Abishag | hughdbryant

Bible readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=567221767

This morning we thought about the parable of the talents and Zephaniah’s prophecy of doom directed at people whose wealth had made them contemptuous of God, who built houses and did not live in them. We were thinking about economics, and wondering whether Jesus and the prophets had to some extent foreseen some of the insights of Karl Marx.

So this morning was economics and this afternoon is politics, or to be more precise, government. We have a description of the change of government, 3,000 years ago in the time of King David. We may look forward to a general election from time to time, but King David could do it simply by having his successor, his son Solomon, anointed, as a result of a promise which he had made to his mother Bathsheba.

You will remember the pretty dreadful story in the second book of Samuel, chapters 11 and 12, telling how King David had taken a fancy to Uriah’s wife Bathsheba when he accidentally saw her in the bath; he engineered for Uriah her husband, who was a soldier, to be put in harm’s way and killed in battle so that he could marry Bathsheba, and how the prophet Nathan had told this story.

‘In a certain town there lived two men, one rich and one poor. The rich man had large flocks and herds; the poor man had nothing of his own except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He reared it and it grew up in his home together with his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and nestled in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.

‘One day a traveller came to the rich man’s house and he, too mean to take anything from his own flock or herd to serve to his guest, took the poor man’s lamb and served that up.’ David was very angry and burst out, ’As the Lord lives, that man deserves to die! He shall pay for the lamb four times over because he has done this and shown no pity.’ Nathan said to David, you are the man.’ [2 Samuel 12:1-7]

And David repented, although the Lord still punished him by saying that the child which he had fathered adulterously with Bathsheba would die, and he did: but then they had another son, Solomon, and David promised to Bathsheba that Solomon would inherit the kingdom after him.

Our lesson today was about how that promise was carried out. David, although he was a bad man in many respects, was a great king, and he kept his promises. I’m not sure that there is more than historical interest in the story so far as we are concerned, because we do depend on democracy in being ruled, rather than the divine right of kings.

Jesus was known as the son of David; he was in a line of descent from King David as the enormous and slightly different genealogies, that you find in Matthew 1 and Luke 3, demonstrate. It was important in that world to be able to prove your ancestry. Perhaps there is a small lesson about how people can change their ways, reform and repent, because there is an interesting little sideline at the very beginning of the lesson from the first book of Kings which we had. The king was very old and Abishag the Shunnamite was attending the King. She was another beautiful young woman, much in the way that Bathsheba had been. But we are told, a little bit earlier, that she had been brought in essentially to keep the old King David warm in bed. But the account takes care to tell us that he did not misbehave. There was no hanky-panky.

In our second lesson we go from divine succession 3,000 years ago to the end times, God the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. This is something which is far beyond our understanding. If you think of our expanding knowledge of the cosmos, of the billions of years and billions of miles in time and space, it seems odd that one can simply say that God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

I think that mathematicians and philosophers will struggle today to tell you really what a beginning or an end of everything could possibly be. There will be some who will say that indeed they are logically impossible, because whatever you suggest to be the beginning, you can always imagine something that came before it; and the same is true of numbers, that whatever number you end up with, you can always add another one.

So St John’s vision, when he was ‘in the spirit on the Lord’s day’, is as good as anything, as a vision of something which is completely beyond man’s understanding. This figure, of the ‘Son of Man’ clothed with a long robe with a sash of gold across his chest, says, ‘Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and the living one.’ It’s a vision of the kingdom. ‘Look, he is coming with the clouds. Every eye will see him, even those who pierced him’.

Well, I don’t think we are ready for him. Our world is full of terrible war, and our government, which I guess, at least so far as the ministers are concerned, you could say has not really been democratically elected but rather anointed, seems more concerned to be inhospitable to poor desperate refugees, than to do any of the other things that a good government should surely do.

This is the time in the Christian year called the kingdom season, when we look forward to the coming of Jesus into the kingdom of God. But are we ready, and would we recognise Jesus? What if he came on one of those boats, or what if he was one of the brave surgeons still operating in the hospitals in Gaza?

What would Jesus say? Dare one say it, he might well say it was time for a general ceasefire – everywhere. All hostilities. This is the beginning. This is the ‘alpha’ of the kingdom. Let us pray that, until things get better, until ‘they shall not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain’, until then, there may be an alpha – but no omega.

Sermon for Evensong on the 10th Sunday after Trinity, 20th August 2017
2 Kings 4:1-37; Psalm 90; Acts 16:1-15

‘Thou turnest man to destruction: again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men’. That’s what we’ve just sung, in Psalm 90. It means, return to the dust, out of which you were made. Psalm 90 is sometimes used at funerals, and describes the insignificance and fleeting existence of human life when compared with the creative – and destructive – power of God.

There’s a powerful novel by P. D. James called ‘Children of Men’. It’s a dystopian vision of the future – just as 1984 suddenly wasn’t in the distant future, in this case, the future is 2021 – not long now.

Gradually, no more children are being born. The human race is dying out. Then, years after the last person was born, a woman becomes pregnant. Now read on! I won’t spoil it for you. There’s a film of it too, which is also good, but rather different.

One little switch. No more babies. And that’s it for the human race. It’s perhaps more frightening, as being rather more mundane, more feasible, in a way, than a nuclear holocaust.

There has been a school of thought – perhaps as a result of too much reading of the Old Testament – that if God does take steps against mankind, it must be to punish them for something they’ve done wrong.

