One of the most moving things I’ve read in the last year was a GQ profile of the once-teenaged, now twenty-seven-year-old pop singer Justin Bieber, one of the best-selling musical artists of all time.  If you’re not familiar with Bieber’s story, it’s almost a textbook case of childhood celebrity. He released his breakthrough album at the age of 15. By 16 he was the youngest man ever to top the Billboard 200, and he followed it up with hit record after hit record. And then with DUI after DUI; with arrests for assault, vandalism, and resisting arrest; and with a series of bizarre controversies including not only video of him singing one of his own songs with racial slurs swapped in for the lyrics, but also, most strangely and perhaps most famously, an extraordinarily narcissistic guestbook note at the Anne Frank House, in which he said she was a “great girl” and he hoped she would have been a “belieber.” All of it was enough to get him banned from performing in the People’s Republic of China. Which, to be fair, isn’t that hard.

“We as a society are all too familiar,” writes GQ’s Zach Baron in this profile of Bieber, “with what happens…to kids like Justin Bieber… But I will share a personal view: Being famous breaks something in your brain. Especially when your fame comes as a result of your talent, from the thing you’ve loved and nurtured and worked at since you were young. Bieber earned his success while he was still a child; then his gift turned into a snake and bit him.”

And then come the paragraphs that really got me: “‘There was a sense of still yearning for more,’ [Bieber] says now. ‘It was like I had all this success and it was still like: I’m still sad, and I’m still in pain. And I still have these unresolved issues. And I thought all the success was going to make everything good. And so for me, the drugs were a numbing agent to just continue to get through… You wake up one day and your relationships are [f—ed] up and you’re unhappy and you have all this success in the world, but you’re just like: Well, what is this worth if I’m still feeling empty inside?”[1]

I don’t mean to be glib, but if you’ve come to that realization by the time you’re twenty-seven years old—that’s a little better than average.

I don’t mean to jump too quickly from Justin Bieber to Herod Antipas, but—hear me out.

The Herod we encounter in this story of the death of John the Baptist shares only one thing with Justin Bieber as he describes his life at rock bottom, but it’s a pretty important thing. They are two men at the height of their powers with absolutely no sense of themselves. They are, without a doubt, the most powerful men in any room they walk into; and they are, without a doubt, the weakest.

This Herod, it’s worth saying, is not King Herod the Great, the Herod to whom the wise men come at Jesus’ birth; that’s his father. After Herod’s death, the Romans had divided his territory among his sons, so this Herod, Herod Antipas, is not quite so powerful. But he’s still the big cheese, the ruler of his own land and one of three brothers at the head of the complicated Herodian dynasty. And when I say “complicated,” I mean “complicated.” After initially marrying the daughter of a neighboring king, Herod fell in love with his niece Herodias, who was already married to Herod’s brother Philip, and he married her as well. So now, not only did Herod have two wives, one of whom was also both his niece and his sister-in-law; but Herodias his wife had two husbands, both of whom were also her brother-in-law. So the girl who dances (whom Mark also calls Herodias; other sources name her Salome) is not only his step-daughter but also both his niece and grand-niece.[2]

You can understand John the Baptist’s concern about the marriage.

But while it’s John’s criticism of Herod’s shady marriage that gets him arrested, that’s not actually Herod’s main problem. It’s not a complicated story, and the moral pretty simple: Don’t make open-ended promises that you may not want to keep, especially if your spouse has a grudge against someone who’s locked up in your basement. If it weren’t so horrifying, it would be funny: the girl who has everything in the world is offered anything she wants, and has no idea what to ask for; so she turns to her mother, who suggests the most grotesque gift imaginable. And “immediately she rushed back to the king,” strangely enthusiastic, and asks not just for the head of John the Baptist but for the head of John the Baptist at once and on a platter. (Mark 6:25) And then, as soon as they bring it, she immediately hands it off to mom.

What can you even say to that?

What’s really striking to me in this story is not its gruesome details. It’s the pathetic tragedy of it all. None of this needed to happen. Herod liked John. He “feared him,” Mark tells us, “knowing that he was a righteous and holy man,” so he didn’t want to execute him right away. (6:20) But more than that, he was intrigued. When he heard him speak, he was “greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.” (6:21) One wonders if this increased the urgency of Herodias’s plot. Herod Antipas’s mind seems to have been opening to John’s message in time.

