe wheat in the ear. When the crop is ready, he wheels the sickle for the time is ripe for harvest. Jesus went on to say, what comparison shall we use for the reign of God? What image will help to present it? It is like mustard seed, which when planted in the soil is the smallest of all the earth's seeds.
Yet, once it is sowed, it springs up to become the largest of shrubs with branches big enough for the birds of the sky to build their nests in its shade. By means of many such parables, Jesus taught them the message in a way that they could understand. To them, he spoke only by way of parable while he kept on explaining things privately to his disciples. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
The reading that you heard this morning from the second book of Samuel about David and Uriah and Uriah's wife, Bathsheba. And the skulduggery of David is, of course, a classic. Classic. It is not the first time that you've heard, I'm sure, this story. Now I think it's important for us to realize that it that what that sad incident in David's life where his lust for a beautiful woman who happened to be the wife of another man, Uriah, and a very noble man indeed and brave man was Uriah.
That this incident in David's life left an enduring imprint upon it. David never got over this. Rest of his life proclaiming his guilt and begging God forgiveness. So while the text ends with Uriah that is the text we have this morning. While it ends with Uriah being slaughtered in the battle, just as David wanted him to be.
Nevertheless, that is not the end of the story at all. Whether or not David is actually the author of all the psalms may be questionable, questionable, but he is certainly the author of many of them. And especially of what we call the penitential psalms, where David proclaims his sin, where he confesses his guilt, and where he begs God's pardon, and above all, never, never doubts God's willingness to pardon him. Today, there is no end of guilt around, so we're told. People who are in a position to know about such things tell us that many, many men and women, old and young, today are afflicted almost as if with an illness, perhaps it is an illness, with their feelings of guilt.
Now in some instances these feelings of guilt are fictitious, they're unreal, they're imagined. Well, they are definitely sick people and they need help. But on the other hand, there is plenty of real guilt around, maybe not as much as it ought to be, but there is plenty of it around. But what good is that except to destroy you unless it is coupled with a conviction of God's forgiveness? Can you imagine a situation that is more hopeless than to find yourself with a frightful burden of real honest to goodness guilt?
By that I mean, you are fully aware of an action that was unjust, that was unfair. In other words, that in some way it was a serious and grave violation of God's law. You are perfectly aware of this, and you are perfectly aware and conscious of your guilt. And of course most of us are most aware of its consequences. Now if you're in that kind of a bind, without any hope of getting out of it, all we can say is your situation is hopeless.
And so what you have to do is try to forget it entirely to submerge it, or you try to rationalize it and try to convince yourself that you weren't guilty at all. Neither of neither plan works. Pushing it down into our, what we call, the subconscious, or getting rid of it, at least as far as our conscious state is concerned, is no answer to it. That only makes the situation worse. And to try to rationalize it, in many instances we know we're just fooling around, that we really aren't kidding even ourselves.
Ourselves. Now, Now, actually, you would find it difficult, I think, to come up with a bit of human conduct that would be more reprehensible, more despicable than what David is guilty of in the reading today. No matter how you look at it, he comes out stinky. And yet he doesn't come out hopeless, and that's the whole story. He doesn't try to minimize his guilt.
He doesn't try to rationalize it. He doesn't try to forget it. He does all of these things in reverse. He remembers it. He confesses it, and he bays God's part.
And all of this with hope, with faith, with confidence. And if there's any so that in this story today of which we've only heard part, I think it's important to keep it all together because it is a scurrilous drama. There is nothing here to be said for David. Nothing. And on the other hand, Uriah comes out such a brave, noble, generous, patriotic, virtuous man.
And he falls in battle just as David plans his destruction. And the result is a very penitential David. He wakes up. He comes to his senses. He realizes what he has done, but he doesn't hang himself.
He doesn't throw himself from the top of the wall. He doesn't do any of those things. What he does do, he keeps his crime ever before his eyes, begging the almighty god to forgive him. And there's where we find ourselves, more or less, more or less, at one time or another. And the whole difference is not between sinning and not sinning.
The question is, what do we do about it? Do we follow the example of a Judas who hanged himself in despair? Or do we follow the example the was saved. In the name name of of the the father, of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen.