Transcript
ADAMS: Our Scripture lesson this morning comes from -- first, from 2 Samuel, the 11th chapter. "In the spring of the year, the time when kings go forth to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel, and 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 on the roof of the king's house,
that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman, and one said, 'Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?' So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. Then she returned to her house, and the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, 'I am with child.' 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 was doing, and how the people fared, and how the war prospered. Then David said to Uriah, 'Go down to your house, and wash your feet,' and Uriah went out of the king's house, and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the door 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, Uriah, have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house?' Uriah said to David, 'The ark, and Israel, and Judah dwell 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 drink, and lie with my wife? As you life, and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.' Then David said to Uriah, 'Remain here today also, and tomorrow, I will let you depart.' So Uriah
remained in Jerusalem that day and the next, and David invited him, and he ate in his presence, and drank, so that he 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, that he may be struck down and die. And
as Joab was besieging the city, he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant men, and the men of the city came out and fought with Joab, and some of the servants of David among the people fell. Uriah the Hittite was slain also. Then Joab sent and told David all the news about the fighting, and he instructed the messenger, 'When you finish telling all the news about the fighting to the king, then, if the king's anger rises, and if he says to you,
'Why did you go so near the city to fight, then you shall say, 'Your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.' When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah, her husband, was dead, she made lamentation for her husband, and when the morning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son, but the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.' And then
in the letter, the first epistle of John, in the fourth chapter and the seventh verse: 'Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world so that we
might live through Him. In this is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to love one another.'" I want to talk with you a few minutes this morning about the sacrament of selfishness. The war was going on. King David was at home, taking his ease on the roof of his palace,
and the rest of the story, you know. He brought Bathsheba to his house; one thing led to another. She became his mistress. They told each other all the old lies. Their love must be right, because they could not live without each other. Uriah was a stolid, unromantic stick. Their affection was the purest and loveliest ever known. Passion invents its reasons, and
it does more. It ruthlessly makes its way. David ordered a battle, and Uriah was killed. Then, Bathsheba became his wife. This flagrant violation of God's command resulted in a chain of evil that plagued David's house for generations, and hurt thousands of people. Adultery is the sacrament of selfishness. It takes the sign and seal of love,
the highest thing that man knows, and makes it the Devil's own right. We are so constituted that our highest spiritual development requires a material base. The purely physical arrangements for the continuation of the race, plus the necessities of mutual support for the young, led to monogamous marriage. This, in turn, led to the development of an emotion with tremendous promise for humanity. It directed the most powerful
drive in the human body and spirit outward, away from self, to concern for another, to an identification with another, which made the finest sympathy appear pale. It bound two people together with chains of gold. It built a firm foundation for healthy affection toward children. Children reared in this atmosphere of love learned faster and seemed more intelligent than other children. They were better
able to adjust to new situations and to devise new improvements. Thus, love proved to have a survival value, and this led to its continuance and its refinement. Love had to struggle with other emotions, especially those which belong to the subhuman origins of the race, the purely sensual. Societies everywhere have recognized the danger of reversion to the animal level, not only to the individual who chooses
to be subhuman, but to the whole social fabric, and therefore, societies have developed severe taboos and penalties in this area, with all sorts of rationalizations and arrangements, some even connected with religion, permitting reversion to subhuman types of emotion and activity. Into such a world came another humanizing element: the revelation of God, the person who created all things and guided their development to the emergence
of creatures uniquely like the Creator, and able to live nobly as His family. At first conceived as naked power and strangeness, God becomes successively a king, a priest, a lover, a parent, best understood after the analogies of family relationships. This intimate relation between man and women became the source of complex emotion at the very foundation
of human society, and also the basis of the highest analogies by which we understand God. An emotion so important is no mere product of material vitality, but divinely intended and designed, and the ultimate relation out of which it grows, and in which it is expressed, should be considered sacred. Our church has sacraments, chief among them Baptism and the Lord's Supper: outward and material expressions of inward
spiritual realities, deep realities. In the Middle Ages, vicious persons held parodies of the sacraments, one of which was called the Black Mass. Adultery is a perversion of the sacrament of love. It is the black sacrament, a sign of selfishness. It has its clear expression, as C. S. Lewis reminded us in his Screwtape Letters, where a senior devil shows the characteristic emotion of hell by turning into a spider who
would like to devour his relations. Says he, "The only love we know in hell is the appetite to devour: pure selfishness." There are four possible attitudes toward adultery, the sacrament of selfishness. One is to say selfishness is natural. Adulterous action is normal. Men and women are merely beasts. Polls indicate that a high percentage of the population breaks the seventh commandment; let yourself
go and be normal! One might as well say half the race is hungry, sick, and illiterate; why rise above it? We do not deny the humble origin of the race. God took dust, and he breathed upon it His spirit. The question is whether we're moving toward dust or God. Are we going to crawl back to slime, or are we going to walk with Him? We have seen Jesus. We know where love is
leading. We can be children of God. This calls for a lifelong union of one man and one woman, a union of body and spirit at the personal level, neither treating the other as an object, but as a person. This is as far beyond the level of adultery as the human body is above the amoeba. It leads to a type of emotion as advanced over lust as thought is beyond reflexes. The fact that
half the population is unable or unwilling to reach this level of emotional life should not be surprising, nor does it call for a relaxation of the ideal any more than popular taste in reading should lead to a new norm for literature. We need to realize this, for the sacrament of selfishness leads to weak and vicious persons, unstable children. It tears at the social fabric. A second attitude toward reality is repression: strict laws and penalties.
Repression has been tried to no avail: drowning, burning, stoning, branding, imprisonment, all with the same effect as being an ape for not being a man. Education is a third answer to the problem of adultery, but Americans are better informed about this matter than any people have ever been, and the sacrament still flourishes. The fourth suggestion is that men and women must be brought to a new stage in living. Mature love is the first mark of a new
level in the development of the race. Jesus Christ is the firstborn of many brethren. He pointed the way to an emotion that acts and reacts personally instead of selfishly. Studies suggest that religious effect does have a definite effect in producing lives disciplined in the direction of this ideal. No one claims that this is easy, or that in a few thousand years of effort, the whole of mankind has risen to the personal level. We do know that for those willing
to try, it is possible and worthwhile. Anyone who has an experience of truly personal love has sensed the destiny of humanity. For such to fall into an unfaithfulness has its parallel in the kiss of Judas. This suggests what is deeply true: the best safeguard of Christian morality is experience of Christian -- of personal love, in all its attractiveness in Jesus Christ. Jesus, whom we come to know as we read the Bible, as we pray,
as we have fellowship with others in the church, is one whose love individualizes. It does not devour life, but leaves it enriched. It does not enslave, but frees. Jesus takes hold of the great, irresistible thrust of your life, moving like Niagara in torrent. He will not say "no" to it, but channels it to its ordinary expression so that it's filled with beauty and satisfaction, and at the same time, He brings it
to bring you and others to light and power. In this development, adultery, the sacrament of selfishness, is left behind, as a worm's preoccupation is forgotten when it becomes a flying thing. Let us pray.
Eternal God, we are very much aware --