Sermon — September 5, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a concept in the social sciences called “Dunbar’s number,” named after a British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar. After a broad comparative study of human cultures and of various other primate societies (chimpanzees, and gorillas, and so on), Dunbar suggested that a human being can, on average, sustain about 150relationships, all told. It’s about the size of a Neolithic farming village, or a pastoral-size church, or an infantry company; it’s the number of people you can meaningfully know as family members or friends, colleagues or neighbors, rather than just vaguely-familiar acquaintances. And while social scientists have debated the exact number—maybe it’s only 100; maybe it’s 200, maybe even 250—everyone agrees that the human brain is not equipped to know or care about 1000 others, or 10,000, or a million, let alone all seven or eight billion of us here. Technology moves much, much faster than evolution.

So if you’re feeling emotionally exhausted these days, it’s no surprise. Modern media have expanded the scope of the suffering we can see, but our brains haven’t kept up. We can more or less cope, most of the time, with what happens within our circle of 150. But every day we see and hear of horrors happening to people we will never know and whom we feel we could never help: in Afghanistan and New York, Haiti and California and everywhere in between. And we’re left with what sometimes feel like only bad options: to turn off the news and stay blissfully ignorant of it all; to close off our hearts and only feel compassion for the people we know; or to feel the constant guilt that we’re just not doing enough to make things right, or the nihilistic despair that nothing we could do would matter anyway.

(I’m sorry—I know it’s a holiday weekend. Was that too much?)

In a sense, our lessons this morning are perfect for Labor Day weekend. Proverbs and James set the Biblical standard for relationships across economic class, between what the Bible calls “the poor” and “the rich,” between what today we’d probably euphemize as “the working class” and “the upper-middle class.” Proverbs warns us against treating hired hands unfairly: “Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate.” (Proverbs 22:22) Do not, in other words, try to take advantage of someone in a commercial transaction or legal affair, the city gate being the place where day laborers stood to be hired and judges and arbitrators sat to mediate disputes. If you’re better off, you’d better be careful. “Whoever sows injustice,” after all, “will reap calamity, and the rod of anger will fall.” (22:8)

And while working conditions are better than they were three thousand years ago, these teachings still ring true. Last year’s Labor Day report from the Attorney General of the Commonwealth was a chilling read. It documents the $12 million in fines paid in hundreds of enforcement actions on behalf of thousands of workers in 2020 alone, for violations ranging from wage theft to unpaid sick time to child labor violations, a pattern of exploitation so pervasive even in Massachusetts that the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division needs seventeen attorneys and more than twenty investigators just to keep up.

Then we could move on to James, who brings it from the legal to the social level, from exploitation to discrimination. “My brothers and sisters,” he practically spits, “do you, with your acts of favoritism, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” (James 2:1) If someone walks in with nice jewelry and nice clothes, he says to the church, you give them a bulletin and a good pew (and a pledge card!)—but if someone comes in off the street looking a little worse-for-wear, the white-glove treatment’s nowhere to be found. (2:3-4) “You’ve dishonored the poor,” James says, (2:5) and therefore dishonored Christ, the one who taught that when we encounter someone who is hungry, or naked, or sick, we encounter Christ himself. (Matthew 25:31ff.)

And then James goes even further. It’s not just that you shouldn’t discriminate, that you should welcome the poor the same way you welcome the rich. It’s that if you want to “really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’” (2:8) you must share what you have with the poor as if they were yourself. For “if a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,” James writes, “and one of you says, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” (2:15-16) Thoughts and prayers without action are empty. Faith without works is dead. (2:17)

Jesus pushes it still further. He leaves his homeland of Galilee and travels to another land, inhabited by members of another culture: to the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, then down to the Greek Decapolis, and heals people along the way. The first story is an especially strange one. Jesus seems to insult or demean this Syrophoenician woman, saying that she and her daughter and maybe their whole people are like “dogs.’ This is not Jesus at his best. And yet the woman is unbowed. Jesus gives in. He agrees that his compassion should extend beyond his own Jewish people to the Gentiles, from the “children” of God to the “dogs” beneath the table. His gifts of healing and exorcism can’t be limited to his own village or tribe or nation; he ought to freely share them with the world.

