Ok…How many of you have had the experience of looking back at your life and lamenting (perhaps over and over) a mistake you wish you wouldn’t have made? I think we’ve all done that at one time or another.

How many of you have had it keep you up at night?

That nagging, awful feeling of blame and guilt that just won’t let you go. 

The nightmares, the sleepless nights! We can be awfully hard on ourselves sometimes.

Wrestling in itself is not bad. It helps us discern right from wrong. It helps us learn and grow. It’s part of our human entanglement with our conscience and with God. But when our torture and turmoil gets out of hand, and anxiety sets in, we can become downright haunted by a past that just won’t let us go. That’s when we tend to push God out and take to imposing punishments on ourselves. Unlike God, sometimes, we can be unrelentingly punitive.

Unrepenting, obsessive, unredeemable guilt is a kind of sin, a self-imposed spiritual desert that keeps us isolated, in bondage, and in a vice grip, and refuses to allow us to be redeemed. As humans, in fact, we can become so obsessed with punishing ourselves, so entrenched in fear, that we forbid ourselves God’s grace. We push away the very God who could heal us.

That’s the story of Herod.

If you have an experience that’s kept you in proverbial chains of guilt, you’ll get a small hint of what Herod was going through in Mark’s witness for today. As for Herod….well, let’s just say, he’s got a pretty big load of horrifying guilt haunting him in the night!

Today, our scripture passage from Mark introduces us to the perils of peer pressure, the haunting persecution of guilt, and above all, what happens to us when we choose to cut God out of our lives!

Today’s passage, though brutal, is filled with deep and meaningful metaphors, high emotional drama, and lots of grief and anxiety. Sounds like a “fun” message, right?

It may not be a fun message, but it’s an important one, one that allows us to look at the inner landscape of our minds and discern what “monsters” and “disembodied voices” we’ve allowed to take up residence in our heads. The story also helps us to understand “sin” in a different way than perhaps we have before.

The passage begins with a haunting! Herod is spooked. I mean really spooked! He believes he’s seeing a “ghost.” And it’s not even Halloween! That tells us right away that we are about to encounter an interesting story.

John, whom we call the Baptizer, as we know, is Jesus’ second cousin. He’s the son of Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, Mary the mother of Jesus. I’ll give you a minute to digest that piece of ancestry. John is the “ram’s horn” so to speak for Jesus. He introduces Jesus to the world as Messiah and Lord. Now John and Jesus don’t really know each other all that well. While Jesus’ parents whisked him off to Egypt to avoid the massacre of infants, John most likely was taken by his mother into the desert to the colonies of the Essenes. Now, 30 years later, John proclaims the coming of the Messiah, and Jesus begins his ministry, a ministry that started out looking relatively similar to John’s. They both called for a baptism of repentance. They both took disciples (in fact after John’s death, several of John’s disciples would go over to Jesus’ posse). They both challenged the religious authorities. They both relied heavily on the prophecies of Isaiah.

So, after John’s death, as Jesus began continuing the ministry John had started, Herod was plagued with nightmares. He looks at Jesus and thinks he sees John’s ghost! His distress isn’t about Jesus’ ministry, but about Herod’s own treacherous role in John the Baptist’s death. Such is the power of guilt, unrepentant guilt.

One of my favorite childhood stories is the story of the “Teeny Tiny Woman.” Does anyone remember that story? It’s an English folk tale, origin unknown, a creepy little tale, and it goes like this (for the quotation marks below, get the congregation to repeat “teeny tiny”):

As you might imagine, everything in the story is “teeny tiny.” So a teeny tiny woman goes from her “ “ house to a “ “ graveyard and finds a “ “ bone that she decides to use to make soup for her supper. But as she arrives home and is tired, she places the “ “ bone into a “  “  jar for the night and goes to bed. Soon, she hears a “  “ voice calling “Give me my bone.” Frightened, she pulls her “ “ covers up to her chin and tries to go to sleep. Once again the “ “ voice cries out a little louder, “Give me my bone!” Terrified now, the woman hides under the covers of her bed barely moving. Finally, the “  “ voice shouts once again in a “ “ voice: “Give Me My Bone!” To which the woman, cries out: “Take it!”

While the tale is obviously a simple, somewhat humorous folk tale meant to invoke the “scaries” on dark, winter nights, the story describes well that inner tiny little “voice” that can so plague us when we feel we may have done something wrong. Especially when we KNOW we’ve done something wrong.

Writers throughout the ages have capitalized on this kind of guilt. Poe and his “Tell Tale Heart!” Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story.” And the classic horror film from 2020, “What Lies Beneath,” among others.

