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Sermon: “Words of Life” (Mark 6:14-29)

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I once had a colleague who was generally acknowledged by the rest of the staff to be a very good hater.  

When I was new, they quietly warned me about her. 

She had a particular contempt for religion and was looking forward to the prospect of a new chaplain.  Apparently, she had said so. 

Soon enough, it did, indeed, turn out that I was on her list, not that I ever knew why.  

More to the point, I was in great company. 

The list of her contempt was a long one. 

She could get in a dig at your expense quicker than just about anyone, like a Don Rickles who didn’t smile and who wasn’t actually kidding.  

Needless to say, most of the time, she ate lunch with one or two specific other people.  

One was more or less like her.  

The other was totally different.  

She was so kind that she’d stick up for anyone, even an umpire who made a bad call during a game she hadn’t actually seen in a sport she didn’t actually follow.  

If her other two lunch companions were very good haters, she was almost the least talented person at hating you could think of, and being around them didn’t seem to faze or corrupt her.  

Somehow, it all just managed to roll off her.  

Of course, it also meant that when you were in her presence, you couldn’t get away with hating the haters. 

There was no trying out a little dig or two of your own, no keeping your antennae up for a glimmer of recognition or appreciation from her – no hope for an eye roll or a momentary smirk.  

Nope.

It was some serious Zen master technique, if you think about it, because the harder you tried to get my kind colleague to play along, the clearer it became that you weren’t nearly so different, nor nearly so untalented in the art of hating as you wanted to believe you were.  

Her behavior was a mirror like that.  

II.

So as we think about this morning’s gospel, I wonder if Mark has one eye in the mirror as he tells us about Herod.  

Herod was significantly hate-able guy, and Herod knew it.  

In addition to the testimony of the gospels themselves, there are historical records that suggest cruelties even more extreme, which I actually won’t get into. 

Rest assured that, true or not, even if these anecdotes were just part of the loreabout the Herodian dynasty, then the gospels are leaving a tremendous amount unsaid.   

If the point was to make readers really really hate Herod, there was a lot more they could have included. 

But they don’t.  

In fact, Mark does something a lot more interesting.  

He describes this evening in Herod’s court with a few particularly icky details.  

The daughter dancing in front of Herod and all his friends.  

The king overcome with creepy delight, promising her up to half his kingdom.  

Her running into the next room to ask her mother how to respond, and her mother taking the opportunity to eliminate a rival in a particularly gruesome way—particularly at a banquet.  

Roman emperors did stuff like this, and the example would not have been lost on Herod’s guests.  

And yet the thing that gets me about Herod is not his shocking cruelty so much as his gaping emptiness. 

I don’t mean to downplay the cruelty.  

But Mark is sure to let us know that Herod has resisted this until now.  

He tells us that Herod has been speaking with John the Baptist, that, in fact, despite all expectations to the contrary, Herod actually likes to listen to what John has to say.  

(Wouldn’t you love to know what that was? I would.) 

Herod is a person who has done so much wrong, and yet John seems to see something else in him, to hold out hope for him. 

John’s whole thing was calling people to account, and that was a dangerous game with Herod in the best of circumstances, much less when he has you imprisoned in the basement of his palace.  

Nobody would have blamed John for hating Herod – he had every reason to – but it seems as if he didn’t.  

Whenever he called people to account, it wasn’t from a place of hatred.  

And whatever he said to Herod, Herod didn’t hate him for saying it.  

III.

Sometimes people can be quick to shoot the messenger. 

Have you ever had to deliver a message someone didn’t want to hear?  

It gets personal very quickly – at least, it can, can’t it? 

It was for Herod’s wife, after all.  She’s out for blood, and that’s that. 

And yet, for Herod, not so much. 

Because if you think about it, John the Baptist down in that dungeon may be the only person who loves Herod enough to try telling him the truth.  

John is only one who will give voice to the thoughts in Herod’s own head – the doubts and regrets that he already has for what he’s done. 

