STUPID POLITICS

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Mark 6:14-29

As I was reading and studying the scripture readings assigned for today, it struck me that they seem like a cross between the television program "The O.C.," and a Shakespearean play. They are full of melodrama. In the story from Mark's gospel for example--the story I'll be talking about today--we have political intrigue, murder, jealousy. Even erotic dancing. I'm sure that those of you who are doing "Year of the Bible" have been surprised by all the salacious material in the Bible--the murder, jealousy, sexual intrigue--that doesn't make it into primetime.

And if this story from Mark were a TV melodrama, it's important to mention that the opening screen would probably read something like, "based on actual events." Because, of course, the events and people depicted in this melodrama are real historical figures; we can corroborate some of this story, and we know about these characters, using historical sources outside of the gospels. So, let's take a moment to explore the story, and do a little history lesson about the personalities involved here.

First, we have a King: Herod Antipas. We should mention that this is a different Herod from the one we meet at the beginning of the gospel, the one who is infamous for killing all the infants in Bethlehem in an attempt to wipe out the baby Jesus. That is Herod the Great; the story of the slaughter of the innocents indicates what we know from other historical sources: that he was a brutal despot. But the Herod in this story, Herod Antipas, was his son.

And actually, Herod Antipas was not quite a king, something that was no small irritation to him, because he always wanted to be a king, like his father. Instead, the Romans gave him the title of Tetrarch for the Roman Empire, ruling over that section of Palestine during the time of Jesus' ministry. So, he was not quite a king.

So one day this Herod, Herod Antipas, decided to visit his half-brother Phillip in Rome. Phillip was a wealthy Roman citizen. You know, let the kids swim in the pool, we can check out the fine dining there in Rome; "lifestyles of the rich and famous." Play a little tennis. And while visiting, Herod was smitten with his brother's wife, Herodias. In the late 70s, when I went to high school, we would have called her a "fox." She was, apparently, exceedingly beautiful.

They fell in love; Herod seduced Herodias, persuaded her to marry him, and decided to divorce his present wife in the process. The problem was, however, his present wife was a daughter of the King of the Nabataeans, a country in Arabia. It was not good for Herod; in order to avenge his daughter's honor, the King of the Nabataeans decided to invade Herod's army, exacting heavy losses. And so this is the backdrop against which our drama takes place: We have a not-quite King (Herod), and his wife (Herodias), whom he had stolen from his brother. Melodrama.

Now, Herod was a powerful person, of course. When he did what most any moral person would condemn--get a divorce and marry his half-brother's wife--no one among his subjects said anything. As the closest thing to the King of the Jews they had, his job was to uphold the Jewish law, and there could be no more obvious violation of the law than what he did. But no one wanted to offend the King. No one made a peep.

Except, of course, for John the Baptist. John is like the boy in that story that I'm sure we're all familiar with, The Emperor Has No Clothes. He is the only one who speaks the truth. "That ain't right," comes a voice from the wilderness, which says what everyone else was thinking. "That's not right to marry your brother's wife," said John. It was the truth. But it was also very stupid politics.

We can maybe imagine here John's disciples, before he makes this statement out there in the wilderness; we can hear a conversation among those who had been following him for so long, trying to convince him to be a little savvier. Maybe they're saying to him something like: "John, maybe you want to think about this move. I mean, we're the good guys. If you get yourself killed, who will be here to speak the truth?"

John decides to speak the truth. John practices the stupid politics of speaking the truth.

Now, Herod isn't a bad guy. Even though this is melodrama, we shouldn't think of Herod as some one-dimensional character, as a person altogether that different from you and me. We shouldn't distinguish Herod's moral universe from our own. He's not a paragon of virtue, but he's also not a villain. You see, he likes John's preaching. He thinks John is a righteous and holy man; he "protects him," it says in the text. We might say that Herod's moral failure in this story is about the fact that he respects John's preaching, his teaching--but he doesn't follow it. It doesn't gain any traction in his life, doesn't change him. And so, Herod is an incredibly powerful guy, but he's also an incredibly weak guy.

I find it very interesting that, if you're a fan of Shakespeare (which I am), you might find all kinds of similarities between this story and one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, Macbeth. I did a sermon several years ago in which explored those similarities. Because we have a wife, like Lady Macbeth, who's trying to make her man "strong"; who we can imagine is criticizing her husband for his weakness. (What the audience might see as the king's moral reflection, Lady Macbeth sees as weakness). We can imagine Herodias, like Lady Macbeth, saying to her husband, "why are you letting that gadfly take potshots at you out there in the wilderness. What kind of man are you? Why don't you be strong, take care of him?"

Herodias gets her chance to make her man "strong." It happens at a dinner party.

