Bring it All
Pamela L. Werntz, Priest-in-Charge

O God of the dance, 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 dished up 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 most troubling parts of the story have been removed).  But really, I’m not sure why those verses got removed when we are not spared any of the gory details about the demise of John the Baptizer.

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 merry, joyous celebratory movement.  It’s a word that means “make sport, jest, mockery.”  It’s a vulgar, in-your-face kind of victory dance in which he 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).  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.

The Gospel of Mark’s account of the beheading of John the Baptist, on the other hand, is altogether godless in its telling.  Jesus isn’t even in this Gospel story except as he is mentioned in passing as the possibly resurrected John come back to haunt Herod’s guilt-ridden imagination.  I think this is the only story in Mark that doesn’t feature Jesus.  It’s here as a literary flourish of flashback foreshadowing.  (How’s that for alliteration?)  That’s what the story is doing in the Gospel of Mark – it’s doing some dramatic foreshadowing.

The scene of Herod’s birthday bash 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 daughter’s fault for dancing so intoxicatingly 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.1  John the Baptist and Jesus were perceivedas threats.  They were challenging the authority of the state so they were arrested.

This is an age-old story isn’t it?  It gets repeated daily whenever the police or the military arrests someone – sometimes anyone – sometimes many someones – to quell the public’s anxiety, to quiet the crowd.  It’s a big part of what’s behind the warehousing of people in prison in this country.  Do you know that we have the highest incarceration rate and the largest number of people incarcerated by a lot?  The US has 5% of the world’s population and almost a full quarter of the world’s prison population!  I cite that because (well because it’s one of the things I get really exercised about and because…) I want to be clear that the story of Herod and John the Baptist, or of Pilate and Jesus, is really not so unique – not so long ago and far away or once upon a time.  It’s more like that label that says “objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”

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.  Perhaps we can see it if we look at this story of Herod and John the Baptist, of Herodias and her daughter, the way one might look at a dream.  What if you dreamt this story?  How might we interpret the dream using the method of identifying a part of yourself or myself in every character or situation?

Probably most 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 we all, when faced with an uncomfortable truth, wanted to kill it, to erase it, to dismiss it or make it go away?  Haven’t we all, in moments of extravagance, made promises that came back to haunt us in one way or another?  Haven’t we all, when asked what we want, turned to someone else to make that determination for us?  Haven’t we all wanted something spiteful?  Haven’t we all kept quiet in circumstances that went against our own personal or moral beliefs?  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!

But before we pummel our dreamy selves into the ground, let’s remember that one component of this 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.

The purpose of this exercise is not to encourage us to engage in some sort of navel-gazing, or to beat ourselves into the submission of false modesty or unworthiness.  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 us.  Because without that reclamation, without that integration, we are flat, two-dimensional beings worshipping 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 our 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 that God needs us to bring it all.    

You may have seen James Carroll’s op ed piece within the last few weeks where he explained that the Muslim affirmation of faith, “Allahu Akbar!” is commonly mistranslated as “God is Great.”  It is more accurately translated, he wrote, as “’God is greater’ greater than any conception of God, or any way of knowing God. Indeed, God is greater than greatness.”2  It strikes me that greater means both better and more.  God needs us to bring it all because God is greater. God is both better and more.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye has a poem called, “Telling the Story,” which ends with these lines:

What will we learn today?
There should be an answer,
and it should
change.

1. See René Girard’s work about scapegoating in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, p. 28 cited at www.girardianlectionary.net.

2. James Carroll, “The Value, Tradition of Revolution,” Boston Globe, June 29, 2009.

Updated July 27, 2009