The Rev, Jennifer Daly
July 14, 2024
The 8th Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 10
Mark 6:14-29
The reading for today is more like a promo for Netflix than a gospel. You’ve got it all. Lust. Greed. Peer-influenced oaths. Murder.
Remember in A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge has to go with the Ghost of Christmas Future. He is sore afraid – and he is who comes to mind when I think about King Herod. I think about his terror, when he learns of a new prophet Jesus, because he believes that John the Baptist, who he has unjustly killed, has come to haunt him. I think of him, not as the king who had John killed, not of the man who dressed Jesus in robes and thorned crowns and then sent him back to Pilate – no I think of him this way – little, weak, rueful, and very afraid.
It is a terrible thing to worry that something you did in your past is going to re-emerge and haunt you. All of us, but especially Herod in this moment, lug around the weight of past mistakes and sins. Frankly when I was preparing for this sermon, all I could think about was how fear can overtake us, but then I went on the Desperate Preacher website, and one of the women wrote:
Herod’s biggest mistake wasn’t marrying his brother’s wife.
It wasn’t putting John the Baptist in jail for stating the truth.
King Herod’s biggest mistake wasn’t finding pleasure in his step-daughter’s dancing to the point of losing his senses or making a promise just to feed his narcissism.
His biggest mistake wasn’t even putting a man to death just to save face.
His biggest mistake was assuming that Jesus was a risen John the Baptist. His biggest mistake was in not coming to an understanding of Jesus. Even after all his sin, Jesus was his answer and yet he could not see who Jesus was. One must understand who Jesus is in order to accept His forgiveness and redemption.
“One must understand who Jesus is in order to accept His forgiveness and redemption.” That line stayed with me. Is Jesus THE path? Is the only way to understand the truths of this universe, and rest in the power and peace of God, through Jesus. I do not think so. But Jesus is A path. Jesus is MY path. And the tragedy of people like Herod is that the key to the universe, to the deepest of peace is standing right in front of them, and they cannot see it. “You have ears but you cannot hear. You have eyes but you do not see.” So the question of today is: What must we do to come to see Jesus, to really understand him – so that we CAN be open to his forgiveness and redemption. “Please sir, we want to see Jesus”
The first thing I believe we need to do is identify our brokenness, our vulnerability. I am not talking about how we have sinned (obviously acknowledging that is a part of the work). I am talking about admitting that life is not in our control, that we cannot manage it all, that it is hard, that life and its pain have worn us down, made it harder to experience joy. I have been very focused in the last year on the idea of God inviting us – in all the ways God welcomed us – to the banquet, to come get baptized, to the many rooms in His mansion. We are welcome, but Jesus says to “stretch out {our} hands”. In other words, if we want to be whole, if we want to be healed, there is a part we must do. We must reach out our hands. We must ask for that healing. We must expose our sick part. We must be vulnerable.
Perhaps you have heard of Bryan Stevenson? Bryan is a Black civil rights lawyer who has dedicated his life to founding the Equal Justice Initiative. EJI has managed to get many people off of death row and has achieved, through advocacy, important legislative reforms such as the law that teenagers cannot be given a death sentence. He also founded the Legacy Museum, which is in Alabama and tells the story of slavery and lynching and mass incarceration in America.
There is a story he tells that I love. In one part of the legacy Museum, there is a wall of 800 jars, each containing soil taken from the ground where someone was lynched. The wall of jars is a powerful and sobering site. Bryan says:
In this soil, there is the sweat of the enslaved. In the soil there is the blood of victims of racial violence and lynching. There are tears in the soil from all those who labored under the indignation and humiliation of segregation. But in the soil there is also the opportunity for new life, a chance to grow something hopeful and healing for the future.
One day a visitor came to the museum in Alabama and said she would like to participate in the soil gathering. So the museum gave her a map to go to a site of a lynching and a jar in which to gather soil. She drove far to get to the site, and it was a place so remote she began to feel a bit afraid. And then, as she was digging, she saw a giant truck go by, and then it turned around and drove by again. She was worried now – a Black woman, by herself, all the way out there. The truck returned again, and a strong white man got out, and her heart began racing. He came over and asked, “Ma’am what are you doing? Why are you digging there?”
