On Still Not Getting It (2nd Sunday in Lent; Mark 10:32-52; February 21, 2016)

On Still Not Getting It

2nd Sunday in Lent
Mark 10:32-52
February 21, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The disciples were confused and Jesus' other followers were afraid. That about sums up the situation, doesn't? It's not a bad description of how things stand with us either. Confused and afraid.

Oh, we cover it well and so did the circles around Jesus, the inner circle of the disciples, and the outer circle of his other followers. The disciples were confused because they had their notions of what God's anointed should be like. They lived as a subject people in a colony in someone else's empire and they didn't like it one bit. Roman power and the collaborators among their own people kept them under their thumbs and they wanted freedom. The experience of Jews living in the provinces of Palestine, though, was that any credible effort in the direction of the freedom they believed was their birthright was met with Roman ruthlessness and Roman iron.

Power was needed to oppose power, ruthlessness to oppose ruthlessness, steel to oppose steel. But Jesus talked of being killed before the battle had even been joined. This defeatism had them confused.

Jesus' other followers were afraid, afraid of the violence that could break out at any minute. One provoked the eagle of Rome at one’s own risk, but Jesus, the man at the center of a movement as he was, would not bring down destruction simply on his own head, but on theirs as well. As much as they liked him, as much as they could hear hymns of liberation in the words he spoke, as much as they could see God's dream taking shape before their very eyes in the healings that he performed, they were afraid that it would all blow away like the figures that can be seen in the clouds that are there one moment and gone the next. They loved this dream but they were afraid of what would happen when the battle trumpets blew and they woke up and the dream faded into memory and they were left with a violent and oppressive reality.

Perhaps Jesus' other followers took the journey south, the road up to Jerusalem, as an opportunity to slip away from Jesus, to return to their homes or to their home towns and pick up the threads of the lives they had abandoned to follow Jesus.

But Jesus' disciples, that inner circle of the women and men who had been with him the longest, maybe they were too identified with Jesus to slip away. James and John seem to have been part of an inner circle within the inner circle, but they were confused and afraid like everyone else.

Fear and confusion are difficult feelings to deal with. I think, too, that fear and confusion are often linked. At least I've seldom felt one without experiencing the other. Fear is what we feel when we are threatened. We all know that it is a very basic emotion. We used to say that fear leads to the fight or flight response, but recent work with returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suggests that it might be more accurate to speak of the fight, flight, or freeze response. These responses are all very primitive and start in the part of our brains that we have in common with lizards and birds. When we are thoroughly afraid, we become bird-brained, twitchy and reactive.

My theory is that, in the flood of chemicals released in our brains by fear and our responses to fear, the part of our brain that analyzes and classifies the things in the world around us becomes overwhelmed. We are no longer able to separate things that we would under normal circumstances. When we are unable to tell one thing from another, when they blend into each other, when they are fused together, they are literally "con-fused". And that's when we are confused.

Confusion is uncomfortable. We'll do a lot to resolve it. When we're afraid in a group, one of the favorite things for humans to do is to look to powerful figures who will tell us what to do. Or we seek to become those figures ourselves.

This, I think, is why it makes sense that James and John took Jesus aside and asked for him to make them his Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Homeland Security. It was a grab for glory, sure, but it was also a plea to give them the helm, to put them in charge (under Jesus of course), to give them the power to set a course that would give them a way out of their fear and confusion. Maybe in this way they could put an end to all Jesus' talk about dying at the hands of the authorities.

Jesus answers them by asking whether they can drink his cup and be baptized with his baptism. We all assume he is talking about their dying the sort of death he will die and we're probably right. But drinking wine is not a way to resolve confusion, quite the contrary. And being baptized, being lowered under the water, doesn't soothe fears. It is as if Jesus is telling James and John, "You want power as a way to protect yourself from fear and confusion, but if you are following me you will go through more not less fear and confusion." That may be a stretch, but this is the unfamiliar meaning I'm now hearing in these familiar words.

