Proper 10B, 14 July 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

• 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19.  David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the LORD with all their might.
• Ephesians 1:3-14.  We should be called children of God, and that is what we are.
• Mark 6: 14-29. What should I ask for.

O God of the stony roads watered with tears, 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.

In the past few weeks, the opening collects have really been speaking to me, and influencing my preaching. This morning, for instance, we prayed that we may know and understand what things we ought to do and have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them. That’s a lot to ask for, isn’t it? Especially when our Gospel lesson is the kind of story that makes many of us hesitant to say “praise to you, Lord Christ,” in response to its proclamation. This gruesome story of John the Baptist’s incarceration and execution as a macabre party favor is unusually long and detailed for the Gospel of Mark. And our lectionary doesn’t include the verses just before and just after this grim tale, so we’re not made aware that this is one of Mark’s story interruptions. 

You might remember that Mark the Evangelist commonly tells two stories in one, one interrupting the other. It seems like evidence of a rough and tumble story-telling style. Mark has historically been viewed by theologians as a rather clumsy writer, lacking in the more refined narrative flourish of the other evangelists. And while his style is generally spare and word choices inelegant, I think he was actually a quite creative theologian. I think that interruption is an ingenious rhetorical device for Mark. He uses it nine times in his brief Gospel. 

Some of you who love language might remember that German theologians have a fantastic word for this rhetorical device “Ineinanderschachtelungern.” I love any opportunity to say that word! The English translation is “nesting.” The rhetorical idea is that the interruption or the middle story offers a key to the theological purpose of the story that surrounds it. The insertion interprets the story it splits. [1] This story about King Herod interrupts the story of the twelve who were sent two by two to the neighboring villages spreading the love of God and proclaiming that all should repent, that is, all should change their minds and turn toward the love of God.  So we can look to the Herod story not just as a creator of dramatic suspense, delaying our learning about how the twelve had fared, but as the interpretive solution to a puzzle about the messages of repentance and the successful healings, about getting right with God and neighbors.

I think it’s interesting that all should repent, not just Herod, not just Herodias and the daughter of Herodias, not just the really evil people but all people in and around the Galilee, and as the Gospel is proclaimed, all people in its hearing.  And they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. Then they returned, gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. But not so fast. First we have to remember what happened to John the Baptizer.

By the time Mark tells the story of John the Baptizer’s execution, we already know from the beginning of this Gospel that Jesus had gone to John for a baptism. Mark says that after John was arrested, Jesus went to the Galilee preaching the exact same message that John had been preaching. No wonder Herod thought John the Baptist had been resurrected.  He thought he’d gotten rid of John the Baptist once and for all. Mark has also already mentioned that the Herodians (that is, those who supported Herod’s rule) were plotting to destroy Jesus.

According to Josephus, John the Baptizer was a very popular man, and a significant threat to Herod Antipas tyrannical and seemingly tenuous grip on his governance of the region of the Galilee. It seems to me that Mark nests this story of Herod in the larger story of unstoppable healing and liberation because he wants his hearers to know that the call to repent cannot be silenced with violence. The Love of God will not stay dead. Herod’s worry that John the Baptist had been raised from the dead should give us a clue that Biblical resurrection doesn’t rely on a body and a head being reunited like Frankenstein’s monster. It’s about physically and spiritually empowering others to do what one was doing before death [2] — more like: “They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds.” Or as I like to say, Biblical resurrection is art, not science. 

I’ve been living this week with this story about Herod, thinking about tyrants in the news and the mess that our country and our world seem to be in right now, while simultaneously devouring a new book about the 10-week civil rights campaign in Birmingham, AL in the spring of 1963. The campaign’s purpose was to provoke a crisis that would force business leaders and civil authorities to recalculate costs of segregation, so they’d decide the costs were too high.

