Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 12, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week we talked about prophets. Specifically, we talked about how societies generally don’t want to hear what true prophets have to say. It’s easy to blame societies for not listening to what we consider to be true prophecy. We get frustrated. We may even get angry. Why don’t they get it? We don’t understand, but that’s just how it is with societies in general, our own not least of all. Even churches usually don’t get it, closing their ears to the true prophets and retreating behind traditional beliefs and traditional prejudices all dolled up with biblical quotes and pious assertions that they are God’s will. Frustrating, isn’t it.

Well, we can go ahead and blame societies for their resistance to genuine prophecy, for their resistance to the truth, if we want. But as I was studying our scripture readings for this morning, especially Mark’s story of the death of John the Baptist, it occurred to me that we really can’t be too self-righteous in our blaming of others, individually or collectively, for not wanting to hear the truth. I know full well, on the rare occasions when I’m being really honest with myself, that the same dynamic is at work in me when people are speaking truth to and about me.. In fact, the psychological dynamic of the relationship most of us have with the truth about ourselves is quite complex, and we see it the story of Herod ordering the death of John the Baptist. Let me explain.

As Mark tells it, King Herod was afraid that John the Baptist, whom he had had beheaded, had come back to life in the person of Jesus. Clearly, he was feeling guilty about what he had done. The background of the story, which Mark gives us only briefly, is that King Herod, a villain literally of Biblical proportions, had married his brother Phillip’s wife, a woman named Herodias. John the Baptist, a prophet and truth teller, kept saying that the relationship between Herod and Herodias amounted to adultery because, he said, it was not lawful for him to marry his brother’s wife. We have to assume that John was right about that. I’m not sure why that relationship was unlawful, but I assume that Herod realized, at some level, that John’s accusation was true.

And Herod didn’t like it. Mark says that when Herod heard John “he was greatly perplexed.” “Perplexed” means puzzled or un-understanding. Some translations render the Greek original here as “he was at a loss.” I understand the story to be saying that Herod was troubled, that he didn’t know what to make of what John was saying but that he found it disturbing. He was perplexed because he didn’t want to hear what John was saying, he didn’t want what John was saying to be true, yet at some level he knew that it was. And so he kept listening. He even like to listen to John, Mark says. I understand the story to be saying that even though Herod found John’s words troubling, even though he didn’t want them to be true, he couldn’t stop listening to them because deep inside he knew that they were true.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had experiences kind of like that. People have said things to me, about me, that I didn’t want to hear. Unlike Herod, I didn’t want to keep hearing them, but I think the psychological dynamic is the same. Let me give you an example from my own life.

During the more than three years that I was a student at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, instructor after instructor told me again and again that I live too much in my head and that I needed to use my heart more in my ministry. Even today, so many years later, some of you may agree with them. I didn’t—at least not then. I got mad. I denied it. I blamed those well intentioned instructors. I said they don’t understand. They think there’s only one way to do ministry, I said. They think there’s only one way to do faith, I insisted. They don’t understand me, I was sure.

Or at least my ego was sure. My ego wouldn’t hear them. My ego fought them. Yet at a deeper level than the ego, I knew they were right. I can’t say about myself what Mark says about Herod, that even though he denied what John the Baptist said he nonetheless liked to listen to him. Yet I can say that I was “perplexed” by what they said, as Herod was perplexed by what John said. I couldn’t just dismiss it. I kept fighting it. I got emotionally enmeshed in it. And here’s the thing I have learned since those days some ten years ago at Seattle University. The amount of psychic and spiritual energy we spend denying something should tell us precisely that we need to pay attention to that thing we’re working so hard to deny. When we find ourselves expending a lot of energy denying something it may well be because deep inside we know that there is truth in the thing that we’re denying. I know that’s true for me. I suspect that it’s true for everyone.

None of us likes to hear criticism of ourselves. I’m sure Herod didn’t. Criticism that people make of us isn’t always the truth, of course. But we can never grow psychologically if we never examine ourselves and see where we need to grow. Criticism from other people can be a tool that we can use to do that. That’s a psychological truth.

But we aren’t here about psychology. We’re here about spirituality, about faith, about our relationship with God. And here’s the thing. God speaks truth to us too. Sometimes those other people who criticize us may be speaking God’s truth. You see, God wants each and every person to develop into a whole, healthy, human being and child of God. The psychologists, some of them any way, call the process of becoming that person individuation. Christianity calls it faithfulness. We call it the life abundant that Jesus Christ came to give to all people. We call it life in the Spirit. Growth into wholeness of being is every bit as much a spiritual matter as it is a psychological one.

Herod’s problem in his relationship with Herodias may have been legal, but more importantly it was spiritual. John was calling him on his sin understood as a violation of the law. But John was also calling him on a spiritual failing, a failing to be the authentic person, the authentic child of God, that God created him to be. He was living a life he knew to be spiritually unhealthy, and John called him on it. Much of the time we live a life that we know at some level to be spiritually unhealthy, and sometimes people call us on it too.

Herod knew John was right, but he couldn’t get himself to the point of accepting the truth and acting on it. Instead he gave in to his ego and its pleasures. He gave in to the desires of the people around him. He gave in to his ego’s desire to maintain appearances and to be seen by others as a man of his word. So he had the man whom he knew, at least at some deep level of his psyche, was telling him the truth killed. Ultimately he wasn’t willing to search his soul in response to John’s accusations and find the truth, the spiritual truth, in what John had been saying. We don’t hear much more about Herod, but we can be pretty sure that he never grew psychologically. He never grew as a person. He never grew spiritually and in his relationship with God, all because his ego wouldn’t let him act on the truth that he found so perplexing.

We don’t kill the people who tell us truths about ourselves the we don’t want to hear. Not literally. But do we listen to them any more than Herod did? Do we listen to God any more than Herod did? We know how God wants us to be. We know that God wants us to be people of peace, both inner peace and peace in the world. We know that God wants us to be people of justice. We know that God wants us to be people of mercy, compassion, and love for all people. We know that God wants us all to be whole, complete children of God. We know all that. We hear it in scripture. We hear it from Jesus. And we find that truth perplexing. We don’t want to hear it because it means we have to change who and how we are, yet we know that it’s true. We don’t kill God, of course, not literally. But we must ask ourselves: Do we listen? Or do we shut God out the way Herod shut John up in a prison? I know I do much of the time. How do you react to God’s perplexing truth about you? It’s worth thinking about. Amen.