But ultimately what’s in Herod’s mind means nothing. He has all the power in the world—or at least in his particular domain—and yet he bends completely to the things that other people want from him. The king knows in his heart that what he’s about to do is wrong—he’s “deeply grieved,” Mark says—“yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse” Herodias’s request. (6:26) This is Herod’s definition of good hospitality: for his priorities to be so distorted by the shame of looking bad in front of his guests for breaking an ill-advised promise that he’s willing to do anything to save face, even murder; which will, ironically, ruin his reputation for millennia to come.

“You wake up one day,” said Justin Bieber, “and your relationships are [f—ed] up and you’re unhappy and you have all this success in the world, but you’re just like: Well, what is this worth if I’m still feeling empty inside?”

And Herod is empty inside. Whatever should be in there, whatever soul or spirit or conscience whatever set of priorities and values that should lead him toward what’s right, is completely gone. His understanding of himself is so profoundly rooted in the esteem and respect of other people that he’s like a suit of armor, not a human being: strong on the outside, but empty inside.

Except, of course, that’s not quite true. There was that piece of him that liked to hear John speak. There was that spark, that tiny flame of inspiration. It wasn’t strong enough, in Herod’s case, to break through the armor. But it was there, working in him, all the same, and who knows what redeeming grace could have transformed his life through John the Baptist’s words if John’s own life had not been cut so short.

But we can see the rest of the process in Justin Bieber’s story. He, too, had a flame inside, even at his worst. Singing, he says in the interview, “was supposed to bring such joy. Like, this is what I feel called to do. And my purpose in my life. I know that when I open my mouth, people love to hear me sing. I literally started singing on the streets and crowds would form around me.” You can see already in what he’s saying how he was turned inside-out: from doing the thing he loves to loving the adulation he gets, from having a sense of who he was to only knowing what people thought of him. But when Bieber hit rock-bottom, the flame didn’t go out. It was the very thing he loved that brought him back.

He gives most of the credit, to be fair, to his wife and to Jesus, and I don’t want to minimize either of those; I am your pastor, after all, and it is my anniversary. But I think he needs to give the music more credit than he does, even if it’s just as an instrument of the Holy Spirit. He had started with a passion for singing and ended up with an ego totally dependent on the opinions of others. But when the reputation on which he’d staked his whole sense of self was shredded in the eyes of the world, the music was still there. And his wife was there, and yes, the love of Jesus was there, all rebuilding together his sense of who he was.

So, none of you have ever been bigamous petty dictators, totally corrupted by the shame of not honoring a promise you made to your step-daughter/niece/grand-niece. And none of you, to the best of my knowledge, were child celebrities. But all of us, at some point—maybe many times—face this question: Do we do what we know is right, or do we do what the people around us expect? Do we listen to the voices of the crowd who cheer us and boo us in turn, or do we listen to the quieter voice of the Holy Spirit speaking in our hearts? If you don’t think we human beings do this every day, just borrow a teenager and ask them to remind you.

And if you ever find yourself in that situation—if you ever find yourself, as I have more than once, feeling somewhat hollowed out inside—I pray that you will find the strength to look in there honestly, and to see whatever sparks are still alive: what person’s words you like to listen to, what music is alive, what passion or love the Holy Spirit is tending deep within you. I pray that you can see them and let them grow. And I pray for all of us, to paraphrase our collect for today, “that [we] may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord…” Amen.

[1] Zach Baron, “The Redemption of Justin Bieber,” GQ, April 13, 2021, https://www.gq.com/story/justin-bieber-cover-profile-may-2021.

[2] I feel obligated to cite this point from William C. Placher, Mark (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 93.

Sermon — July 4, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

(Due to an issue with our sound system, there’s no audio recording of this week’s sermon. You can find the text below.)

Not all Episcopalians are tea-drinking, Masterpiece-Theatre­-watching Anglophiles obsessed with The Crown, but—let’s be honest, some of us are. Some combination of the Episcopal Church’s old upper-crust New England identity and our ongoing relationship with the Church of England as part of the Anglican Communion means that the Episcopal Church has its fair share of people who are fond of Merry Old England, to such an extent that Old North Church, of all places, held a service a couple weeks ago celebrating the Queen’s 95^th birthday! (And we love them for it.)

