Year B Proper 10
Mark 6:14-29

Sunday Sermon – July 15, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

In today’s gospel, we hear about John the Baptist and how his head ended up on a platter. When we first meet John the Baptist in the gospels, he’s described as wearing clothes of camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey, which isn’t the most relatable first impression. We soon learn him to be a a prophet, and the Bible is full of prophets who are given a hard time for all their truth-telling! He is best known as the baptizer of Jesus, although he had been performing this Jewish ritual of cleansing for quite awhile leading up to that moment. When we meet him today, we hear the story of his death, resulting from his regular daily prophetic duty of speaking the truth, even when not in the position of power. And while his death may seem like the end of everything, the Gospel is not a story about the end.

Although, our lives do seem full of endings, don’t they? We’ve all had experiences that brought us to our knees and made us feel like our heads – or perhaps even more often our hearts – were about to be served on a platter. I managed to make it partway through college before I had my heart truly broken for the first time. After hearing our relationship was over, I remember being so hurt and sad and angry. Hadn’t I been loyal and honorable? What did I do to deserve such heartache? Looking back on the resulting prolific journaling, I have to confess: I remember comparing myself to the dog Old Yeller, blindly led to his execution by his loyal companion.

The words we speak have power. In Creation, God speaks as God calls the world into being – and calls it good. Prophetic voices, like John the Baptist’s, gain their power from their fearless – yet loving – speaking of truth, at all times and to all people – and disregarding any earthly power structure that we believe divides us. This is how Jesus spoke to us, modeling for us how we are called to speak to each other. Today’s gospel passage and story about John the Baptist tells us everything we need to know about truth. Truth requires courage to speak, and it cannot be unheard. Truth forces us to face difficult things that we may not always want to hear. Truth transforms our world whether we choose to listen or not.

John the Baptist may have made a strange first impression on us, but you gotta admire the fearlessness with which he speaks the truth to King Herod, telling Herod that marrying his brother’s wife, Herodias, was wrong. It’s easy to speak truth from a position of authority, when people have to listen to us. Among equals, it’s more challenging, (although looking back on how difficult it was for me to be broken-up with definitely made me more compassionate in all the times since that I’ve been the bearer of such a pain-inflicting truth)…. However, to cry out for justice from a position of vulnerability takes great courage. Truth-telling is essential for justice. In our Baptism, we promise to seek justice for all people. In our judicial system, courts of law seek the truth in order to enact justice; distorting one distorts the other.

One of the easiest ways we distort truths is when we’re not ready to hear them; this is true both for truths others speak to us as well as those we are reckoning with with ourselves in our own stories. Herodias, Herod’s new bride, was livid when John the Baptist declared her marriage was unlawful. She would not hear that he was right. She was not prepared to accept that John’s words were true, so she chose to hold onto her anger and wait for an opportunity for revenge, rather than open herself up to accepting the world to be a more challenging and complicated place than she was prepared to accept. When I remember the raw, shocking, pain of my first broken heart, I was angry, too. I was in denial, too. John’s violent death is not a consequence of Herodias getting angry; John’s violent death is because Herodias chose to stay angry. John’s violent death came from Herodias’ refusal to reconcile herself to a difficult truth about her life. But Herodias couldn’t do it all on her own, she needed both her daughter’s and husband’s complicity; Herod clearly has agency, too.

While we’re quick to read Herod’s execution of John the Baptist as simply fulfilling a promise, but Herod’s relationship with John the Baptist is far more complicated. While Herod probably didn’t appreciate being called out about his unlawful marriage, today’s gospel also says that Herod knew John was righteous and holy. Furthermore, Herod enjoyed listening to John but found him confusing. Another sign of truth can be feeling the transformative power of something, even when we don’t’ yet comprehend what that power means. Because of this, Herod feared John and protected him. Herod feared the truth he did not understand. When I moved past the anger of my broken heart, I still had to navigate the fear of moving forward living by a different set of rules than the ones I’d become accustomed too. When Herod told his daughter that she could ask anything of him, he chose to behead John the Baptist, rather than risk his position of earthly power by breaking his oath to her in front of all his honored guests. It’s a lot like that time – much later in Mark’s gospel – when Pontius Pilate leaves the decision to the people and believes moving forward is as simple as washing his hands. When we’re outnumbered, it’s tempting to look for security in any earthly power we have, just as Herod and Pilate do, forsaking what we know is true for what we believe is security. Herodias’ role in the violence of this passage came from anger; Herod’s role in John’s violent death came from fear. How we respond to truth doesn’t change how true it is but it does affect our relationship with God.

After John’s gruesome death, his body is brought to the tomb by his disciples; an act that mirrors what Jesus’ disciples will later do for Jesus. Both men cautioned us to resist temptation with their honesty about its perils. Both died violently when humanity failed to resist temptation and chose an easier path. John practiced the cleansing ritual of baptizing. The most important truth of all is: Jesus, in his death, cleansed us from all our sin and promises us eternal life in the resurrection the ultimate transformative act in which God takes death and gives us eternal life.

Shortly after that first heartbreak, shortly after that season of anger and fear but still in the stage of comparing myself to Old Yeller, a priest friend of mine posted a picture of himself blessing a beautiful, Yeller-like Golden Retriever. The caption read “This is Yeller. He’s a cancer survivor of 16 years with a lot of wisdom in his eyes.” Apparently, I was a different kind of Yeller than I thought. In that moment, I learned that when we have the courage to hear and accept the life-changing truths that we all must to face, we are also accepting how we are transformed by them and with them and in them. In our transformation, we actively participate in the resurrection and affirm our faith in God’s ability to breath new life into any death, any heartbreak, any supposed ending that comes our way.

One of my favorite quotes is Gandhi’s “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Today’s gospel passage teaches us that, in order to do that, we have to be the kind of truth we wish to see in the world.