So—and here’s the part where I just leave you feeling bad about yourselves—let us choose a good name instead of riches. Let us not rob the poor but defend their cause. Let us not engage in acts of favoritism but welcome all equally. Let us share our wealth with all who are hungry. Let us go beyond the borders of our own communities to give freely and lovingly to the entire world. Let us tackle together the great challenges of our time: racial and economic injustice, political misinformation and division, mass incarceration and educational inequality, and climate change, and affordable housing, and… too many other things to name.

I know a priest who calls these “salad sermons,” because they just end with “let us, let us,” and more “let us.”

The problem with a salad sermon is not that it’s wrong. We should resist injustice. We should share what we have with the poor. We should care for people who are not like us, of every tribe and language and people and nation. These exhortations are good and holy and true. The problem is that they crush us with their weight. These problems are real problems, they’re big, systemic problems; they feel too big for any one of us to solve. Like the constant churn of bad news that overwhelms our capacity to feel, salad sermons overwhelm our capacity to act, demanding we do everything and leaving us unable to do anything.

But Jesus and James don’t do everything. They do something.

James isn’t talking about Global Poverty in capital letters. He’s talking about this person in front of you right now, and how you treat him or her: about this person who walks into your church in ragged clothes, about this person who is hungry or cold, and what you do when the two of you meet, face to face. Jesus isn’t a global-health professional whose mission is to heal the world. He’s trying, in fact, to go on a retreat—he “did not want anyone to know he was there.” (Mark 7:24) But this woman asks him to help her, and he does. And then he moves on, and heals just one man, and begs them all to leave him be. Jesus doesn’t want to do everything. But he can’t keep himself from doing something.

So that’s my little anchor of hope today. We cannot fix it all. We do not have to fix it all. What we can, and what we should do, is to care for the people right in front of us, the people in our circle of 150, the people with whom we live in relationships, whether they’re geographically near or far.We are not made to worry about the fates of eight billion people around the world. But we are made to walk in love.

There are very different ways to do that. Maybe it’s by making sandwiches or buying groceries for our neighbors at St. Stephen’s, people you can see and hear and go to PTO meetings with. Maybe it’s by supporting Episcopal Relief & Development and their partners in Haiti, our brothers and sisters in Christ and in the Episcopal Church. Maybe it’s by picking up the phone and calling a friend who’s struggling just down the street. Maybe it’s by trying to keep your own kids safe and full and warm for one more week. Whatever it is—whatever small thing it is—it won’t feel like it’s enough. It will probably never feel like it’s enough. But you don’t have to do everything to fulfill the “royal law” of love; you just have to do something, knowing that only Christ the King can really fulfill that royal law, but trusting with all your heart that God will “never forsake those who make their boast of [his] mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Amen.

Sermon — August 29, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

As the hurricane-that-wasn’t bore down on my in-laws’ home in eastern Long Island last weekend, where we were staying on vacation, some people made last-minute escapes back to the City or across the Sound to Connecticut. We hunkered down, buying gallons of drinking water in case the well shut down; stocking up on rice and beans, pasta and peaches; filling the car with gas and downloading the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie and an entire season of Daniel Tiger onto my iPad. Natural-disaster kit complete.

And then, at the very last minute, I made my escape. Not along the railroad to Manhattan or across the water to Connecticut or up the highway to Boston, but far across the sea and the sands of time, to the world of 1980s Glasgow, because in between showings of Winnie the Pooh and trying to ward off cabin fever over the two-day storm, I was reading the 2020 Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain.

The novel tells the story of “Shuggie” and his family as Shuggie grows up from a kindergarten-aged boy to a young man living on his own. We follow Shuggie and his family from neighborhood to neighborhood of working-class, post-industrial Glasgow: from their in-laws’ overcrowded apartment to a decrepit house on the edge of a closed coal mine, where Shuggie’s father abandons them, and finally into a new neighborhood in the heart of the city, where Shuggie hopes and prays that things will be different.