When the rest of the inner circle found out what James and John have done they were angry. Why? Was it simple jealousy? Was it because they didn't think of it first? Was it because the want an "open process" for the selection of Jesus' cabinet ministers? Or is it simply that when fear and confusion increase, the first casualty is mutual trust?

But the way out of the uncomfortable place that the disciples are in, this place of fear and confusion, is not authoritarian leadership. The way out of the uncomfortable place is mutual care and service. I say "mutual" because care and service are often not mutual. Care and service change nothing when done by people at the bottom of the social pyramid for the people at the top. Jesus suggests that mutual care and service are the path through fear and confusion. They remind us of who Jesus is. They remind us of who we are. They focus us on our core values. They are like a light in the darkness.

If we decide that being powerful, or tough on our enemies, or ruthless in the pursuit of the way we think things ought to be in the world or in our community or in our church, are the way to be, then we will have a lot of company. Every ruler, every petty tyrant, and every local despot does the same.

We are easily blinded by the images of power, toughness and ruthlessness conjured up in stump speeches and political ads. The disciples and we are all in need of healing from this blindness. Like the blind beggar Bartimaeus, when we are healed we will be able to follow Jesus. Jesus' path is vulnerability, tenderness, and mercy. That path leads to Jerusalem, to rejection, to suffering, even to death. And then to resurrection life. That path, the way of vulnerability, tenderness, and mercy, that and no other is our way.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Rescuing the Rich (First Sunday in Lent; Mark 10:23-31; February 14, 2016)

Rescuing the Rich

First Sunday in Lent
Mark 10:23-31
February 14, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

We Christians have a troubled history with money.

Jesus, on the other hand, seems to have been pretty clear about it. In the earliest form of the beatitudes, the one found in Luke 6. There Jesus tells his followers, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." That seems pretty straight-forward, especially if we go on to read the parallel to this verse from the woes that follow: "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation." In Jesus' eyes, the poor are blessed and rich are cursed.

But we Christians went to work right away to soften this harsh statement. In Matthew's version of the beatitudes, the one that we maybe memorized in our confirmation classes, Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." This raises the possibility that we could be poor "in spirit" while still being rich in what? our bodies? our bank accounts? Anyway, the door is left open a little, so that rich among us Christians don't have to go away sad.

There are other signs of this softening in the New Testament. Paul, for example, criticizes the rich in the Corinthian church, but not in a way that suggests that wealth itself is a problem. They shouldn't bring their gourmet delicacies to eat at the church's potluck suppers in front of people who hardly afford to eat at all. Paul, for his part, depends on the generosity of the wealthy, or at least the upper middle class, to support his ministry. He typically stayed at the home of one of them while he was in town, sometimes for several months. Paul needs the wealthy-ish.

Later, this trajectory continues. Clement, a teacher in ancient Alexandria in Egypt who worked in the late third and early fourth centuries, taught that, while wealth was dangerous [Clement of Alexandria, "Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved", 1], it could be possessed without harm. It is possible to be literally poor and be consumed with wanting to be wealthy [Clement, 12]. So then true spiritual poverty is this:

But if one is able in the midst of wealth to turn from its power, and to entertain moderate sentiments, and to exercise self-command, and to seek God alone, and to breathe God and walk with God, such a poor man submits to the commandments, being free, unsubdued, free of disease, unwounded by wealth. [Clement, 26]

This would be true even if the poor man that Clement describes happens to be a rich man.

So wealth itself in Clement's view--and he was certainly not alone--became morally neutral. What mattered for him was the internal attitude toward wealth.

Our own John Wesley preached on "The Use of Money." He argued that Christians should do three things: 1) Make as much as they can, 2) Save as much as they can, and 3) Give away as much as they can. Of course, he expanded and explained each of those. We should make money in ways that do not harm ourselves or others and are not forbidden or unlawful. We should live on as little as we can. Then we should give away the rest. He was pretty sure that Methodists would be able and willing to obey the first two directions. He wasn't so sure about the third. Perhaps he was right.