Well, this was as true on July 4, 1776 as July 4, 2021. We take the national holiday for granted, but Episcopalians on that first Independence Day were not quite sure. The majority of loyalists to the Crown, after all, were Episcopalians; although, to be fair, the majority of Episcopalians were not loyalists, and in fact more than half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of the Episcopal Church—or rather, at that point, members of the Church of England. In 1776, after all, there was no Episcopal Church, just the parishes of the Church of England in the colonies, and this was part of the dilemma. From its founding, the Church of England had been defined by its commitment to “royal supremacy,” the notion that the supreme religious authority in England, second only to Christ, was not the Pope in Rome, or even the Archbishop of Canterbury, but the King or Queen.

So there was a certain cognitive dissonance for those early Episcopalian patriots. It takes a certain mental agility to believe that the King George III is both the Supreme Governor of the church of which you’re a member, and also, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, “A Prince whose character is…marked by every act which may define a Tyrant.” (Although to be fair this is the way many people feel about their church leadership.)

The Episcopal Church’s somewhat ambivalent relationship to Independence Day has continued over time. We include it in our official church calendar as a Holy Day, on par with Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, with the feast days of St. Mary or the apostles. (BCP p. 17) But we’re not actually observing it today, because in our calendar we almost never displace a Sunday’s lessons and prayers with a holy day, unless it’s on the level of Christmas or Epiphany; in fact, we transfer these holy days to the Monday. So our lessons today are the ones for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, not for Independence Day, which the Church observes tomorrow, transferred like the federal holiday, instead. The logic is telling: Holy Days are feasts celebrating a particular saint or a national day, but every Sunday is a feast of our Lord Jesus, and he always outranks them.

I enjoy all this trivia, of course, but there’s a serious point. This fundamental tension between royal authority and spiritual authority, between national identity and Christian identity, between our allegiance to the various kingdoms and republics in which we live on earth and our allegiance to the one kingdom of God, is not just a quirk of Episcopal Church history or of the prayer book calendar. It’s one of the key threads of the whole story of the Bible.

Our first reading this morning is near the peak of the narrative arc of the whole Old Testament. King David is the paradigmatic king, the King Arthur or George Washington of his own people. But kingship is a fairly new institution for the people. In the old days, the Israelites hadn’t had any kind of king; they were just a clan led by a series of father figures: Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. In Egypt, they lived for four hundred years under the Pharaohs, but when they finally gained their independence, it was under the leadership of Moses: a prophet, not a king. And when, having finally entered the promised land, they found themselves oppressed and attacked yet again by the Philistines, God raised up judges, to lead them in battle in times of war and to settle their disputes in times of peace. But there was still no king, because God was the one true shepherd of the people.

Still, God is not exactly the most hands-on political leader, so the people begged the great prophet and judge Samuel for a king. (You may remember this story from way back in the beginning of June.) We want “a king to govern us, like other nations,” they say. (1 Samuel 8:5) Samuel is distraught, but God tells him: “They have not rejected you, they have rejected me from being king over them.” (1 Sam. 8:7) Samuel warns them that a king will not be good for them. He’ll draft their sons into his army, and their daughters to be his servants; he’ll take their harvest and use it to feed his court. But the people are unconvinced, and God and Samuel give in, and the people choose Saul to become their king.

But God has another plan in mind. God immediately sends Samuel to anoint instead the young boy David. The story follows David as he defeats the giant Goliath, joins Saul’s court, and befriends his son Jonathan; and likewise as Saul gradually goes mad with jealousy of this young warrior, and tries to kill him, leading ultimately to a civil war in which Saul is killed and David rises to the throne.

David is a great king; after all, as our reading says, “the Lord, the God of hosts, [is] with him!” (2 Sam. 5:10) But there are already cracks in the precarious structure of his kingdom. Within a generation it will split in two, and over the following centuries each of the two kingdoms will decline and collapse as they cycle through increasingly corrupt kings, with only occasional good ones along the way. Even over the course of David’s own decades on the throne, the decline begins; I don’t want to spoil it for you, but over the coming weeks we’ll hear more and more stories of the many ways in which even this great king is not exactly a good man.

