Sermon delivered by The Rev. Cristina Rathbone
All Saints Church, Brookline
July 12, 2009
(2 Sam 6:1-5,12b-19, Psalm 24, Ephesians 1:3-14, Mark 6:14-29)
A thirteen year old friend of mine named Kate got one of those personality tests on line from a friend of hers the other day. It was one of those things you are supposed to fill out and then pass on and one of the questions on it was: "Chose one thing that you definitely are not." After some thought she finally put down "lonely" which is incredibly beautiful, I think. It's a surprisingly tricky question though and for the longest time I couldn't think of how I would answer it. The next day, on my way back from church, I finally got it: "One thing I am definitely not is 'measured'."
It's funny I thought of that. But I think it's true. In fact, four or five years ago, back when I was first tentatively embarking on the path to ordination, filled with hope and wonder (and fear as well too because it's always a frightening to ask for the one thing you truly desire) — back then, before I'd even officially written to request entrance to the process, a friend of mine, an ordained person, told me that she worried I didn't have the kind of personality that was suited to what she called "the constraints of the priesthood."
Well I was devastated, of course. "What do you mean?" I managed to ask. "It's just that people expect priests to act a certain way ..." she said. And then we both looked ahead out of the windscreen of the car I was driving around in at the time and neither of us said a word because what, really, was there to say? I knew exactly what she meant of course — and I thought she was probably right too. If being a priest meant, primarily, cultivating a sort of well-behaved and decorous approach to life — and even to death — well, I needed to think again about my calling.
Happily for me at least, that isn't what ended up happening in the end and, as a brand newly ordained person, I am filled beyond measure, filled to bursting, with gratitude for our church's life and work in the world around us. But it seems to me that we can still learn a lot about the people we are called by Christ to become, by thinking about this question of constraints. Because I think that friend of mine was right in a way, though not, perhaps, in the way that she thought at the time. There are constraints on the path of faithfulness — of course there are — and not just for priests and deacons, but for all of us struggling to grow into the people we were created by God to become. The question is not whether we are frightened and challenged by the constraints of the path we have chosen to follow, because I for one most certainly am a lot of the time. The question rather, I believe, is whether the constraints we chose to take on are always, or necessarily, the ones suggested to us by Christ, instead of those we wounded and broken humans beings too often insist on hoisting upon ourselves.
The stories from the Gospel and the Hebrew Bible that we heard today have a lot to say on this matter, I think. In the gospel of Mark, we are presented with King Herod, powerful ruler, wealthy man, husband of a beautiful Queen ... and seeker after something more. It's easy to overlook this last fact in the face of all the others but it's true nonetheless. Herod recognized John as "a righteous and a holy man" and liked to hear him speak. In fact, his longing for some kind of deeper meaning to his life was so strong that it seems he used to trundle on down to his own dungeons to sit and listen to him. Just try to imagine that: a king sitting quietly in a dank, dark cell listening to the teachings of his own prisoner. What was he thinking, we might ask, keeping a man he so revered locked up in a dungeon alone in the dark? How could he have stood up at the end of each of these conversations and walked out of that place of torture and punishment into the light of his royal palace, knowing all the time that the person who held the answers to his innermost questions remained down below in the dark? How could he have lived with himself? He must have felt as if he had killed John the Baptizer over and over again — even before the fateful day of that feast.
But he had to, he must have told himself. His honor depended on it. People expected a king to act a certain way. He couldn't let some nobody from nowhere tell anyone who wanted to hear that his marriage was illegal. It undermined his authority — it damaged the sanctity of his office! And so he was stuck: sneaking off into the depths when he could, following his heart into a place no king in his right mind should ever be, and then returning, heart heavier than ever we have to imagine, to the pomp and increasingly empty feeling trappings of the rest of his life. King Herod, constrained.
On the other side of the coin we have David, also a King. Only by the time we encounter him today this king has already done what I can't help but imagine Herod longed to do more than anything in the world: he has stripped the robes and heavy brocade vestments of his kingship off of him – cast them away like rags — and having clothed himself instead with a simple linen prayer robe, was now accompanying the arc of God through the streets, dancing – madly dancing, dancing "with all (his) might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals" all the way to the City of David. That David seems happy at this point in time is an understatement. That he is free, also. And that this joy and freedom births more of the same for everyone around him is as indisputable as those delicious sounding raison cakes he handed every man woman and child of Israel when they finally reached the holy city. But there are those in the crowd who are appalled — and the text takes time to draw our attention to them as well.
One of these is named Michal, and she is the daughter of Saul, himself a tragic character both taken up and brought low by the Lord. Michal is looking out the window of her home at David, this man who must have looked like a usurper to her — and she sees only folly: a mad disdain for the dignity of his office, and behavior the likes of which demeaned not only David himself, but the memory of her father as well. "She despised him in her heart" we are told and a little later, just a couple of lines after our reading finishes she actually comes to him and says: " How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself before the eyes of his servant maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself?'
And you know what David says in response? He says: "It was before the Lord that I have danced ... before the Lord!" And: "I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes, but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor."
David, you see, was not dancing for himself. He was no more a carouser than Jesus was — though both were so accused. But nor was he dancing because his office demanded that he dance. His office, at least according to Michal, more or less prohibited it. Instead David was dancing because the spirit and the proximity of the Lord moved him so to do. He was, as he said then, dancing for others: for the Lord and for those sent to him to care for. To put it another way, David that day, was living out of the one real constraint we must all take to heart: he was loving the Lord our God with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind — and he was loving his neighbor as himself.
What would have happened if Herod had dared do the same? If, when his daughter came in to dance for his guests, he had flung off his cape and gone and joined with her in a dance of love rather than display? And what would have happened if, after that dance, aflame with yet more love and gratitude, Herod hadn't made an oath to her, but rather to the true source and object of his desire which was God? We will never know of course. But it's worth imagining just for an instant the change that might have taken place in that rather stodgy dinner if he had instead ordered John to be released so that he could continue in his own dance — and then, in light of the Lords' love, and of the gratitude that was now threatening to break the bounds of his own heart, if he had thrown open the doors of his palace and invited everyone in to share in the feast.
Would his life have been any easier if he had dared trade the constraints of his court for the yes, far more challenging and sometimes even undignified seeming constraints of the commandments of God? Probably not. But I feel certain that he would have been happier. And that the world would have been one step closer to the Kingdom of Heaven as a result: the people of Galilee would have been welcomed and fed the way the children of Israel were welcomed and fed those long years before by David and the beginning of a new age would have arrived.
What would happen if we were ever to dare do the same? If, the next time the constraints of our position in life came into screeching conflict with God's own requirements, we chose to follow the latter, which we hear, I believe, through the deepest desires of our own aching hearts? What new life would be birthed, what new hope, what new joy?
The good news is that the invitation is there, all the time, waiting; as patient and insistent as John in that dark, deep-down dungeon. All we need do is walk away from the human constraints of pride and decorum and say 'Yes!' to it. As the psalm for today so beautifully puts it:
Lift up your heads, O gates!
And be lifted up, O ancient doors!
That the king of glory may come in.
Amen