Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, “John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.” But others said, “It is Elijah.” And others said, “It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” But when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”
For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. For John had been telling Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee. When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.” And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” She went out and said to her mother, “What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the baptizer.” Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.
Mark 6:14-29
Before we start, I just want to mention a disclaimer: there is a system that some churches use to read through the Bible on Sunday mornings, which enables them to read a large portion of the Bible over three years, and do it all on the same pace together. If you haven’t heard of that, it’s called the lectionary. I love that system, and usually use it to guide my preaching. So, when I was preparing for my time with you all this morning, I turned to my trusty lectionary. There, I found a couple of texts that really, really challenged me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve challenged you, too. One of my impulses was to say, well, maybe we should look elsewhere for scripture this morning. But, as we’ll discover together this morning, I think some of these harder realities are the very ones that we need to spend some time with together. So, let’s dig in together, and see what God might be saying to us this morning through his Word.
The two very difficult Biblical passages we are confronted by this morning both have to do with important prophets of our faith. In our Old Testament passage today, we read about the Amos’ vision of a plumb line, that tool which God would use to measure the uprightness of his people, and about the rejection and persecution Amos underwent as a result of his prophecy. In the New Testament reading for today, we find a story almost too hard to read aloud in the middle of worship, which relates the beheading of Jesus’ cousin and friend John the Baptist. In both stories, God calls a messenger to remind God’s people about the moral laws they have failed to uphold, and in both stories, that messenger is put in danger because of the message they have conveyed.
There’s a lot of heavy stuff for us to think about in these challenging stories. There are the serious sacrifices that Amos and John make, giving up their careers and living humbly in order to do God’s work, not to mention risking their own lives to fulfill their divine mission. There’s the political thing: certainly one of the major elements of these stories is that the prophets have the courage to share God’s message with the rulers of the land. In many ways, I think, that’s a lesson that we ought to think about these days—our world needs people like Amos and John who are willing to witness the injustice and immorality that pervades American life today, particularly before the most powerful people. There’s the issue about the rulers’ companions in these stories: the king that Amos criticizes on God’s behalf depends too faithfully on his greedy priest, Amaziah, and John mostly gets into trouble because his prophecy offends not the king so much as the queen. There is much for us to think about here about the company that we keep.
But I think the major lesson for us this morning concerns the ways that sin creeps into our hearts and distorts our judgment. Not only do we lose control, like when we just unthinkingly finish that whole bag of potato chips, but we even start to lose a sense of the fact that what we have done and what we continue to do is wrong. We do whatever we can to not have to deal with the reality that we have disobeyed and disregarded the God we love so dearly.
That’s what Herod does. Remember, Herod is the son of Herod the Great, the king who rebuilt the temple, a god-fearing man. Herod himself likes to hear good preaching. He even likes to listen to John the Baptist, the prophet who has been calling people out to the desert where he lives to repent and be baptized. Herod likes John and senses that John has a pulse on God’s word. And he wants to hear it. Except… at some point Herod decided to marry his sister-in-law Herodias, and that’s explicitly against the law, and John reminds Herod of that. John won’t bless the marriage. This infuriates Herod’s wife, who wants to get rid of John by having him killed, and troubles Herod, who would rather not hear the truth of his sin, but also is unwilling to kill a righteous man. So Herod imprisons him.
I know that’s what I do with my sin sometimes. It’s not that I don’t know that I am sinful and have done things that disobey God. I think there are very few of us here that would try to say we are without sin. We just have a hard time facing those specific sins we have each committed. For me, I take whatever those specific things are—especially if they are sins I’m not completely sure I want to renounce yet—and I just keep them like that box of junk I have in my closet with the random charger for the gadget I never use, and that old worn out wallet and leftover Saint Patrick’s Day decorations, all of that random junk that I just don’t want to go through. I figure I’ll look at it, you know, next month. So I keep it all in a box, hidden away, where I don’t have to look at it too frequently, but I know it’s always up there.
That’s the easiest way to take care of those things we just don’t have energy to deal with right now. And I get it. It takes so much to come to terms with those things that we have done—sometimes it’s just too much for us. I see this kind of thing at the psychiatric hospital where I work: people who, when they’re really sick, sometimes delusional or out of control, they’ve done things to hurt the ones that they love very much. And so, as they get healthier and healthier, they have to come to terms not only with their illness, but also with the fact that they have inflicted harm, sometimes serious physical damage, on their dearest friends and family. And that just feels like an impossible task sometimes. And though most of us here maybe haven’t had to experience that particular sort of challenge, we, too, have hurt many of the people we loved, or done things that we know that God—the God who has given us so many blessings—has not approved of. Sometimes, it becomes so hard for us to come to terms with our own sin that we just have to get it out of sight and out of mind like Herod.
