“The Dangerous Dance”

Mark 6:14-29

A Sermon Preached by

Rev. Dr. Peter W. Shidemantle

15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 13, 2003

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., DeWitt, NY  13214

Phone:  315-446-0960      FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com

Like the "Gangs of New York," our gospel text this morning has really nothing in it that speaks of authentic joy or hope. It is a sordid tale of anger and revenge, resentment and death. Maybe this is the reason that I have never heard, let alone preached, a sermon on this text. Jesus is never even mentioned. Instead, the plot revolves around two men - John the Baptist and Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, and two women - Herodias, Herod’s wife, formerly married to Herod’s brother Philip, and Herod’s niece and stepdaughter, also named Herodias. The Jewish historian Josephus identified her as "Salome," which helps keep the characters straight.

John had gone to Herod and had told him that his marriage to Herodias was a moral outrage - he had broken up his brother’s marriage in order to take Herodias as his wife. Herod didn’t like John’s words, but Herodias was furious about it. She wanted to kill the baptizer, but Herod, who spent a lot of his time trying to please people, decided just to put John in prison.

It all came to a head (if you’ll pardon the expression) when Herod threw a birthday party for himself and invited all the most influential people in the region. Salome provided the evening’s entertainment, and she danced up such a storm that Herod (who undoubtedly was "under the influence") told her that she could have anything she wanted, even half his kingdom. When Salome asked her mother what she should ask for, she didn’t even have to think about it: "Ask for the head of John the baptizer!"

Salome returned to the party and made the demand to Herod, that John’s head be served up on a platter as if it were the last course of the banquet. Herod didn’t really want to grant the request, but he couldn’t afford to lose face in front of Salome or his VIP guests, who had heard him make his foolish promise. After the grotesque scene ended, what was left of John was claimed by his disciples and laid in a tomb.

Jesus is never mentioned here, but the foreshadowing of Jesus’ own death is clearly present. From the beginning of Mark’s gospel Jesus’ ministry is linked to the work of John the Baptist. So too their deaths, by different means, but with the same result, and at the hand of the same powers. Instead of Herod, it will be Pilate, a cross rather than a sword - and so will it be, as Mark’s readers knew, for the early followers of Jesus, many of whom will be imprisoned and even executed, for the sake of the gospel.

What this story should do is remind followers of Jesus, in any age, that we should never become carried away with the notion that faithfulness to God will ever be easy. There is, and always will be, very real resistance to what God, and those who seek to be faithful to God, are about. Herod liked listening to John, Mark tells us. He found him interesting, even fascinating. The world is usually delighted to hear the fresh word of a new prophet. There is a sense in which the world is eager for that one clear bell of righteousness, and stands in awe of one who is willing to speak up before power with calls for justice. There is a sense in which we admire one who will tell us truth about ourselves even when we don’t want to hear it. But resistance comes when those who are entrusted with power are threatened by any authority other than their own. It’s not that they are all good or all bad. It is that when things get tight, expediency and people-pleasing usually rule the day - and the truth is what gets sacrificed on the altar of power. Combine with that the lusts of the heart, the capacity for evil that can flourish in any of us, the ferocity of wounded pride and the wish for revenge - and it all comes together in a dangerous dance - and it is normally the prophet who gets crushed.

In one very telling scene in "Gangs of New York," three groups of people are shown at prayer at the same time: the leaders of two of the gangs preparing to do battle with one another, each calling on God to give them strength to crush the enemy, and a group of wealthy uptown New Yorker’s, formally dressed and gathered around a table full of delicacies, where the patriarch thanks God for his many blessings and for his love. Soon all of them will be engulfed by riots in the streets and the Union army’s ferocious quelling of those riots. Having lived by the sword, in the case of the gangs, or gained great wealth through being partners with crooked politicians, in the case of the uptowners - all would perish or have their lives forever changed by the same means that they had gained their power and wealth and control.

This is the prophet’s word, that destruction looms for the people or the nation, for the individual, who choose the "easy" way of expediency, who push away righteousness and disregard morality, who cover over the higher calling of God’s justice and love with the pleasures of the moment, the fear of losing face, of being seen as "weak" in the eyes of the world. It comes back around. What is sown, in time, is also what is reaped.

This sordid tale of John’s death in Mark comes right after Jesus sends out his newly organized disciples on their first training mission, and following this story Mark tells us that "The apostles returned to Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught." In this story Mark is giving a kind of preview of what it will be like for them, what the disciples of God might expect from the world - that at first they will be welcomed warmly. But as the dance goes on the world will want them to be quiet, that it is enough. It will tell them that it is time to separate church and state, that we aren’t ready right now for what they have to say, that it’s not a good time to be talking about these things. Mark is saying that whenever and wherever the disciples of Jesus Christ are faithful to the words of God’s grace and power, they had better be ready for the world to continue the dangerous dance of power, wealth, fame, passions, egos, drugs, all swirling around together in deadly combination.

By the end of "Gangs of New York" I sort of felt like I wanted to take a shower - that all the blood-letting and violence and abuse, the bigotry and the crooked politicians, and the wealthy who felt they were above it all - all became victims of their own passions and indifference to the suffering of others. They had their time, but it ended tragically, as it had to end. The story of John’s end, as the story of Jesus’ end that it foreshadowed, is hardly the same. Herod had his time. Pilate had his time. They, and others like them, always have to watch their backs. Caught up in the dangerous dance, they choose momentary pleasures and shift their allegiances to what will benefit them in the short-term - for that is all there is. But who is remembered more, Herod and his important guests, or John, who went headless to heaven? Who is remembered more, Pilate and his henchmen, or Jesus, the crucified one, who lives and guides his followers in the way of peace and love?

We should not believe that we can stand above or apart from the powers that destroy and abuse life. We are not free from being implicated in the dark dance of this world’s powers. But we are free in how we shall relate to them, free to choose the way of the one who was crushed by the powers only to overcome them in the end.

You can’t decapitate the truth of God. A crucifixion can’t stop the Son of God. It takes more than persecution to stop the mission of God in the world. There is another dance, the dance of the people of God, the dance that goes on and on. From the resplendent table of Herod’s banquet Mark moves the story of Jesus and his followers to a simple table set in the wilderness where multitudes were fed with just a few fish and a few loaves of bread. It is a table of abundant generosity, a table where less is more, where sharing results in enough for all. This is the life to which we are called - a life that gives witness to the generosity of God’s love and goodness - a life that brings light to the darkness, that shows the darkness for what it is, a life that redeems the days we are given for the sake of the one who gave himself for us. This is the dance, the great celebration to which we are invited, and invited again. Take up the invitation and find your burden lifted, your feet made lighter, your appetite for righteousness increased. There is no stopping the people of God who give themselves to the dance of life.

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