Then, of course, in our time we have had the rise of what is called the Prosperity Gospel. Many if not most television preachers fit belong in this camp. Prosperity Gospel argues that Wealth is a sign of God's favor that is given to those who believe and act on God's promises. Christians are supposed to have and enjoy riches in this life. So we have people like Joel Osteen who is worth tens of millions and who lives in a ten million dollar parsonage in Houston. But within the horizon of the Prosperity Gospel he serves, not as an example of clergy corruption and greed, but as a shining example of what can and should happen for all Christians who believe and act on God's promises.

It doesn't hurt that he is able to project an image that suggests that he is completely surprised by his own success and finds it barely comprehensible. There is something about him that just makes me want to root for him.

It isn't clear what we can take away from this strange history. What is clear is that we Christians aren't clear about how we should think about wealth.

Our culture isn't much help. We seem to have gotten Wesley's first rule down pretty well. We tell our kids to go to college because a college education is the ticket to having a "good job," by which we mean a job that pays well and doesn't involve getting dirty. We even look at college and universities and we evaluate them on how good an investment they are. And by that we mean, the average lifetime income of its graduates divided by the cost to attend.

At the same time, we think there is something not quite right about a pastor who lives in a ten million dollar parsonage. And we are quite willing to dispise someone like Martin Shkreli, the investment banker whose Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the rights to drug Daraprim and promptly raised its price from $13.50 a tablet to $750. Shkreli has since been arrested and charged with fraud, but the price hike was perfectly legal. All he was doing was attempting maximize his profits.

With all of this rolling around in our heads, with all of our experience of money and wealth (mostly other peoples'), with the Church's inability to sort this out, it is no wonder that we come away from hearing today's lesson, well, in the words of the reading itself, "dismayed...saddened...startled...shocked." There doesn't seem to be anyone who finds any good news here.

I'm going to skip lightly over the first part of the lesson. The man's question and Jesus' responses to it are worthy of their own sermon. I'm more concerned by the explanation that Jesus gives his followers after the man went away dismayed and saddened.

Jesus has probably not asked any of us to sell all that we possess and give the money to the poor, so we're not making up excuses in our heads for the why Jesus' demand was so outrageous. This, after all, could simply be pastoral care adapted to meet the needs of this one parishioner.

My head goes to work when Jesus begins to talk in general about wealth and entering the kingdom of heaven. Like the disciples I'm startled and shocked. Maybe it's because I know how translations sometimes make it easier to evade the text. For example, I could let myself off the hook because Jesus says, “It will be very hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom!” After all, I'm not exactly wealthy! "It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom." But I'm not really a rich person, either.

But that's not what the text actually says in Greek. There, it is "It will be very hard for those who have possessions to enter God's kingdom." What's the difference? Well, in the ancient world there were three classes of people: the destitute, the poor, and the rich. The destitute did not have resources to sustain their own lives. The poor were those who had to work to make a living. The rich were those who had enough productive land that they didn't need to involve themselves on a daily basis in the business of making a living. They had people for that. It's a little like the distinction I've heard between those who work for their money and those whose money works for them.

But I'm a little of both and so, I suspect, are most of you. I have a pension fund, money that the churches where I've served and I have contributed that is then invested in a variety of financial instruments so that when I retire, there will be an income or at least a nest egg. I am, by the standards of the ancient world, both poor and rich at the same time. So at least part of what Jesus is saying applies to me, camel and needle's eye and all.

Like the camel I can try to wiggle out of it, to wriggle through some loophole I think I see, so I can claim to be okay without having to make any uncomfortable changes. But this a vain effort. Our world tells us that we ought to make a lot of money so we can have a lot of possessions, the kind of possessions that make for a comfortable retirement. But it is clear that Jesus sees things differently. For him wealth is dangerous to us and the more we have of it the more likely it is that we will serve it and the less likely it is that we will serve God because it is impossible--not unlikely, not hard--impossible to serve both money and God.