Shuggie’s mother is a particularly complicated character. She suffers much throughout the story, often while trying to protect or provide for her children; but she also inflicts much suffering, including and sometimes especially on her children. She maintains a certain kind of dignity for much of the story, carefully maintaining her makeup and dressing well; but it’s not so much dignity as arrogance, snobbishness, trying to show that she’s not like those people next door, and it becomes stranger and stranger as her life falls apart. And most importantly, she’s unable to take responsibility for anything she says or does. Someone else is always wronging her; it’s always someone else’s fault, and as time goes on and relationships fall away, that somebody is often poor little Shuggie Bain, who’s the only one who really tries to love her.

It’s a dark story in many ways, a story of abuse and alcohol and the loss of innocence. But it’s also a strangely hopeful one. Not because it has a happy ending per se, but because Shuggie is and remains, despite it all, a compassionate and loving man, just as he was a compassionate and loving boy. For all his mother’s self-destruction, for all his father’s cruelty, for all his siblings’ selfishness in saving themselves and leaving him behind, when Shuggie finally escapes, he’s still able to love.

“There is nothing outside a person,” Jesus says, “that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (Mark 7:15) There is nothing in the world outside you, in other words, that can make you unclean or impure or unworthy; it’s the evil that comes out from inside you that determines who you are.

This whole episode begins with a kind of strange argument over hand hygiene. When the Pharisees see that Jesus’ disciples are eating without washing their hands, they’re scandalized. And when they question Jesus, he’s harsh in response; he calls them hypocrites!

It may seem to us, of course, that Jesus and his followers are wrong. Of course you should wash your hands before eating. (And if there are any kids in the congregation: Listen to your parents! You should wash your hands!) Now more than ever, with eighteen months of hand-washing songs embedded in our brains and hand-sanitizer bottles still stashed all over the place, it seems more obvious than ever!

Jesus’ disciples, of course, didn’t know the first thing about viruses or bacteria, about the importance of washing your hands to prevent infectious disease. Handwashing wasn’t even common among doctors or nurses until the 19^th century. What they’re talking about in the Gospel is a kind of ritual handwashing. When they talk about “clean” and “unclean” hands, those are religious, not medical terms. They’re meant to separate holy things and places from ordinary ones, not to promote public health. And it seems that Mark, probably writing for a non-Jewish audience, may be mistaken, or at least exaggerating. While he claims that “the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands,” (Mark 7:3) modern scholars of the New Testament and ancient Judaism have pointed out that not all Jews had adopted this practice.^[1] “The tradition of the elders” Mark refers to is the particular teaching of certain sages and rabbis among the Pharisees; but it’s not a universal practice.

The priests in the Temple washed their hands before offering sacrifices; to do it before eating every meal is to imagine that the ritual practices of cleansing and holiness used in the Temple should be extended to all of life, and while this kind of rigorous holiness has always been attractive to some people, it was far more stringent than the letter or even the spirit of the law.

So on a very particular, historical level, Jesus is picking one side in a debate among first-century Jews about ritual practices. No, he says, you don’t need to wash your hands for dinner as if you’re offering a sacrifice in the Temple; God won’t strike you down for eating with impure hands.

But then Jesus goes on the offensive: you’re “hypocrites,” he says; you “honor [God] with [your] lips, but [your] hearts are far from [God.]” (Mark 7:6) You worship “in vain…teaching human precepts as doctrine!” (7:7) Our reading skips over the next paragraph, but Jesus cites another practice that the traditions of the Pharisees allow, in which a person can essentially abandon their responsibilities to support their parents in their old age by designating their wealth as a donation to the Temple. But this tradition, found nowhere in the Bible, violates the Fifth Commandment, to “honor your father and your mother.” (Ex. 20:12) Hence the hypocrisy: the Pharisees accuse Jesus of violating their traditions, while they themselves “abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” (Mark 7:8)

Now, all of this is somewhat interesting from a historical perspective, but maybe not that relevant either way. We’ll continue washing our hands, thank you very much, Jesus. And that’s okay, because it’s really just the concrete example of a bigger point: this practice of ritual handwashing is irrelevant, because “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile” them. (Mark 7:15)

He doesn’t just mean this in the narrow sense, that there’s nothing that we can touch with our hands that can make us impure, or that there’s nothing we eat that can defile us. There’s nothing outside a person that can do this. Nothing in our circumstances or our situations in life renders us unworthy of God. Nothing about the neighborhood we come from or the family we live in, nothing about the clothes we wear or the place we live or how well we keep up appearances can make us any more or less holy.

