The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10B, July 12, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of our future, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

This is one of those Sundays when “Praise to you, Lord Christ,” just doesn’t seem like the right response after a Gospel reading. Actually, all three of our readings this morning get my dander up. In 2^nd Samuel, what gets me is almost a throw-away line about David’s wife Michal, the party-pooper of the story, who saw him leaping and dancing and despised him in her heart. What’s Michal’s problem, you might wonder (if you noticed her at all). Well, Michal has been used and abused by her father King Saul and his successor King David, but according to tradition, she loved David and did not think he should be recklessly prancing around, scantily clad, before the throne of the Holy One. (I’m with her.)

The way David is described here has a complexity and moral ambiguity that are not readily apparent. What David was doing while leading a triumphant procession of the ark is here translated 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 slave girls of his subjects like one of the riffraff” (which is how the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible, translates the Hebrew in verse 20 – “like one of the riffraff”). Turns out there’s a very thin line between being fully alive in the Glory of God and the self-congratulatory disregard for the dignity of every other human being when one believes God to be exclusively on one’s own side in a contest or war. The ark, riding on its new cart up to Jerusalem, surely stood for the presence and power and promise of God. [1] It’s fine to have furnishings and buildings that stand for the presence and power and promise of God, as long as we don’t think that God is ours alone…as long as we don’t put God in a box of any size.

There’s much to commend the letter to the Ephesians, but it reminded me of being in Ephesus a few years ago, and learning about how sophisticated and progressive that city was in the first century of the common era, with regard to the leadership of women, how egalitarian it was when it came to women in authority, in learned professions – teachers, architects, artists, medical practitioners, and I just got mad thinking about how the Church has discounted and suppressed that information through the centuries. In light of the last few weeks in this present century, in this country, I thought of the amazing work of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters in the early nineteenth century, born and raised in Charleston, SC, and who died in Hyde Park, MA, whose brave writing and public speaking and teaching connected freeing blacks from slavery and freeing women from subjugation. I’m guessing that not many of us learned about them in grade school social studies.

Then I got to this dreadful story of the execution of John the Baptist, which gets blamed on a woman and her young daughter (of similar age to Jairus’ daughter). I mean come on. So I had quite a head of steam built up by Friday when I sat down to begin writing my sermon. I wondered anew what this story is doing in the Gospel of Mark. It’s a long story in the shortest Gospel. (Matthew shortens it when he writes his Gospel account, and Luke and John don’t include it at all.) What is Mark doing with this “interruption” in a narrative of healing and freeing success? It’s a literary flourish of Mark’s – both flashback and foreshadowing. Having heard about the healing work of Jesus and his disciples, 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 likely immediately think of brave Queen Esther who saved her people when asked by King Ahasuerus 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, but the hearers of the story would have immediately recognized the popular theme of “a righteous person in a wicked court.”[2] Mark is highlighting the difference between the way of right-relation and the way of wrong-relation, even in the face of death. Mark is telling a story of the unstoppable presence and power and promise of God.

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 (they didn’t have better judgements). 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, [3] rather than make a just peace. John the Baptist and Jesus were perceived as threats. They were challenging the authority of the state by stirring up healing and freedom so they were arrested. They were undermining the governing authorities’ ability to make the people instruments of their own oppression. Biblical scholar, Pheme Perkins, who teaches at Boston College, writes that justice is always the ultimate victim in situations where sexual and power politics rule, and that the “willingness to sacrifice others to maintain honor, prestige, and power remains one of the great temptations of persons in positions of authority.” [4]

You know, the more difficult the story, the more I like to wonder with you about what it is doing in scripture and what such a story might be doing in us. How is this story teaching us, exposing us, changing us? How does this story play out 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? 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 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 desired something spiteful? Haven’t we ever 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 days when I’ve done all of these things on the same day! Before lunch!

And what do you know of the insistent, even prophetic voice within calling you to the healing and liberating power of God that perplexes you, that you like to listen to but that you lock up – you know — put in protective custody so that it doesn’t stir too much up? In what ways are you willing 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? [5]

But before we pummel our dreamy selves into the ground, let’s remember that one component of our gospel dream is 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 right answer is always “freedom and healing for God’s 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. I want to urge us into greater fullness in our relationship with the Divine. 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 – that is not the God of our past or our future. The scriptural testimony is about a creator capable of all the vagaries of creation and more: a spirit of holiness 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 darkness. 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. But in the end, what we are called upon to do is our part.

Perhaps you saw David Remick’s article in The New Yorker last month about President Obama. In it, he quotes Mr. Obama who said: “I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past…But we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have. … But I think our decisions matter. And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that, at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” David Remnick concludes that “it turns out that this was not, for Barack Obama, a rhetoric of resignation at all, but a kind of resolve.” [6] May we each find our own resolve renewed to write our own paragraph about the presence, the power, and the promise of God.

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