So that leaves me in a quandry: what about my pension plan? What would I do without it, besides living in rather dire poverty, I mean? Jesus gives us a glimpse of an alternative. In Jesus' day wealth was seldom personal; it was part of a legacy, an inheritance, a patrimony. The possessions that Jesus speaks of--lands and houses--are inheritable. To abandon that sort of property was to abandon the families that went with it. This perhaps is why Jesus tells the disciples who have left their families and modest properties behind that they "will receive one hundred times as much now in this life—houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and farms (with harassment)—and in the coming age, eternal life." Leaving their own families, they will enter a different sort of community, the community of Jesus followers, and the resources of the whole community will be theirs if they need it. It comes down to a choice between having my own and being in it for myself on the one hand or being part of a commonwealth and being in it together with all Christians on the other hand.

Maybe. I'm still not sure. I'm still trying to get over being startled and shocked by Jesus' words and by what they imply. I still don't get it. That's okay. It's clear that Jesus' disciples didn't get it either. He isn't done with them. He's not done with me either.

Shrine Builders (Festival of the Transfiguration; Mark 8:27--9:8; February 7, 2016)

Shrine Builders

Festival of the Transfiguration
Mark 8:27--9:8
February 7, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I've never really understood the transfiguration story. I'm not sure what it's supposed to be telling us. I'm not clear about why it's where it is in Mark's gospel. I mean, is this supposed to be Jesus meant when he told his friends that "some standing here won’t die before they see God’s kingdom arrive in power"? If not, what did he mean by that prediction? And I don't really understand what we're supposed to be seeing in our mind's eye. We are told that his clothes were dazzling white, whiter than the laundry products of Jesus' day could have gotten them, but, if Jesus was transformed, into what was he transformed?

I don't get Jesus in this story, but I do get Peter. He sees this overwhelmingly awesome thing. He sees Moses and Elijah with Jesus. (By the way, how does he know they were Moses and Elijah? Were they wearing name tags? Did they introduce themselves?) He was terrified. He did not know what to say. So, of course, he didn't just keep his mouth shut. No, he blurted out something.

Family systems theorists tell us that, When we don't know what to do, we do what we know. That's what Peter did. Confronted with an event that was new and overwhelming, he said, "Rabbi, it’s good that we’re here. Let’s make three shrines—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." This seems appropriately foolish, familiar, somehow. Like I said, I get Peter. He makes sense, or at least his nonsense feels familiar.

On the face of it, Peter's statement, "Rabbi, it’s good that we’re here. Let’s make three shrines—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." is pretty illogical. What in the world makes Peter think that shrine-making is the appropriate thing? But Peter's suggestion isn't quite as nonsensical as it sounds.

Let's take a closer look at the text. Peter says, "Let's make three shrines..." There are several different ways to translate the Greek word that is taken as "shrines" here. The word is skênê. It refers to a tent or a booth. I'm going to have to be convinced that "shrine" is a good way to translate it. So far I’m not convinced.

Skênê occurs several times in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, especially in two contexts. The first is one of the festivals, Sukkoth, the Festival of Booths. Sukkoth lasts for eight or nine days (depending on whether you are in Israel or elsewhere). During Sukkoth each family spends some time in a sukkah, a temporary shelter made from leafy branches. There is a picture of a sukkah on the front cover of the bulletin. It can't be built under a cover of any kind. Its roof has to be loose enough so that it is possible to see the stars through its holes. Families eat meals under the sukkah and they invite their friends. If you are ever invited, accept the invitation.

Sukkoth commemorates the time that the Israelites spent in the desert, living in temporary shelters as they wandered from oasis to oasis. It remembers and celebrates a time when the Israelites lived in immediate dependence on God, when God provided food in the form of manna, and Israel wanted for nothing. Sukkoth is a harvest festival and also celebrates the way that God continues to provide for God's people. Always in the Greek Old Testament, the Hebrew word sukkah is translated as skênê.

