Who wants your head on a platter?
What truth is worth your head? What truth is worth your life?
There are two types of people in the world we despise. The first are people who can never be trusted to tell the truth. The second are people who can only be trusted to tell the truth.
We all know people who have trouble telling the truth. Is there anyone here who doesn’t know someone for whom a lie is just a more convenient interpretation of reality? The great psychoanalyst Carl Jung once noted that there were only two kinds of people he could not “cure:” schizophrenics and compulsive liars. Both create alternative realities.
The second kind of person we cannot bear are those who DO tell the truth. We can’t tolerate them because they see right through our daily disguises, our fake facades. They are not impressed by all our flamboyant “toys,” or our flush bank accounts, or the degrees we hold, or the opinions of others. We don’t like them because the truth they reveal can be uncomfortable, awkward, harsh and unyielding.
It’s hard to know which of these two kinds of people offends our sensibilities more: the liar or the truth-sayer.
Can you remember the first time you got in trouble for telling the truth? I can. Can you, really? I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours. [This would make a great interactive time with your congregation.]
I was four or five years old. One of my aunts was visiting our house, and she asked my mother why my brothers and I didn’t come over more to visit them and play? I chimed in, “I know the answer to that . . . Because my mother says your house is dirty.”
[If you need to prime the pump of memories, you might want to use one of these:
*When asked by some funny-smelling “old lady” (that is someone older than our mother!) if we didn’t just love her strange green casserole . . .
*When asked by your neighbor if you wouldn’t like some more of their freshly baked but noxious brownies . . .
Chances are, if you expressed your true feelings on these offerings, you got in trouble . . . later.
Same thing when you fended off a Marlboro-laced hug and kiss from Great Uncle whom-ever with a disgusted “Yuck” or even worse, “You stink!”
Eventually we learn that while we should always tell the truth, we don’t always have to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Some call this the art of the “white lie,” the polite under-played put-off. But whatever you call it, most of us gradually master the complex socialization process that enables us to keep what we’re thinking to ourselves. Those who fail to learn this social side-step are likely to find employment opportunities limited, friends in short supply, and relationships with the opposite sex unexpectedly brief.
The truth be told? We usually don’t want the truth to be told.
Once we learn how to avoid those childhood social snafus that resulted in stunned parents, scandalized neighbors or relatives, our own seared ears (and possibly smarting bottoms!), it became easier and easier to back away from the truth.
Except maybe during adolescence. There are lots of ways teenagers find to flaunt authority and assert their independence. But maybe the most frustrating for parents is when they insist upon being tactlessly truthful. A ticked-off teen will rarely be shy about expressing their “true” feelings. Sugar coating seems to melt away as they enter high school. And the most tooth-grinding problem parents of teens have? Our truculent teens are not always wrong.
There was a reason that young people made up such a large part of the backbone of the civil rights movement. The plain, ugly, unvarnished hypocrisy of Jim Crow laws segregated seats and bathrooms, denials of civil liberties these “falsehoods” were painfully obvious to them.
The next generation took delight in debunking our commoditized consumerist lifestyles. These fossils from the sixties still live among us, flicking their old-guy pony-tails. We nostalgically rib them for being “hippies.” But the youngest civil rights activists of the early sixties have never seen the truth they told ever branded as “dated” or “naïve.” The civil rights movement of the twentieth century, like the abolition movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were initially led by churches, pastors, people of faith. Truth-tellers called the rest of us to Micah 6:8 living [love mercy, act justly, walk humbly], and such truth-telling never loses its tang.
John the Baptist was a truth teller. But he wasn’t always “the whole truth” truth-teller.
John the Baptist didn’t decry Herod Antipas’ opulent lifestyle. He could have.
John the Baptist didn’t call Herod Antipas on the carpet for glad-handing the oppressor and out-Rome-ing the Roman royal style of politics. He could have.
John the Baptist didn’t berate this Jewish tetrach of a Roman province for riding roughshod over the needs of his own people, and instead toadying up to the cruel Emperor. He could have.
Why didn’t John the Baptist do what he could have done? Why didn’t John the Baptist tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
Because John’s agenda wasn’t political. John was a prophet of God called to speak the gospel truth. And the gospel truth he was called to speak was repentance and righteousness. Even though John didn’t tell “the whole truth,” he told the truth of repentance and reform. John’s call offered no room for negotiation, no room for mediation, no room for dispensation. John the Baptist’s call required the gospel truth of repentance and reform.
The gospel truth meant, first and foremost, an admission of wrong-doing and attempt at right-turnings. As hard as that might be, “true” repentance was not achieved through any one-time confession. True rebirth [justifying grace] takes place once, but conversions [sanctifying grace] take place every day until we are ushered into eternity [glorifying grace]. True repentance can only be genuine if it is expressed in moral action.
For Herod Antipas, the price of true repentance was far too steep. He couldn’t admit his own wrong-doing. He wouldn’t send Herodias back to Herod Philip. He had flagrantly flaunted the Torah-directive that no man may marry his living brother’s wife (Leviticus 18:16). John the Baptist understood Herod’s actions as an offense not against Roman power or the snares of Palestinian politics or even the rules of good leadership. John the Baptist saw Herod’s actions as an offense against God. John’s moral integrity is what ultimately cost him his head.