This is bad news, in a way, because it means the easy fixes don’t work. Little Shuggie Bain’s mother can’t make everything right just by applying a fresh layer of makeup and making sure there’s never a run in her tights. She can’t fix her family by moving them to a new neighborhood, where nobody knows who they are. The same old destructive patterns will emerge, because the neighborhood and its people are not what’s wrong with her; the problem lies within.

But I think this can also be very good news. It frees us from having to attend to the things that simply do not matter in the eyes of God, all the practices of appearance and respectability that make up the ritual hand-washings of our lives. But it also frees us from some of the pain of whatever has happened in our lives, because whoever we are, whatever we have done, whatever has been done to us, “there is nothing in all creation”—to borrow a phrase from Paul—that can “separate us from the love of God.” (Romans 8:39) There is nothing outside us that can defile us. But what comes out from us can.

It’s a challenging idea. It means that we are responsible for the things we do. Our flaws and broken patterns of behavior are not germs that infect us from the outside. They flow out from the inside. All the theft, adultery, greed, deceit, envy, pride, and folly in the world, all our sins large and small, can’t be prevented by washing our hands for two “Happy Birthdays.” They can’t be blamed on our parents or our spouses or our children or our friends. They are ours. They bubble up inevitably within us.

But so does grace.

And that’s the really good news. There are many things that flow out from our souls that can defile us, that can make us “look at [our]selves in a mirror,” to borrow an image from the Epistle of James, and not like what we see. (James 1:23) But there are many good things too, because God has “implanted” in us a “word” that “has the power to save [our] souls.” (James 1:21) God has given us a new “birth,” God has made us “the first fruits” of a new creation. (1:18)

God has already done what we prayed for in the opening collect today. God has grafted in our hearts the love of God’s name. God has nourished us with all goodness. God has brought forth and is bringing forth in us the fruit of good works, the spiritual growth that allows us to be “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” with one another. (James 1:19) God is increasing in us “true religion”—not the belief that our religion is the true one, but true religion, “religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father… to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep ourselves unstained by the world.” (James 1:27) Because the world can’t stain us—“there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile”—and what is inside us is not just a laundry list of evils, but the implanted Word of a holy and loving God.

^[1]The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Second Edition, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 84.

Sermon — The Rev. Greg Johnston

August 1, 2021

Lectionary Readings

When I was at my last church, there was a Men’s Discussion Group that met every Wednesday morning at 8:30. They’d make a couple of pots of coffee, and sit together around a table in the parish library, and read the gospel reading for that week off the little lectionary handouts to discuss. They were mostly retired scientists and engineers and lawyers, and they always ended up with some fascinating and often esoteric discussion. But I remember one Wednesday morning, just a few weeks after I’d arrived at the church, when someone read the gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday, and everyone kind of sat in silence for a minute or so, and then someone said, “Wasn’t this last week’s reading?” And, after a few mumbles and a few nods, they turned to the Old Testament instead. And I know that that Wednesday morning was almost exactly three years ago, because here we are, back in John chapter 6.

Every three years, in the depth of summer, our lectionary switches from reading through the Gospel of Mark to carefully study most of this chapter of John, beginning with the miracle of the loaves and fishes and continuing through the long and meandering sermon that we call “The Bread of Life Discourse.” Even more than the rest of the Gospel of John, this material can get a little tedious. Jesus repeats the same themes and claims in verse after verse, a winding exposition of the theme: “I am the bread of life,” with many variations. (John 6:35)

So I’ll be going on vacation soon.

No, I feel bad joking, because this is the way that priests and parishioners alike sometimes experience these five weeks on the Bread of Life. They can feel as tedious and uninspiring as they are repetitive and circuitous. In a way, it’s remarkably similar to the Eucharist itself: week after week, we say and do the most unusual things, but because we say and do them week after week we start to tune them out. Sunday after Sunday, I stand and the altar and repeat Jesus’ words over bread and wine: “This is my Body. This is my Blood.” That’s an extraordinary thing for him to say! And it’s extraordinary that two thousand years later, after a hundred thousand Sundays worth of Eucharists, we’re still doing it. And yet we almost take it for granted. Most people, on most Sundays, are not at the altar rail in the most pious state of mind: we come distracted by anxiety or boredom, by the sound of our child’s cry from the nursery or a new water stain on the ceiling, by our frustration with the preacher’s sermon or our readiness to get out of here and have some lunch. Of course that’s not all the time. But it’s sometimes. And I’m not saying this to wag a finger at you. I’m saying it to recognize that this is how human brains work: Do something once, and it’s amazing and novel; do it twice, and it becomes passé.