So now, for people who think in that way, it will be likely to be rather a worrying time. We have the President of the USA completely failing to condemn white supremacists and Nazis – saying there are ‘some very good people’ among them; in this country, all of sudden, it’s not beyond the pale for people openly to want to shut out from this country anyone who isn’t a white, English-speaking person with useful skills and plenty of money.

Nearer to home, did anyone even think for a minute whether it was right to chase away the travellers, the gypsies, who came and camped out on the Leg O’Mutton field in Cobham? Remember, Hitler exterminated Gypsies as well as Jews. How should we treat them? What would Jesus have said?

Now again, instead of seeking closer union with our neighbours in Europe, we have set our faces against them with the vote for so-called ‘Brexit’. ‘Sovereignty’, whatever that means, is supposed to be more important than the brotherhood of man.

I think that Emily Thornberry was right, although she got into hot water for saying it, about the house with a white van parked in the drive, festooned with English flags. That flag is not benign: it is meant to say, ‘England alone!’ Go away, everyone else. Black, brown, foreign people: go away from our ‘crowded’ island. The crowds are, I would suggest, a myth. There is plenty of room in the UK. The hidden, evil message is that there are too many of the ‘wrong sort of person’ – people who are not like us.

I still remember the first time I went to Bombay – the first time I went to India – and walked down the street. I was the only white man. The only white man among thousands of brown and black faces. I began to imagine what it must feel like to be a black person in England sometimes. No wonder that black people may congregate in places where there are already significant numbers of black people. We have a certain innate small-c conservatism, all of us, I think, which makes us easier with people whom we know.

Obviously in a country of nearly 70 million people, we can’t know everyone, so I suspect that we fall back on what people look like. If they look like us, fine. If not, there might be a reservation, a hesitation, a query in our minds.

This isn’t good. Xenophobia, racism, white supremacy. No thought for the idea that we are all equally God’s creatures, God’s children. God, if He cares about us in the way the Old Testament describes, might well send some plagues down on us for being so awful.

Yet so far as I know, God hasn’t worked that way recently. Taken as a whole in the Bible, in contrast with the various chastisements in the Old Testament – and Psalm 90 is said to be a Psalm of Moses, inspired by the complaining of the Israelites in the desert – there are many stories of healing and salvation.

Elisha’s two miracles described in our first lesson are cases in point. The first one is a sort of self-help example with a miraculous element, a bit like feeding the 5,000, in that the oil never ran out, and the resurrection of the Shunammite woman’s daughter is like the raising of Lazarus or the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter – ‘damsel, arise’ – in the New Testament.

We don’t know how these miracles worked – or else they wouldn’t be miraculous. Maybe these stories are just mythical. It’s striking how similar the miracles done by Elisha are, in these two cases at least, to Jesus’ miracles.

The ‘rose of Sharon’, the beautiful girl, in the Song of Solomon, ‘nigra sum sed pulchra,’ in the Latin words of the beautiful canticle in Monteverdi’s Vespers, is said to be a ‘Shulamite’, or a Shunammite. Perhaps there’s a link with the ‘great woman’ in our lesson from 2 Kings. She was kind to the man of God, Elisha, and ‘constrained him’ to eat bread. It’s a bit reminiscent of Mrs Doyle, Father Ted’s housekeeper, pressing ever more cake and sandwiches on her hapless priestly charges: ‘Oh, go on, go on, go on …!’ Maybe she was Abishag, the most beautiful woman in Israel, who went to comfort King David in his old age – she too came from Shunem.

But even in the beauty of Monteverdi there’s a wrong note. ‘Nigra sum sed pulchra’ sings the girl – although often, for mysterious musical reasons, it’s actually a male counter-tenor singing – meaning, ‘I am black but beautiful’. To sing ‘but’ beautiful is awful – but in 1610, when the Vespers was written, that kind of casual racism was unfortunately there. I feel that if we can change the words of the Lord’s Prayer so that we ‘forgive those who’ trespass against us, instead of ‘them that’ do it, we could change ‘nigra sum, sed’ (black, but …) to ‘nigra sum et pulchra’. ‘And’ beautiful. Perhaps you, Robert [Prof. Robert Woolley, Director of Music at St Mary’s], could speak to Harry Christophers or Sir John Eliot Gardner about it.

The disciples with St Paul – (including St Luke, who most likely was the author of the Acts of the Apostles as well, and who was an eyewitness with the Apostles, at least for some of the time, which we think partly because of the passage which was our lesson tonight, in their journey, where it says, ‘We’: ‘We came with a straight course to Samothracia’, and so on) – well, he and the disciples went to pray, not just in the synagogues, but in Philippi they went to a part of the river bank, where people went to pray; actually, not just any ‘people’ went there, but a group of women. And there they met and got to know Lydia, who, like the Shunammite woman with the man of God, Elisha, invited them to stay with her. She ‘constrained them’ too; she was another Mrs Doyle!

Shunammite women, blacks, and the women worshipping with Lydia on the river bank: all a bit different, according to the lights of the time then; but all variously blessed. To be with Elisha, and with the apostles – and of course, with Jesus – we should be celebrating diversity and welcoming the people who are shut out – shut out by polite society, but also because they are black or strangers or refugees. Let us not shelter behind false distinctions between ‘genuine’ refugees and ‘economic migrants’. Whatever they are, they are here; they are human beings like us; they’re just as good as us; and if they are refugees, they need our welcome, our love, and our help. ‘Come again, ye children of men.’

Will it ever End?

Nigra Sum