And she explained about the museum and the project and that she felt called to be a part of it. And he asked if he could help her, and she said yes, but she didn’t have another spade, and he said he would use his hands. And so she continued bending over with her spade, and he began digging on his knees in the dirt. And then she said, “Are you ok?” because he was crying, and he said, “No ma’am.” He said, “I’m so afraid that my grandfather was involved in the lynching that happened here.” And she gave him a hug, and the two of them sat together in that field and cried. And that’s the work, right there, that’s the work of vulnerability that allows you to heal, to feel the power of Jesus’ work for redemption and reconciliation. When you open yourself, as those two people did, small miracles happen. And Jesus is right there.
The second step in building a relationship with Jesus is overcoming your fear and recognizing that there is no ending to God’s love. That feeling that its too late, that you’ve lost something permanently – that’s fear. Thich Nhat Hanh the poet and activist talks about the cloud who is sorely afraid she will stop being a cloud. She is afraid of dying, of becoming nothing. But if the cloud practices she will realize that its impossible for a cloud to die. It can change into rain or vapor but a cloud cannot become nothing – it’s impossible. We must come to the same realization.….I coach the 8th graders at my school when they prepare their weekly sermons. Each of them must preach from the lectionary once a year; it is a graduation requirement. This winter I was working with Eli – who is lovely – silly and goofy, but also mature and wise in some real way. He knows when to pull back. He knows when to think rather than laugh – a rare quality in a 14 year old boy.
Anyway he wanted to preach about gratitude, but he said, “The person I am most grateful to I can’t tell.” I asked why not, and he said because he died. Then he told me of his wonderful basketball coach, who had been like a second father to him, who had driven him everywhere since his family was homeless, and would take him out to dinner, and listen to him, and push him to succeed. And Eli felt like he never said thank you and now the coach was dead. In the end, he decided to preach about him, to make him real to his schoolmates, the impact he had had. Amazingly, or perhaps not amazingly, perhaps just as you would expect, his sermon sparked reverberations. When it was time for the prayers of the people, one of the 5th grade boys stood up and said, “I want to pray for Eli’s coach.” He continued to offer that prayer for months. It was an important reminder for me. There are not endings in the way we so often think. People stay with us, live on in our collective summoning. Jesus’s love is like Thich’s cloud – it stays with us in so many ways, through all of our forms. It is only when we remove ourselves from that love, that we stand alone. And Rueful.
Finally, in order to see and understand Jesus we need to recognize our own belovedness and this is perhaps the hardest thing of all. Robert Farrar Capon, who was a chef and an Episcopal priest had an analogy I adore. He said that trying to understand God as a human is akin to an oyster sitting on the floor of an ocean looking up and seeing a ballerina dancing on the shore. All that an oyster has is its tiny, hinged movement – open, close, open close. And above is this astonishing beauty doing arabesques, moving in ways the oyster finds impossible. expressing things the oyster knows nothing about. The oyster has no language to explain all that it is seeing and feeling – except that ballerina is weird, and mysterious, and maybe even frightening, but it is also beguiling,
Understanding Jesus means recognizing that God, the ground of our being, the truth, the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sustainer – is with us, seeks relationship with us, keeps inviting us. Not because we have earned it by being beautiful or rich or hard working or honest, but because it is God’s table…and all are welcome. It means recognizing that God, our vast source of love, who we call Father, who loves us and gathers us like a Mother Hen, sees none of our dividing lines, our border walls, our social registers, our “worthiness” – loves all of us, each of us, the best of us, the worst of us, the best in us, the worst in us. All of it. All of us. If we can know that truth, if we can allow Jesus to lead us towards it, then we can be free of the weight of our past sins. And unlike Herod we will not be afraid, but rather we will find that “peace that the world cannot give.” Amen.