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Writer's pictureSt. Aidan's
Jul 13, 20248 min read

8th Sunday After Pentecost

8th Sunday After Pentecost

Proper 10 B: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24

Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

The Rev. Cameron Partridge

July 14, 2024



Good Morning St. Aidan’s. It’s good to be back among you after time away at General Convention in Louisville, followed by family vacation. It’s also good to be out of the heat. Everywhere I have been since late June has been either hot and humid or hot and dry. My grandfather used to wax lyrical about the natural air conditioning of the Bay Area’s fog (then unnamed), and I join him in that. I think of our fog as a cool, calming, slow-motion wave draping over our hills, calling us to slow down, to breathe, to let God’s healing, life-giving presence ground us even if and as the world around us is (perhaps literally) on fire. Your kingdom come, O God, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us the strength and wisdom, Holy Spirit, to see and like holy weavers collaboratively participate in spinning and weaving the threads of your reign here on earth; that your far-reaching, resurrection justice may root and reign.

God’s kingdom, God’s reign, God’s dream is on my mind this morning, friends. It is on my mind because of how it surrounds and is contrasted with the scene of horrific political violence that is depicted by our passage from the Gospel of Mark. This story is a kind of anti-kingdom parable, whose assignment for my first day back from vacation I have anticipated for some weeks.[1] It struck me back in May that this passage was perfect for our monthly Zoom Wrestling with the Scriptures Bible study because of how much it makes us shake our heads, wondering where the Good News could possibly be found in it, wondering why the lectionary would even have assigned it in the first place, given its violence. On the second question, I can only say that this passage comes to us thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary (not the Episcopal Sunday lectionary which ordered our readings prior to 2000), and we do not hear this story in other years.[2] On the first question, I think Good News can only be seen by how this passage contrasts God’s kingdom with the kingdoms of this world.[3] Good news can be discerned through a glass darkly in the stories that surround our story.

Our story is conveyed by Mark almost as an aside. Just prior to our passage Jesus had the experience of being rejected in his hometown, as often befalls prophets. Following that rejection, he had sent the disciples off in pairs. You know this story – the Lukan version (Luke 10:1-12) of it is especially familiar to us from our Vital and Thriving journey: travel light; cast out evil in your path, calling people to repent, to turn to God; share the Good News of God’s in-breaking reign; be healers. Spread the wide-ranging, world-renewing justice of God. When Herod caught wind of this burgeoning movement, he wondered what it was about. It couldn’t be the return of John could it? The one whose light I thought I just snuffed out? And then we hear about this leader, John, whom the Gospel of John describes as one who came as a witness to testify to the light (John 1:7), as we heard back in January.[4] In our story his witness also testifies to the horror of political violence. And not simply the fact of such violence, but how it can insinuate itself through a celebration, through a family, even through the actions of a young person so saturated in a system that they seek to please an authority figure / family member in the most horrifying way. This was a major question we wondered about in our Wrestling with the Scriptures study of this passage last month: how awful were the details of Herodias’ and her daughter’s roles in this story. How the drunken Herod uses them to conceal the violence of his own decisions. It was he whose brittle, drunken authority required saving face, yet it was Herodias and her daughter who were put in the position of serving up the bloody results of his actions. Political violence is awful in its overt details and in the covert ways it seeks to mask itself up with characters on the margins of the scene, in this case a mother and daughter. That the dancing of Herodias’ daughter could draw out this violent response is a travesty of justice, to John and his community, to Jesus and his followers, to the young woman used in this horrendous way, to God who would have us dance irrepressibly before the true divine sovereign as David does in our first reading (2 Sam 6:5, 14).

For dancing points to the depth of divine justice, its boundlessness, its mobility, its joy, its peace. Dancing before the ark of God, as David does, can be unsettling – our passage from 2nd Samuel conveys a response of jealousy, an impulse of containment (2 Sam 6:16). For God’s sovereignty and the transformative power it unleashes in this world is fundamentally unbounded, flipping tables, upending human strictures, bringing to nothing the things that are, exposing the sheer foolishness of human hierarchies. And to the power structures of our world, such a kingdom is profoundly threatening. This was what Herod feared both in John and in Jesus.[5] Yet the power of God is to be celebrated in all its mystery. It is to be honored in the practices that help manifest God’s reign: lifting up the lowly, visiting those in prison, loving our neighbors in the most expansive sense of that term, feeding the hungry. And these qualities of the kingdom, which flow outward in Mark’s gospel and in our lectionary readings to come, surround our horrific story. Our story is set in the midst of these true kingdom, deep dream qualities in order to put us on guard against the system of political violence that is as rampant in our world as it was in that of Jesus and John.

