L.D. 41, II Samuel 13:1-22 “Seeing the Image” Scott Hoezee

”Road beef.” If I just mention this phrase, what image does it conjure up in your mind? It sounds suspiciously close to the phrase “road kill,” which is not a very pleasant image. I suppose you might think it refers to a steak you eat at a restaurant while you are on the road for business or something. In any event, I doubt that anyone here this morning would ever want to be referred to as “road beef,” and yet according to baseball star Jose Canseco, exactly this degrading term is applied to women by any number of baseball players in the major leagues. As highlighted in a recent column by Maureen Dowd, Canseco claims that major league ballplayers can be a superstitious lot. So when a player, or a whole team, gets into a slump, it is believed that the losing streak can be snapped if a player has sex with the ugliest girl he can find. The women in question are then referred to as “road beef.”

In a recent book, Canseco mentions a number of his fellow players by name, saying that they regale one another about their “slump buster” bedmates, describing them as fat, ugly, or “the gnarliest chick you can uncover.” Of course, the women themselves are unaware of this. To them, having a relationship with a handsome, famous major league star seems to be the luckiest break they ever had. Of course, it never leads anywhere. The players discard their road beef as soon as they are finished. But think of how these women feel now when they read Canseco’s book and realize how they were regarded by these players even at the very moment they were intimate with them.

Here is a scenario as brutally ugly as it is old. Throughout history sexuality has been abused and misused in a nearly endless variety of ways. But whatever its precise form, the result of misused sexuality is always the same: real people get reduced to impersonal objects that are then tossed aside. Nothing short of heartbreak and desolation typically follow. It happens every day. It happens in every echelon of society and across all age groups. It happens with immature high school boys and girls who now talk about “friends with privileges” to refer to friends with whom you have sexual dalliances. But it happens just as readily among millionaire baseball players. It happens in the penthouses of midtown Manhattan and it happens in Asia where even in the wake of the horrible tsunami, thugs swept up some of that disaster’s orphans to throw them into a thriving sex slave industry.

The specifics are as easy to detail as they are sickening to consider. But the point for now is that the end result is always the same: by abusing one of God’s greatest gifts, we reduce one another to something that is decidedly less than human. The human carnage is all around us, and yet even so the mere suggestion of chastity, of adhering to some form of sexual restraint, is met with incredulity and disbelief by many. People want to maintain the myth of having “sexual freedom” and they will try to defend that freedom at all costs.

But the costs are too high, and this morning’s consideration of the seventh commandment forces us to wonder how and why that is. C.S. Lewis once observed that people often accuse the church of being way too interested in what people do behind the bedroom’s closed door. “Why do religious people talk so much about sex,” people ask. As Lewis replied, it is not the church that is obsessed with sexuality, it’s everybody else! From the looks of every single magazine on display in the supermarket checkout aisle, sex is a predominant feature on the minds of most people as it is. In our cultural milieu, accusing the church of being overly interested in sexuality is a little like accusing a fish of being overly interested in water. This is by no means the only topic we need to address as Christians, but given its prevalence, it is a subject we inevitably must address quite often.

So this morning we will use II Samuel 13 as a reminder of why our human sexuality must be handled with far greater care than some people believe to be true. But we ponder this so that we, too, can be careful in our own lives in all those times when we feel the temptations that come from our way. Because although it is frightfully easy to do what I have already done this morning (namely, point the finger at the excesses of the wider society), we dare never forget that our first task is to keep our own temples of the Holy Spirit pure and holy. We struggle and sometimes fail in this area, too. But that is all-the-more reason to ponder this so that we can help each other be holy as God desires us to be.

The story in II Samuel 13 is a sad and sordid one. It also serves as a near-perfect vignette of the mad irrationality of sexual lust. Frederick Buechner once defined lust as the craving for salt of a man already dying of thirst. And indeed, lust has a way of blinding a person to the obvious in its mad pursuit of something that, as soon as it is captured, will become loathsome. David’s son Amnon develops an obsessive desire for his half-sister Tamar. It literally drives him to distraction. He can’t sleep, he can’t eat. His ache for her becomes physical. It gets so bad that his cousin, Jonabad, notices that something is wrong and so asks what in the world is going on. Once Amnon explains his situation, Jonabad says “No problem” and presents a beguilingly easy way for Amnon to get what he wants. In a series of innocent-looking steps, Jonabad manages to get Tamar into a situation where Amnon can quickly gain the advantage over her. If Tamar suspected something, we are not told, but certainly in the end she knew what was happening and she protested it loudly.

