It wasn't just about the warm fuzzy feelings that came from the pastoral relationship between shepherds and sheep; in those days your livestock was your wealth and the source of your economic security. Of course, God was the giver of all good things, but the bigger you managed to grow your flocks the more secure you felt, David remembered.

But life wasn't just about accumulating wealth, David knew. Religious law and moral sensibilities demanded a sense of appropriate constraints and a tangible concern for the welfare of others. Stealing someone else's only little lamb when you were in the midst of abundance and wealth struck David as horribly egregious. Weren't you supposed to give to the less fortunate, not take everything from them? David was outraged at the presumption, the lack of moral character, and the misuse of power evident in the rich man in Nathan's story. "The man who has done this deserves to die." David blurted out.

But Nathan's simple story was more than a mini-morality play about agrarian justice. The parable was a mirror. Nathan pointed at David's image reflecting back from the dark depths of the story. "You are the man," Nathan said.

David came face to face with himself. He remembered instructing his commanders to push Uriah, David's faithful commander and Bathsheeba's husband, into the heat of battle and then telling them to abandon Uriah at the front lines. Uriah had been faithful, following David- trusting him with his life- and David had forsaken him. Was this how a good shepherd would have behaved? Was this how a king of Israel should behave? All the wrongs David had done to Uriah on the battlefield and in Bathsheeba's bedroom jumped out of Nathan's story and loomed over David, casting the shadow of death over the house of the King of Israel.

What had gone astray from the time when Samuel the prophet took a horn of oil, and anointed David with the spirit of the Lord, in the presence of David's seven older brothers, and a camp full of sheep?

Power and privilege had given David a lever that magnified the effects of his actions while blinding him to the appropriate limits of personal will and desire. David had the power to do anything he wanted, a lever large enough to move a nation, but he lacked the moral sense to limit the range of actions he might pursue. Perhaps he imagined, as we sometimes do, that strength of his own arm had gotten him the wealth and the power that he wielded. Perhaps David imagined that they were all his personal possessions to use however he pleased rather than items on loan from God who had ideas about how they should be used.

Whatever story David had been telling himself, somehow it came to seem sensible to kill a trusting subordinate through guile in order to cover up an act of adultery so that David could end up possessing this other man's wife. Things were going from bad to worse and they just kept on going until Nathan held up a mirror.

It doesn't matter whether it was King David of Israel centuries before Christ or a people of power and influence in 21st century America who live in Phoenix, Monkton or Sparks. We must each learn to ask not "What do I desire and how can I get it" but "What does God require of me and how can I use what He has given me in order to do it."

But first we have to learn to see straight. We look at the world through lens of power and privilege that condition what we see and how we interpret the view. This too is not a new phenomenon. Simon, the Pharisee, threw a party and invited Jesus. On the surface there seemed to be some level of hospitality and intimacy-Jesus was at Simon's table- but Simon was keeping Jesus at arm's length, and under a microscope, rather than actually embracing him. Simon's thoughts, as we hear them in Luke's gospel, indicate that Simon was sure of his actions and his perceptions- about Jesus, and about the weeping woman at Jesus' feet.

In an ironic statement, we hear Simon mutter to himself "if this man were a prophet he would have known what kind of woman this is who is touching him- that she is a sinner." Jesus was a prophet, and more. Not only did He indeed know the status of the woman, he knew the heart of Simon and the need of each for forgiveness.

Other than Jesus himself there is no person without sin - not in this church, not in the bible, and not in the world. Jesus knows us all as sinners, as sheep that go astray, and as souls longing for salvation. The bridge between sin and salvation is built from absolution. We are stuck on the side of a cliff as long as we insist on fiercely clinging to our perspective rather than reaching out to embrace our neighbors. We remain isolated as long as we imagine that an unbridgeable chasm stretches out between our worth and the value of others. There is no true communion without connection, and connection requires both forgiving others and asking for forgiveness for our own blindness and missteps.

We cannot stand in mid-air and build a bridge solely out of our own efforts anymore than we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Archimedes' statement aside, we cannot move the whole world simply using the long lever of power and privilege we possess. To imagine moving the world as our purview is hubris. It's a small step from there to the plight of David in which a person presses his view so sharply onto others that somebody gets killed. But if we are willing to have Jesus shift our perspective and call us into His work, with God's help we can be of use in expanding God's kingdom.

What would happen to our sense of the world around us- of God and our neighbor- if we closed our eyes behind the lens of power and privilege we wear and listened deeply to the stories of others who see the world through different lens? We might discover some different vistas. We might also discover bridges that we did not know were there, but on which Jesus has been waiting for strangers to meet and to become friends in his name.

Some of your vestry and other leaders began to get a sense of that yesterday. We had lunch with the Rector and lay leaders of St. Mary the Virgin on Walbrook Avenue in the city. They are a predominately African-American congregation. We are almost all white. I imagine that each of us had assumptions about the other people and the other congregation.

But we decided to step onto that bridge that Jesus offers. He stood in the middle and good will came pouring in from either end like flocks from different folds gathering around one shepherd. We have far more in common than any of us might have imagined. We also have differences in perspective that will enrich each other's understanding of God's grace. We have a sense that the Spirit is at work and we are being called into something, together. The next meeting to discern what that might be will be held at St. James as we strive to walk on the paths that Christ has prepared for us to walk in.

It is our hope that we can help each other put on Gospel glasses and learn to see more of what Jesus is trying to show us all about the bridge that can carry us from brokenness to true communion- the absolution that makes people and communities whole- and the levers of His grace that can indeed move the whole world. AMEN