“Real World Religion” Psalm 24; Mark 6:14-29 The Reverend Joanna M. Adams Morningside Presbyterian Church Atlanta, Georgia July 16, 2006

“Real World Religion”
Psalm 24; Mark 6:14-29
The Reverend Joanna M. Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, Georgia
July 16, 2006

She went out and said to her mother, “What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of
John the baptizer.” Mark 6:24

What in the world is such a sad, violent story like this doing in the Bible? Actually, the
Bible is full of stories that expose the dark side of things, but seldom do we dwell on
them. Sometimes in the summer, when the church pews are thinly populated, preachers
give into the temptation to roll out a sermon series with titles like “Terrible Texts” or
“Stories I Bet You Didn’t Even Know Were in the Bible.” Trust me. I’m not going to do
a whole series on these kinds of things.

The Lutheran Handbook is a tongue-in-cheek approach to all things Lutheran and attempt
to get people interested in faith matters and in the Bible. It has a chapter entitled “The
Five Grossest Stories in the Bible,” none of which I will share with you today, other than
to say the one of the subtitles of that chapter is “The Naked Prophet,” and another is “The
Almost Naked Prophet,” the latter having to do with the time Jeremiah buried his
underclothes in wet river sand, dug them up, and put them back on again. I’ll spare you
how the rest of the story goes.

There are many problematic passages throughout the Bible. In II Samuel, the story is
told of a well-meaning man who reaches out his hand to steady the Ark of the Covenant.
And is struck dead on the spot. Job suffers indescribable miseries. Absalom, son of
David the king, while riding on a horse, gets caught in the branches of the tree, and his
father’s enemies come and stab him in the heart. There are other stories like this in
scripture.

I want to go back to the original question: Why is the story of the beheading of John the
Baptist in the Bible, and more specifically, in a book that goes by the name “Gospel”?
The word “gospel” means “good news,” and yet, you can put your ear to the ground,
listen as hard as you can, and not hear a single note of good news in the vicinity. (1)
Jesus does not appear in the story. God is not mentioned.

The plot revolves around two men and two women. The men are John the Baptist and
Herod Antipas. John, son of Elizabeth and Zechariah, was the forerunner of Jesus. He
was one who baptized Jesus. He was a prophet who made no special claim for himself,
but told everyone in shouting distance to repent and be baptized and to get ready for the
one who would come after him. “I will not even be worthy to stoop down and untie his
sandals. All I have to offer is water for baptism, but he will have Holy Spirit.” John’s
natural humility not with standing, he was quite a character, famous for saying whatever
was true, whether people wanted to hear it or not. He was memorable in that he always
wore a hide of camel’s hair which was held in place by a leather belt (a factor that
disqualifies him from the naked prophet contest). He ate locusts and wild honey. He was
quite a topic of conversation around Jerusalem and the Judean countryside. That’s John
the Baptist.

The other male character in the story is Herod Antipas, tetrarch or regional governor of
Galilee during the Roman Empire, from the 4th century A.D. to 40 A.D. He was the son
of the more familiar Herod the Great, who was frightened out of his wits when the Magi
showed up at the palace asking about the holy child and ordered the murder of every male
child in the district. You could accurately say that the son inherited a problematic gene
pool, but it is also true that Herod, Jr. was a frightened, suspicious man in own right. It
didn’t matter how swanky his throne was, he was worried that someone might become
more influential than he was, that someone might get ahead of him. In today’s story, he
is a grown man, afraid of ghosts. That is Herod.

The female characters are a woman named Herodias and a woman named Herodias.
Herodias I, I will call her, is the current wife of Herod the governor. She was formerly
married to Herod’s brother, Philip. The other Herodias is Herod’s niece/stepdaughter.
Are you with me so far? I am not making any of this up. Thank goodness, Herodias II is
known by another name. She was called Salome by the Jewish historian, Josephus, and
that’s what we are going to call her too. Actually, in Bible school in Mississippi, we
called her Salome, rhyming with “baloney,” but actually, the way you say it is “bologna,”
but we won’t even go there. We are going to call her Salome this morning.
Here is what happened: John the Baptist, who, as I said, had no problem speaking truth
to power, went to Herod and told him that his marriage his brother’s former wife was a
moral outrage because Herod had broken up the brother’s marriage in order to take
Herodias as his bride. The king naturally didn’t like hearing that message, but he also
realized that John was a righteous, holy man; and, believe it or not, he was usually
interested in what John had to say, so instead of arresting him and executing him, he
arrested him in the sense of having him taken into protective custody. The bride,
Herodias, was much less happy about John the Baptist. She was infuriated that she had
been talked about in such a way, and she waited for an opportunity to get her revenge.
It came to pass when Herod threw a birthday party. The entertainment of the evening
was provided by the family lotus blossom, the young and graceful Salome, a.k.a.
Herodias II. She danced so beautifully that Herod told her she could have anything she
wanted, even if it was half the kingdom. (One can only imagine how many goblets of
wine the Governor had consumed before he came to the point of saying, “I will give half
my power away.”) When Salome consulted her mother, Herodias seized her opportunity,
“You should ask for the head of John, and so Salome did, adding her own personal touch
of the platter. Herod did not want to grant the request, but he was afraid of losing face
before his relatives, and before the VIP guests who had heard him make his foolish offer
and so it all came to pass as Salome had requested. After it was over, what was left of
John was claimed by his disciples and lain in a tomb.