Guilt run rampant is one of the most gut-wrenching, fearful, mind-bending inner “demons” that we can possibly possess. For our own guilt can provoke us to “haunt” ourselves to death. When we refuse God’s healing, when we seal ourselves off from the One who can save us, we sentence ourselves to an endless cycle of relentless emotional and spiritual torture, a hell of our own making.

We all make mistakes. Not all as serious as Herod’s we hope! But we all fall short of the glory of God and need God’s healing hand of forgiveness and grace in our lives, need the assurance that our slate is wiped clean, and we can be freed of the pain of our past transgressions.

Sometimes we get stuck.

In our scripture for today, John has gotten himself, stuck. Really stuck, in a very bad place. He’s got John’s murder on his mind, and his brain is in playback. For he is responsible for the death of God’s prophet, a holy man of God, his own spiritual advisor, renowned man of God, John the Baptizer. 

But instead of facing God, he continues on, dragging his guilt behind him.

Anxiety-ridden and more than a little paranoid at this point, Herod cries out in response to Jesus’ ministry: “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised!” Wow, out of all of the people in scripture who have trouble believing in resurrection, faith in God’s power of resurrection is not Herod’s problem!

Herod is what you could call a suggestible and pliable kind of guy. He’s not a pushover exactly, but he’s definitely browbeaten by some of the people in his life, most of all his new wife, Herodias, whom he took from his brother. An advisor to Herod, the wise and holy prophet John the Baptizer had admonished Herod for marrying the divorced wife of his brother, telling him it was wrong, and encouraging him to make it right. As you can imagine (and we don’t know the history of how it happened), Herodias was furious at the interference. Herod was Jewish, and his faith was reasonably strong. He respected John, protected him, and feared him as the prophetic voice of God. Although he chose to block God’s voice out when it came to his marriage, John’s voice and Herod’s transgression gnawed steadily at his heart.

Herod had an inner conflict….to whom should he show deference? His employers the Romans? His wife Herodias? Or John? And God? He wanted to appease both. In the end, he was forced to choose. He chose badly.

We see an interesting image of Herod at the party he gave for his courtiers, officers, and leaders of the Galilean Romans. Although Herod was Jewish, he worked for Rome, so he felt the need to please and appease, entertain and establish ties with his lofty, crusty guests. Obviously understanding Herod’s need to “look good” for his countrymen, Herodias found her chance to act in order to get rid of John.

Again, wanting to act dignified and powerful in front of his guests, Herod promised Herodias’ daughter Salome whatever she wished if she would dance as entertainment for Herod’s guests. Thus began a “dance macabre” that will be remembered and talked about no doubt for years to come, centuries in fact!

In cahoots with her mother, Salome asked for the head of John on a platter. Although disturbed, caught in the falsity and embarrassment of the moment, Herod complies. He betrays his own conscience, soul, John, and his covenant with God in order to “tow the line” and “act the loyal Roman” in front of his watching guests.

John does the deed. At first he is relieved. No more can John’s voice accuse him of adultery. No more can God’s prophet comment on his life.

So he thinks. Until that pesky disembodied voice! Until that haunting of his soul.

From that moment on, Herod would be plagued and tortured by his own sin. For he had betrayed not only John, but himself, and God. In one fell swoop of John’s head, he cut off his covenant with God and, he feared, sealed his fate.

Unable to repent, unwilling to face God, still uninterested in giving up his need for status, power, and appearances, in a sense John’s eyes on that platter will continue to accuse Herod from that day forward, in his thoughts, in his dreams, until his mind….breaks.

We call it obsessing! Herod called it seeing “ghosts.”

In a sense, they are ghosts, guilt-ridden memories of things that our minds and hearts can’t resolve and that we refuse to give over to God.

And yet despite all of this, God’s voice continues to call to us: “sinner come home.” For Jesus came not to condemn the world but to save the world, and he would try to do so down to his very last breath. For the message of Jesus is clear. God forgives. God offers grace. God offers life to everyone who repents and believes in Jesus’ power and grace.

In Jesus’ final moments, he hung on the cross between two others. One taunted him, but the other asked forgiveness. Jesus turned to the suffering man and said, without asking what he did, without judging his life, without threat of punishment, without guilting or blaming, “You will be with me in paradise!”

That’s all it takes. That’s all it takes.

Jesus offers us a perpetual “ticket to ride,” an unending offer of entry to anyone who turns to him. That’s what repentance is. It’s simply turning to God. It’s allowing God to free you of the burden of guilt, sin, and horror that you carry, so that you can find peace.

Today, I ask you, what disembodied voices have you allowed to plague your mind? What age-old sins of the past are you allowing to rule your present? Jesus wants to take all of that from you. All you’ve got to do is turn to him and ask.