Ephesians 1:3-14 ; Mark 6:14-29
July 12, 2009
I had lunch with a friend this week at the Thai restaurant. Now, I don’t for a minute believe the fortunes you get inside the cookie at the end of the meal mean anything. But, and I know I’m not alone in this, I still look and wonder what it would be like if they did mean something.
Of course, I always assume it will be a good fortune. The eating establishments want your experience to be positive, so they aren’t going to load the cookies with fortunes about how we will encounter great suffering in the week to come. It’s just not good business sense.
So it was with my fortune this week. I opened it up and it said, “Everything will come your way.” Now, of course I don’t believe in fortunes at all, but still, I thought “wouldn’t it be nice if everything I want would come my way?”
That day – my fortune cookie day – was not a good one. It was the day I got back from vacation, and the very first thing I did when I got into work was to start reading my emails. Within 5 minutes, through some technical glitch, or act of the devil – I’m not sure which – I lost my emails of the past 2 years. It was horrifying.
And of course, this little “glitch” meant that I did not exactly get to spend the day as I had planned. I was going to catch up on a number of tasks and check in with a lot of people. Instead, I spent the day doing things that more resembled the work of my previous profession than that of a pastor. To top it all off, my success was minimal, to put it generously. (Perhaps indicating I made a good choice when I switched professions 12 years ago). In the end, I am still missing about 18 months worth of emails.
And there it sat, next to my computer all afternoon taunting me: my fortune. When was the good stuff promised in my cookie going to come my way? Then, one time I looked down at the smug fortune and I noticed something. A word was missing. A word I had supplied but was never actually in the fortune. The word “good.” It did not say, “everything ‘good’ will come your way”, it just said – “everything will come your way.” All of a sudden I thought maybe the fortune was coming true – a huge truckload of everything was being dumped all over my desk. And that truck – like all trucks that dump things in our lives – was truly filled with everything: the good, the bad, the ugly and the sublime. It just so happened that the rotten, smelly garbage is what landed on top of the pile that day.
The letter to the Ephesians opens with such grandiose declarations that it sounds like a fortune cookie. “Praise be to God who bestows on us in Christ every spiritual blessing in the heavens!” Cool. Not a bad fortune. Believe in Jesus and every spiritual blessing will come our way. The letter goes on to say we will be redeemed, our sins will be forgiven, we will be brought together in unity, and we get a wonderful inheritance.
Of course, such a reading taunts all of us who call ourselves Christians because life is anything but a steady flow of wonderful spiritual blessings. But, maybe we’re reading this too much like we read a fortune cookie at a restaurant. Maybe we are seeing things that aren’t there and assuming things that aren’t assumed. Even though “blessing” sounds pretty and nice, I’m not sure the spiritual blessings that are so freely bestowed on us by God are always what we wish they would be. These so called “blessings” look a little less pretty when we read them in light of the story from the Gospel of Mark.
And what a lovely story this is. It’s always nice to start off a Sunday morning with a little beheading. Here is a story about someone who is surely one of God’s chosen – John the Baptist. He spoke truth to power, never veered off course from his ministry or calling. He praised God and preached the good news. And what were his spiritual blessings? Well, he did get to pour sweet honey on his locusts in the desert, I guess. But in the end, it was his head on that platter. What kind of blessing is that?
What the author of the Letter to the Ephesians seems to be describing is something much more fierce than winning the spiritual blessing lottery. The author tells us that when we choose this path of following Jesus, God adopts us. And this is not a “come on in and have some pie at the kitchen counter” adoption. This is the fierce adoption of a child by a mother. Lydia had no choice in becoming my daughter. I chose her and now she is shaped and formed by me as her parent. Who knows, she may like meat. But I have bestowed on her the spiritual blessing of vegetarianism. .
Likewise, God adopts us, and so we become subject to God’s power, God’s visions and God’s hopes. We are brought into a realm where spiritual forces work on us, changing us, shaping us. We’re told in Ephesians that when we are adopted, we’re “marked with the Holy Spirit.” There is something about this idea of being “marked” that sounds more like being a member of the mafia than of a religious tradition. “Marked” with the Holy Spirit? Do I really want that? Once we’re chosen – once we are adopted – we are showered with whatever “blessings” God sees fit. Maybe that will be the blessing of good things coming our way. Maybe that will be the blessing of learning to speak truth to power coupled with the blessing of having a head that looks particularly good when served on a silver platter.
This story of John the Baptist’s death disrupts any idyllic picture we might have of what it means to be Christian – as if Jesus’ death on the cross isn’t enough to do that in the first place. This is one of the lessons of John’s demise. I think there is another equally important thing we can learn from this gruesome text, especially in light of the whole gospel of Mark. We learn that there are more parallels between the disciples and Herod than between the disciples and John the Baptist. In other words, this whole beheading story might be less of a warning about how the disciples could end up like John, and more about how we are all vulnerable to ending up like Herod.
