Choosing To Choose

"Choosing To Choose"

Mark 6:14-29
July 12, 2009

King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, “John
the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at
work in him.” But others said, “It is Elijah.” And others said, “It is a prophet, like one of
the prophets of old.” But when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has
been raised.”

For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison
on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. For
John had been telling Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And
Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for
Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected
him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.
But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers
and officers and for the leaders of Galilee. When his daughter Herodias came in and
danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for
whatever you wish, and I will give it.” And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask
me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” She went out and said to her mother,
“What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the baptizer.” Immediately she
rushed back to the king and requested, “I want you to give me at once the head of
John the Baptist on a platter.” The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his
oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. Immediately the king sent a
soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the
prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her
mother. When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a
tomb.

If you’ll look at the cover of your bulletin this morning, you’ll find a picture of Caravaggio
painting entitled The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, done in the early 17th century,
though the tiny representation of it on your bulletin doesn’t do it justice, because it is
actually on a huge canvas, still hanging in an Italian church. If you could see it in its
bigger form, you might catch some of the beautiful and human details that one always
finds in Caravaggio’s paintings: notice, for example, that the picture captures the
moment when the executioner is trying to finish the job—there is blood already spewing
from John’s neck, and the man is poised to finish the job. Next to him is the jailor—see
the keys hanging from his waist—patiently waiting for the job to done, and then there
are the prisoners watching the murder from behind the prison bars, from the window.
The jailor points to the large plate where John’s head will eventually rest, and the
woman holds it, holds it ready for the moment when deed is done, and John’s head
rests on the plate. Perhaps that is Salome, who is mistakenly named as Herodias here
in Mark, perhaps that is Salome, ready to claim her prize, but the woman next to her is
horrified, it seems, horrified at the sight, and maybe she is us, maybe she represents
us, we who are appalled by the scene before us.

And yet, the background of the painting, especially if you imagine it in its true size, the
background is as important as the characters in the scene. You have the weirdly out of
place rope dangling on the right side of the painting, and then there is the archway that
forms the backdrop here, as if it was a sepulcher, a tomb. And if you know anything
about Caravaggio’s work—and I know just enough to get me by, barely—you know that
he was famous—or infamous—for the fleshiness, for the realness of his people, the
people in his paintings. In fact, three times his commissioned paintings for churches
were rejected because they depicted people like the Virgin Mary as a bit too human, a
bit too fleshy. In one work, Caravaggio’s painted the dead body of Mary as one would
a real corpse, rather than the idealized version that was popular during the day, a Mary
looking as if she was simply sleeping, ready to be whisked away to heaven. There
were rumors that he had used the body of a dead prostitute as a model. In this
painting, done later in his short life, we find something missing, something that had
always been present in his earlier paintings, and that missing element, according to
many art historians, is joy, a joy in being alive, a joy found in the way he relished the
human body, the way he represented human beings on the canvas, something that is
lost now, in his later paintings like the one we have before us, because of how life had
turned out for Caravaggio.

You see, Caravaggio was famous and notorious, all at the same time, as much for his
paintings as for his personal life. Between 1600 and 1605 he had built up quite a list of
violent and aggressive acts, a laundry list of misdeeds, even as his fame increased. In
1605 he committed a murder over a wager on a tennis match in the city of Malta, and
thereafter spent his life on the run, going from city to city, garnering a few painting
commissions here and there, and yet always looking over his shoulder, wondering
when and if the authorities would catch up with him and arrest him. And from that
moment on, in his paintings you see only death, images and hints of death, you see
only agony because the guilt seemed to have eaten him up alive, and he could not run
away fast enough, or far away enough to run from himself. At the beginning of his
career, the people in his paintings are beautiful, wonderfully sensual, real but by the
end of his short life, a life on the run, it is death that seems to crop up in every painting,
death and only the ugliness of life. Finally, in 1609, after escaping from prison the
year before, Caravaggio was shot in the face, his face mangled beyond recognition, an
irony for a man who loved human beauty so much, and on his way to Rome, on the way
to a pardon that he thought was waiting for him there, he died of a fever. His choices,
Caravaggio’s terrible choices had finally caught up with him, and one of the greatest
painters of his time simply faded into the shadows of history, only to be rediscovered
again in the 19th century.

Choices—they help us or they hinder us, they give us life or they give us death, or
sometimes a bit of both. Surely Herod, the king in our story today, was also a man with
a set of choices before him—a choice about how to handle this prophet in his midst; a
choice about how to deal with a daughter and a wife who were a bit out of control; a
choice about how to deal with his pride, especially the pride around his public self, and,
finally a choice, on whether to go through with his reckless words that will eventually led
to the death of an innocent man. We all make them—choices, every day, at every
moment, most of which are not all that big of a deal, but others, others choices, can be
life changing, and they can lead us down one road, or the other road, both of which
have the potential to be life changing. Herod, the puppet king of the Roman Empire,
Herod, who is technically speaking, the real king of the Jews, Herod has imprisoned the
prophet John the Baptist, Jesus’ own mentor, for speaking out against his marriage to a
woman he should not have married. And yet, Herod cannot seem to help himself—he
seem so fascinated by John, intrigued by him, and yet so fearful of him, that he can’t
seem to get himself to shut him up permanently, if you know what I mean. Herod may
hate this man, may hate him for so publicly shaming him for his hypocrisy and his
personal misdeeds, but Herod can’t ignore the fact that John is a good man, an
anointed man, a person sent by God to Israel for some grand reason.

