This past weekend I had the privilege of preaching at St. Andrew's Lutheran Church, my old Teaching Congregations community. The message is rooted in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, verses 14-29, with some attention drawn to the scenes afterwards. This sermon solicited some comments from parishioners - I was glad - they got thinking about what God's love speaking to malicious power might look like. Here's the manuscript!
"Beheadings, Loaves, and Fish: Visions of God's Justice"
Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and God’s Son, Jesus the Christ. Amen.
Hello, friends. It is good to be here again. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Dean Safe, former ministry intern of this congregation. I bring you greetings from Luther Seminary as I preach and preside here along with Mary Metzger at St. Andrew’s during these next two weeks. It is a joy to be worshipping among you.
I preface my sermon with this. We all know that we’ve had an eventful past month as a nation. From the Charleston shootings to the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality, we’ve been called to address the systemic and institutional sin of racism and what it means to truly welcome our brothers and sisters in Christ who identify as LGBTQ – by finally gaining equal rights that the rest of us have. These events have spurred conversations on various Christian perspectives, and we’ve pondered what God might think of it all. From the pulpit to the vigils to the marches to celebrations to funerals, it’s been a month that has both been full of mourning and repentance, alongside hope and promise and calls to action.
Our text for today is indeed gruesome. It includes a beheading. When I first read through this text, I thought, “Uffda. Where is the good news in that? There can’t be anything worthy of proclaiming.” The more I pondered, however – and as the Bible often surprises its readers – I realized how very wrong I was.
This is a messy story, without a doubt. Inside this flashback of a story are contained human greed, blood, and a need for power. We have a cast of characters here, principal among them King Herod, John the Baptist, and Herodias. King Herod is ruler over Galilee during this time, and likes to keep religious rebellion at a minimum. Herod had John arrested and put in prison – John was maybe getting a bit too excited about this whole Jesus thing, he thought, while Herodias, his new wife, wanted him killed. Herod has an amount of respect for John, and doesn’t honor Herodias’s wish. He doesn’t see the need to end John’s life. The king later hosts a banquet – a lavish gathered affair for the high rulers and officials with, I’m sure, plenty of wine and good food and dancing – where Herodias' daughter gets up and dances. It is then that she sees an in. After all, she has pleased the king. So much so that in that moment he promises her whatever she asks for and even half of his kingdom. Herodias knows what her mother wants – the head of John the Baptist, forerunner and announcer of the Messiah and Savior of the whole world. She has power now that she wields for evil – both as a member of the Herodian family dynasty and now personally over the king. Herod has always been a man loyal to his promises and oaths. He had made strides to keep John alive. He knew that John was a righteous man. In that moment, I imagine Herod smacking himself on the forehead, thinking, “What in the world have I done?” He needs to honor Herodias request, and he knew it.
The guards go in to the prison – where it is dank and dark and end up killing John and bringing his head on a platter back into the banquet hall. Later, the disciples bury the body in a nondescript tomb. The act is done. It is finished. Literally, a head on a platter. A story of contempt, power, and rule. A good man, who ran ahead with the Gospel and promise of Christ, has been silenced. The prophet has become a martyr at the expense of capricious political rule. This is early in Jesus’s ministry, and we all know that Jesus is out to change things. What, his followers might ask, does this mean, if Jesus is promising something new?
We find ourselves in these moments today. I know I do. Reflect on the last month, and it’s easy to see where good people have been silenced. It’s easy to see where violence comes to the forefront of national attention. When acts of racism are still committed, when black parishioners are killed by a young white man out of hatred wrongly motivated by race, when he shoots them during Bible study in their very own congregation – those are senseless, head-on-a-platter, I’m-out-to-get-you moments that grieve me, and I would hope everyone, deeply. I know that I’m guilty in being complicit in this, in not speaking up to the injustices that are implicit in racism. These acts of racism, sexism, classism, and you and I know that the list goes on, and on, and on, and other occurrences like it where humans are out to bring low and hurt others in society is despicable. How racism still perpetuates and swims in our culture is wrong. How we use the struggles of those on the margins, who are good people, for our own comfort and benefit needs to stop. Just like John the Baptist, this way of orientation and thinking continues today. We continue to find ourselves in the same senseless cycle as a society at large – killing ordinary, prophetic, innocent people for the keeping or gaining of power, silencing them forever. That, my friends, as we all know – is not Gospel. So the question needs to be asked - where do we find Christ in this.
All I can say in the midst of this is thank God for what comes next. Thank God for Jesus. I’m cheating a bit and taking a few preachers’ liberties. I’m using the next scene in the drama of Mark’s Gospel to advocate my point. In this story, a new vision for the world takes place – one that doesn’t look at all like a bloodied prison cell. What happens immediately after John’s death is the jump to the feeding of the 5,000 – where Jesus and his disciples take a few fish and loaves of bread and feed the crowds around them. In this story, when people are gathered and fed in community, it shows in concrete action what Christ embodied and brings into the world – that love triumphs power; that gathered community is stronger than individual desire. It takes the beheading of John – as tragic and as difficult as it is – and places it in a larger context. Though there will be violence, death, and persecution that persist in the name of sin, and none of it is ever okay or warranted, we can each do our part as faithful Christians – it’s the call of the Gospel that we are responding to. We can indeed do our part in correcting injustices until God reconciles creation to the way it should be. We are a gathered, faithful people who hear Christ’s words and respond to God’s call will be fed and sent into the world despite the sin that inhabits the creation around us. We see that “bread and loaves in abundance” mentality also today in our culture – where Gospel is being proclaimed in word and action – when people who identify as LGBTQ gain rights in national law, when action is taken to talk about ways of erasing racism in community, when food and shelter are given to people in need of a home, and in many other ways in how we carry out ministry here.
Friends, today, and every day, we are invited into this important work by God who claims us as God’s own. The violence of this Gospel story is indeed disturbing, but we still find ourselves living in some very disturbing realities today – societally, and in our own lives as we go about our day-to-day. The story of the beheading of a first century prophet is still resonating with us in the here and now. Just as this text is uncomfortable, so should today’s brokenness that persists in this world make us just as so. In that, we are called to be working for God’s justice. Be doing God’s work with your hands and your mouths and ears. Speak up when you hear something malicious spoken against someone. Pray without ceasing for those afflicted by societal wrongs. Offer a word of hope to those who ask for one, and maybe even to those who don’t. Comfort someone in his or her time of need or mourning. Educate yourselves and each other on racism and in the ways in which it is too often so subtle.
We have been given this call – to speak love and justice to power where it is wrongly placed. As John the Baptist was beheaded and brought to the banquet hall, Christ turns around and goes out with loaves of bread and fish and his disciples and feeds people. Christ’s love will always speak truth to malicious, violent power, and we are the people who will testify to it and act because of it. These are times, my friends, when we cannot be silent. These are times when we get to be the light of Christ to those who surround us and live among us, for the sake of the Gospel we have been entrusted with. Listen, for God is calling you. How will you respond? Amen.
Dean