The title of the book is taken from something that Baptist minister Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth said after his house in Birmingham was bombed on Christmas Day because of his civil rights work. He said, “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live,” The book is a riveting daily account by Paul Kix of ten harrowing weeks that changed our country for the better, leading directly to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It reads like a mystery novel, which is fascinating to me because we know how the story ends. You know, at the beginning of the campaign The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was arrested and placed in solitary confinement. From that extremely low point, King produced the masterpiece Letter from Birmingham Jail, written with a stubby pencil in newspaper margins and on toilet paper, smuggled out of the jail by his lawyer. Toward the end of the ten weeks, incarcerated again, his attitude about being in jail had changed and he felt it was a mistake to be let out on bail.  

I’m self-conscious about preaching about all the things I didn’t know about the Birmingham campaign with a daughter of Birmingham in the front row of the choir! I did know some things about the tyrannical Bull Connor, the Ku Klux Klan, and the nickname Bombingham because of the dozens of racially-motivated unsolved bombings. I knew about Governor George Wallace’s bigoted statement that he stood for racial “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” 

I didn’t know stories about James Bevel, Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Charles Billups. I didn’t fully appreciate the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s failures between 1957 and 1963 that threatened to swamp it, and yet their fierce insistence on non-violent responses to so much violence being perpetrated against them. I didn’t fully appreciate their fierce insistence on protests that would not stop and the thousands and thousands of protesters who just kept coming, who exercised such discipline in non-violent direct action.

And I didn’t know about the thousands of Black children who organized and protested – kids between the ages of 6 and 20 – at least 2500 of whom were arrested and held in concentration camp kinds of facilities. I didn’t know about the complaints from within the campaign that it was wrong to put children in harm’s way, as if white supremacy wasn’t already doing grave harm to them, and as if Bull Connor had no choice other than to knock them down with water from firehoses and attack dogs when they were already on their knees.

I didn’t know that the later protests were named “Operation Confusion” which reminds me a group of clergy I was once in who would end grace before meals with everyone raising our forks in the middle of the table, rattling them, and saying “confusion to the enemies!” And I hadn’t registered that the racist bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Rosamond Robertson, and Cynthia Dionne Wesley came just after the movement leaders had negotiated an agreement on integration of facilities and jobs in the city. 

I didn’t know the story about the miracle that happened when the protesters kept coming, day after day, about the Rev. Charles Billups, assistant pastor of the New Pilgrim Baptist Church leading the march singing I want Jesus to Walk with Me – then dropping to his knees in front of Bull Connor, and shouting, “Turn on your water! Turn loose your dogs! We will stay here till we die!” And to his amazement, the thousands of protestors behind him picked that up as a chant. Bull Connor shouted to the firemen, “turn on the hoses.” But the firefighters didn’t do it. One firefighter shouted, “We’re here to put out fires! Not people! The story goes that Charles Billups and at least some of the firefighters began to weep, and then the line of police and firefighter resistance parted, and the protesters walked through, and nobody was injured that day.  The protesters marched to the public park across the street and prayed and then peacefully dispersed.

The campaign didn’t change Birmingham or the rest of the country overnight and it didn’t complete the work. The conflicts within the movement – the disagreements, the setbacks and disappointments, the betrayals, the compromises, even the deaths continued, but so did the organizing, the marching, the praying, and the singing. Don’t lose track of the singing! The Rev. Dr. William Barber in the documentary, Bad Faith, about the dangerous growth of Christian Nationalism said, “I believe we’re in the moment right now that’s primed for a movement that leads us into a resurrection of America. And I believe, if we do it right with love and justice, many of the people who have put on Christian Nationalism, will take it off.  Will get born again; will see the gospel in its truth and that’s what gives me hope, even in America. I’m not an optimist, no, no. I’m full of Christian hope.” The hope is, as medieval mystic Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well, …for there is a force of love moving through the universe that hold us fast and will never let us go.” John the Baptist knew it.  Jesus and his followers knew it. May we also know and understand what things we ought to do and have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.

1. Thanks to James R. Edwards for his article, “Markan Sandwiches,” in Novum Testamentum 31:3, July 1989, p. 193-216.
2.  D. Mark Davis leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com in the blog post for Proper 10B