Mark 6:14-29

Some years ago, I met a young woman who worked joyfully in a kitchen preparing foods, serving meals, and washing dishes. She would spend her days around the preparation of meals and cleaning afterward. She'd also tend to the care of the rooms where guests of the Bishop stayed. She would spend days at a time doing this work sleeping over in a cramped room that held hers and another's bed, in addition to the belongings she brought which were hanging from nails in the walls, stored there while she cared for guests who stayed at the Methodista Center in Cuba. She would spend these days away from her family but was lifted up, staying here in the bosom of love founded on Christ Jesus. Those who came to stay there would also be ones who would surround her with love and care. She was a single mother of a little girl. Her husband had abandoned her, and much like early life for the Hebrews we read of in scripture, being a single parent, no longer in a marriage provided for by a husband, she also was abandoned and jeered by most people in Cuba. She could not get a job; she could not get help. She was at her wits' end. More bluntly, she was on the edge of her life. Within her there was a great loss and sadness and despair. Most of her family abandoned her.

That was one side of her. But somehow she held onto life with just a thread. She happened to step into a Methodist Church whereupon through the people who greeted her, she was embraced with the love Jesus offered. Her stepping across that threshold turned around all the messages she was receiving from her family and others. In time, she was able to get this job through the church. She had to travel by bus a great distance from where she lived in order to get to the Methodista Center . But it was worth the dust and time, and the days away from her daughter, to be able to provide for herself and her daughter. The cramped quarters were far better than the street or prostitution or worse. How proud she was of her little girl; she always would share a photograph of her. How good she feels. Maria smiles a lot; you can catch her singing when she thinks she's alone. Mind you, she faces the same ridicule without – on the outside, that's one side of her life, but deep within, she has found her self, her worth. She has found a resource of grace received and known.

More recently, I know of another woman who also cared for her family deeply. She, herself, was ill but she was able for the most part to keep her illness under control; only later in her life did the disease rob her of parts of her body. The tragedy in her life, though, wasn't her own illness but the diabetes of her daughter – her daughter was such a bright star with so much potential; she had been given a great education and gotten a great job – and lo, she was struck down by the disease before the prime of her life. Medications, amputations, transplants, and organ rejections: she lost her fight for life. She was cared for by her mother. This tragedy was beyond what life was supposed to be about: a mother doesn't lose her daughter; it's supposed to be the other way around. She carried this one part of her – a deep sadness. But somehow through the ensuing years this woman kept a thread of hope alive, another part of herself open to possibility: even though deeply disappointed she kept a thread of hope alive in her, that enabled her to rejoice in her other three children and their families, and rejoice in her grandchildren as well. And even as diabetes began to challenge her living, she did not give up hope in living.

It doesn't seem as if in this morning's scripture reading there could be any thread of hope, any stream of grace possible. We just heard a text of terror. It's almost as if we were reading of an event unfolding somewhere else in the world. Or it's as if we were reading the police wrap sheets or reports from the newspaper. Here we have Herod Antipas who is the Roman tetrarch of the Galilean area because of the beguiling ways of his step-daughter, Salome, promise John's head delivered on a platter. Even though Herod and his whole family are noted as hating the Jewish folk (one sign of Herod's disdain is that he had the audacity to establish the Galilean capital in Tiberias, that was great all except for the fact that it would be atop a former burial ground of the Hebrews. This was a desecration to the Jewish folk.), this Herod in our story pauses and listens to John. Is there a possibility for grace here? John and his message intrigue him; John's message at the same time, indicts Herod's life. Herod dares to take his brother's wife while his brother still lives. This amounts to adultery, a great abomination, in the eyes of Judaism. To put John in his place, perhaps, to keep him safe, Herod has him put in jail.