Deeper than any of his dungeons is the desire of Herod’s heart for a new and better path forward.  

This foolish public vow he makes after his daughter’s dance: is the point that he’s just gross? 

Or is the point a more subtle one, that, given what his life has become, Herod would give literally anything for one moment of actual connection or actualjoy?  

And yet, given what his life has become, he can’t even have a moment. 

Whenever he opens his mouth, his words just unleash some new horrific freak show.  

John the Baptist is the only one who speaks different words to him, and who offers a way for Herod to imagine speaking words of life instead of death.  

If we went around this room, I suspect it would not take us long to name the words of life that we’ve been blessed to receive along the way. 

For all the moments when faith and hope and God can feel hard to find, there are other moments when words of life hit the ground like Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz,” when everything goes from black and white to technicolor.  

They are not always easy words. 

Yes, sometimes those words are things like, “I love you, too,” or “welcome home,” or “you’re cured.” 

Sometimes they are things like, “you need help,” or “I need help” or “something’s not working” or “this isn’t right.” 

Life is often good but rarely easy.  

Nevertheless, we know when the truth comes out and real life – new life — beckons.  

When it does, we must be brave enough to say yes. 

Herod does not find it in himself to be that brave. 

Even so, I think Mark wants us to be very very careful about indulging the temptation simply to hate him, or to refuse to bother trying to understand him.   

We live at a moment when cartoonish perspectives are all around us. 

Fear, distrust, and even hatred are “in” right now, and the effort involved in seeking actual understanding can feel like a heavy and thankless lift.   

But in his own time, John the Baptist didn’t think it was.  

Jesus didn’t think it was.  

Their faith in words of life, and in the God who speaks the world into being, was unshakeable.  

Their delight was far too great. 

All those people whose lives they touched, who had found the courage to say yes to a life that was close to God, accountable to God, and which glorified God, had reaffirmed their every hope.  

That hope was so deep that they wanted it even for Herod, just as they want it for you and me today. 

Let’s keep wanting that for one another, and humbly, for ourselves — especially now. 

And I hope we turn out to be remembered later on for how we became really really bad at hating, and how we helped the world to find its way. 

Amen.

A Christmas Day Sermon (Matthew 2: 13-15)

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The journalist Andy Rooney once wrote that “One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas.” 

If you and I have left those very messes in order to be here this morning, well, think of the glory that awaits us upon our return! 

Rooney is right, of course. 

When you consider the overabundance of joy that comes into our homes and our lives on Christmas, a little chaos is a small price to pay.  

Where your family may be different than mine is that in my family, Christmas is a day not only for opening new presents, but also for remembering previous ones.  

The opening of presents seems to take us back to other years and other living rooms, with other family, some of whom are gone now or moved away. 

But I don’t want to misrepresent the spirit of our remembering.  

We Grants are not particularly sentimental folk. 

So what you need to understand is that at Christmas, the tales we love most to tell are the ones that recall the Great Duds of Christmas Past.  

There was year my mother got my grandmother, her mother-in-law, a strand of pearls for Christmas…and my grandmother got her a stuffed cat.  

There was the year when my mom got a salad shooter for the second Christmas in a row from the same person, although at least it came in a box the second time around.  (I had insisted on that box.) 

There was the year my grandmother got everyone nutcrackers, each one themed to our hobby at that time—my father’s was an admiral nutcracker.  I got a golf nutcracker.  

This was just your average misfire until my uncle got to his, which was not a carpenter nutcracker in line with his hobby, but was, perplexingly, a shoemakernutcracker, which had nothing to do with anything.  

There is disagreement in our family about what happened next.  

We’re divided about whether he actually put it in the fire that day.  

If you’re interested, the actual disagreement centers on whether our family still used the fireplace at that point, but not whether my uncle was the kind of person who would throw his Christmas present into one.  