So four times in the next month, Jesus will say some variation on “I am the bread of life,” or “I am the bread of heaven.” (John 6:35, 41, 48, 51) And by the third or fourth time, most of us will stand through the gospel thinking, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wasn’t this last week’s reading?”

Or maybe we’ll hear it differently this year. Three years ago today, when this gospel was last read, anyone in the world could walk into a church on any given Sunday morning and receive the Body of Christ, the living bread that came down from heaven. Two years ago, the same was true. One year ago today, though, things were wildly different. None of us had received that bread of heaven in four months; and it would be four more before we began to celebrate the Eucharist again. So I wonder whether all this talk of the bread of life and the manna from heaven will seem a little fresher after a year in which we were cut off from it.

There’s a sense, of course, in which Jesus isn’t talking about the Eucharist at all, at least not as we know it. He’s talking about himself through the metaphor of bread. And he’s talking about the miraculous meal they’ve just had, in which five thousand people were fed with five loaves and two fish. The crowd are unimpressed. “Our ancestors ate manna in the desert,” they say; God gave them each day their daily bread for free, and all they had to do was gather it up off the ground, where it had fallen like dew in the morning. What’s one meal, once in our lives—they say—compared to that? But Jesus turns their objection on its head. The manna itself, he says, is just a foreshadowing of him: “I am the true bread from heaven…For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (John 6:32-33) The manna sustained your ancestor’s life as they wandered through the desert; but I am the food that will sustain you for eternal life at the end of all your wanderings through this world.

In another sense, Jesus really is talking about the Eucharist. At the very end of the discourse Jesus will tell the crowd that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,” and the crowd will be scandalized, because that’s disgusting. (John 6:54) Many of those who follow him will turn away. And this was likely the experience of the early Christians as well, as they spread their newborn faith. At first, people were excited to hear news of the coming of the long-awaited Messiah, then disappointed and confused to hear that he’d died and risen again and then disappeared. And then they were disgusted when they heard about the consolation prize: “He died, and he rose, and he ascended into heaven, so here’s not here now. But don’t worry, he is still with us, because every week we eat his flesh and drink his blood!” Come on. We can admit it here, right? That’s a really weird elevator pitch.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says. (John 6:35) But when we try to pin down precisely what he means, we tend to ask the wrong questions. The crowd following him around certainly did, more than once. After the loaves and fishes, after all, Jesus walks four miles across the sea without a boat, and when the crowd who’ve been searching for him finally find him, they ask the least interesting question in the world: “Rabbi, when’d you get here?” (John 6:25) “When?” What about “How!?” He tries to explain again and again what’s going on, and they say to him, “What sign are you going to give us? …What work are you performing?” (6:30) As if they hadn’t seen the miracles he’d just done.

We, too, tend to ask the wrong questions about “the bread of life.” I don’t mean to minimize some very important sixteenth-century theological debates, but most arguments about the Eucharist are something like asking, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus reaches out his hands to us to feed us with himself, with his very own life, with the true bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, and we ask— Okay, but in what sense is it you, and in what sense is it bread? What are we talking here… Transubstantiation? Consubstantiation? Spiritual presence? Symbolic memorialism? Instrumentalism? Parallelism? (I’m not making any of this up.) Is Jesus’ presence in the bread and wine a real presence or a spiritual presence, or only a reminder of what the Lord has done for us? If it’s a real presence, then is the substance of Christ’s body present in place of the substance of bread, while the accidents remain unchanged; or is Christ’s body present in, with, and under the species of bread, and that’s all we can say for sure because it’s really not appropriate to import the Aristotelian categories of medieval term logic into theology in such a reified way?

