Community Church Sermons

Year B

July 15, 2012

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Serving Up Your Head on a Platter

Mark 6:14-29

Rev. Martin C. Singley, III

Senior Pastor

LISTEN IN!

So much for happy, uplifting Bible stories! You may have come here today hoping to hear about the sick being healed and the hungry being fed, but what you got is the beheading of John the Baptist. Even those of you who don’t like Baptists probably feel depressed. This is not a happy story.

Meet the Herods – Antipas, the King; Herodias, the fiancée; and Salome, the fiancee’s daughter. You would not want to be invited to dinner over at the Herod’s house. You just might find that you are going to be the main course with your severed head served up on a silver platter.

The Herods were just plain insane.

Herod the Great – the patriarch of the family – was King over Israel when Jesus was born. Remember? He was the one who called in the Wise Men to ascertain when and where the Christ – the so-called King of the Jews - was to be born. He said he wanted to come and worship the baby Jesus. Yeah, right! We know he had other plans. In fact, Herod felt so threatened by this baby that he had all the infant boys in Bethlehem under the age of two murdered. He just wanted to make sure there was no threat to his throne. After all, he was the king of the Jews and there would be no other.

Herod was not a nice man. Not only did he kill the children of Bethlehem, but he also murdered some of his own children – the sons he feared had their eyes on his throne. One historian reports that people said it was better to be one of Herod’s pigs than one of Herod’s kids! He was a paranoid nut-case!

But they say the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree, and even Herod’s children who managed to escape being killed by their dad were themselves a bit off center.

Take Herod’s son Philip. Please! He lived in Rome, kind of a swinging bachelor. But when his brother Aristobolus was murdered by their father, Herod the Great, Philip stepped up to the plate of decency. He took into his care Aristobolus’ orphaned daughter, Herodias. What a kind and merciful guy! She was just a child. So Philip’s niece became his daughter. But Philip was not actually into the adoption for purely altruistic reasons – if you know what I mean. He was not really interested in being just Herodias’ uncle and father. He wanted to be her lover, too! So Philip had his way with his young niece/daughter. They got married and had a daughter of their own and named her Salome. And they lived happily ever after.

Well, sort of…

…until Philip’s brother Antipas came to visit. Herod Antipas was tetrarch over Galilee, the province in Israel where John the Baptist was preaching and Jesus was going about healing people and performing miracles of great mercy. Well, on this Roman vacation to visit his brother Philip, Antipas took a liking to Herodias, Philip’s wife, daughter and niece. Are you following this?

And evidently, Herodias reciprocated the feelings. They started an affair, and when the time came for Antipas to return to Galilee, Herodias left her uncle/father/husband Philip and went with him, along with her daughter, Salome. Once they got to Galilee, Antipas had to take care of one little problem - his wife – so he evicted her from the palace, and the new family set up housekeeping together. And so Herod Antipas, Herodias and Salome lived happily ever after.

Well, sort of…

…until John the Baptist showed up.

Now you’ll recall that the Gospels tell us John went around preaching that the kingdom of God was about to arrive, and to prepare the way for it, the nation needed to repent of its sins. Israel needed to get right with God. Remember? “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!” And right up there in the castle was the biggest sin of all taking place right before the eyes of the whole nation. And John named it. John spoke to it. John stared into the eyes of power, and called out the sin. Do you know the old saying, “You shouldn’t mix politics and religion?“ Well, evidently John didn’t get that memo. He publicly pointed his finger at the king and cried, “It is unlawful for you to have your brother’s wife!”

Needless to say, the Herods didn’t much like that sermon.

Herodias, the beautiful fiancee - especially - was furious. She had already said “Yes!” to the dress, hired a wedding coordinator, and consulted with the Cake Boss. Nobody but nobody was going to get in the way of her wedding which was going to be the biggest and best royal wedding ever. So to satisfy her rage, Herod Antipas had John arrested and thrown into prison.

But even that was not enough for Herodias. So one night at a dinner party thrown for all the big-wigs in Galilee, Herodias sent her daughter and Antipas’ stepdaughter/niece, Salome, out to dance. And dance she did! Antipas was so “moved” – if you know what I mean – that he offered to give the girl anything she wanted – up to half his kingdom! That sounds like a marriage proposal to me! You know those Herods!

But what Salome told Antipas she wanted was what her mother had instructed her to ask for.

“I want John the Baptist’s head…on a platter.”

And so John – a man who never hurt anyone – who spoke the Good News of the coming kingdom – who stood up for moral principles – who preached that after him was coming someone greater who would usher in the way of God – John, the miracle baby born to the barren Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah – John, Jesus’ cousin who had baptized him in the Jordan River – John, was beheaded and died. And they served up his head on a silver platter.

And the Herods lived happily ever after.

It sometimes seems that way, doesn’t it? Like the saying goes, “The good die young, but the bad seem to go on forever.”

One of the most confounding questions faced by people of faith is the question of “theodicy”. If God is loving and good, why is there evil in the world? And even beyond that, if God is loving and good, why doesn’t God do something about it? Why does evil so often seem to win?