Is your ear still to the ground? Can you begin to hear echoes of the good news of the
gospel of Jesus Christ? How it was that before he was killed in a spectacularly
undignified way, Jesus had spoken truth to power? When Jesus had appeared on the
scene, it was John who announced his coming. After John was dead, the king thought
John had been raised from the dead. That was not so, because Jesus was the one who
would defeat death, but it turns out that no beheading, no crucifixion can stop the
kingdom of God come near in Christ Jesus.

This story, as sad and challenging as it is, was told for the encouragement of the church
as it tried to live out its faith in the real world. Just as John’s death foreshadows Jesus’
death, John’s death also reminds the disciples of Jesus that regardless of how things
appear on the surface, even when the signs of success are all around, as they were after
the disciples’ first missionary journey, if you do your job right as a follower of Christ, as
a servant of Almighty God, there will be shadows. It will not be easy. For Christ’s
kingdom to come, the kingdoms of this world have to be defeated, and in order for the
kingdoms of this world to get out of the way, the forces of worldly power must relinquish
their positions, and they never do it gladly. Many of the earliest readers of the gospel
would themselves be imprisoned and die, in many instances, terrible deaths for the sake
of the gospel.

In a time like ours when being Christian is seen by many as the path to success and
prosperity, it is important to remember the scandal of the cross. It is important to
remember that anyone who wants to follow Christ, to speak for him, to serve him must be
in the business of disturbing the comfortable as well as comforting the disturbed.
Deitrich Bonhoeffer the great German theologian, who himself was executed later by the
Nazis for participating in a plot against Hitler, wrote of the cost of discipleship and the
difference between cheap grace and costly grace: “Cheap grace is the preaching of
forgiveness without requiring change or repentance. . . cheap grace is grace without the
cross. . .. While costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field, for the sake of it a man
will gladly go and sell all that he has. Costly grace is costly because it cost God the life
of God’s own son: ‘you were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God so much cannot
be cheap for us.” (2)

You and I are a long way from literally having to give up our lives for the sake of Christ,
and yet, surely, there is something to learn here about how to live in the world and yet not
be of the world, something about operating according to a different set of values,
something to hear about something other than being comfortable as the goal of one’s life.
Jesus said, “If you wish to become my disciples, then deny yourselves and take up your
cross and follow me.” To be a disciple is not to be full of yourself, but to be full of trust
that Christ’s kingdom really is the one lasting true thing. To be a disciple is to be
convinced that there is nothing more profoundly beautiful or meaningful in life, even
joyful in the oddest sense, than to be willing to give up everything for something that is
more important and more lasting than yourself.

I don’t think we are called to go out of our way to ask for trouble; in fact as a pastor, I
spend a good bit of time trying to help people avoid putting on a Messiah complex. I tell
them that the role of Savior is already taken. But that is a different thing from making the
brave, costly choices that true discipleship inevitably entails. In a moment, we are going
to say The Apostles’ Creed. Did you know that the only “word that describes the earthly
life of Jesus is the word “suffer”? “He suffered under Pontius Pilate.”
What might making a costly choice look like for us?

A young person says no to doing what everyone else is doing, because she realizes it will
compromise her human dignity. She will pay the price of no longer being in the crowd.
A congregation decides to step in faith and speak up for the excluded. There is a cost for
that.

A college graduate decides to take a couple of years to work among undocumented
migrant workers rather than going straight into the MBA program.
You and I make choices everyday about whether we will live our lives successfully or
significantly.

Sue Monk Kidd begins her book, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter with this
sentence: “The truth will set you free, but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way you
live.”

The story of John the Baptist story has a lot to teach us about living in the real world. As
Salome dances before the king, we remember that a person can be beautiful on the
outside and not so great on the inside.

We read the story, and remember that the shadows are real. We realize that evil can
flourish in any human heart, and it almost always arises out of wounded pride. If you
ever feel yourself righteously full of wounded pride, then you had better treat it as if it
was a snake bite, and deal with it radically and quickly, or it will poison you and cause
you to do things you don’t want to do.

I think about the election that is immediately before us and the public servants who are
running for office in Georgia this year. I think about how you and I, the voters, need to
watch any tendency on the part of anyone who is in public office to do the expedient
things and to try to please all of the people, all of the time. Let us remind our political
leaders that they and we are always answerable to a higher power. I think of something
that Desmond Tutu said to the South African Minister of Law and Order, who was
responsible for enforcing unjust and unfair laws: “Mister Minister, I remind you that you
are not God. One day your name will be a faint scribble on the pages of history while the
name of Jesus Christ will live forever of his kingdom there will be no end.” Nothing can
stop the kingdom of God and the mission of Christ.

I bet not a single one of you has ever given Herod Antipas a single thought, but I love it
that today we have gathered to give thanks for the brave and faithful life of John the
Baptizer and to rejoice that there is no power on earth that can silence the good news. As
Dr. King once said, “Unarmed truth and unconditional love will carry the day.” Thanks
be to God.

(1) Much of this sermon is taken from my chapter in Living by the Word, Debra Bendis,
ED., Chalice Press, 2005.
(2) As quoted in The Cost of Moral Leadership, Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson.
William B, Eerdmans, 2003.