Unfortunately, the story as we have it reads a bit like a Shakespearean tragedy. And so Herod the king comes off as a kind of caricature. But there are some important clues in this passage that point to a much more real and complex human being whose flaws and foibles are more like ours than we are probably comfortable with. When I see Herod as a human being and not a character in a play, I don’t see someone who was innately mean or evil. Herod, we find out, kind of liked John – or at least had a healthy fear of him. But, more than that, he was compelled by what John was saying. Here John had come into his life because he denounced the relationship Herod was having with his brother’s wife. Herod arrested him to silence him, yet Herod kept letting John speak hard truth to him. We’re told Herod even, liked listening to John – the one who was basically condemning both Herod’s personal and political life. Reading between the lines, I have to believe that John was influencing Herod, giving him a picture of the kingdom that Jesus had come to bring – a kingdom in direct conflict with the one Herod currently led.
It was not an easy road John offered, but something must have caught Herod’s attention; just as something about this Christian endeavor captured our attentions at some point, as evidenced by our very presence here today. Herod was deeply conflicted. He lived with both feet in his own kingdom to be sure, but John was speaking of a different way. That way was hard, and didn’t promise riches or power. But it promised something, and I think it was almost enough for Herod…almost. In the end, Herod was not willing to betray everyone and everything hew knew based only on what John said. But the depth of his struggle can be found in how he felt when he chose to have John killed. He was, we read, deeply grieved. The greek word here is quite powerful. It’s the same emotion expressed by Jesus when the disciples fell asleep on him in the garden of Gethsemene. It is a sadness that sits in your gut and leaves you hollow and empty. Herod chose wrongly. But I truly believe he did not choose lightly.
We’re hard on Herod, but the story of John and Herod is sadly predictive of the story of Jesus and the disciples. The disciples were initially intrigued with Jesus. They found his teachings and healings compelling and they followed him. But, when the going got rough, when the consequences of following Jesus became clear, and they were asked to make some hard choices between the life they knew and the life Jesus was calling them to, most of them chose to back off, and one even chose to play the role of Herod. Jesus was killed – betrayed by one of his own – and at the end of the Gospel of Mark, there is no resurrection appearance, no reunion scene between the disciples and the risen Christ. There is just fear and abandonment.
We have to make difficult choices sometimes. It may be hard for us to relate to Herod in this story since none of us actually have the stomach to order a beheading. But, I do think we can relate to those times when the God who has adopted us asks something of us we can’t quite bring ourselves to do. We like to re-tell the Christian story in fortune cookie terms. On some level we all want to be victorious, successful and wealthy. And if someone is willing to tell me that Jesus happens to also want that for us, well, sign me up! That’s good news. Except that it isn’t. It isn’t good news. It’s just tempting news. Jesus knew that. John knew that. And I think Herod knew that on some level.
So, if being Christian does not mean only good things come our way, and even seems to promise some very difficult life choices and experiences, why do it? Why sign up?
Because we are not just adopted by God as individuals to live individual Christian lives. We are chosen by God for community. We are adopted into a family. And if we let that family shape us as a community, our community will play by different rules. And that community is good news. It’s good news for all those who are being crushed under the weight of a world that lives by Herod’s rules. We are Christian not just for ourselves, but for the sake of the world.
The community Paul describes – the one we have been adopted by God into – is, in the end, a beautiful sight. It is a community of inclusion, where non-Jews, like the Gentiles in Ephesus, and non-Christians like so many around us today, have a place without having to convert or conform. All are in and are now a part of something that transcends all religions and creeds. Everything will come our way, and I mean everything. And being Christian is not always easy. But imagine this:
The kingdom of God that Jesus announced and embodied is what life is like on earth. Imagine if God ruled the nations, and not our presidents and prime ministers and dictators and despots. Every aspect of personal and communal life would experience a radical reversal. The political, economic, and social subversions would be almost endless – peacemaking instead of war mongering, liberation not exploitation, sacrifice rather that subjugation, mercy not vengeance, care for the vulnerable instead of privileges for the powerful, generosity instead of greed, humility rather than hubris, embracing rather than excluding.
Choosing this faith requires a counter-cultural choice. And it’s hard because the way things are seems so powerful, so inevitable, while the alternative seems eons, if not dimensions, away. Sometimes we can do it, and sometimes we waver and retreat. But each time we lean into that powerful force of adoption and join the kingdom of God, we are freed a little bit more from our lives as individual pilgrims wandering around subject to the prevailing forces of the day. Each time we choose to live in Christ, we are showered with the spiritual blessings that bring us into a community shaped by God and visible to all. We become, in short, the good news. Amen.
