Sermons for the Month

The Perfect Man/Woman (Part Two)
DATE: August 6, 2000
SERVICE: Pentecost VIII
TEXT: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a
“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
[NOTE: Using last week's material, review, if necessary, the background information concerning HBO's Golden Globe award-winning series Sex and the City.]
Previously on Sex and the City ...

Carrie discovers that her ex is engaged to a 26-year-old named Natasha, Miranda reconciles with Steve, and Samantha encounters a man with too much to offer. Before that, we met the alcoholic boyfriend, the mean boyfriend, the rich-but-old-enough-to-be-your-grandfather boyfriend and the secretly married boyfriend.
HBO's television comedy Sex and the City asks the ubiquitous question, universally pondered by single women the world over: Is the perfect man out there? The answers range from the bitter to the profane to the roundabout but humorous.

Question: The perfect man, the perfect woman, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus are all in a car accident. Who survives?
Answer: The perfect woman. The other three don't exist.
Perfection is fiction. As the fictional characters of Sex and the City continue their quest for the perfect man, the writers of Sex and the City have created a Web site for real, live people to explore their own romantic desires.
Called "Build the Perfect Man," surfers can create their fantasy partners so that the search for the perfect man no longer subjects the huntress to humiliating blind dates and excruciating first conversations in loud pubs. Instead, the hunt for Leonardo DeCaprio evolves into an activity much like the hunt for the perfect shoes. Of course, this is fantasy, and while you can actually shop for shoes, cars and jewelry, shopping for a human being who will be your soul mate and eternal love interest usually doesn't work this way.
Nevertheless, writer Katy McLaughlin ruminates: "If only finding a man could be more like shopping. Shopping is fun. Shopping is there for you. Shopping isn't afraid to commit - in fact, there's a no-return policy in most Manhattan stores."
A quick cruise of similar Web sites supports the notion that the perfect man remains elusive but desperately desired. According to iVillage, billed as the Web site by women and for women, Mr. Perfect's top 10 qualities are: honesty, kindness, sense of humor, thoughtfulness, sensitivity, passion, ambition, good looks, a feminine side and financial stability.
Let's make sure we understand. The perfect man oozes manliness while embracing his soft side. He's athletic and trim, but appreciates women who aren't. He adores your mother. He finds all your little quirks adorable.
Where is this embodiment of fantasy? Where is this Pillar of Perfection? Listen v-e-r-y carefully. Fact is, the perfect person exists only in our dreams.
That's the conventional wisdom.
David, however, defies conventional wisdom.
Granted, it doesn't look good for David. Previously, on The Adventures of David ... In our last episode, King David spied the lovely, naked Bathsheba taking a bath and decided to invite her up to the palace for a dangerous liaison, although she was married to the noble soldier, Uriah. This is not a grasping Bathsheba-cum-Mae West attempting to climb the social ladder wrong by wrong. She was summoned by the king, and "taken" by the king.
When it was discovered shortly thereafter that Bathsheba was with child - and there was no way Uriah could be the father - David plotted to have Uriah killed in battle. Uriah died, and we now pick up the story with a grieving Bathsheba who quickly becomes the latest in a succession of royal wives.
To put it the way girls in my Confirmation class might, David was a hunk. When we first meet young David in the Bible he is described as "ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome" (1 Samuel 16:12). Men and women alike could not keep their eyes off him. He charmed the king. He charmed the king's son. He even charmed the king's servants as they drooled over the way he strummed the lyre. Women shook at the mere mention of his name. He was a patriot. He exuded testosterone. He slew a giant. What more can we say?
Yet, he handled himself with grace. He wrote poetry and sang songs. He spoke with an aura of authority. To the world, David seemed to be the perfect man. And there's evidence that he both read and reveled in his own reviews.
Until he met up with Nathan, the prophet charged with the task of holding him accountable. Nathan threw together an ancient form of intervention. With a parable and a pointed finger, Nathan cashed David's reality check: David was quite far from being the perfect man. In truth, he was the selfish man. The greedy man. The scandalous man. The man who deserved death.
"You are the man!" Nathan thundered. He didn't mean, "You da man!" He meant, "You - are - the - man!" Mr. Perfect was a sexual predator - a sinister, murdering, ungrateful major disgrace. Even if all the world admired him still, the God who gave him his life knew the bitter truth. David was utterly tainted. And the penalties against him would be severe.
His child with Bathsheba would die. David's family life would look like an episode of Sex and the City gone mad: rebellious children, a daughter raped by her brother and sons attempting to overthrow their father.
At this point, however, we are able to get the true measure of the man. In the thick of this immoral mess, David begins to pick up the pieces. First, he acknowledged his sin. Then he confessed it. Then he accepted the consequences.
One might protest that all this talk about perfection is slightly disingenuous. No one is or can be perfect. Only one person was perfect, and that was Jesus Christ.
Granted. Yet Jesus himself said that we are to "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). Perfection is a valid topic for discussion. If human beings are capable of perfection, David is someone who, in his darkest hour, found it.
Clearly, moral perfection in an absolute sense is not possible for mortals such as David and ourselves. But Scripture provides a clue for Jesus' puzzling statement. Follow the argument with me: The word Jesus used (teleios), suggests reaching an end or design. In other words: Completion. Maturity. A word with a similar meaning appears in Matthew 4:21 where the disciples are mending (katartizo) their nets. The disciples have fishing nets which are so torn and ripped, they can no longer function as they were intended or designed to function.
"I always joked that it was time to stop playing when I had to be helped off the field," says four-time All Pro Chris Spielman, 34. The time came last August, when the Cleveland Browns linebacker found himself briefly but agonizingly paralyzed after a jarring collision with Chicago's Casey Wiegmann. The Massillon, Ohio, native and 10-year NFL veteran has dangerously compressed spinal disks, and doctors warned him that any further injury to them could mean permanent paralysis. "I couldn't take the risk," he says. Neither could his family. Stefanie, 32, his wife of 10 years, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and their daughter Maddie, 5, and son Noah, 3, had come to depend on Dad during their mother's illness. "Maddie said, 'I don't want Daddy to be in a wheelchair - he won't be able to go swimming with me,'" Spielman recalls. "It was a no-brainer. The stakes were too high." Spielman's decision was applauded both on and off the field ....
Oprah Winfrey nabbed him for her show last October, telling him that his devotion to family was "true inspiration. You are what a real man is."
The meaning is clear: God has a creative intention for us, and to the extent that we live in harmony with that intention, we can be the Perfect Man or the Perfect Person God desires us to be. But let's not call it perfection; let's call it maturity (Ephesians 4:13). Paradoxically, spiritual maturity is something at which we cannot arrive without God's help. We move into maturity as we respond in harmony with God's intention - will - for every situation of our lives.
David's life was ripped and torn to shreds. Only in his confession, repentance and acceptance of responsibility was he able to experience a shape-shifting moment that moved him back into the creative orbit of godly intention. It takes maturity to acknowledge the truth about our lives, to confess our sins, to turn from that sin and live as God created us to live.
When Nathan said, "You are the man," David was looking at either a Maalox moment or a mature moment. Regrettably, David's wake-up call didn't come without crisis intervention. And it is helpful to remember that had he been obedient to the will of God on the rooftop, he wouldn't have been disobedient in the bedroom. To be a spiritually mature man or woman, one needs God; without God we will continue to act in our own interests, that is, to be nothing more than human.
There is an old German proverb that goes, "I grow too soon old, and too late smart." To his credit, in the end, David behaved like a man of God; too bad that in the beginning he behaved like a man without God.
AMEN