A sermon at the Church of the Epiphany for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2024

I’m curious, so curious why people thought that Jesus had to be someone else. Why they couldn’t allow him to be someone new, someone that God had created specifically to be himself. Why they were afraid to let God do a new thing.

When news of Jesus reached Herod Antipas, he was troubled. He was troubled because people were saying that this was John the baptizer come back to life, or Elijah, or another prophet come back to life; come back to haunt him.

So I’m curious why people, why Herod, thought that Jesus had to be someone else.

I’m afraid, too, that the identification with John the Baptist underscores a nasty point in that story; that his head was not buried with his body. You can imagine the conspiracy theories that transpired: that it was not really John that the disciples claimed and buried; that John had somehow been spirited away, and was now living as Jesus. 

The people who were not able to let Jesus be himself might also have been people tied up in grief, bound up by hope, caught up in flights of fantasy and false information. Or people like Herod, mired in guilt.

But that’s why it is so important to set Jesus free to be himself! The patterns we see in the Bible, of hope and sin, greed and guilt, destruction and God’s patient, repetitive redemption, that is always new, always doing the unexpected, merciful thing: these patterns teach us that left to our own imagination, we are lost. With God’s creativity, nothing, no one is beyond new life.

It is a gift to us that God created a world that has discernable patterns, rhythms, predictable days and seasons (although we are not beyond messing with those). We see patterns in history, in relationships, in the fractals of snowflakes. We use them to guide our anticipation, to help us to plan next steps, to choose what to wear when we get up in the morning: sundress or snowsuit? We can learn from the examples of history and experience, positive and negative, what to do and what not to do. 

But when we take for granted the patterns that God has created – the seasons, the tides, the swirl of the oceans and all that spins from them – when we forget that our stewardship of the earth means to maintain and to learn and to dance with rather than to mooch off those patterns, then we get into the kind of climate mess we face today.

It is a gift to us that God has created us each in the image of the One, so that we might recognize in one another that spark, that template of the divine that reminds us to love one another. Yet that image, like God, is infinite in its potential and its variety and its expression.

When we reduce people to patterns, stereotypes, when we assume that we know who they are because they’re just the new Elijah, right? Or the new John, or the new Stacy, or the new Hitler – when  we forget the intricacy of God’s creation of every soul, fearfully and wonderfully made, then we forget something about God, and about ourselves. 

When we treat people as patterns, as immigrants, as Republicans, as white folk, or Black; when we reduce people to patterns, we forget that we, too, are people, who prefer to be known by our own names, as individuals, rather than as the type of someone else. When we reduce people to patterns, violence is done to the image of God. The people injured in Butler County last evening, the people killed, including the perpetrator, had he but remembered it, were made in the image of God. Let’s not do that to one another. Let’s not lose our humanity.

It’s frightening, what happened last night. The attempted assassination of a former president and current candidate for the presidency. It’s frightening because mass shootings are frightening, and all too common in America today. The one in Butler County was not the only one to occur last evening. It’s frightening because it breaks the pattern of our image of ourselves as a nation intent on the peaceful transfer of power. There is a lot to work through here. It’s going to take some time, and some prayer, and some divine providence. But how often have we heard in the word of God, “Do not be afraid”? And St Paul has written elsewhere, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). For God is always able to find a new way, even when we see no way.

There is a lot going on in this morning’s readings. There is dancing, there is despising, there is death, there is adoption, there is the Ark of the Presence of the Living God. In the background, before the ecstatic dancing, there are months when David is afraid to bring the Ark home, and afraid of what new thing God might be doing with it, with him.

Then there’s Herod, and Herodias, and the intrigue of political alliances and family drama. At the end, there is the choice between vengeance, vindication, and integrity. Herod is afraid that if he goes back on his word to give the girl anything – anything – that she asks for, then he will look weak and foolish. But how strong a lesson would it have been for him to stand before his guests and say, “I will give you anything, but I will not become a murderer for you. Choose again.” If he had been willing, not to break his word, but to break it open to the grace of God, the capacity of God to find a new pattern, free from violence and vengeance. 

For us, and for the sake of our country, this is not a choice between the bullet and the ballot box. This is a choice between the bullet and our souls. This is a choice between politics and prophetic witness to the power of God’s way of love. Jesus had a choice: call down legions of angels or go to the cross, subvert the power of political violence by defeating death itself. Defeat hatred with the overpowering love of God. Overwhelm vengeance with the suffocating aroma of mercy. Break open the patterns of this world, and let in the kingdom of heaven.

When we forget to let God do a new thing, when we try to fit Jesus into old patterns, our patterns of vengeance and vindication, patterns and pigeon-holes that lead us to violence; when we do that, we forget that the cross broke apart the very structures of life and death; that his incarnation broke the rules of separation between humanity and divinity; we forget that God can make us new, too, if we need it, and we want it, if we will remember it, and have the courage to live it. 

There is no part of us, of me, or of you, that God has not created in God’s image. There is no part of us, nor of anyone, so tarnished that God cannot re-create it in God’s image. Even when we cannot see the way forward, that is only because there is no pattern or rule of our imagination that can contain the love of God. Jesus is the proof of it. He was, he is his own Person, and the God of our salvation.

Amen. 

Readings include the beheading of John the Baptist (Mark 6:14-29); David dancing before the Ark (verses from 2 Samuel 6:1-19). The news of the day includes the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a campaign rally.