But there is hatred and treachery lurking about; Herodias, Herod's new wife, hated John for speaking the truth. There are remnants of early Jewish writing here; can you hear Jezebel and Elijah here; Jezebel hated Elijah for telling the truth. Herodias is the one whom young Salome consults when Salome's step-father Herod promises that because of her fine dancing at his party, she can have anything her heart desires. When Salome presents the question to her mother, Herodias cannot help herself; her hatred rules. Salome explains her desire to Herod. Is it now that grace breaks forth? Flannery O'Connor says, “There is a moment in every story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to accepted or rejected even though the reader may not recognize this moment.” Do we see just the one side of possibility here; does the other side, does grace come forth? Alas, Herod gives in to the dark, the untamed, the wild side. It is very hard to see any stream of grace in all these events going on here. John the Baptist is put to death; some friends gather to prepare his body for burial.

Why is this story here in the gospel of Mark anyway? It seems a detour of sorts. Mark, for the most part, is a succinct story of the gospel. Jesus is on trajectory toward death and glory. There is not a lot of fluff put into the series of events presented. Mark is the earliest and shortest of the gospels. There was a clear sense of urgency to tell the good news before Jesus came again. When this gospel was written, there was clearly persecution going on; declared Christians were being put to death. So why this extended story about John's death?

The very story is introduced with folks debating who this Jesus is. Amazingly, several suggest a prophet has been resurrected! Resurrection is not new concept with the Hebrews in our Christ Jesus. It is, however, a new experience in Jesus Christ. Even Herod suggests resurrection – a resurrection of John who he had put to death.

Now that's the entry point: trying to figure out who this Jesus is, and tying Jesus with resurrection. Now here's another connecting point: John is the forerunner to Jesus. Can you hear it? John in many ways parallels Jesus – he is put to death by a sympathetic ruler in the name of hatred, there is not a word from John. His body is collected by friends. This, my friends, is perhaps the very stream of grace. John dies because of Jesus; John dies a death very much like Jesus.

This text of terror isn't about Herod or Herodias, or Salome or John; in the end, it is about Jesus. There's the stream of grace!

But I am getting ahead just a little. Let's stay with the story for a moment more and consider what isn't written about in this story. We are so taken up by the events and perhaps the possibility of grace that we sometimes overlook this figure John. He is the object of events unfolding. That, I think, is where the stream of grace abides. Much as Jesus lived grace upon grace even to his death: is grace itself, John also lived in grace he experienced from Jesus, he was steadfast, as he faced the quizzical Herod, the hatred of Herodias, and the whim of Salome, and even as he faced death because of hatred. That's the stream of grace.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote a short book some time ago, Gift From the Sea , about relationships/marriage and making a comparison between the different times in a relationship with different kinds of shells. She writes at one point of how one can learn to live through ebb-tides, the low points. She poses: How can one learn to take the trough of the wave? It's easy perhaps to see from a distance – on the shore - to see how the still ebb-tides reveal another life below the level we normally reach. Something like our looking at this story about John the Baptist. We get caught up in the fast pace of events when sometimes it's what's unspoken, it is what's underneath the events that reveals much more. Anne describes how” in this crystalline moment of suspense, one has a sudden revelation of the secret kingdom at the bottom of the sea. Here in the shallow flats one finds, wading through warm ripples, great horse- conchs pivoting on a leg, white sand dollars, marble medallions engraved in mud….' She continues on to say,” each cycle of the tide, each cycle of the wave is valid', and I would add each cycle of life – the low points included that it may be just in those moments when we can grasp onto that grace that is there always – somewhere below the surface.

Maria found it as it walked across that church's threshold, a mother found it even in suffering the death of her daughter, John in his facing his death found it. In abandonment, in great loss, even in the face of death, the promise of grace can be found.

Do you notice something else? In all of this, there is not the promise that because we come here on a Sunday, because we may have faith to move mountains, or because we live virtuous lives that nothing difficult will come in our lives. No, there are texts of terror in some of our lives. There are hard times in each one of our lives. The promise given is that even as we face those hard times, there is a stream of grace, maybe not totally visible or understandable, but it is there to uphold us even in the most difficult of times. Jesus life and death and life in us again are testimony to that.