O Absalom, My Son, My Son

Scripture Lessons: Ephesians 4: 25 – 5: 2, 2 Samuel 18: 5-9, 15, 31-33 Sermon Title: O Absalom, my son, my son! Preached on August 8, 2021 Last Sunday Rev. Cassie Waits preached a beautiful sermon focused on Absalom, one of King David’s sons. Leaving the worship service several members commented on how rarely anyone ever talks about Absalom, so I wanted to deal with him again today, specifically focusing on how King David talks about him. Scripture tells us a lot about King David. Probably there is considerably more written about David than any of us really want to know. In reading the Bible we see that David, not only defeated the giant, Goliath, but great up to be a man who abused his power, was corrupted by his status, and got so used to dealing harshly with his enemies that he seems to have forgotten that one of his enemies was his own son. Our Scripture Lesson ended with King David’s hauntingly emotional words of mourning: O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son! Just in this one verse King David refers to Absalom as his son four times. Before this verse Absalom is known by King David as “the young man,” as though the King barely knew him. Have you ever heard of something like this happening before? Have you ever been so mad at someone that you forgot how much you love them? Or have you ever noticed how easy it is for some people to do violence to or to speak harshly of whole groups of people, say the Jews, when they’re all lumped together, but when something happens so that one sees a member of this group as an individual, maybe they find out that their neighbor is Jewish, something changes. So, some say that they can’t stand millennials. Maybe even some people here would say that all millennials do is look at their phones. They can’t read a map. When you hear someone talk like that, ask them about their 25-year-old grandchildren and listen to how their attitude changes. Or consider how harsh sentencing for minors makes perfect sense until it’s your kid getting into trouble. It’s amazing, but it’s true. When we see people as people, we’re capable of incredible kindness and empathy. When we lump them all together and generalize, we’re capable of incredible evil. One of the most terrifying children’s movies I’ve ever seen (does that sound crazy, a terrifying children’s movie?) is called The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas. It’s the story of a father who oversees a German concentration camp. The camp is out in the country, so his family must leave their home in the city, his son must leave all his friends, and in his new home without any neighbors he’s lonely and bored. One day he wanders beyond the fence of the beautiful estate and discovers a barbed wire fence. On the other side of the fence is a boy, his same age, playing in the dirt, wearing stripped pajamas. Can you imagine where this story line is going? The German boy and the Jewish boy become friends. They eventually dig a small hole under the fence so that the German boy can go inside the fence to play. This is fine until all the children inside the fence are corralled for what they’re told is a shower. The German boy is pushed in with them, and his father must face the total depravity of what he’s been doing now for months as he searches through the bodies to find his son lying among them. “O Absalom, my son, my son!” His eyes were opened when it was too late. That’s how it was with King David. When he says, “O Absalom, my son, my son!” as though he’s seeing this war for what it really is for the very first time. Before that it was a rebel faction of his own citizens led by a young man who must be stopped. As he holds his boys head in his arms it’s senseless bloodshed, nothing more. Has it ever been this way with you? That the way you see changes. Instead of generalizing about a group of people, something happens, and you really see that they are just people. There’s an important book that was on Oprah’s book club list a couple years ago. It’s called, Sing, Unburied, Sing. It’s a hard book to read, for it tells the story of a broken family, a father incarcerated at Parchman prison, and his son, so full of innocence, though he’s treated as a criminal before he has the chance to even begin to understand who he was born to be. Pulled over on the side of the road, the police officer sees him as a threat, as a danger, and tells him repeatedly to put his hands over his head and to get down on the ground. Having heard this boy’s story, the reader sees him very differently, for the reader knows that he is only a boy, only a child, made a victim again and again, afraid of his own shadow, and protector of his baby sister. You see, everything can change depending on how much you allow yourself to see the humanity of the people who are being hurt. Everything changes when you know their story. Everything changes when it’s your son. “O Absalom, my son, my son!” All the fight goes out of King David when he realizes that it’s his son who’s dead, and he is the one who’s done it in trying to defend his place of power. You wonder what he would have changed had he been able to see it sooner, just as we all do. Once we begin to see people as people, maybe we ask: How could I have made that joke now that I know how much hurt it caused? How could I have thought that way? What’s true is that Scripture is always pushing us to see people more clearly, and more truly as people, always forcing us to ask: “how well do we love our neighbors as ourselves?” Truly, not always so well, but God always sees this way. To God, everybody is somebody and all children are previous. One of the most powerful sermons I’ve ever read is one preached by a preacher at his own son’s funeral. It was preached by William Sloan Coffin, and it begins: As almost all of you know, a week ago last Monday night, driving in a terrible storm, my son Alexander – who to his friends was a real day-brightener, and to his family “fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky” – my twenty-four-year-old Alexander, who enjoyed beating his old man at every game and in every race, beat his father to the grave. He goes on to say that his own heart is mending, thanks in large part to all those members of the church who have written letters and been present with him and his family. However, he points out one whose presence was less than helpful: When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died, I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside Boston, when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking middle-aged woman, carrying about eighteen quiches. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, “I just don’t understand the will of God.” Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. “I’ll say you don’t, lady!” I spoke. (I knew the anger would do me good, and the instruction to her was long overdue.) I continued, “Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his, that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of ‘frosties’ too many? Do you think it is God’s will that there are no streetlights along that stretch of road, and no guard rail separating the road and Boston Harbor?” Maybe you can relate. So often, in an attempt to bring comfort to the most horrible of situations, good, Christian people carrying quiches and casseroles don’t see people as people. They think with their heads more than they feel with their hearts, which is the opposite of what God always does, says the preacher: The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, “It is the will of God.” Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break. Did you hear that? “O Absalom, my son, my son!” The difference between God and David is not how much it hurt, but that God never forgot that it would. God was never just fighting a war. God was never just squashing an insurrection. With God there is only mourning in war time for every dead child on the battlefield is precious in his sight. That’s how we must learn to see. For our country and our community divides over different issues. We feel such strong feelings about the vaccine or whether or not to require a mask. Remember that everything changes when it’s our son on a ventilator. And when that’s the case, who cares about public opinion? Who cares about the middle ground? Who cares about what’s popular or objective? It’s just, “O Absalom, my son, my son!” and when we see that we finally start seeing clearly. In the same way, some talk objectively about marriage equality. We talk of family values and societal standards until it’s our child who tried to take his own life because he isn’t wired like everyone else. Everything changes when it’s our child’s life. “O Absalom, my son, my son!” When we see it that way, that’s when we start to see. When we remember that when one of our children dies, “God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break” we truly live out the Christian faith. As the first Scripture Lesson said, “Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us.” Remember that at school. Remember that at work. Remember that at home. Remember that when you look in the mirror. Be imitators of the one whose heart is the first to break. Amen.