Proper 10B, July 15, 2012
Ephesians 1:3-14 [God] set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time.
Mark 6:14-29 What should I ask for?
O God of our dreaming, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
The summer lectionary has handed us some truly terrible readings for us this morning. First, the story of how the ark of the covenant came to reside in Jerusalem, which is not a nice story. Although the lectionary calls for the most troubling parts of the story to be removed, I elected to leave them in rather than to tell you about them. Then we have the story of the beheading of John the Baptist with a passage from Ephesians in the middle insisting that somehow everything is going to be alright.
It seems to me that scenes like the one from Samuel or the one from the Gospel of Mark are harder to relate to than your average Bible story for polite folks in an Episcopal Church on a midsummer day. What might they have to say to us? I mean, I’d be very surprised if, when Susanne read the Gospel just now, any of you thought to yourself, “oh yeah, that reminds me of a dinner party I went to one time when a guy got beheaded.”
I’m not going to focus on the story from 2 Samuel, but I do want to point out something about the complexity and moral ambiguity about the way David is described here. What David was doing while overseeing a pious procession of the ark is here rendered dancing, but it’s not the usual word to describe joyous, playful movement. It’s a word that means “make sport, jest, mockery.” It’s a vulgar, in-your-face kind of victory dance in which David was lewdly exposing himself “in the sight of the slavegirls of his subjects like one of the riffraff” (which is how the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible, translates the Hebrew in verse 20). No wonder Saul’s daughter, Michal despised David in her heart. It’s a reminder of the very thin line between participating in the Glory of God and the self-congratulatory disregard for the dignity of every human being when one believes God to be exclusively on one’s own side in a contest.
In contrast, the dancing in the Gospel story is just dancing. Perhaps that’s hard to believe because of the way this scene has been depicted in the arts, but the Greek word for dance, just means dance. The same word is in Aesop’s fables referring to “children at play.” And the Greek word describing Herodias’ daughter is “little girl” – the same word used for Jairus’ daughter. There is no sexual innuendo in the Biblical accounts of Mark (or Matthew… Luke and John do not tell this story). According to writer Lizz Curtis Higgs in her book with the fantastic title, Really Bad Girls of the Bible, “using solely the New Testament accounts, we’ll need to eliminate the heavy cosmetics, the skimpy costume, the seven disposable veils, the sultry music, and the suggestive undertones…despite what some commentators insist, “to dance” is not synonymous with “to sin.”[1] There’s plenty of sin in this story, but don’t blame the little girl for any of it.
This Gospel story is about John, surely a man of God, being beheaded because of a birthday bash gone terribly wrong. It’s a story within a story of the spreading reputation of Jesus’ power to heal and cast out demons through his disciples who had been sent out two by two all over the countryside without spending money or a change of clothes. When the word of healing and liberation got to guilty Herod Antipas, the story goes, he thought, “It’s John the Baptist come back to haunt me.”
This interruption is a literary flourish of Mark’s – both flashback and foreshadowing. Herod is flashing back to his decision to have John the Baptist killed and foreshadowing Pilate’s decision to have Jesus of Nazareth killed. Mark’s community would also be thinking of brave Queen Esther who saved her people when asked by King Xerxes what he could give her up to and including half of his kingdom. The parallels between Babylon and Rome couldn’t be clearer. Tragically, Herodias was no Esther.
The scene of Herod’s party has many elements found in the scene at the end of Gospel with Pilate and the crowd. Herod and Pilate both want to please their people, against their own better judgments, according to Mark. In Herod’s case, it’s the angry wife’s fault; it’s the little girl’s fault for dancing so well. In Pilate’s case, it’s the religious leaders’ fault; it’s the crowd’s fault for choosing to let another prisoner go free. In both cases, these two powerful men make deadly decisions to save their own faces, to appease their communities and to purchase tranquility, however temporary.[2] John the Baptist and Jesus were perceived as threats. They were challenging the authority of the state by stirring up health and freedom so they were arrested.