If none of that made any sense to you, you may well be on the right spiritual track. Again, I don’t really mean to make fun. Theology’s certainly interesting. It can be important. And if you think Eucharistic theology is interesting and important, feel free to talk to me about it at Lemonade Hour! (And actually, I think Doug Heim and Alice Krapf both volunteered during our Wardens’ Meeting on Tuesday, as well.) But let’s not forget what Jesus says when they ask him for a sign: “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says to them when they ask him for a sign, “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” (6:27) You are not here because you were rationally convinced. You are not here because you understand intellectually what happens at the altar, because you can articulate a doctrinally-coherent description of the sense in which Jesus is bread or vice versa. You are here because you came to Jesus and were fed.

It’s true for each one of us. In some sense, something once fed us, and we were filled. And we come here, week by week, to look for more. Maybe it’s a satisfying meal. I hope to be a decent-enough cook. But it’s not my meal to serve, in the end. The people ask Jesus, “What should we do to do the works of God?” (6:28) And he answers, “This is the work of God: that you believe.” (6:29)

It’s an ambiguous phrase. We ordinarily translate it this way: “This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.” (6:29) In other words, this is all the work you need to do that pertains to God: simply to have faith. We don’t need to understand what’s going on at the altar or analyze it in the right philosophical terms. We just need to be here together, faithfully sharing this holy meal.

But the same New Testament Greek phrase could just as well be translated: “This is the work of God, so that you may believe…” (6:29) And that’s a different sort of thing entirely. This, all this, is the work of God, so that we may believe. This bread of life that comes down from heaven is not our reward for believing. It’s our spiritual food. It’s not what we get if we believe. It’s what feeds us so that we have the strength to believe.

Most of us spent most of a year cut off from the Body of Christ made present in the Eucharistic bread. But we were not cut off from Jesus, the Bread of Life himself. In a thousand different ways, he came to us, and fed us, despite it all; and we seek him, not because we saw signs, but because we ate and were filled. We have tasted “the food that endures for eternal life,” (John 6:27) and we have come back again and again looking for more, hungering for the peace of God, praying with the crowd who follow Jesus: “Lord, give us this bread always.” (John 6:34) Amen.

There’s a certain kind of official photograph that’s popular no matter who the president is: the White House Situation Room candid. You may know the most famous example, from the night of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011: Obama sits, hunched forward in an open-collared shirt and tie; across the table, Hillary Clinton pensively analyzes the situation; to Obama’s right, Joe Biden looks like he’s seen it all. It’s not hard to find other examples: George W. Bush sitting casually around the table with Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice to hear the latest updates on Iraq; Clinton leaned back with his arms over the chest while he’s briefed on Bosnia; Trump and a team of decorated generals sitting up very straight and starting straight ahead as they watch the mission to capture Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. These images project everything a president wants to be: serious, commanding, and in control, and maybe—if you’re Bill Clinton—cool, in more than one sense of the word. When the commander-in-chief sits in the White House Situation Room, he can, with the mere word and the click of a button, deploy the full might of the greatest superpower in history anywhere in the world. Ironically, this is the exact opposite what a leader would want his subject’s to picture him doing for most of history. An ancient leader would have shown his strength by leading from the front, not by staying at home in a secure room.

So the way the narrator tells this story about David in our first reading today is intentional. Like any great ancient king, David was first and foremost a warrior. His rise to power hadn’t begun with a rousing speech or a brilliant policy plan; he was the one out there with a rock in his sling, fighting the giant Goliath. But now, his long decline from greatness has begun, and you can see it in the first sentence: “In the spring of the year, when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel… But David remained at Jerusalem.” (2 Samuel 11:1) And not only has he stayed behind; he’s sleeping in. The story happens “late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof.” (11:2) His men are at war, risking their lives, and David’s at loose ends.

And unsurprisingly, he gets up to no good. In quick succession, he sees his neighbor’s wife Bathsheba bathing on the roof, sends for her, and sleeps with her; and soon enough, it turns out she’s pregnant. David tries to cover it up. He sends for his neighbor Uriah to come home from the war, thinking that perhaps if he returns soon enough, nobody will even know whose child it really is. But Uriah, unlike David, chooses solidarity and integrity; while his men are out in the fields, he won’t sleep at home. So David covers his tracks another way instead. He writes a letter to his general Joab, and puts it in Uriah’s own hand to deliver, with the grim message to send him to his death. David is in control. David is in command. David has all the power in the world—and he uses it in the worst way imaginable.

