2 Samuel 18:5-33
It is a story I have told many times. The locals were delighted to see us as we boarded the ferry. We would be sailing east on the Rio Escondido on our way from Managua to Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast. So delighted were they, that they rearranged themselves, their goods and their livestock, to make room for us on the bow of the boat, where we would have the best view. Or so we thought.
Sure, there was a machine gun nest on the roof, but there were armed soldiers everywhere we went in Central America in the 1980’s, more in Tegucigalpa than in Managua, but what is one more or one less M-16 or Ak-47 in that context?
It was only about an hour into our journey that our guide explained the source of the local’s enthusiasm. It seems the Contras, U.S. funded terrorists, sometimes attacked the ferry. But they were terrified that they might accidentally kill an American, so if they saw people who were very clearly “gringos” on the boat, they would not attack. In fact, at that point only one American had been wounded in an attack on the ferry, an African-American activist who was indistinguishable from the Black population on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.
We’d had to get to Nicaragua in a roundabout way, as it was under U.S. embargo. Reagan was still in office, and since America doesn’t do nuance, the socialist government in Nicaragua was communist, which of course became our self-fulfilling prophecy as we pushed the socialist government of Nicaragua into the arms of real communists like Cuba and the Soviet Union.
I’d followed events in Nicaragua since my childhood, being that nerdy kid who read the newspaper and watched the evening news when I was home. I knew about the 1972 earthquake and the death of baseball superstar Roberto Clemente as he was flying in with relief supplies. I knew about the revolution that overthrew the brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, and the efforts the Carter Administration made to support the new regime. I knew that the moment he took office, Ronald Reagan had not only reversed that policy, but had started an illegal proxy war against Nicaragua, the reason there was a machine gun nest on the roof of the ferry, the reason we were invited to the front of the boat.
The Sandinistas, the revolutionaries who liberated Nicaragua, were the good guys. During their first years in office they achieved remarkable things, like increasing literacy by around 60%, and lifting many out of poverty. They’d won an overwhelming victory in a fair election once they had stabilized the country, not that Ronald Reagan cared.
The leader of the Sandinistas, president of Nicaragua, who I was privileged to see while I was in country, was Daniel Ortega. The president of Nicaragua is Daniel Ortega. And there lies the problem.
Last week, we read the counter narrative to the Davidic Covenant. That covenant, part of royalist propaganda, claimed that just as God had chosen one tribe out of all the world’s tribes, so had God chosen one house out of all of the Israelite households, promising that a member of the House of David would sit on the throne forever. Christians seized on this idea, imagining Jesus as natural-born heir to the Davidic promise, his reign eternal as the resurrected Christ. Never mind small details like Joseph not actually being his father, at least according to the credal traditions.
Christianity conveniently ignored other divine promises, like the one we heard last week, when the prophet Nathan confronts David over the murder of Uriah, when God declares through the prophet that “the sword shall never leave your house.”
In today’s reading, we see that sword in action. David, who took power after leading a coup d’etat, was a despicable man. Now, he is a decrepit despicable old man on the throne, more the Shakespearean Lear than courageous King Henry, facing a rebellion by his own son, Absalom.
The conflict began when David oldest son, Amnon, raped his half sister Tamar. David failed to act, so after a period of time, Amnon’s half-brother, Absalom, took deadly revenge, then fled the country. Intrigue follows, then reconciliation, then rebellion. Just as David led a coup d’etat against Saul, so Absalom attempted to oust his own father. Absalom appears to be winning until the tragic events we read this morning. Earlier in the text, we learned that Absalom had glorious hair. It would be his undoing.
Though the text we have received is filtered through the lens of royal propaganda, throughout the rebellion, David looks exactly like what he is, a weak and corrupt autocrat holding on to power he should have ceded long ago, just like Daniel Ortega.
People do not always know when they should let go and step off of the stage. Sometimes they finally figure it out, even if it takes an entire nation to push them, through public statement or mass protests, in the District of Columbia and in Dhaka.