You know, I like to wonder with you in my preaching about what a particular story is doing in scripture and I’m always wondering what a particular story might be doing in us. How is this story teaching us, exposing us, changing us? What might this story being doing in us? Because I do think that this story is in us. I see it more easily when I look at this story of Herod and Herodias, and Herodias’ daughter and John the Baptist, the way one might look at a dream. What if you dreamt this story and were telling the dream? (For one thing, the fuzzy details and the things that don’t quite make sense don’t matter so much in a dream.) How might we interpret the dream using the Jungian method of identifying a part of yourself or myself in every character or situation?
Most of us can rest easy knowing that we’ve never sentenced anyone to death, or asked for anyone’s head on a platter, at least not with the expectation of actually getting it. However, if you dig below that, haven’t many of us, when faced with an uncomfortable truth, wanted to kill it, to erase it, to dismiss it or make it go away? Haven’t we, in moments of extravagance, made promises that came back to haunt us? Haven’t we all, when asked what we want, turned to someone else to make that determination for us? Haven’t we ever wanted something spiteful? Haven’t we all kept quiet in circumstances that went against our own moral compass? Haven’t we all gotten caught up in a crowd and ended up going along with something that didn’t feel right? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had some days when I’ve done all of these things on the same day! Before lunch!
What do you know of making public and hasty promises that have hurt others and that later haunt you? What is the insistent – even prophetic voice within calling you to the healing and liberating power of God that perplexes you, but that you like to listen to and that you lock up – you know — put in protective custody? In what ways are you willing or driven to sacrifice that insistent voice to preserve your public image? How have you been ambitious, callous, or opportunistic and ruthless? Or what do you know of your own desire to please others at any cost?[3]
But before we pummel our dreamy selves into the ground, let’s remember that one component of our gospel dream is the figure of John the Baptist, who calls things as he sees them. Loudly. John speaks truth to Herod, even when Herod has the power to kill John, which Herod ultimately exercises. John says what he believes. We all have moments when we know we must speak up and when we do speak truth, even at personal risk. We all have moments when we tell truth come when it may and cost what it will. We all have a voice of a little girl within, inquiring, “What should I ask for?” The answer is “freedom and healing for my people.”
The purpose of this exercise is not to encourage us to engage in some sort of navel-gazing, or to beat ourselves up. Rather, it is to help us reclaim and incorporate the parts of ourselves that live in the shadows, the parts we would rather didn’t exist, with the parts of ourselves that astonish and delight us. Because without that reclamation, without that integration, we are flat, two-dimensional beings worshiping a flat, two-dimensional god. I want to urge us into greater fullness in our relationship with the Divine, to explore mutuality in that relationship to the utmost. To do that, I think we may need to be reminded every now and then of the vast realm of potential for both extravagant good and terrible evil that exists both inside our little personal universes and in the larger universes we inhabit.
That means that we need to apply this vast realm of potential to our notions of god as well. I have no patience for the idea of god which (or Who) desires to create and preside over some sort of greeting card happiness factory. I suspect that one reason a lot of folks give up on believing in god during or after adolescence is because of the droning god-is-good mantra that persists in so much of our popular culture as it begins to clash with life experiences. But the scriptural testimony is about a creator capable of all the vagaries of creation and more. A god that makes mistakes ranging from harmless bloopers to terrible destruction. A creator that is heartbroken at such mistakes sometimes, and sometimes just plain angry enough to disavow any responsibility at all. A god for whom our own range of capabilities is but a small subset: envy and compassion, ecstasy and moroseness, arrogance and humility, passion and indifference, destructiveness and creativity, brilliance and stupidity. The account that scripture gives is of a covenant relationship with the divine and with one another that invites each to be fully present, fully alive, fully awake to and with the other. The story that scripture tells is of a God Who needs us to bring it all, all of the time.
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye has a poem called, “Telling the Story,” which ends with these three lines: “What will we learn today? There should be an answer, and it should change.”
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