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“You Want What?!” Rev. Melissa St. Clair, 7/12/15

“You Want What?!”
A sermon preached at
Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Fort Collins, CO
by the Rev. Melissa St. Clair
July 12, 2015

An extramarital affair. A second marriage between a powerful, older man and his sister-in-law. A drunken party. A sultry dance. An impulsive promise. A wife who plots to exact vengeance on the one who spoke truth to power. A murder plotted to save face.

A scene from the soap operas that would fill the screen after the news at noon that my mom always watched on days when she wasn’t at work?

Or – our gospel lesson for this morning?

READ MARK 6:14-29

Phyllis Trible coined the phrase “texts of terror” in reference to passages of scripture like these. Unsettling texts that narrate slavery, genocide, assassination, beheading, cannibalism, rape, and many other heinous acts. The verses that paint God as the very one who commands downright disturbing, denigrating acts.

I always scratch my head for a moment when I hear people, usually on TV, talking about Biblical family values. Have they read their Bibles lately?

Even in stories that seem to be benign, stories that we use as the basis for children’s décor themes, if we read past the verses that get summarized in Sunday School, we find tales of drunkenness and other poor life choices. Noah, you know I’m looking at you, guy.

So what do we do with these stories? If I were the Queen of the Lectionary, I would tempted mightily to skip them. After all, isn’t preaching celebration? How exactly does one squeeze some good news out of the one about the head of the guy who baptized our beloved Jesus being served on a platter?

We could overlook them. A little late for that today, though.

We could allegorize them. Massage them into something we feel more comfortable with. That’s safe, for sure.

Or we could just go there. Read them out loud and pick them apart and take them for that they are – a glimpse at first century life as real and messy and violent and broken as ours is today.

Herod’s marriage to Herodias (or Salome, as she’s called in other versions of this story) is a controversial one. Birthed from an affair with his sister-in-law, these nuptials are just another piece in the puzzle of political marriage. Herod’s first wife was the daughter of the king whose region bordered his own and was a potential threat to him. Something about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer…
Historians contemporary to the author of Mark’s gospel paint a similar picture – except without the same impetus for John’s murder. They claim that “Herod decided it would be much better to strike first and get rid of [John] before [his words] and work led to an uprising.”

So why did Mark create this scene – the birthday party, the seductive dance, the drunken promise? As clickbait?

Mark’s trying to paint a picture about what life was like in the world in which Jesus lived. He’s providing important context for Jesus’ ministry and why it was so radical. This story, as uncomfortable and graphic as it is, serves that purpose well.

On one hand, there’s what happens when the Herodian court, the ruling class and its attendant power structure, get together to party.

This party ain’t no Jesus party.

A Jesus party, as we’ll read in just a few more verses, is like the feeding of the crowds – 5000 and 4000, because Mark tells the story twice.

When Herod throws a party, the meal is about corruption and violence. Only the upper crust of society are invited. When Jesus throws a party, the meal is about reconciliation. And y’all come. Everyone is invited.

There’s one other option for stories like these in scripture, these “texts of terror.” It’s to remember that just as they are not the final word, they are far from the only word.

Growing up, the most consistent playmate of my brother and me was the girl who lived next door. She and I were born the same year, although were a grade apart in school. I’m not exactly sure how long her family lived next to ours – she was just always there. We rode bikes together and played on our swing sets together and slept over at each other’s houses. As we got older, we’d take walks together – to Kmart, to Pibby’s to get ice cream. She’d come over to our house to use our digital antennae to listen to the out-of-town radio station that had the Top 10 countdown every night so she could hear her favorite Backstreet Boys song that our local radio station never seemed to play. I’d go over to her house to watch cable TV.

One afternoon, we were out on my parents’ back deck playing Chinese checkers. You know, the big star shape and the marbles… Anyway, the sky started getting darker with each turn taken. Before long, fat raindrops began to plop down from the sky. We quickly grabbed the marbles and the playing board and the box that contained it all and started to make our way toward the back screen door.

In her haste, my dear neighbor friend forgot what my mom reminded us about a hundred times as we went to play outside – that the deck was having some boards replaced, and to be careful around the hole where an old board had been removed and hadn’t yet been replaced.

Down she went – her leg through the hole, followed by the box and the marbles.
One would imagine a compassionate, caring neighbor would immediately rush to her friend in distress to console her.

I wish I could say I was that kind of friend in that moment. Instead, as my mom came rushing out to see what the howling was all about, she had to pause for a second to see who was actually hurt. Our sweet neighbor was crying out in pain, and I was wailing about my lost marbles. Literally.

I don’t remember what happened with our neighbor next, because I scrambled underneath the deck to pluck as many marbles as I could from the stones that they had cascaded into during the mayhem.

I do remember getting a talking to about how we are to respond to people in crisis, that people are more important than things, and that an apology was in order.

There was still one black marble missing when I called next door to make amends. I doubt that my neighbor friend remembers this story. Or, should I say, I hope my neighbor friend doesn’t remember this story, as it was far from one of my finest moments. I hope she remembers what I do – the trust and love we shared across the fence for many years, never best friends, but constant ones.

We can read and study the individual stories of scripture – and there’s no doubt that they are worth noticing, because stories are important.

And we can put them in their first century context, process them, glean what we can from them. And then we can take a step back, and look at the whole of what we know about God through scripture and reason and experience and tradition.

The great Rabbi Hillel, who when asked what the basic principle of the Torah was, replied: “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor: That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”

His words are echoed both by his near-contemporary, another rabbi, the one we know as Jesus of Nazareth, who taught: “Whatever you wish people to do to you, so you should do to them: for this is the Law and the Prophets,” and by an early leader in the movement that Jesus started, the rabbinically trained Paul, who pronounced that “Love is the fulfilling of the law.”

The Bible’s authority comes not from its individual pronouncements, but in its overarching message: just, equal, even loving, treatment of all God’s people, no matter their age, their gender, their sexual orientation, their socio-economic status, their race, their class, their ethnicity.