But for now, this morning, we celebrate David’s reign. For “all the tribes of Israel” have come to him. The war is over, the people want to reunited, and, God willing and the people consenting, it is David “who shall be shepherd of [God’s] people Israel.” (2 Sam. 5:1-2)

The appointed reading then skips three verses. (I put them back in this morning to make a point.) The verses appointed skip from “he reigned over all Israel and Judah thirty-three years” down to “David occupied the stronghold, and named it the city of David.” (2 Sam. 5:5 to 5:9) In other words, they skip right over the war crimes, the part of the story where David attacks disabled civilians in cruel and literal retribution for a boast. “Even the blind and the lame could beat David,” the Jebusites say—and so he instructs his soldier to attack them first. In moments like this, the Bible doesn’t tell us stories of cruelty to say that cruelty is good. It tells them, I think, to say that even the best of our human political leaders—even the King Davids among us—easily slide from bravery into cruelty, that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as the saying goes. And indeed, the institution of kingship—the rejection of God as king and God’s replacement with a series of human kings—will lead the people of Israel into disaster.

But as we read the stories of King David and King Solomon this summer and into the fall, we’ll also be reading alongside them the stories of a very different kind of king. For Christians, David is what’s sometimes called a “type” of Jesus, a kind of foreshadowing of who Jesus in turn will be. Jesus, like David, begins to reign at thirty years of age; but he’ll live only one year more, not forty. Jesus, like David, emerges from relative obscurity among the people; but where the tribes of Israel will come to David to anoint him, the people of Jesus’ own neighborhood will “take offense at him,” for after all, “prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown.” (Mark 6:3-4)

And most importantly, while David will be a king just as the people had asked—a king “like other nations,” a brave warrior and a savvy general, God’s predictions will be right. David will turn his violence against the people. He’ll exploit them for his own sordid gain. Having rejected God as king and yearned for the kinds of kings that other nations have, the people will get their wish, and it will be their undoing.

But Jesus is another kind of king. Jesus will decline to wage a revolutionary war. Jesus will refuse to take up arms, even to defend his own life. He’ll inspire Paul to “boast of [his] weaknesses,” (2 Corinthians 12:5) to claim to be “content in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak,” Paul writes enigmatically, “then I am strong.” (12:10) And why? Because this is the message Paul receives when caught up in a mystical experience: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (12:9) So “I will boast all the more gladly,” Paul says, “of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” (12:9)

“Power is made perfect in weakness.” There’s no power more perfect than Jesus’ power, which breaks the bonds of death itself. And yet there’s no king who’s ever been weaker than Christ the king, abandoned on the Cross. So you can understand why I said that there can be a slight tension between the governments of the world and the kingdom of God. The very source of Christ’s strength is weakness in the eyes of the world, and it’s in following this gentle king that we find true greatness.

There’s a vigorous debate in our country right now over the right way to frame American history. The movement arising from George Floyd’s murder has convinced some that it’s more important than ever to teach about the long history of racism in America. Others take offense at the notion that America is somehow fundamentally flawed. Many American Christians have come down on this latter side. But I wonder whether they’re missing the point. Every person, every leader, every human organization is fundamentally flawed. That’s just the Christian doctrine of sin. Even King David, the greatest king of God’s own chosen people, was an imperfect man. America, too, will always be imperfect, because America is not the kingdom of God.

So happy Fourth of July! Enjoy it. There’s much to celebrate about our nation’s life, especially this summer. And there’s much work still to be done. But our nation’s greatness and strength are not the measure of our value; nor is its goodness, nor even our own individual greatness or strength or goodness—but Christ’s weakness. Our nation is good to the extent that it helps us, as our collect puts it, “keep all [God’s] commandments by loving [God] and our neighbor.” But just as this Sunday Feast of our Lord outranks the Holy Day of the 4^th of July, in the end the most central part of our identity comes from the weakness and goodness of Christ, not from the strength or goodness of these United States. For “[his] grace is sufficient for [us],” and his “power is made perfect in weakness.” Amen.