The other context for skênê is the Tent of Meeting. As I'm sure you remember from Sunday School, Israel didn't always have a Temple. When the Israelites wandered in the desert and in the days of the judges, instead of a Temple, Israel had a large tent. There are detailed instructions for how to make the Tent of Meeting,but the main things is that it is portable. As you remember, when God moved, Israel moved too. When God stopped in a place, Israel set up the Tent of Meeting and it served as the place where God was worshiped until God moved again. Of course, like the Temple it protected Israel from direct exposure to God and to God's glory. Seeing God face to face was said to be fatal and being too close to God's glory wasn't healthy either. Remember that this was before sun screen with SPF protection.

I make light of the situation, but ancient Israel did not. We have lost the sense that God is powerful to the point of being dangerous, but Israel had not. If that sense had faded for Peter, James, and John, it was quickly recovered as Jesus was transformed, Moses and Elijah appeared, and they were overshadowed by a cloud.

When you don't know what to do, you do what you know. If Peter, James, and John had been British and found themselves overwhelmed, awe-struck, and at a loss, they would have made tea. It's what the British do when they don't know what to do. Since Peter wasn't British and tea was out of the question, what did he know how to do that he could do when he didn't know what to do?

He could build a sukkah. Better yet, he could build three sukkoth, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. When Israel was confronted the awesome presence of God's glory, they built a sukkah for it. Every year of his life Peter had commemorated Israel's experience in the desert by building a his own sukkah. Peter didn't offer to build the sukkoth because he wanted to somehow preserve the experience of the transfiguration. In this way our translation is a little misleading. Peter didn't intend to build a shrine. When faced with something new and awesome, Peter responded by calling on the past to provide a model for the present. When you don't know what to do, why not do what you know?

But, of course, in the story we know that doing what he knew was the wrong thing to do. He acted out of fear and ignorance--"He did not know what to say, for they were terrified."--and was immediately overridden by God. A cloud "overshadowed" all six of the figures on the mountaintop. God spoke out of the cloud, “This is my Son, whom I dearly love. Listen to him!” Then, when the cloud was gone, so were Moses and Elijah and the disciples were left alone with Jesus.

Like the sukkoth that Peter proposes to build, the cloud and God's voice throw us back to the Exodus. When Israel had finished the Tent of Meeting as instructed, the cloud of God's presence "overshadowed" it. During the exodus, too, God spoke to Moses out of the cloud, commanding Moses and the Israelites to listen. Now, however, the cloud of God's presence does not overshadow a sukkah of any kind and the voice from the cloud commands the disciples to listen to Jesus.

As temporary as it is, as portable as it might be, a sukkah no longer seems to be in order. Even the paltry protection against God's glory is not allowed. God no longer takes up residence in a tent, but in the open air; leather walls or leafy branches will not shield us. Peter is summoned to a new and immediate way of being with and listening to God.

He must have been confused. His best and really only response to this overwhelming presence is set aside. He is forced to sit in the presence of God without distraction, even the distraction of having something useful to do. He can't build three sukkoth or even one. He can't even make tea. He can only listen, which, of course, in the Bible almost always means listen and heed.

I don't know how it went for Peter after that. He doesn't do too well in the New Testament. In the gospels he is always the fool. In Paul's writings he is always wrong. Maybe Peter has an untold story. Did he learn not to trust in his sukkah-making but instead to attend to God present and speaking in each moment? I don't know.

I do know that we, his spiritual descendants, have never really learned his lesson. We build our sukkoth, not of leafy branches or leather, but of wood, bricks and stone. We cannot imagine our life as God's people without a building to contain it. And that may be part of the illness from which the contemporary Church suffers: our life as God's people is contained. How often have our buildings become our mission and the Church been reduced to a memorial society with a building on the front of which a bronze plaque is fixed that says, "Once on this spot, the people of God, empowered by God's Spirit, healed the sick, set captives free, announced the day of God's favor, and preached good news to the poor. We maintain this building in their honor because we don't know what else to do."