Well, we know the story, or at least most of us do: Herod makes an impetuous promise
because of the beautiful dancing of Salome—again, misnamed Herodias here—and
she goes off to ask her mother what she should ask for, who especially hates John,
because she has been named as an immoral woman for marrying Herod. “Give me his
head,” she tells her daughter, and so Salome goes off to tell her father what she wants,
which horrifies him, but he’s trapped—trapped because he publicly gave his word, and
now his pride is on the line, and he cannot go back on it, not without shaming himself in
front of his own royal court. Herod is a vain man, a weak man, who gets caught up in
own pride, a pride that leads him to do the wrong thing. He makes a choice out of fear,
a fear of being publicly shamed—his pride will not allow that, so someone else must pay
the price, and that person, in this case, is poor John. We’ve all made bad choices,
sometimes for what we thought were good reasons and other times for bad reasons,
but usually someone gets hurt in the end, with these bad choices we make, for
whatever reason. And yet, there are times when we make the right choice, and even
then there are terrible consequences: John the Baptist continues to speak, he makes
the right choice, and yet it lands him in prison, and eventually it costs him his life; Jesus
continues to speak of God’s love, and all whom it includes, and the new world that love
is going to bring about, and yet that choice costs him his life. Right choices can lead to
some difficult consequences as well.

So, why make good choices, if they might lead to the same consequences as the bad
choices? What’s the difference, really? Well, I’m not sure I can answer this question
easily, aside from offering this one major truth that comes to us as readers of this text:
truly, doing the right thing has its own rewards, whatever the consequences, good or
bad. If you are non-Jew hiding Jews during the Nazi occupation, and the consequence
is death if you are caught, well, then, the consequence of you doing the right thing is
the same as John the Baptist’s reward: execution. We’ve done the right thing, the right
thing, which was to save the life of an innocent person. Now, most of us don’t ever
have to pay that high of a price, but sometimes making the right choice means that
some bad things are going to happen. If you ever had to make a difficult decision, one
that you knew was the right one, but was also one that was going to hurt you, going to
cause you pain, well, then you know what it means to live with the consequences of
doing the right thing. Herod should have broken his word, he should have told his
daughter that he could not and would not keep his word, his promise, because John’s
life and quite literally, his head, was off the table, but because Herod was so driven by
his fear of shame, by being publicly shamed for not keeping his word, he made an
innocent man suffer and die because of his poor choice of words, about a promise he
should not have made nor one he should have kept.

Doing the right thing doesn’t always mean that good things come our way. Over the
years I’ve made some good choices and some bad choices, and a few other choices I’m
not so sure about, but I suspect I’ll find out at the end of all things whether they were
good or not. One of the most difficult choices I’ve ever made was whether or not to live
openly about who I was and whom I loved in this world, especially when it came to telling
that truth in the context of the church. You’d be surprised, or not so surprised, how not
valued truth telling is in the church, which is a shame, really, especially if you believe
you have the truth, or, if you are like us progressive Christians, if you believe you have
a beautiful piece of the truth. And it has cost me, though not to degree of John the
Baptist’s beheading, or anything like that—it’s been a small cost, really, though it is one
that I still struggle with, because I’m not so good with the suffering thing, even if it’s very
much a light cross, in the great scheme of things. And yet there is something to do the
idea that if you do the right thing, and you make the right choice, that alone is its own
reward, because your heart is open to world in that moment, and it is open before God,
which is the most important thing. When we do the right thing, when we make the good
choices, when we live our lives with integrity, and share the truth as it has been given to
us, as John the Baptist does here in this text, what we may get is a beheading, or, if we
are lucky, a crown on the head, but the one thing we will also surely get is a sense of
peace about what we have done, that we did the right thing, we made the right choice,
and our souls can be at peace, at least about this one thing.

People’s lives have been ruined because they did the right thing, of course. Not mine,
thank goodness, but you can argue that John’s life was cut way too short because he
did the right thing, and all of us can probably name one or two people whose good
decisions, whose right choices cost them their lives, their careers, their families, their
reputations. Think of the stories of whistleblowers whose only reward is the truth, and
who often get destroyed in the midst of their truth telling. But the ability to choose, to
choose the do the right thing, sometimes to go against the flow, it’s a wonderful gift.
Sure, we can make the choices that Caravaggio and Herod made, we can be reckless
with our talents and what has been given to us, but the choice itself, oddly enough, the
very chance to make an actual choice about our lives, that is a gift, it is a gift from
God. As much as there is shadow in our gift of being able to choose, there is probably
more light that shadow in that gift, actually, in this gift of being able to make a decision
to do the right thing rather than being simply programmed to do the right thing, in this
gift of having free choice. We do have the ability to change the world, our town, our
souls, despite what our culture sometimes tells us, that nothing in this world ever
changes, not really, and we, we certainly don’t change—once Kevin, always Kevin, as if
I can’t change, or you can’t change. But we can change, but we have to choose to
change, and that the choice is before us, as it was for before Herod, before John,
before Caravaggio, before Jesus, before me, before you, at the most interesting and
unexpected moments in our lives.

Interestingly enough, I was reminded this week that the word “heretic” actually means
someone who is able to choose, as someone who chooses to choose, ironically
enough, and if that is the case, then all of us should be heretics, people who make the
decision to choose, to choose to do the right thing, to make good choices, while
understanding that those choices may get us lauded and celebrated, or they may get
us crucified and dismissed from history. The point is to choose, and to choose the best
we can, and understand that in the choice itself, we have the power, we have to power
to choose

to love — rather than hate.
to smile — rather than frown.
to build — rather than destroy.
to persevere — rather than quit.
to praise — rather than gossip.
to heal — rather than wound.
to give — rather than grasp.
to act — rather than delay.
to pray — rather than despair.
to forgive — rather than curse. (Homiletics Online)

We have the power to change the world, our world, the world inside of us, and the world
outside of us, by our choice to choose, and to choose well, and to love the God who
has given us the gift of choice, the gift of being heretics, ironically enough. Amen.