But this is the worst part of sin. Aside from the act itself, our unwillingness to confront our sin sets us apart from God in the same way that Herod refuses to listen to the words of the prophet he admires, so that we get farther and farther away from our Heavenly Father who loves us.
That’s why, in the text Bob read for us from Amos this morning, God gives his prophet Amos a vision of a plumb line. Now, I don’t know how many builders we have in this congregation, but I know that we’ve got a few handy folks, and we’re also in the middle of some very important construction on Harmony Road. So, are any of you construction-experienced folks familiar with what a plumb line is?
And the fact is, just because we put that sin up in that junk box of our hearts doesn’t mean that it has no power over us anymore. In fact, it’s when we keep that stuff hidden and concealed that we become susceptible, in the same way Herod was, to letting our shameful sins multiply and bind us in a web of evil. Herod, who thought he solved his problem by locking John away, gets caught when he promises his stepdaughter anything she wants in front of many of his subjects. The stepdaughter runs to her mom, who has been chomping at the bit for an opportunity to get rid of John permanently. When the stepdaughter returns and asks for John’s beheading, Herod doesn’t want to go back on his word, or he’ll look like an untrustworthy, powerless ruler. It’s not that he doesn’t have a choice—Herod chooses to fulfill her request in the same way he chose to unlawfully marry his sister-in-law. But his sin has got the better of him. His refusal to own up, at the very beginning, to the sin of his marriage to his brother’s sister, only gets him in deeper, and deeper, and deeper.
Sin can get the better of us, too. It can catch us in a web of lies, or keep us away from church, cause rifts that tear apart relationships, and lead us to do things that we never would think ourselves even capable of. I think that’s why God calls us to confession every Sunday, to bring before him those things that would otherwise get a hold of us. I know it’s not fun—just this week, at a worship service at the hospital where I work, when I invited all of the patients to join me in a prayer of confession, one of the guys interjected, “aw, confession, do we have to?” And I get it. I often find myself kind of going through the prayer of confession on auto-pilot, spending our moments of silent confession thinking about what’s for lunch. I think we’d rather sidestep that stuff. But we need to be confronted with our need for confession—which is why, in the same way King Jeroboam and King Herod need the prophetic words of Amos and John, I think we all need this story in Mark to measure us up, to tell us where we haven’t been completely upright, to hold up a mirror to us and to call us to confession so that we might restore our relationship with our Father who loves us.
Now, friends, I have done my best to witness to a truth the Bible reminds us of—the truth of our sinfulness and, I think, our resemblance to Herod in our desire to not have to come to terms with our specific sins. I know it’s not particularly enjoyable to have to devote our time and energy to a truth like this one. I know I would rather sleep in than show up here this morning to have to tell it. Seriously.
But I’d be letting you down if I didn’t tell you about another truth that Mark writes about, and it comes at the very end of his book, after he describes another execution even more as heart-wrenching and unjust. Jesus, John’s cousin, also loses his life at the hands of a politician in a bind, after witnessing to truths that many in power didn’t want to hear. But death has no victory over Jesus. Rather, Jesus, God’s son, the Lord of the Universe, overcomes death and breaks the power of sin over humankind. And Jesus extends that victory to us in a grace that surpasses all understanding. No matter the depth and weight of the sin that we have committed and borne, no matter how far we have gotten into that potato chip bag of indulgence and transgression, no matter how much we have shrouded our own sin in the past, Jesus offers each one of us forgiveness of all of these things.
God does repeatedly hold up to us a measure or a mirror to remind us how we have fallen short of his expectations of us, not so that he can lord our misdeeds over us, but so that we can remember that we each depend on the grace that he gives us through his son Jesus. And that’s why we get together every Sunday, not just to get to see each other—although that really is a real treat!—but also so that we can witness to this incredible truth of the grace that the Lord of All offers to us. There is no good news for us to hear if we aren’t willing to come face to face with the reality and specificity of our own sin. But we need not be afraid to confess those real, concrete, specific sins because our God has promised to forgive us, and his love is always greater than our sin.
That means that that junk drawer that is clunking around in your heart right now—with the mistakes you have repeated more than once, the hurtful things you have said to the person you love, the promises you haven’t honored, the generosity you withheld, the unfairness you inflicted, the anger you didn’t control, the regretful decision you made, the desire you failed to restrain—you can take all of those things out of that box, and look straight at them, and let them know that they have no power over you, because Jesus has already answered for those sins on the cross. Thanks be to God! Amen.
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