Sunday, July 14, 2024 - Blame

This sermon was preached for Sunday, July 14, 2024 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Psalm 24, Ephesians 1:3-14, and Mark 6:14-29.

I can’t read today’s Gospel story about the beheading of John the Baptist without thinking of the strangest party I ever attended. Some context: I was studying abroad during the first semester of my college’s Arabic language program in Amman, Jordan. Now this program had been rather hastily put together after my college’s established Arabic program had been evacuated during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The director of our program, in scrambling to find last-minute housing for the female students, had had to forgo the usual placing of students with host families and instead selected a women's dormitory near the University. It’s important to the story to note that director chose our particular dorm because it had the latest curfew out of all the female dorms near the University - the absolutely unheard of 10pm. (Our male classmates, of course, had no curfew in their dorm). 

2022 Google street view of my old dorm (complete with the windmill).

Even though we weren’t with host families, we were there in Jordan to have an immersive experience alongside Jordanians, living and studying all in Arabic. But we told our director a couple months in that we were still having a lot of trouble getting to know the other Arab women in the dorm. So our director pressured the dorm matron to put on a party for us American college women and for the young Arab women in the dorms - with the idea that we’d mingle and talk and make friends, finally start to bridge the gap between language and culture. 

But that’s not what happened. What happened was that us American girls were seated around in an arc while the young Arab women came out to dance for us - to perform the sort of belly dances and what not you’d find at skeevy touristy places. Instead of the distance between us shrinking, it widened - widened to the gap between performers and an audience. It felt just like we were courtiers gathered to watch Salome dance for our amusement. The party was strange, awkward, and further separated us from the people we were longing to know more. 

A few days or weeks later, I can’t quite remember, a fight broke out in the parking lot. A very illegal gun was pulled and the local police investigated. Suddenly, all the oddities of this dorm began to fit together like puzzle pieces falling into place: that strange late curfew, the attached restaurant with a literal windmill on the front, the secret tunnels connecting its back rooms to the dorms, the restaurant’s exclusively Saudi clientele that would often slow down, roll down their windows, and beckon to us, the dorm matron’s reluctance to have us make friends…Now, to our program’s credit as soon as they realized we’d been accidentally housed in a brothel, they did move us out of the dorm pretty quickly. Of course, our parents were only told the full story after new apartments had been procured.

So yes, whenever I read this story of Salome’s dance, the dance of King Herod's stepdaughter, particularly when I picture how the scene has been eroticized and orientalized and depicted throughout the centuries, I think of those young women dancing for us. I think of how they were living very different lives in the rooms right next to us without us ever guessing at what was happening. I think of everything we didn't understand about the power dynamics at play. I think of everything we didn't say and everything we didn’t do. My heart aches for how easily we American women were whisked away after that gun was pulled but how the young dancing women were left behind. Was there more I could have done?

In much of scripture, conniving women are blamed for the poor choices of quite powerful men. Kings and patriarchs with incredible power are depicted as victims, manipulated by jealous wives and plotting queens. Think of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Ahab and Jezebel. The dancing stepdaughter in today's Gospel, Salome, has historically been depicted as a temptress, a seductress who beguiles and bewitches the king. The queen comes up with the idea for the murder and her daughter amplifies it, demanding the added humiliation of a silver platter for John the Baptist’s head. The king is just caught up in their plot. So we overlook the king’s immense power over all the other characters in the story and we are left thinking along with King Herod, “Well, what choice does he have? He’s bound by his oath!”

Of course Herod had a choice. We always have a choice. The irony is that sometimes, the more power we have in a particular situation, the less choice we feel we have - because we have so much more to lose. When I look back at moments when I felt helpless, I often realize I had more power than I knew, or more power than I had the courage to use. I think this is why Christians tell and retell the stories of the martyrs and the saints. We do it here at St. Mark’s each Wednesday at the noon service. I’m always struck that even in moments where it seemed these heroes had no choice at all: recant their beliefs or be put to death, betray their community or be exiled, the saints chose to stay true to their Christ. They made the hard, courageous choice despite the cost.

Pretending we had no choice, what could we do? helps us side-step some self-examination about our own relationship to power and powerlessness. But when we affirm, when we believe that we always have a choice, it means reckoning with the values behind each of our choices. It means taking accountability for action and inaction alike. It also means we need to get real about forgiving ourselves when we make the wrong choice, the harmful choice, the costly choice - or the choice to do nothing at all. 

When I reflect on the choices that haunt me most, it’s easy for me to slip into naming who and how I was manipulated by other people. Who was the Herodias in my story? But it’s also easy to fully blame ourselves for not knowing all the things we know now - everything we couldn’t have known and understood at the time. 

There’s a harder, more faithful approach that pushes through and beyond blame and regret. This is what the writer Ephesians means when he writes we are forgiven and redeemed, destined to be purposeful, holy, and blameless. With forgiveness, and self-forgiveness, and with the eyes of faith, we step back and look for how God was acting within and between all the mistakes and foibles anyway.

The whole story of John the Baptist’s beheading is tinged with regret. King Herod thinks of it because he is haunted by what he did, because he had always wondered if there was truth in what John the Baptist had to say. When Herod encounters Jesus, he sees the reincarnation of the prophet, speaking John the Baptist’s same powerful, resonant message to the people. The Good News could not be quashed, not by this king or anyone else. It doesn’t make what Herod did okay, but it does show how God’s goodness will triumph anyway.

We always have a choice. We won’t always choose perfectly. And yet God takes each one of our choices, every one of our mistakes, and bends them toward the good. John the Baptist prepares the way for Jesus Christ in life, ministry, and message, but also in death. His murder, then Jesus’ cross - with time, with faith, in God’s hands, they are all refashioned for our salvation. 

I do not know what happened to the women we left behind in that dorm, any more than I ever learned their names. But I do know what God did with me. I know that God drew me back to Jordan to study women’s rights and bodily autonomy in Islamic law a couple years later. I know that in doing so God drew me back to faith, and to Christ, and eventually here to you. I’m coming to terms with the fact that God even now is drawing me elsewhere, apart from you, but not away from God, never away from God. There is nothing you or I can do, no misstep or fumble or even egregious sin, that will ever convince God to stop drawing each of us ever closer to divine love.

The Good News does not promise us that with enough prayer and faith and effort we can live a regret-free or trespass-free life, always making the righteous choice. And it certainly doesn’t promise that our choices won’t come with painful consequences. The Good News promises that God can and does work through flawed human beings and all our mistakes. 

Yes, even that moment that haunts you. Even that mistake you made. Even the choice you regret with all your being - God has already forgiven you, already lavished you with grace. God is refashioning your failings, reshaping them even now for good. 

Study Abroad in Jordan, 2011