Immune to Self-Awareness: Sermon for June 13 by Susan Daughtry

Several years ago, in seminary, a friend of mine said something that I have never forgotten. He said, "Well, Susan, some people really are immune to self-awareness."

Whoever it was we were talking about has been long forgotten, but the phrase is pretty self-explanatory. All of us run into people whose actions run right over other people. There are those who seem uncaring. But just as often, there are those folks who seem to be just completely unaware that their behavior is inappropriate or hurtful or rude. They've gotten into some kind of track of thinking about things, and haven't bothered to pick their head up above ground level to see where they're headed, or who they're running over. And when people live like that long enough, refusing to step back in humility and look at their lives with respect to others, they are, in my friend's words, immune to self-awareness, blessedly able to continue on their path without concern for other people.

And all of us know, too, that there have been moments when we have been that person immune to self awareness. With the mixed blessing of hindsight, surely there is some moment in your past that you can point to and say, "Alas, I was in fact a complete jerk at that time." Just as a sidebar: If you can't remember a time when you were even unintentionally hurtful to someone else, then I wonder if you should really sit and think about what being immune to self-awareness means.

The point being, all of us have these moments. We are creatures with blind spots. Sometimes we willfully choose to ignore our blind spots instead of looking into them, lest we find something uncomfortable.  Sometimes we choose to be blind.

Such is the case in our readings today. [Click here for this week's readings.]

In the Old Testament story about David and Nathan, the background is important. David had seen Bathsheba bathing on the roof of her home. And he wanted her. This is David, the king that God chose for Israel, the king who has been lauded and loved and put on a pedestal, the king whose reign trumps all the others. And this David, this man who loved God and who was supposedly the most righteous of all, he sees Bathsheba and wants her for his own, and plots to kill her husband Uriah by sending him off to die in battle. With Uriah out of the way, he marries Bathsheba. But, according to the story, God sees all this, and sends the prophet Nathan to call David to account. Nathan approaches David by telling him a story about someone else's sin. A rich man, and a poor man, and the poor man's lamb. When David hears that the rich man abused his power to take the poor man's lamb, David says, "This man deserves to die! He will have to repay the poor man four times what he took, because he did this thing and because he had no pity."

So here's David's blind spot. We know that it isn't that David didn't have a moral compass. It isn't that he didn't know wrong from right. It's that he chose not to use that moral compass on himself. He chose to ignore it when it got in between him and what he wanted.

So Nathan says to David, "You are the man!" You are the rich man in the story. God took you from being a lowly shepherd and made you king of Israel, gave you a harem of wives, and power over all this land, and, like the rich man in the story, you use it to kill a man and take his wife. "Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house." What you have done cannot be reversed. There will be consequences and they will be long. And this promise that God will strike down the son born to David and Bathsheba-the son conceived before Uriah had died-this promise is indeed fulfilled in the story. The saga of David is long and theologically, politically, and narratively dense. In the one slice we hear today, the point seems to be this: David chooses to be immune to self-awareness when his morality gets between him and what he wants, and God does indeed call him to account for it.

NPR did a story last week in which they interviewed people on the street about the oil spill in the gulf. And it was almost sort of unfair. Isn't it a travesty, the reporter asked. What do you think? And the blessed people said, "Oh, yes. It is a travesty. Someone should pay for this." And then the reporter turned around and said, "Have you thought about changing the way you use energy? Will you find a way to use less gas?" "Oh, no, I can't do that," said the people. "I need my truck for work. I have to drive a lot out here, it's a rural area." The reporter stopped short of saying what Nathan said to David: You are the man. You are the one who is doing this. We can rail against BP all we want, but know this: we are the ones whose demand for oil caused this spill and the next one. And the consequences of our blindness are real and unavoidable.

David was lucky enough to have someone whose job it was to call him to account. That was the role of the prophets in those days-to bring those in power face to face with their own integrity, or lack thereof. Most of us do not have this. And when we are confronted by someone-a friend, a coworker, a story on NPR, whatever-it's easy to write off their accusations or criticisms. It takes a great deal of courage to look at the parts of our lives that we are not proud of, the parts that belie the values we say we profess. Often we've done such a good job of hiding our failures from ourselves that we literally cannot see them. Thus, "blind spots." It takes a great deal of courage to take an honest look at ourselves and admit to being a mess, rather than keeping up a front of being on top of things all the time.

The Gospel text is an incredibly visual contrast of those two. Jesus is at a dinner party hosted by a Pharisee, whose suspicion has already been palpable. And this woman walks in off the street, lets down her hair, and starts weeping and bathing Jesus' feet with costly perfume and kissing him. And in contrast to her dramatic act of devotion, there is the host of the party, with his arms crossed, who cannot see her as anything other than a sinner, and cannot see the situation as anything other than a scandal. 

She comes to God believing in God's love for her and offering her devotion, despite being a mess. He, the Pharisee, convinced of his own righteousness, can't even offer God a bowl to wash his feet with when he comes to dinner.

Here we are, at dinner with God. That's what we do every Sunday in the Eucharist-we remember that God invites us to his table. We remember that This is God's body; this is God's blood. Including us. Including the physical world we inhabit. The God who made us, and who knows well our blindness and our immunity to self-awareness, loves us beyond belief. And here we are at the table with him.  This God believes wildly in our power to see the course we are on, and to change. This God looks at our lives with absolute honesty and profound love. The God who made us loves us wildly, and wants us to take off our blinders, and have the kind of bold love for ourselves and for this world that would allow us to find another way to live.