It may be the case that our presidents look strong when they lead from home, and David looks weak. But in a more important way, they have something in common: they want to be in control. The presidents want to project a public image of being in command, so they pose for photos surrounded by generals and advisors, or choose to publish the perfect candid shot. David just wants to be in control of everything, all the time. He sends for Bathsheba, and she comes to him. He sends for Uriah, and he comes to him. But human beings, it turns out, aren’t quite pieces on a chessboard. He can’t, ultimately, make Uriah go along with the cover-up; and so he makes a much worse plan instead.

Few of us have David’s power. Most of us don’t even have David’s temptations. But many of us have that same desire for control. Wouldn’t it be easier at work, or in a relationship, at church or in our country, if people would just do what you wanted when you wanted? Most of us, after all, think that we’re right, most of the time. When others disagree, most of us wish that they would just want the same things that we want and do the things we want them to do. We have plans in our heads for the way things should work, and it would be so much easier if everyone else would just go along with it—wouldn’t it? We constantly struggle for control over the situation, and when someone else gets their way, or even just refuses to go along with the plan, we get really mad.

(Or maybe I’m just projecting. I do have a three-year-old.)

So it’s a refreshing contrast to see Jesus’ surprising behavior in our gospel this morning. He’s been traveling around Galilee, doing signs and wonders, healing people and multiplying loaves and fishes, and now they want to come and “make him king.” (John 6:15) But he retreats. He’s spent his whole ministry proclaiming the coming kingdom of God, recruiting lieutenants and gathering a crowd of supporters, but the very moment that they try to put him on the throne, he runs away. He gives up control, he gives up the opportunity to seize power and enact his agenda; instead, he chooses weakness, and he’ll stay weak until the very end. David’s plan to stay in control ends with him sending an innocent man to his death, but Jesus’ plan is just the opposite; he himself will be the one to die.

And yet, strangely, this will be the greatest victory yet. Jesus turns away from earthly power because he’s got bigger fish to fry. He’s not waging war on Herod or on Rome, but on some stronger celestial force, on all the stormy powers of darkness and chaos through which he walks calmly. David’s weakness in staying behind when the army goes out to fight is just weakness, and it highlights his greater weakness of willpower and character. But Jesus’ weakness is a kind of strength. By going to the front, but refusing to fight, he somehow, mysteriously, wins the battle against death itself.

This isn’t a kind of moralistic tale: “Be like Jesus, don’t be like David.” You should try to be a little more like Jesus and a little less like David. But that’s actually not the point. Yes, we struggle with our own desires for control. Yes, we struggle with our various other temptations. Jesus has already won the final victory for us, but we still struggle in this life and so, as Paul writes, he sends the Spirit “that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power…and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” (Eph. 3:14) In the daily struggle to be a better version of yourself, God is there, strengthening you along the way. But Christianity is not, primarily, about whether we live up to that measure of perfection, whether our love for one another really approaches the purity of the love shown to us by the Christ who dwells in our hearts.

It’s about the strange juxtaposition of our imperfection and God’s grace. It’s about this contrast: We are, for the most part, like David: good in many ways, sometimes even great, but always flawed, one way or another. And yet always loved even more deeply than our flaws, even more deeply than we can imagine. Paul has to pray for the Ephesians that they “may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth” of Christ’s love for them, (Eph. 3:18) because God’s love for us, however imperfect we are, is more powerful than we could possibly understand without God’s help.

King David and our presidents want to project and image of power, of calm, of control. And so do we. We want to look and feel competent and in control of our lives. But we’re not. We’re not in control of the situations around us, or the things that we feel. Many of us lose control, from time to time, of the things that we say and do, and come to regret them. But whenever we lose control, whenever our imperfections show, whenever we do something we ought not to have done, or leave undone some thing we ought to have done, whenever we see what we have done and feel regret, God is already there, dwelling in our hearts, forgiving us and loving us beyond our wildest imaginings. And all we need to do is to accept it. So I pray, with Paul, “that you may have the power to comprehend…what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:18) Amen.

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.