But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord. 2 Samuel 11:27b

The thing that David had done? What thing?

Sometimes I get really frustrated with our lectionary. (For those of you who are struggling to master Episco-speak, that’s the book that tells us which chunks of Scripture to read in church on a particular Sunday.) A lot of people don’t realize that the lectionary sometimes leaves stuff out. Look at this Sunday’s Old Testament reading, for example: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15. What happened to verses 11 and 12? I’ll let you read them and decide for yourself why the lectionary crafters might have edited these out of our Sunday worship. Of more concern is that, in this case, the lectionary leaves out the beginning and middle of the story.

The verses prescribed by our lectionary make only one definite reference to “the thing that David had done.” You have to back up to 2 Samuel 11:1 to really appreciate that David had arranged for the death of his soldier Uriah by placing him at the front of a battle and ordering that the other soldiers leave him exposed. Now that’s bad enough, but his motive makes it worse. David wanted Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, for his own, and he’d already gotten her pregnant—a fact that Uriah would soon discover. Wow! Aside from sounding like a Hollywood screenplay, that sheds a different light on things, doesn’t it? The righteous king, with whom God has made a covenant, has in one precipitous and cruel act broken a heaping handful of commandments—and not just those pesky dietary laws. He was probably keeping Kosher when he ordered Uriah’s death. We’re talking about a goodly number of the big 10! Suddenly the story: a) makes sense, and b) becomes a lot more complicated.

Another place where our lectionary consistently edits out the dark side is in the psalms. Whenever you see a gap in the verse numbers for the psalm listed in the lectionary, I encourage you to crack open the hard copy and read the whole thing. You’ll find the full range of human emotions in the psalms: praise, agony, anger, revenge, hope, and that feeling you get when God’s grace and power simply and suddenly overwhelms you. No matter how you feel in a given moment, the psalms will assure you that someone else has felt that way, too. They’ll encourage you that it’s OK, even right and beautiful, to offer our whole selves—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to God.

The point of my little rant is not to suggest we bag the lectionary. It has the wonderful effect of ensuring that many parts of the Church around the world are encountering the same piece of the Story at the same time. There’s something lovely and powerful in that. However, I am pointing to the responsibility we have to engage Scripture on its own terms. Because it’s there, in the whole Story of God and His people, that we find ourselves.

I encourage you to resist the urge to sanitize Scripture. Read the parts that make you uncomfortable. In the Episcopal Church, we often teach that Scripture is a living Story, one that was created out of oral history by many hands, edited and re-edited, and one that continues to yield new revelation as we interact with it in our own time and place. This non-literalist approach doesn’t mean that Scripture isn’t sacred. In fact, for me, it’s the opposite. The reality that so many voices managed to gather the whole range of human experience and put it in context with God’s relationship to His people, and that the Story they tell remains relevant 2000 and more years later—that is sacred. So when we ignore parts of Scripture because they seem too dark or scary, we’re ignoring aspects of the Sacred.

To edit out the uncomfortable parts of Scripture is to be dishonest about who we are and who God is. It leads us to deny the darker side of ourselves—the potential we all have to be David at his worst. In fact, the “scary” parts of Scripture give us a place to stand when we discover the whole range of human behavior and emotion in ourselves. If we don’t engage the whole picture, we might start feeling like God’s Story isn’t for schmucks like us because we don’t see ourselves in the Story.

The Story is for all of us. The Story is for those people we label as “them.” Don’t settle for an abridged version doled out in palatable doses on Sundays. Read it, mark it, learn it, inwardly digest it. For it is this Story—this kaleidoscope of dark and light—that reminds us of who (and Whose) we are.

Check out these resources for online bible study @ http://www.episcopalchurch.org/107902_116094_ENG_HTM.htm