Who wants your head on a platter? What truth is worth your head? What truth is worth your life?
John the Baptist, like all the other “prophets of old” (v.15) had perfected the art of giving offense. Have you?
Let’s call the art of giving offense “sanctified indifference.” It is not that John the Baptist, or Jeremiah, or Nehemiah, or Hosea, or Zephaniah or Peter or Paul, or Jesus, or you, don’t care about staying alive. But all of God’s prophets develop the art of sanctified indifference to the consequences their truth-telling might bring. And one of the great problems in the church today is that we are missing that sanctified indifference.
It’s not that they didn’t care. It’s that they cared more for what God cares about than what kings and bishops and majority rules care about.
John the Baptist spoke the truth. John the Baptist was not afraid to offend. John the Baptist was more afraid of divine reprimand than human reprisals. He was well-practiced, well-prepared in the art of giving offense. Threatened by the local ruler, John refused to amend his message. Imprisoned, he never wavered. He kept up his offense even while locked up in his prison. Talk about sanctified indifference.
Herod couldn’t let John, and his offensive truth-telling, out of prison. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to take the final step and quiet John forever. The oath he swore to give his dancing daughter “anything” she wanted forced his hand. Though “greatly grieved,” he can at last be rid of that offensive voice that kept chiding him.
John’s sanctified indifference was his hallmark, and that sanctified indifference came from an unyielding, unswerving, undiluted obedience to God. So I ask of us all this morning, myself included: who are we offending? What are we if we are not offending someone? Jesus said “Beware when all speak well of you.” Should we be “beware-ing” this morning? Who wants your head on a platter? Do we even have any sanctified indifference?
Are we “doing our job” as disciples of Jesus if we are not giving offense somewhere, to someone? Truth-tellers often don’t end up with good labels. But it’s with sanctified indifference that we hear the epithets hurled our way of “whistle-blowers,” “tattle-tales,” “spoil-sports,” “goody-two-shoes,” “wet blankets,” “prudes” and “prunes.”
They used to be called simply “Christians.” Neighbor Dick Staub, author of some great books on theology and pop culture, quotes a friend of his who says: “truth without grace is legalism; grace without truth is romanticism; grace & truth together are dynamism.” The Christian voice in history has often been “dynamite” because we brought together grace and truth, because with sanctified indifference we “spoke the truth in love,” as the Bible says.
Nowadays, so as not to offend, maybe we should be honest and call what we do and who we are "Sermonettes for Christianettes"... short and sweet worship that will not interfere with busy calendars and struggling consciences.
John's sanctified indifference was just a warm-up show for Jesus' offensive abilities. John just got in trouble with a lower case political figure. Jesus got the local ruler, the Roman governor, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, until almost everyone took offense at him. And the more people took offense at him, the more sanctified indifference he showed.
We aren’t all called to go as far as Jesus did. But we are called to lives of giving offense, to learn this art of sanctified indifference to what people may think or say or do.
So: Who wants your head on a platter?
If you are preaching this sermon the week it was posted, you are dealing with the massive outpouring of grief at the funeral service for Michael Jackson, officially at the Staples Center in LA, but unofficially all over the world. Michael Jackson was a musical genius, both in terms of composition and performance, a genius of a choreographer, a genius of a stylist. What if Jackson had people in his life who weren’t afraid of giving offense, what if certain people who loved and cared for Jackson brought grace and truth together in his life, and weren’t afraid that he might want their heads on a platter? Might he still not be alive today?
One of my favorite Michael Jackson songs was “Man in the Mirror.” It was the only song on the album “Bad” that Michael himself didn’t write. All proceeds from the song went to charity. Listen to the words:
“If you want to make the world a better place
Then look at yourself and make a change.”
What if Michael had someone who had the John the Baptist courage to hold a mirror up to his life and remind him on the man he wanted to be. Steve Stockman, who has written some great books on the spirituality of U2 and the theological underpinings of rock music, discovered this past week a Sylvie Simmons 1983 article for Creem magazine in The Observer’s Review Special Issue. This is a time in Jackson’s life when he saw himself as a Christian, a Jehovah Witness Christian, but a Christian. Here are Jackson’s words:
I believe in God. We all do. We like to be straight, don’t go crazy or anything. Not to the point of losing our perspective on life, of what you are and who you are. A lot of entertainers, they make money and they spend the rest of their life celebrating that one goal they reached, and with that celebration comes the drugs and the liquor and the alcohol. And then they try to straighten up and they say, ‘Who am I? Where am I? What happened?’ And they lost themselves, and they’re broken. You have to be careful and have some kind of discipline.
I’m going to close this sermon with a tribute to the Michael Jackson I shall remember the most. It’s Michael singing 20 years ago at the Grammy Awards, with a gospel back-up choir. He’s singing “Man in the Mirror,” and singing quite a bit of it on his knees.
[You can find it on YouTube at the following url. Or you can just listen to an audio recording.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zpTQCQEFhg
As you hear Michael Jackson sing these words, make them your words. Will you risk bringing together grace and truth, that more may live? When you hear Michael sing these words,
Oh to make a change for once in my life... I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways’... do I see one more hand there!
. . if you’re willing to be the change that can change this world, if you’re willing to show some sanctified indifference in your life, then will you join me in raising a hand?