Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, rcl yr b,
Sunday, July 14th, 2024
II Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

The disciples cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.
King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known…
He said” John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”  (Mark 6:13-14, 16)

Our Gospel this morning, the description of the beheading of John the Baptist, seems more suitable as material for a Netflix original than as a text for meditation.  There is action, color, dancing, and music in this story.  And there is conflict. Looking not that closely, we can easily see anger, violence, trickery, and revenge. Is there gospel in this Gospel?

Herod Antipas (successor to Herod the Great) was a weak king, and his weakness was revealed throughout the account in this morning’s reading from Mark. Not only was he weak, but his infatuation with his wife’s daughter Salome (he would give her anything she asked, even half of his kingdom) was disgusting. And then there is the rage of Herod’s wife Herodias toward John the Baptist who has prophesied against her scandalous and ill-conceived marriage to Herod, and then there is her rage against Herod himself for only jailing John, not executing him for maligning Heroidas’s good name. What a mess! The combination of Herod’s weakness, his desire for Salome and Herodias’s rage against her husband create the perfect storm of human depravity which ends in the senseless beheading of John the Baptist, the herald of God’s Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

As readers of Mark’s gospel, we really don’t see this coming. Last Sunday, Jesus commissioned the twelve disciples for their work of preaching repentance, casting out demons, and healing the sick. This Sunday we encounter a horror story! What a mess! What an unlikely context for the life of discipleship!

There is a messy element to human experience this Gospel reminds us: things are rarely (if ever) perfect.  Even when it seems that order is being restored or that hope and optimism fill our thoughts, there is still struggle, injustice, loss and suffering, and in the case of this morning’s Gospel, violence.

The world is messy; our lives are messy.  Sin – ours and the sin of others – does not go away, just because we are devout or do good works. Good and evil, the heroes and the villains coexist – and not always as discrete entities that can be sorted, but often in combination, muddied and confused.

The good news of the gospel is that God does not abandon the world because of sin, because of the mess. Ironically, this good news resides more in the letter to the Ephesians this morning than it does in the Gospel itself.

Because they were seen as disruptors and the Romans never shied away from violence, Jesus and his disciples had every reason to fear something like the fate of John the Baptist as their own end. But the power of God was so real in their experience, and their understanding of the gospel so intimate that nothing could stop their witness, their teaching and their healing.  We are here today because God was with them and did not abandon them nor the disciples who came after them.

What is true is that even in the mess, even if we end up contributing to the mess and recognize our guilt, God adopts us as God’s own. “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world,” we read in Ephesians, “that before God we should be holy and blameless.  God destined us in love for adoption through Christ Jesus.” Our stories may not be like a Netflix original, and our sins may not be as great as the weakness and treachery of Herod and Herodias, but we still need God’s adoption, God’s love and mercy, God’s “always yes” if we are to participate in God’s mission of salvation and redemption for the world.  Sin, the mess, and its compromising of the gifts of God we have received, renders us immobile as disciples.  Adoption, God’s “always yes” no matter where we are or what we’ve done, transforms the value of our negative experience, precisely at the moment of repentance, precisely at the moment of turning toward God. Forgiveness of sin is the power of the Cross. And so, in Christ, God loves us into repentance; in Christ, God loves us still more into salvation.

To follow Jesus is to encounter the mess and strive to make it less messy and to prepare the conditions for grace in our hurting world and our hurting community. Not to give up on ourselves or others, and to affirm for ourselves and others that God, too, is in the mess, working alongside God’s chosen ones, God’s adopted ones, the adoption that is proclaimed in Holy Baptism, our baptism.

For all Christians, Holy Baptism is our lifeline. It is God’s promise to cancel the power of sin in our life, God’s “always Yes” freeing us to take our place alongside those first disciples of Jesus in the work of preaching repentance, casting out demons, and healing the sick. And while we’re talking sacraments, Holy Communion is the regular renewal of our baptismal covenant – so essential to the life of discipleship, so essential for our life in Christ.

As we receive together Christ’s body and blood, this morning, and in every Eucharist both past and future, we are created anew as the community of God’s adoption.  Holy Communion is also God’s “always yes”, spoken with such frequency, such predictability, such power, and such honesty that we slowly, surely, begin to begin to see God with us in the mess of discipleship and in the mess of living. And in this refreshment of the good news of Jesus Christ, we are transformed by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit from people of “sometimes yes, sometimes no” to people of God’s always Yes. This is our faith. This is our hope. Thanks be to God.

JFB