Right in the middle of Amnon’s groping and clawing at her body, Tamar asks the key question: “What about me?” The word “me” is, of course, what grammarians refer to as a personal pronoun. The sofa in your living room can never be referred to in a personal way because it’s a thing not a person. Only a real person with real emotions and a tender heart that can be wounded can be referred to as “I” or “me.” But Amnon was blind to the fact that he was dealing with a real person. Tamar’s personal reference to “me” was lost on him. His lust brought him to the point where he no more expected to hear Tamar refer to herself as “me” than you would expect the hamburger you are about to eat to stop you and say, “Whoa, there, buddy! You’re going to take a bite? What about me!?”

Amnon rapes Tamar because to his fetid and fevered mind there was only one person in the room to begin with and that was good old Amnon himself. When it was all over, Amnon resisted despising himself for what he had done. So he takes all the loathing that he should have heaped onto himself and conveniently transfers it to innocent Tamar. She has now become a reminder to Amnon of the worst part of himself, and so he exiles her. Verse 1 of this chapter indicated that Amnon had fallen “in love” with Tamar, and no doubt he let himself believe that was true. Certainly it is what he said to Jonabad. Of course, when you genuinely are in love with another person, there is also an erotic desire that results from that. But that is only because genuine love for the heart and soul of the other person is already there. The falsity of Amnon’s supposed “love” for Tamar is revealed instantly in the fact that he knew nothing about Tamar except that she was attractive in a physical way. He never loved her. He never knew her. He just wanted something from her. And he took it.

The scary part is that Amnon didn’t realize this. Unchecked sexual desire can make a person believe almost anything. That fact alone should be enough to prompt us to exercise great ethical caution when it comes to sexual matters. The possibility for self-deception is as high here as anywhere else in life—it may, in fact, be higher than in most parts of life. But more on that in a moment. First I want to highlight two other parts of this chapter.

One sad item to note is Tamar’s comment in verse 13 that King David would give Tamar to Amnon if Amnon asked. That may or may not have been true. Certainly it would have been an ethically dicey thing for David to approve. But perhaps the reason Tamar thought that was because, as the previous two chapters showed, David had just met his own sexual Waterloo: the affair with Bathsheba, David’s subsequent murder of Bathsheba’s husband, and the prophet Nathan’s confrontation with David. David set his whole family on a course of disaster. Maybe even Amnon and Jonabad quietly assumed that if the old man could do it, why couldn’t they? Nathan predicted that David would suffer great horrors in his wider family as a result. And indeed, he would lose two sons, both Amnon and Absalom, even as Tamar herself became an isolated and despairing figure.

II Samuel 13's reminder of what resulted from David’s sexual sin is the Bible’s way of reminding us that even though our desire for sex can make us utterly selfish and self-centered, in the end we always hurt so very many others. Currently on TV there is an ad slogan that says something to the effect, “Every guy knows that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” But it’s a vital lie. There are always more people involved in how we conduct ourselves sexually. And those other people are always the first to get hurt.

Hence we note Tamar’s fate: ultimately Amnon succeeds in literally throwing her out. He then tells the servant to bolt the door shut behind her. And that image of Amnon on one side of a locked door and Tamar weeping on the other side is as perfect a picture as the Bible presents as to what happens whenever God’s great gift of sexuality is abused. The very act that is meant to draw people together and then bind them together in gossamer bonds of affection ends up ripping people apart and then building a wall between them.

Of course, I am aware, as are most of you, that lots of people in this world have so jaded themselves sexually that they do manage to have multiple casual encounters in ways that somehow do not immediately or palpably ruin their lives. It’s difficult for many of us to wrap our minds around that. But the fact that some manage to live this way does not justify it. Lots of people have no difficulty living with themselves despite dumping huge amount of toxic waste into streams and riverbeds, causing sickness and cancer all down the food chain. I don’t know how those people can live with themselves, either. But the fact that it doesn’t bother them doesn’t mean that wanton polluting of the environment is a legitimate lifestyle choice. Some things are wrong whether it bothers someone or not.