Now, there are all sorts of reasons people cling to power, or seek to return to power, from fear of the gallows or an orange jumpsuit, to simply wanting the lifestyle and sycophants that come with autocracy.
Far too many come to believe their own propaganda, that they alone can make Russia or America or Venezuela great again, that only they can protect the people from “the other,” whether that other is immigrants or queers or the opposition party.
“Only I can” is an iteration of the messiah complex, historically seen also in the way European cultures interacted with others during the most toxic phase of settler-colonialism, the great white savior bringing civilization by destroying civilizations, bringing salvation by converting others to a religion that claimed to be the only true religion, shipping kids off to boarding schools to strip them of their culture.
And lest you should think this is all in the past, incidents like children, almost always non-white, getting suspended or expelled for their hair is just one more iteration of this long-running effort to force others into a box defined by Europeans and their descendants, enlightenment in this case really meaning “en-whiten-ment.”
Humility is not only biblical. It is the only sensible response to the fact of our mortality. Everyone who, like Percy Shelley’s King of Kings, Ozymandias, declares their might, ends up broken on the desert sand. Even if humankind were the pinnacle and purpose of creation, and we certainly are not, the reality is that our individual lives are a flicker against the flow of time, and even this amazing planet will one day be gone, as our particular star continues along its natural evolution. The iris blooms, beautiful and miraculous, and then is gone, having stunningly fulfilled its purpose.
It may be unfair to think of this clinging to power as pride. There are a lot of shades of gray in human motivation, and pride feels blatantly sinful, so I’m not willing to attach that term to people who genuinely if misguidedly believe they are doing what they are doing out of selfless service. But there is certainly an exaggerated sense of self-importance, or more accurately, a failure to see, nurture, and call out the capabilities of others.
It is hard to make a graceful exit, so hard that until recently one of our only examples in politics was George Washington, who, having refused a crown, also refused to run for a third term.
We see it in athletes all the time, and I’m not just talking about the second-hand quarterbacks the Jets tend to sign. Elbie Fletcher’s first season with the Boston Braves was Babe Ruth’s last before he retired. Fletcher said of the “Bambino,” “he was forty years old. He couldn’t run, he could hardly bend down for a ball, and of course he couldn’t hit the way he used to. One of the saddest things of all is when an athlete begins to lose it … and to see it happening to Babe Ruth, to see Babe Ruth struggling on a ball field, well, then you realize we’re all mortal and nothing lasts forever.”
We do not serve our cause when we hold spots that should go to the next generation, assuming there is a next generation coming along. That isn’t always the case, not for the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes Lodge Number 26 or the ordained ministry, but that in and of itself reflects leadership that has become stale, lost the vision, failed to adapt to the changing needs of a changing world, an age of discontinuous change, which sometimes requires discontinuous leadership.
Even the most conservative Christian should remember that in their orthodoxy, there is only one savior, and it ain’t Joel Osteen or Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. In fact, even the idea of sole leadership, the cult of personality, is toxic, cowardly David on his throne.
The skills needed from today’s leaders vary, and the greatest leader is not so much leader as she or he is what Alan J. Roxburgh calls “synergists” in his book “The Sky Is Falling !?!: Leaders Lost in Transition.” He also uses traditional language like Abbot/Abbess. He goes on to say, “Synergistic leaders call forth a community of leaders of all types – pastor, apostle, teacher, prophet, poet, etc. – who, together, cultivate environments that nurture missional life. Such a leadership order can become a communitas out of which new forms of missional life might emerge.”
Early Christianity was not so much organized around worship, though the communal meal was central to the community. It was primarily constructed as schools of discipleship. We must reclaim that tradition, turning our life together into schools not only of discipleship, but of effective leadership and activism, so that when the day comes, we can let go, in faith and in humility, so the powerful play can go on long after we have contributed our verse. Amen.