Getting into the spirit of the Great Duds of Christmas, one of my daughters never fails to recall the year that we did not achieve “even-steven” on their presents, and she had to sit there watching as the other one worked through one backlog and then another and then another.  Or so she says.  

Of course, there are also the moments when we have managed to get it right.  

Everyone has those, although they may not be quite so fun to tell.  

But you’ll remember those moments when, there amid the glorious mess of the living room, someone receives a gift that is truly wonderful.  

For just a moment, a hush seems to fall over everyone as the recipient takes it in.

I love that hush.  

It’s a respectful silence unlike any other because it recognizes, not that someone has gotten something that they really really wanted, but a much deeper gift: it’s what it’s like to witness a moment when someone feels they have truly been seen.  

We go quiet in the presence of a much holier kind of joy.  

Such moments remind us that, while we may be quick to console one another for a dud gift by saying “well, it’s really the thought that counts,” there are gifts that really do count—moments that take account of us in a particularly powerful way. 

There’s a moment in C.S. Lewis’ novel, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobethat seems to point to this kind of joy. 

You may not particularly remember that when we first see Narnia, the land on the other side of the wardrobe, it is under a witch’s spell. 

The spell is keeping the land in a perpetual, joyless winter which Christmas cannot break through.  

Do you remember the grim joke during the first months of COVID that today’s date was the 97th of March, or what have you? 

That’s more or less what Lewis is imagining as the spell of a perpetual winter.  

But slowly, the witch’s powers begin to weaken, until one day, the characters at the heart of the story hear sleigh bells in the distance—and it turns out that, at last, and for the first time in ages, Father Christmas has been able to come in.  

The moment is described as having a certain surprise.   

“Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly,” the story says. “But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn’t find it quite like that.  He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still.  They felt very glad, but also solemn…Lucy [she’s one of the children] felt running through her that deep shiver of gladness which you only get if you are being solemn and still.”  

This reminds us of what we sometimes see reflected in the giving of very special gifts: a particular love that shines through the stillness of such moments. 

There’s a lesson in that, too. 

As an anchor point for faithful people, Christmas is trying to talk about God’s love, which arrives for us “so big, and so glad, and so real” that it first evokes that same stillness, and then a “deep shiver of gladness.” 

To look around us, it may not seem that still. 

We celebrate Christmas with tremendous gusto, whether that’s in the form of the glorious mess in the living room, the recitation of the Great Duds of Christmases Past, the biggest tree that could possibly fit in our house, or the loudest sweater we can possibly find to wear for the office party. 

(Someday, I should try to do a sermon about the theology of ugly sweaters.  Come back next year, everybody!) 

Some of you may even have taken part in an informal “Whammageddon!” contest.  

If you don’t know what that is, it’s about trying to avoid the insipid 80s pop song, “Last Christmas,” by the superstar duo, Wham!, whom some of us remember well.  

Anyway, in “Whammageddon,” the last one standing (the last one not hearing the song) is the one who “wins.” 

It’s the “-aggedon” part that interests me – as in Armageddon, from the Book of Revelation. 

It suggests that the Christmas season is an epic battle…a battle that we can only win through some kind of avoidance.  

Certainly, it reminds us of how hard it can be to unplug ourselves from the world’s chatter, even when we really try.  

I’m actually not that gloomy about it. 

I think the real joy, and the real point, is in losing the game. 

Its underlying message is that, like that particular song, Christmas works unrelentingly to find us. 

Whenever and however we manage to get captured are things to be celebrated, and recognized as sources of laughter and community, those two great heralds of God’s kingdom.

God bless the gusto of Christmas – the glorious mess of it.  Even the duds.  

But bless also the stillness of its arrival in our hearts. 

It comes to remind us of how profoundly we’ve been seen, how intimately we are known, and how tenderly we are cared for, not only by those dearest to us, but even more fully by God.

It always takes our breath away and fills our hearts with love. 

Amen.