This is a part of our illness that, afraid and not knowing what to do, we have done what we know. But however we struggle with our illness, we cannot forget the story of a man who was told to leave off pitching tents, building booths, and making shrines and to listen to Jesus instead, and who did.

The cure for our illness, then, would be for our life to be let loose, into the world, into our communities. The cure for our illness would be for the past to open up our present and future rather than to set limits for them. The cure for our illness would be to be overshadowed by the cloud of God's presence and to hear God's voice speaking once more, directing us away from all the useful things we might think of to do, and bidding us to listen to Jesus.

When we don’t know what to do, we do what we know. Until we do something else. And who knows what will happen then?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

#GalileanLivesMatter (Mark 5:21-43; Third Sunday after Epiphany: January 31, 2016)

#GalileanLivesMatter

Mark 5:21-43 Third Sunday after Epiphany January 31, 2016

Someone has called Mark's Gospel a passion story with an introduction and there is some truth to that. Of fifteen chapters, five chapters, fully one-third of the gospel, are given to the events in Jerusalem.

But Jesus' suffering and death are anticipated long before that. In the middle of chapter eight, Jesus predicts his own death, and again in chapters nine and ten. The first hint that the narrator gives us of Jesus' death comes in the early part of chapter three as the Pharisees and Herodians--two parties that got along about as well as Tea Party Republicans and Occupy Democrats--plotted together against Jesus. Not content to sideline him or even to have him killed, they planned to "destroy" him.

In our reading this morning we see Jesus rejected by the people in his hometown. They somehow cannot make Jesus' ministry and Jesus' history with them go together in their heads. Such was their rejection of him that he could not even perform the acts of power that usually went with his preaching.

After this rejection, he sent his disciples by twos on a mission trip through the region. They preached good news, healed the sick, and set free those who were possessed by evil spirits. They had strict instructions not to provide for themselves but to depend on their hosts for everything they needed.

The rumors of Jesus' ministry reached Herod and that reminds the narrator of John the Baptizer. Herod was convinced that Jesus was John come back to life.

Later, when Jesus first talked about his going to Jerusalem to die, we are told that the path of discipleship is the path that leads to death on a cross. But here, well before that, in three relatively short passages we are shown rather than told what this business of following Jesus will involve. If we are faithful, says Mark, we will find that it costs us dearly. We will lose the respect of our neighbors. If we are sent as Jesus' apostles we will have to be dependent on others for our needs. If we are persistent in following Jesus and announcing his good news, we will find ourselves at odds with the powers that be. It may even cost us our lives in a literal sense.

It's this last, religion-and-politics story that especially arouses my interest. Maybe it's because I can't turn on the television without hearing why it would be the end of the world if this or that candidate for President wins their party's nomination, or because the phone hardly ever rings without its being a robocall looking for my support... and my money. For two more days it's the crazy season in Iowa. And then we will be forgotten for a few months and after that left more or less in peace for another four years.

This last story tells me that John the Baptizer had never heard that religion and politics are supposed to be kept apart. John the Baptizer had no problem with calling out Herod the King.

This Herod is not the Herod who was king when Jesus was born; he was Herod Antipas, the son of the first Herod. Nor was he actually a king. With the permission of Rome he ruled over a quarter of his father's kingdom, so his title was actually "tetrarch"--ruler of a fourth. He was the tetrarch of Galilee.

In those days marriages were a way of securing alliances and, because the need for alliances changed, it was common practice in the Roman world to divorce an inconvenient spouse and marry another who would be more useful. Herod Antipas married Phasaelis the daughter of King Aretas IV of Nabatea, to gain an ally on his southern border. He later divorced her, though, to marry his niece Herodias who had been married to and divorced from his half-brother Herod II.

