This Week: Proper 10B
Gospel: Mark 6:14-29
The first question preachers have to answer each week is simply Should I preach on the gospel?
Some of us feel obliged to do it pretty much every time. And many were trained to try and tie all of the readings into the sermon. Many more have little trouble picking the reading they are most fond of dealing with. And, of course, many don’t preach from the lectionary at all—regardless of whether they use it!
I’ve always been convicted by the idea that we must never avoid a text. If we’re going to read it out loud in church, and it causes you to wince or worry, then I feel obligated to preach on it. This is especially true in the gospel.
I bring this up, of course, because this week’s gospel is a doozy.
Adult themes
This is perhaps the most difficult part of dealing with a troubling text: when the text itself involves themes that might require a trigger warning or an NSFW label.
This week’s gospel involves adult themes: violence and suggestive sexuality. In particular, the beheading of John the Baptizer and the implied sexuality of Salome and the arousal of the men who witness it. This latter theme is more implied than blatant.
How does the preacher tackle a subject we are most often discouraged from ever talking about?
The particularity here is itself revealing.
Sex is less frightening than arousal.
That’s the thing about American culture: we can talk about sex at the macro level in the most abstract of terms. We are comfortable judging and condemning people for the assumption that they have had sex. And we condemn for the knowledge of having sex.
We also apply assumption of sexuality to our children—not just gender, but active sexuality in the form of “his teasing you means he likes you”. And we put boys and girls into active adult roles of pretend relationship courting in the form of dances, proms, and cotillions.
These are the mutual examples. Let us not forget the child beauty pageants which literally dress up children to look sexually attractive and athletic wear built to enhance the sexual desirability of the participants.
We are very comfortable with the abstract, implied sexuality of people. And we love talking about not having sex and the perils that go along with sexual activity outside of marriage. Church people especially love that one.
But when it comes to communicating what happens between people, describing sexual arousal, or even to share what a positive example of human relationships look like, people of all manner of beliefs suddenly turn into puritans.
Western culture is comfortable blaming women for male arousal.
This is what makes this story essential to preach on. Not just that it is difficult to talk about the adult themes. But at it’s heart, Christians have spent the better part of two thousand years blaming Salome for dancing in a way that caused erections.
Our inability to communicate effectively about this helps reinforce a purity culture that blames women for the behavior of men. And worse: it masks the naked evil at the root of Herod’s political power.
If we don’t speak to this, how can we speak to victimblaming and shaming? To the nature of the powerful to manipulate the powerless?
We must deal, too with Herod’s regret.
This is almost as important a detail as the sexism in the West’s response to Salome. It is the West’s absolving of Herod by seeing his regret as itself absolving rather than the path to absolution.
This is Herod’s story. It isn’t a story about Salome. Herod jailed and killed John the Baptizer and is haunted by that fact.
I would love to speculate on what that means for him. There are rich opportunities in poetry and prose to explore the impact of regret. Imagine a stage production likening Herod to Scrooge, visited by apparitions (or ghostlike disciples), offering a constant refrain of repentance!
Whatever we focus on, however, I doubt our avoidance of the gospel protects us anymore than it protected Herod’s fragile soul. And I suspect that the common desire for easy spirituality, light and affirming, is the most seductive response of them all.