July 14, 2024 - The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning again, Epiphany. I must admit that I had a different sermon ready for today when I sat down to dinner last night with my parents, my brother, and Abbey and the girls. In the middle of our meal, a friend sent me a text with just a photo of the former President of the United States, fist in the air and what looked like blood on his face, and I didn’t believe it was real at first... and then he sent another text, one with the news video of Donald Trump apparently being shot in the ear at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Details are still coming in even this morning, but I knew right away that my sermon for this morning had to change.
Tragically, there have been many TV moments in my 40 years that stand out as pretty memorable. I remember running to my high school Spanish classroom to watch the second plane hit the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. I remember a few years later watching bombs fall on civilian buildings in Baghdad in America’s response, alongside several political science majors in our college dorm, some of whom were cheering. More recently, I remember where I was when I watched coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting, and the Las Vegas concert shooting, and the Uvalde school shooting... and then I vividly remember watching the insurrection at the Capitol Building on Epiphany 2020.
Now, I don’t know if last night’s possible assassination attempt was another event to add to that memorable list just yet, but it feels like it might be. See, all of those events I just listed revolve around acts of extreme violence, of which there are far more memorable examples than I could begin to list in one sermon... maybe a few more come to mind for you. The last few decades have been punctuated by violence of all types, and as I have said in several of my sermons here already, we live in dangerous and frightening times for many, many people. And as I’ve also said, it is our job as the church to figure out how to live amid those times as Christ would have us live.
Ironically, I told Pat Housekeeper just this week in our Wednesday healing service that our gospel story from Mark was difficult for me to grapple with; I have so little personal experience with gruesome violence or blood or gore... John the Baptist, a political prisoner at this point in Jesus’s story, is beheaded in our reading and his head is served on a dinner platter! Pat pointed out that violence is tragically common in places like modern-day Gaza, in war zones, but I could not even begin to fathom a human head bleeding on a platter at a party. It’s too much. It’s awful.
See, my daily concerns revolve around health insurance, kid bedtimes, and cardboard disposal... I am about as insulated as I can get from gruesome, political death. And this beheading is an especially revolting image. It forced me to keep the gospel at a distance for most of this week... No thanks, I wanted no part of it, there was nothing for me here right now.
And so, I have, back on my computer, what I think is a really good sermon on 2 Samuel 6: King David dancing with joy before the Lord, full of overflowing love, unable to restrain himself, getting undignified, even though others judge him for it.... Maybe you’ll hear that sermon the next time the lectionary comes around, which I think is in three years. Because today, as it turns out, we sadly do have to talk about violence.
The story here in Mark 6 follows the story we discussed last Sunday, where Jesus visits his hometown, receives no honor, and then leaves, amazed at their lack of faith. I preached that Jesus could have forced his way in Nazareth... he could have made people believe through godly, powerful acts. But the way of God is not of force but of invitation, and invitations by their very nature can be rejected. Jesus invites, is rejected, and then leaves, and then he tells the disciples to do likewise, establishing his formal ministry.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Mark drops the story of John the Baptist being beheaded. We haven’t heard anything about John since the very first chapter of Mark’s gospel, where he baptizes Jesus and then is arrested by verse 14.... but now, in chapter 6, Mark gives us a flashback, because Herod is concerned that this Jesus guy, growing in popularity, might be John “raised from the dead.” Perhaps realizing he had not told the story yet, Mark then tells us how John died, and it’s violent.
There’s a framing here that I think accomplishes a few things for Mark. There’s some clear foreshadowing: like John, Jesus will himself die a violent death at the hand of the empire. There’s some suggestion in the text that being raised from the dead is not beyond the realm of possibility too: Herod thinks John has been raised, and as we know, Jesus would be. I think too that Mark is telling this story in this place to signify that the torch has been passed: John the Baptist was doing good work spreading the good news, and now that we know John’s story has come to an end, it’s Jesus’s turn to step fully into the spotlight.
But this sort of literary framing aside, it’s this odd, violent story itself, of Herod and Herodias and their daughter, apparently also named Herodias, that I think speaks to us amid our own violent story. There is clearly some name confusion in this passage, so let me try to outline it before I get to the message here. You may be familiar with “King Herod the Great,” from the Christmas stories, the one who talked to the wise men and tried to have baby Jesus killed... he killed an unbelievable number of babies in doing so. That’s also a terrible, violent story about power... but this is a different Herod... this is his son, Herod Antipas. This Herod was also ruling over Galilee, and he wanted to marry his brother’s wife, named Herodias, and John the Baptist publicly objected to that and was arrested for it. Then, translators differ on this, dancing for Herod at this birthday party is Herodias’s daughter, most often known as Salome, but in our NRSV it’s now translated as “his daughter Herodias” ... yes, it’s all a mess. Let’s get to the point.
At this party, Herod the ruler of Galilee, the holder of power, offers his dancing daughter a gift, “Ask me whatever you wish, and I will give it... even half of my kingdom.” This is an incredible offer. And yet, instead of that generous gift made available, the vengeance of the mother blinds her and pushes her to choose violence. Upset that she had been publicly shamed and reprimanded, she chooses to have her imprisoned enemy killed, and brutally. She could have had nearly anything, and she chose the head of John the Baptist on a platter. And Herod, afraid of appearing weak at court, uses his power and takes John’s life. Knowing it was wrong to do so, he kills a righteous and holy man.
The message here for us could be a little clearer, I’ll admit, and the names certainly don’t help. But I think on the day after another nationally-televised tragedy, on a day when calloused and hateful jokes will be made about the shooter’s poor aim, on a day when it feels like our world is broken and is likely going to get worse in the near future before it gets any better, we have to recognize that there is a better way than the way of violence and hate.
It is the way of understanding, forgiveness, giving, self-forgetting, and love.
You see Jesus is offering us all so much, the very Kingdom of God is available to all of us, his way is available, and yet we all often choose our own way, the one we see modeled everywhere throughout the empire, one where we are sure we are the ones who know what is right, and then sometimes we strive to take power into our own hands to enforce it, to make it possible. We too often fail to pray St. Francis's Prayer of Peace with which we started the service, instead saying “Where there is hatred, let me hate those who hate!” “Where there is discord, let me prove you wrong!” “Where there is war, let me win that war.” This sermon and this passage are clearly about how wrong we are to choose the way of violence, but I think this applies to all the choices we make too.
I ask you today, as I admittedly asked you last week, to simply choose a different way, to choose the Kingdom offered to you by a loving God who came and died and longs to set us free from the way of violence, sin, and death.
The church in America has a crappy track record of choosing and modeling that different way, and we would all be a lot better off if Sunday Schools and formation classes and sermons across the country focused on how to live that different way more often.
But let this start here with us today, and with you, from brunch onward. Seek ye first the kingdom of God, not the way of violence, sin, and death, in all that you do.
To his continued credit, our presiding bishop Michael Curry posted last night on social media about this latest act of violence. He wrote, "The way of love—not the way of violence—is the way we bind up our nation’s wounds. We decry political violence in any form, and our call as followers of Jesus of Nazareth is always to love.”
Will you choose the way of love this week?
Comments