But when it comes to sexual ethics, we need always to emphasize why we as followers of Jesus Christ talk about this at all. Contrary to any number of pop misconceptions that we are being up-tight Puritans who are ever and only out to spoil other people’s fun, the key item for us to make clear is that it is precisely our love for one another that drives our concerns for sexual ethics. Despite multiple, ongoing attempts for years to undercut this idea, the Hugh Heffners of this world have not succeeded in making anyone believe that sex is finally no big deal that comes with no inherent risks. Society is now chock-full of Tamars, of women who have been exploited and are left desolate as a result. Jose Canseco’s brusque terminology of “road beef” properly offends even the most secular of people, but when you get right down to it, that brutal term is just one example among many of the ways by which especially women are now reduced to something impersonal.

Our Creator God gave us nothing short of his very image. Our ability to relate to and love another human being—including in the sexual dimension of love—is meant to mirror the kind of loving unity that God himself preeminently displays in the holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is precisely our fierce, ardent, loving desire to see one another as precious people bearing the divine stamp that leads us to remind each other that any form of sexuality that obscures the precious nature of another human being is an abuse of sex. Any practice or relationship that focuses ever and only on your pleasure irrespective of the feelings or personality of the other person is going to lead you, sooner or later, to hurt that other person in ways from which he or she may never recover.

That is why we have always said that sexuality is a gift for a husband and wife to enjoy and explore together. These days some see that as very backward thinking. But if you define sexuality as being first and foremost a loving way to affirm and build up another person, then it makes complete sense to say that a committed relationship is the context in which this explosively powerful gift belongs. Again, however, what motivates us to talk about this is our desire to see every person affirmed and loved, and nowhere can that better happen than within the context of a lifelong, committed marriage relationship—a relationship where promises to nurture each have already been made up front.

We Christians often talk about the need to be “Christ-like.” Probably, though, we don’t often think that we can be Christ-like when being actively sexual. We tend to restrict “Christ-like” activities to public acts of compassion or to how we conduct ourselves at work. Maybe we even get a little embarrassed to think that there is a way to be Christ-like even when making love. But listen: we are always Christ-like when we think of other people first, when we reach out to them in love because we see God’s own image in them. If we cannot see each other through those eyes even when we are naked and amorous, then even as married persons, we have let our sexuality become more secularized than we realized.

Augustine was not often wrong in his theology—most of his thinking passed on to become the spine of all Christian theology ever since. But Augustine was profoundly wrong when he once suggested that the Holy Spirit leaves the room when a man and woman make love. Not only are we not evacuated of the Spirit’s presence when as husband and wife we exercise our sexuality, we should if anything realize that in just that setting, if we cannot look upon each other with the eyes of Jesus, then we risk forgetting the one thing we must never forget: namely, the image of God resides at the core of every human being that exists. In all that we do, including our sexuality, we either honor that divine image or we abuse it; we either see that divine image or we let it get fogged over by our selfishness.

 Occasionally you may hear someone claim that Jesus never had much to say about sexuality. Some who point that out do so in order to claim that since Jesus wasn’t too worried about such things, neither should we be today. And I suppose that if your definition of sexuality is limited to a physical act done by consenting adults, then Jesus’ relative silence on the matter might seem relevant. But the point of this sermon is that sexuality begins with seeing each other as precious in God’s sight and so precious to one another. There was never a moment when our Lord forgot that. His tender, gracious compassion reached out in love to every person he met. He was the most unselfish person who ever lived.

If we make Jesus’ attitude the basis of our relationships, then we won’t get hung up on whether or not Jesus talked directly about sexuality very often. Because then we will realize that actually, every single thing Jesus ever said and did already tells us all that we need to know. We were created to nurture each other in self-giving, self-forgetting love. If that kind of love sets the tone, we may well find that most of the questions we’ve ever had about sexuality have already been answered. Amen.