This shuffling of the marriage deck caused two sets of problems. The first was that it ticked off his first wife's father, King Aretas, who promptly waged war on Herod Antipas' southern border. Herod Antipas suffered a serious military defeat at Aretas' hands. He then appealed to Rome for help, but at about the same time Emperor Tiberius who was Herod Antipas' sponsor died and his brother Caligula became emperor. Caligula had a different idea than Tiberius about who should be tetrarch of Galilee. When Herod Antipas appealed to Caligula, Herod Antipas and Herodias were sent into exile to what is now southern France but was then considered even less fashionable and more barbaric than Galilee.

Incidentally, just to complicate things further, Herodias' daughter Salome--the one who did the dancing--was also Herod Antipas' niece. And, Herodias and Salome were not only mother and daughter; they were also first cousins!

That was one set of problems. Another also had to do with Herod Antipas' marriage. Musical marriage beds was a game that the Roman elites played for political gain, but Herod Antipas' divorce from Phasaelis and marriage to the newly-divorced Herodias violated three different Jewish laws. Divorce was quite possible, too possible according to Jesus, but remarriage while the first wife or husband was still alive was not legal. Both Herod Antipas and Herodias violated this law. Herodias was both Herod Antipas' niece and his sister-in-law. Either relationship made their marriage incest in the eyes of Jewish law.

Tradition has made this set of problems into a sexual scandal, but politics and power lay at the center of this scandal, not sexual pleasure. Herod Antipas like his father Herod the Great had hitched his wagon to the Roman star. He used his rule to extract money from Galilee. He used the money he extracted to build public monuments to his own rule and to flatter his Roman bosses. He built a Roman-style city to be his capital and named it Tiberius in honor of his patrón Emperor Tiberius.

To extract the money he needed for these things, he raised taxes on land so that peasants were forced into selling their land. This had two results: the creation of a large body of unemployed displaced peasants and the consolidation of land into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Any Galilean who grumbled or complained in a public way was violently silenced.

All of that, of course, was what John the Baptizer and anyone else in Galilee, expected of the Romans. What bothered them was that Herod Antipas, like the rest of his family, claimed descent from King David. They posed as children of the Torah, as sons of the covenant, but they kept only the the most convenient parts of the Torah. Any law that got in the way of their quest for power was simply ignored in the hopes that any problems would go away.

They would have, too, were it not for a prophet like John the Baptizer whose #GalileanLivesMatter movement insisted on exposing Herod Antipas' betrayal of the Torah and his disloyalty to the covenant. This did not sit well with Herodias who, if anything, was more ambitious than her husband. So John, Herodias, and Herod Antipas acted out the same drama that Elijah, King Ahab, and Queen Jezebel had acted out so many centuries earlier, with the difference that this time it ended in the death of the prophet, not the queen.

It seems that this is the reward for those who preach that God's reign is at hand and who call people to repentance. Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who was killed by US-trained assassins in 1980, said that this is the sort of thing that happens when the Church is faithful. "[W]hen the Church is persecuted it is a sign that it is fulfilling its mission." [Homilia 25 de noviembre de 1977, I-II, p. 339. "Cuando la Iglesia es perseguida es señal de que está cumpliendo su misión." My translation.] There are some who claim that Christian faith is being persecuted in our land, but having to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple is not persecution when our business is to bake cakes for the public, nor is it persecution when we are told that we can't use tax money to erect a nativity scene on the courthouse lawn. If I read this passage correctly, I have to say that we are not entitled to the privilege of having our faith be a sort of de facto established religion.

The spiritual cost of this privilege has been very high. We have become accustomed to being inoffensive as the price of this privilege. The United Methodist Church has been silent too often in the face of war, greed and oppression. We have failed to name these things clearly for fear that if we do someone might be upset. We have looked instead to safeguard our institutional future with clever public relations campaigns and the outreach program du jour.

But this is not our calling as God's people. Our calling is to name and resist "evil, injustice and oppression in whatever form they present themselves." Our calling is to risk what Jesus risked, what John the Baptizer risked, what Martin Luther King, Jr., risked, and what Monseñor Romero risked. Our calling is to tell the truth even when no one wants to hear it. Our calling is not so much to honor Jesus, as to follow him.