Proper 10B: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

We’ve got two terrific stories this morning in our readings. But they’re not too edifying, are they? The reading from Ephesians might be more uplifting, But I find it difficult to follow its rather rambling style, even when I have the text in front of me. So where is one to begin? Well, I think I’ll begin by admitting that the stories are such attention-grabbers that there’s no way just to set them aside. I suppose I could forcibly extracting some edifying morals from them. I could praise David’s religious devotion. Or John the Baptist’s courage. Both of them notable. But the stories would still be more interesting than the moral. 

And, somehow, the thing that keeps striking home to me this year is the way politics and religion get tangled up in each story. Religion and politics: the combination makes me queasy—like, perhaps, some of you. Aren’t they supposed to be distinct from each other in a democratic society? Well, we’ve been reminded over the last decade or so that it doesn’t work out that way in our day. And it certainly didn’t in these stories. So bear with me for a bit, please, while I try to untangle some of the strands here, starting with David and the Ark. I see no reason to question David’s devotion to Yahweh. But there are other things going on here, too.

Now, if you know this story already, you probably noticed that something was missing from the reading: the full story of the two brothers, Uzzah and Ahio. They were assisting with the ox cart that was carrying the Ark, Ahio walking ahead and Uzzah beside the cart. And at one point the oxen caused the cart to shake. Uzzah reached out his hand to steady the Ark and was promptly struck dead for his efforts. (If you’ve ever seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you’ve been treated to a more cinematic and, of course, gruesome version of what the Ark could do to presumptuous people.) David himself was so alarmed by the incident that he left the Ark right where it happened, on the threshing floor of a certain Obed-edom. We don’t know how Obed-edom felt about that. He wasn’t even an Israelite. He was a Gittite, a native of the city of Gath—so presumably a Philistine. But he didn’t really have a choice, and he must have treated the Ark with all due respect, because everything went beautifully for him. The family was healthy; the crops were good; the household was flourishing. Only then did David risk bringing the Ark on into Jerusalem in that exuberant procession that we read about. 

So the Ark’s power was dangerous, but power was in fact the point. David had only just been accepted as King of Israel in place of Saul, who’d been killed in a battle with some other Philistines(!). The only way he could bring wars like that to an end was to unite all twelve tribes into a single force around himself. And what could do that better than the Ark, which had been leading the tribes into battle for centuries? So he gathered “all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand.” That’s the army we’re talking about. The army is going to bring the Ark to David’s new capital. David was calculating on political as well as religious advantages. 

But he was a devoted worshipper, as his dance proved. He didn’t have to dance the Ark all the way to Jerusalem. He was king, after all. He could have ridden at the head of the procession in a chariot. He could have walked respectfully a few yards behind the ark. But, no, he donned an ephod and danced the Ark into town. 

Now, you may well have wondered what an “ephod” was. It’s hard to be absolutely sure what it was in David’s time, but if we take later descriptions of it into account, it appears to have been a kind of short apron, tied in the back, with shoulder straps. It was definitely a priestly garment—undergarment, actually, in later days. And David, in donning it, was adopting a priestly identity, which he carried on further by offering sacrifices before the Ark and blessing the people in God’s name and giving everyone a share in the sacrificial feast. 

But the ephod was not a modest garment. Later on, his wife Michal, would accuse of him of “uncovering himself before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself.” Since he’s described as “leaping and dancing,” it sounds as if she was being no more than literal. But why did he do it? As Michal recognized, it didn’t do anything for his image as king or his political prestige. The narrator of this tale is signifying to us that he was caught up in the fervor of his religious devotion. Still, he was king. He couldn’t keep his religion and his politics in separate, sealed compartments. But, in this case, they worked quite well together. David showed that he and the God of all twelve Israelite tribes were on the best of terms.

Our story from Mark about Herod Antipas and his birthday party has dancing in it, too. And it, too, is concerned with the mix of religion and politics. Herod Antipas didn’t dislike John the Baptist. In fact, he liked spending time with him, listening to him. But John crossed him politically by saying that his marriage to Herodias, previously his brother Philip’s wife, was contrary to the Torah. It was indeed; there’s no getting around it, though I imagine that many other religious leaders of the time managed to look the other way. 

Still, John wasn’t a hell-fire and brimstone denouncer of people’s sins. The heart of his message was the mercy of God and the love of God and he called people to be baptized and accept forgiveness of their sins and lead honest and honorable lives. This must be the message Antipas loved to hear from John.

But Herodias saw it differently—and she had to. She had taken a great risk in divorcing her first husband and marrying his brother. She wasn’t just an angry, vengeful person; she was fighting a political battle for her place in the world. It would be natural for her daughter to share her mother’s concerns, but she’s had an even worse press than Herodias herself. Oscar Wilde’a play and Richard Strauss’s opera, with its dance of the seven veils, created her modern image. Poor Salome, painted as a lewd dancer and a person of unfathomable lasciviousness. The New Testament never suggests that her dance was lascivious. More likely, it was religious, a prayer calling down divine blessing on Antipas’s birthday. (Sacred dance was a major feature at the Temple in Jerusalem. Why not at a birthday celebration?) I think Salome was just caught in the middle of a three-way power struggle between Herodias, Herod, and John. But she wasns’t a blood-thirsty temptress. And Herodias wasn’t some fairy tale ogress. She was genuinely devoted to her husband. And in later years, when the Emperor exiled Antipas to Lyons in what is now the south of France (not quite the culinary mecca then that it is now), she went with him. In this story, religion and politics are inextricably mixed up together.

Now, it doesn’t warm the cockles of my heart (nor, probably, yours) to hear that religion and politics have always been intertwined in human life. But it’s important to hear it and to see that this is not simply a bad thing nor a good thing. It is what we human beings make of it. And this should be no news to us. I doubt there’s a person here whose understanding of our national situation and decisions about voting aren’t intertwined with our religious beliefs and commitments. And this seems equally true of our current president, Mr. Biden. He is at least as serious a Christian as the bishops who are trying to drag him in a right-wing direction or excommunicate him. And many of the evils of the previous administration were carried out at the behest of deeply religious people­—abetted, to be sure, by callous political opportunists. 

Now, is it a terrible thing for a preacher to be saying that religion can be either a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t think so. It’s just reality. And it’s always been reality. It was true in Jesus’ time. It was true in the Middle Ages. It’s still true today. 

The important thing, then, is to understand our faith truly, to profess a faith that is truly what Jesus called it, “good news.” And our reading from Ephesians actually does pivot on this central point. Our faith is all about the goodness of God. God “has made known to us the mystery of his will.” And that mystery is a “plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth.” God’s lavish generosity is meant for us—but never just for us. It’s meant for the world—indeed, for a larger world than we can even imagine. What we’re called to do is to hold this vision up for ourselves and others to see. We need to hold it up in the messy world of politics as well as the more purely devotional world of worship. Indeed, we come to worship partly to keep being reminded of it and refueled by it. 

But the vision will always have to engage with the public and political sphere. Aristotle defined the human being as a political animal. We’re also religious animals. It’s been true from the beginning. And rather than thinking that we can build a wall between politics and religion, we have to accept that they’re for ever intertwined in us, and seek ways that the good news of God’s love for all can come to expression in our politics as well as our prayers.

Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd, Berkeley

7TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, JULY 11, 2021