The Wake Up Call, Kathy Hykes, Pentecost Proper 10--Year B--July 16, 2006

Mark 6:14-29

“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.”

The news story headline in the Tuesday morning Times News spoke of the testimony by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a Senate committee hearing on immigration.  The nation’s top military leader, Marine General Peter Pace choked up when he discussed his parents’ hardships as immigrants to this country and his belief in the importance of immigrants to the military.

I thought as I read this that here was a man of empathy, a man of compassion, someone who feels with another, even without the imperative of any risk to himself.   His personal experience informs his emotional involvement and he can not but have compassion for those whose lives may be affected by any law that Congress makes.  And he is willing to speak on their behalf.

In the last several weeks I have been reading two books by Karen Armstrong. One is called A History of God and the other, The Spiral Staircase. I have found them both rather profound. The Spiral Staircase is a memoir of Armstrong’s life in the convent, her subsequent departure from there, and her spiritual quest in pursuit of God.  One of the many statements that she makes that resonated with me is this: that all of the great religious Traditions are unanimous in one respect, the Rabbis of the  Talmud, Jesus, St. Paul, Moses, Buddha, the Sages of the Upanishads, and Mohammed, have said a similar thing, that our understanding of the divine must lead us in every way to compassion, and that compassion should be practically applied, it must bring one to action, which is what will bring us to transcendence, or in our Christian vocabulary, to God.  If our understanding leads us to meanness, or killing then it will not lead us to God.

The Gospel reading this morning of the beheading of John the Baptist is a compelling, cruel, and violent story that at first seems stunningly out of place, coming as it does between the sending out of the Apostles on their mission, and the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes. I want to talk some about the three main characters of this story and then about why I think this story comes when it does.

John the Baptist is a figure I have talked about before in this church and I confess that he is a Biblical character who continues to fascinate me. In fact I love John the Baptist. If he lived today, he is not perhaps a man I would be drawn to naturally, living as he did such an austere life, persistently preaching repentance in uncomfortable, and risky, places. I wondered how he ever got King Herod’s ear. He must have been an obviously caring man. Moving forward to our current day, I liken him to Bono, the lead singer for the Irish rock group U2 who has gotten the ear of most of the leaders of the richest countries in the world saying that they should use their power to eliminate hunger and indebtedness in desperately poor countries.

John the Baptist has told Herod that his marriage is illegal. He has said this to the man acting as the representative of the occupying forces from Rome, who in those times had so much power over the people of Israel that he appeared to be above the law. John is conveying a message to Herod that power is not all that he should be thinking about. He brings him up short. “When he heard him he was perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him,” the writer Mark tells us.

Herod is a man who is open to conversion. He is apparently not so morally certain of his position as to reject any argument that does not agree with his own. He could turn around, he could begin to see another way of being in the world, he could begin to think of the plight of the Jews he is governing, to empathize, to recognize that there may be other views than those of Rome. He even took the first step by protecting John the Baptizer from his wife Herodias, thereby telling her that she should be quiet, let me hear what he has to say, let him talk. This is usually a first step in understanding, a move towards compassion. Let me hear what he has to say, let him talk.

My father grew up in an Irish- American household that for all of its many virtues, held an ancestral contempt, bordering on hatred, for the British, because of their cruel treatment that had led to such misery and pain for the Irish people. When America entered the Second World War, my father was sent to, where else, to England, where he was stationed for the duration of the war. Early in his stay there he was befriended by an English man he met, who took him into his household. Dad became friends with the man’s entire family, and spent most of any leave time he got with them, greatly reducing the terrible homesickness he was feeling and beginning a friendship that has continued in our two families even into the generation after mine.  When my Dad returned home from the war, he spoke to his father about this family, telling him what these people had done for him and wondering aloud about this hatred the family harbored.  When he looked at his father, he saw tears in the man’s eyes. This was a man capable of compassion, of letting a man talk, of hearing another side.

Herodias on the other hand is one of the most reprehensible characters in the Bible. She stands with the grain that falls on hard ground. Nothing can penetrate; no new life can grow there. She is darkness.  She is morally certain.  And all she wants is revenge. Not only is she not compassionate, she is stunningly dispassionate. She has no feelings with any one at all. Not her first husband surely, and not this one either, not even with her daughter  She will fight for power no matter what, or who, falls under her foot. Herodias will hand you your head on a plate if you dare try to tell her there is another way to be.

I made the decision not to characterize Herodias with a present day model, because as I thought about her and lived with her in my mind over the last few weeks, I believe I have, or have had a pinch or more of Herodias in me from time to time. I will leave you to search you own consciences and come to your own conclusions about her.

Karen Armstrong says pay attention to what distresses you about another and look to see where it is in yourself.  Empathy and compassion are learned in our families, among our friends, with our pets. We have to put their needs above our own.  We constantly forgive, try to understand their point of view, and we fail, over and over to put their ideas or needs first instead of tripping on our own egos. ‘Do not do unto others what you would not want them to do to you’, another version of the golden rule says.  Do not say about others what you would not have them say about you. Do for others and try to understand them before you say anything at all, we as Christians might say.

Before we tuned in to Herod and Herodias the disciples had just learned what their mission is going to be, from Jesus.  Jesus has put them through an empathy boot camp.  He has taken them on a reality road trip to see what the kingdom of God needs to look like—diseases healed, political and ethnic divisions erased, the hungry fed, through faith in a living and present God.  Jesus has demonstrated what they are to accomplish by ministering to the ills of the people of the day, giving people in a very practical way what they need, going from village to town, excluding no one in spite of cultural taboos, and teaching them to do the same. He sent them out two by two, for comfort and company, giving them power over unclean spirits, commissioning them to preach that people should turn their lives around, anoint the sick with oil and heal them. Jesus told them their purpose, what he would have them do. The mission, the vision, comes first.

We are living in a time of great turmoil and some days I dread picking up the newspaper.  The news is full of war, violence on both sides, oppression and suppression of ideas on both sides, disagreements about gender, human sexuality, race, ethnicity, and religion.  When I was doing diversity training and consultation with organizations and corporations in Bermuda, I got very discouraged once, losing heart over the enormity and intractability of issues of racism, and all the other ‘isms’ that share as their basis a lack of compassion and empathy.  I expressed this to a peer whom I considered my mentor and he reminded me to picture what the world looks like when we don’t do anything, when we do not act.  The ominous story of Herod’s family is what it looks like when we do not do anything. It is a model for a world without compassion. It is a place where our own concerns are the only things that matter.

The Gospel writer Mark is reminding us I think that the mission will not be easy and not everyone will hear what we have to say about how the world should be. But he follows that story with a miracle. The story that follows is the one about the five thousand people sitting on nothing but the ground, starved for nourishment in body and in spirit, who are fed with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish --dished out by some folks who consciously behave as though they each had a role in bringing about the kingdom of God

-- to the very real people right there.

Amen.

References:
Armstrong, Karen, A History of God (Ballantine Books, New York 1993)
Armstrong, Karen, The Spiral Staircase (www.landmarkaudio.com).