This is a big hang-up for many people. Some folks lose their faith over this.

How can we believe in a God who permits birth defects, and allows war and violence and hunger and poverty and cancer? How can we believe in a good and loving God who lets nature rage through hurricanes, droughts, tsunamis, earthquakes and other disasters that hurt and kill millions? How can we believe in a God who permits people like Herod Antipas and his sociopathic family to rule over others and on a whim serve up peoples’ heads on a platter?

Where is God in the midst of all this hurt, injustice, and cruelty?

Whatever you think about the Bible, one of the things we should all admire about it is its willingness to take on the hard questions of life. Questions like this one. And the Bible doesn’t shrink from these questions or offer easy, trite answers. One of the reasons I am a Christian is because our scriptures force me to think outside the box of conventional wisdom, and calls into question some things I’ve always believed, and challenges many of my most deeply held values, and invites me to journey into a world that is far bigger and more mysterious than I can even imagine. And the faith the Bible leads me to is not a simplistic set of doctrines to simply believe in. Oh, if only it was a matter of believing! But it’s not. This Christian faith is a whole new way of LIVING - a whole new way of seeing life, and finding our place within it, and living it fully, and discovering in it a God who truly does love us and is at work saving – and not hurting – the world.

Why does evil exist?

Let me answer as honestly as I can at this point in my journey. I don’t know. I have no idea. It is a question beyond my ability to answer. Maybe someday I’ll know. But right now, I don’t. No one knows why there is evil in the world. We just know there IS evil in the world.

But I think the more important question for us to ask is this: Where is God in the midst of it? Where is God in this world where evil is at work destroying people and where countless King Herods – called by many names - serve up peoples’ heads on silver platters?

Well, that’s what the Gospel of Mark is trying to help us get at today.

You know, if you are going to be a serious student of the Bible, you’re going to have to learn to look beyond the simple words on the page and see a bigger picture. You have to see how the stories fit together. For instance, you might notice that this story about the beheading of John the Baptist is sandwiched right between two other very interesting stories. They seem to have absolutely no connection to it, but they do!

The first is our text from last week, when Jesus went home to Nazareth, was pretty much rejected by the hometown people there, and then went with his disciples out to the surrounding villages where they healed and helped a lot of people. Remember? The last scene in that story has the disciples all excited because they had helped and healed many people. Hold onto that thought.

The second is next week’s Gospel reading that will be about Jesus and the disciples feeding the five thousand. Crowds have come out to hear him teach. It is late in the day. The disciples want Jesus to send the people away because they’re getting hungry and there’s not a fast-food restaurant anywhere to be found. Jesus says, “No, you give them something to eat.” They say, “All we’ve got is 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish. That’s not enough to feed all these people.” Now, we’re not told exactly what happened that day, except that Jesus took the loaves and fish – held them up to heaven - and gave thanks to God. Then he gave them to the disciples to pass out. And there was enough to feed all 5,000 people, with twelve basketfuls of leftovers!

Wow! - two wonderful stories about Jesus and his followers healing and helping and caring.

And sandwiched between the two is this awful story about evil at work.

Why do you suppose Mark arranged these stories like that?

I think it is to help us take up that question, “Where is God in the midst of this evil Herod-filled world?”

Why, he is out there bracketing evil with goodness - healing the broken, feeding the hungry, touching people who are the victims of Herod’s evil with the grace of the kingdom of God.

And while King Herod thinks he has eliminated those who oppose his reign of terror, Jesus and his disciples are out in the countryside undermining his evil with acts of mercy, and kindness, and love. And Jesus is gathering together a growing band of followers who believe that evil will be overcome by good, and that the work of the devil will be destroyed by the loving people of God.

And this, you see, exposes the really important question the Bible wants to ask us today. It is not so much, “Where is God in the face of life’s troubles?”

No. The million dollar question is, “Where are YOU?”

All around us there are people to be healed. There are people to be fed. There are people to be set free from the powers of evil.

I wonder if you remember these two people (show pic)? It’s Jennifer Johnson and her son Sean. They were really up against it a few years ago, a single mother trying her best to raise a young son - a boy with health problems that were exacerbated by unhealthy living conditions. Jennifer didn’t have enough income to provide a healthy, safe home for Sean.

And then you came along.

Through the Loudon County Habitat for Humanity, you became Jennifer and Sean’s adopted family. You partnered with them to build a house that Jennifer could afford to buy. You helped them with things like budget planning, and good decision-making, and parenting skills. You helped furnish their home, and planted shrubs and flowers, and you gave them a hand up. Most importantly, you kept up your friendship with Jennifer and Sean, and they are thriving.

You know, all around us, young mothers, fathers and children have their heads served up on the silver platter of misfortune, tragedy, bad decisions, economic woes. King Herod shows up in many forms in the lives of human beings.

But Jesus Christ sends us out to contest evil with good, hurt with hope, rejection with acceptance, hate with love.

Where is God in the face of evil?

Look in the mirror.

That’s where God is.