It is imperative that in the wake or midst of the violent currents of our world, we keep our eye on the prize of God’s dream, refusing to be pulled into their insidious orbit.[6] Particularly for those of you who lived through the 1960s, I can imagine yesterday’s news from Pennsylvania may have your memories and perhaps made you wonder what new cycles of violence – physical, emotional, or spiritual – may come. I join our bishops Marc and Austin and our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry in decrying yesterday’s violence.[7] I strongly concur that as Christians we should condemn as Bishops Austin and Marc wrote, “all violence that threatens human life, and certainly the lives of those who put themselves forward in our democratic, political processes.” I appreciate Presiding Bishop Curry’s statement that “the way of love—not the way of violence—is the way we bind up our nation’s wounds.”[8] Presiding Bishop Curry further prayed that “we as a nation and a world may see each other as the beloved children of God.” I feel strongly that the kingdom of God calls us to seek actively to see each other through the eyes God, not the eyes of fear or paranoia, not the eyes of a violent system that dehumanizes and spreads its tendrils through slogans soaked in grievance and the proliferation of guns. There is much we do not yet know about what exactly happened yesterday and why. If perhaps some of us have friends or family members – particularly conservative ones – who may reacting in anger and fear, I would urge us to resist reactivity and to seek God’s grounding in the days to come. I would invite us to let the cool fog of the Spirit’s holy presence overshadow us, reminding us of the deeper promise of God’s reign that binds up the brokenhearted, that draws us into neighbor-knowing and -seeing, that calls us into a love so just and transformative, so world-renewing, that we in the fullness of time, cannot but dance.

When I was in Louisville for General Convention, I had the honor of serving as a moderator on a panel with the Rev. Drs. Charles Halton and Kelly Brown Douglas. You may recall that we have read and talked about some of Dr. Douglas’ writings here at St. Aidan’s. The concluding chapter of Dr. Douglas’ most recent book, Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter deeply moved me as I prepared for that conversation. Dr. Douglas writes there of her struggle against despair, particularly in the wake of violent backlash against the movement that seeks to center the deep mattering of Black lives. She notes the observations of the historian René Girard about how violence can be contagious, building upon itself.[9] But then she observed that violence is not the only form of social contagion. So too can be joy, laughter, and ultimately hope. People coming together in support of justice can foster a kind of irrepresible hope. We might recall that kind of contagion in various movements and events from Pride marches to the Occupy movement. Dr. Douglas’ despair dissipated as she came to experience the sheer ebullience of Black Lives Matter Plaza, and she was reminded of God “resurrecting communities around the globe from the despair of crucifying death into the resurrection hope of new life.”[10] Such contagion signals what she calls, drawing on the theologian Ashton Crawford, “an imaginary… [of] ‘otherwise possibility.’” Such possibility is “not utopic… but it is the elaboration of the fact that an alternative exists.”[11] An alternative exists, dear friends, in the kingdom, the dream of God, whose resurrecting power, working in us – in our relationships, in our seeing and listening, in our practices of interpersonal care and justice – can do infinitely more than we can ask for or imagine. May we steep ourselves in that hope, that kingdom dream this morning, in the days and weeks to come, and always.

 


[1] Or as Andrew McGowan puts it in his blog post “A King, a Dance, a Death,” “this scene is an illustrated counter-example to the reign of God which is the true subject of the Gospel.” https://abmcg.substack.com/p/a-king-a-dance-a-death

[2] Matthew has a less detailed version of this story at 14:3-12. Luke 9:7-9 only briefly reports Herod’s wondering who Jesus was and recalls that he had already John beheaded, but there is no description. The Gospel of John reports John the Baptist’s being thrown into prison (3:24). McGowan notes that the Episcopal Sunday lectionary and the Roman Catholic Lectionary leave this story out. https://abmcg.substack.com/p/a-king-a-dance-a-death

[3] Again, McGowan makes this point about contrasting kingdoms and notions of kingship in https://abmcg.substack.com/p/a-king-a-dance-a-death

[4] It was actually December 17, Advent 6: https://www.staidansf.org/post/testify-to-joy-advent-6

[5] In reflection upon this passage William Placher comments, “It is an odd fact that the motives of the wealthiest and most powerful so often involve an element of fear ­– fear of losing what they have, fear of embarrassment, fear that someone will see through their mask of importance to the nervous human being they know lies within.” Mark: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 94.

[6] As always, my references to the dream of God draw upon Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (New York, NY: Seabury Classics, 1991, 2006).

[9] Kelly Brown Douglas, Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2021),193.

[10] Douglas, 194.

[11] Douglas, 194

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