Now--this is really the point I want to make this morning, and it's a very simple one. It's about the fact that the moment of moral decision for Herod doesn't come in the halls of power, in some grand confabulation about morals and ethics; it's not in the midst of some great debate about the ethics of using torture, or the method for trying suspected terrorists. No. It comes at a dinner party--it comes as a result of a silly joke at a dinner party.

It's a birthday party for the king. (The not quite king). We have some erotic dancing--Salome, the daughter of Herodias, who also must have been quite beautiful, does a dance. We can imagine it was a kind of dance the Torah, the Jewish law, would not approve of. It moved the king...so to speak. He was inspired to make a spurious promise. It was a joke, really. "I'll give you anything you want--up to half my kingdom!" It was a joke!

Salome asked her mother, Herodias, what she should ask for. Now was their chance.

"John the Baptist's head on a platter."

What will he do?

Will he be weak? Will he follow through on his vow?

The tragedy of Herod's moral failure--his real weakness--is that he's more concerned about not losing face with his guests at a dinner party and we presume with his wife, than about doing the right thing. And so, there we are--we too are at the party and suddenly we see John the Baptist's head show up all of a sudden next to the hors d'oeuvres. Herod is a man not to be messed with. And yet, all there realize what a pathetic sight that is; they know who the weak one is. No one says a word.

This is a hard story to read, hard to talk about, hard to preach about. It makes me uncomfortable. Because I think it pushes us to think about the moral choices we make, not in the moments of great moral strife, but the small, subtle moral decisions we make every day.

Because we can think that we're not like Herod; we're not involved with great moral choices. We're just trying to live a good life. And yet, we don't realize that the critical moral choices of our lives usually don't come in the form of a Hitlerian encounter--the Gestapo knocking on our door. More likely, they will come at a dinner party. We might not realize that our involvement with evil can often consist of the subtle compromises we make in our everyday lives in accommodating to it.

Several years I was playing golf--for some reason this story has stuck with me over these years. It was at a time when I had the golf bug, and I was a walk-on at one of the public courses in our area. And they put me with these two other guys. At one point, one of them found on the ground a pink tee. It was the cause for them to start in on all kinds of jokes about gay people--they joked about the other being gay, acted in that stereotypical way, and so on. It made me uncomfortable. I didn't go along with it. But I also didn't say anything. In the end, I felt guilty about it. But, what would it have mattered? I thought to myself. If I had been impolitic, if I would have taken a small moral stand, tell these guys I was offended, what would it have mattered? It wasn't a big deal. And yet, I think about how all such interactions, among such folks and those who don't challenge them, create a climate in which it's OK to make fun of gays, and Jews, and African American people; and then it creates an environment in which Matthew Shepherd gets killed, in which people find the justification to abuse each other. That's the logical end of it.

The thing about evil is that it has a way of working its way around the cracks in whatever moral armor we might have developed for ourselves. Evil usually doesn't come knocking on our door sporting a couple horns. We buy an SUV because we can, it's culturally acceptable, even if we know it's killing the ozone layer. What's a little exhaust among friends? And soon the ice caps are melting, and Trenton is under water.

The truth. If we practice it, we realize it's bad politics. It will get you into trouble in polite company. As William Sloane Coffin has written--as you can read on the front of your bulletin--"Truth is always in danger of being sacrificed on the altars of good taste and social stability." Aligning oneself with the truth may not get you elected. May not make you the most popular in the office. It can even get you killed; if we go back to our melodrama today, speaking the truth got John killed.

That's what evil seeks to do--kill the truth. People in power killed John. They killed Jesus.

Strange thing, though. And here's where we'll end today. The truth doesn't seem to be kill-able. It has a way of coming back. Herod was afraid of Jesus because he thought he was the truth--John's ghost--come back to haunt him. (Another parallel with Macbeth, by the way, if you want to check out the play its parallels to this story).

And so, here's the good news. Practicing truth in our lives--in the very small, subtle decisions we make, in the attempt to embody the stupid politics of the gospel...to attempt to do so is taking the long view, because to live out of that truth is to live out of something that doesn't die.

Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was uncompromising about speaking truth to the right-wing dictatorship in El Salvador in the late 70s and defending the rights of the poor, was killed by March 1980 by that regime. He knew he would be killed. "If they kill me," he said, "I will rise again in the people of El Salvador."

Several years ago, I saw a movie called The Little Buddha, and there's a scene in that movie in which a monk takes a glass of water, and points to the water and says, "this is the most powerful thing on earth. You cannot destroy this. You can spill the water, you can break the glass, but you cannot destroy the water; it simply goes to another form."

We cannot kill the gospel; we cannot kill the truth. The question simply remains: what are the choices we will make, when the Gestapo comes, or when racist joke is told over cocktails, or when you're making your next car-buying choice? What will you do?

Amen.

 

July 16, 2006

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