Fairhaven UMC

In high school, and regrettably no further than that, I always tell myself I’m going to start again, but who knows. I was a runner. I started running track in middle school. I was a sprinter at first, and I was okay.

You know? And if I’m honest, I think the reason that I started out sprinting was because the events are just so quick. You know, it’s literally a sprint. At worst, whenever I was running the 400 meter, the longest sprint event, one of the hardest events in my opinion, it was done in like a minute or so. So the pain was relatively limited.

But by high school, I’d started cross country, and so I’d switched to long distance. And that consists of a 5K race, 3.1 miles, and it stretches over fields and hills, along trails and paths through the woods, open fields. And I was significantly better at this, but it was certainly much harder mentally.

You’re suffering for the whole thing. You’re huffing and puffing. Your legs are burning for something closer to 20 minutes, not one, as you strategize when to push, when to pass another runner, when to save a little bit of juice for the very end. There’s a little bit of a mind game there too.

And it was very much a love-hate relationship for me. I have never, ever been the kind of person who just loves running because it feels so good, who enjoys it. Those people are nuts. Not even when I was putting in 40 miles a week.

I did not like it, and yet. I don’t know. But there is nonetheless a deep thrill in every race. You blow past someone after pursuing them for a mile.

Feels great. You overtake a few people with a last-minute burst before the finish line. Just an amazing feeling. And my parents were always extremely supportive.

Always present at each race across Western PA. I ran in D10. So in Pittsburgh, you got the whip-yole, which is very compact. You don’t have to travel that far for races.

But in District 10, my parents were traveling to Erie, Greenville, all the way around, almost out to Punxsutawney. My parents were always present, and they would jog from point to point along the course to cheer. And I appreciated that. I really did appreciate that.

My parents were some of the few that were always there. But my dad would drive me nuts. Let’s go, Dylan. Pick up the pace.

Run faster. Push him. Pass him. Push.

Some positive cheering, you know. Let’s go. Keep it up. Nice job.

I could accept that, you know. Nice job. I want to hear that. But being told what to do was infuriating.

I hated it. I am trying, Dad. I’m running as fast as I can. I’m doing my best.

Please shut up. And I’d complain to him about it when we got in the car. And what got me about it, I think, was this clear implication that I was not performing at the level of my ability, which no one wants to hear. When their lungs are on fire, when they’re staring up a 200-yard hill.

But of course he was correct. He was right. Which is part of why it bothered me so much. I was almost always able to push harder, to set my mind to it, to improve my race over the previous week.

I was able to get ever closer to my potential. And so this morning we turn to the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Ephesus. We’re in the fourth chapter here. We didn’t read the first three.

We kind of jumped here. But he’s switching direction in the letter. So this is how it starts. First of all, you can tell that he’s switching direction by the use of therefore.

That’s a classic Paul thing. He spent the first three chapters of Ephesians focusing on Christ and the nature of the church. He’s speaking very mystical here. He’s emphasizing that God has welcomed both Jews and Gentiles into the church.

Is uniting us together for the purpose of working out our salvation and reaching all the world. He’s talking about how the church is God’s chosen medium to change and save the world. So from chapter four onward, Paul is moving into something more practical. He’s answering the question, Okay, so what? Now what does this practically look like? So keep in mind above all that Paul is a pastor himself.

He’s writing to a congregation in the city of Ephesus. This is not a general book that he wrote to be part of the Bible. This is a pastoral letter to a real church. And he’s giving practical spiritual direction to people who are still trying to figure out what it means to be Christian.

As the Ephesians have gotten this far in the letter, they’re saying to themselves, Okay, we’re followers of Christ. We are the church. So what are we supposed to be doing? What are you saying to us, Paul? Paul has made his case now for the relationship between Jesus, who’s ascended now into heaven, and the church that remains below until he returns. Paul says that Christ is the head of the church and we’re his body in the world, all the members, the arms, the legs.

And so now he leads with a really strong command to open chapter four. Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, Paul’s in jail here in Rome, I encourage you to live as a people worthy of the call that you received from God. That, he says, is living with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. But the line that really pierces, I think, is that opener.

This is the NRSV. It’s a little bit different. Lead a life worthy of the call to which you have been called. How does that make you feel? How do you receive that? Live a life worthy of the call to which you have been called.

I’ll tell you that for me, it’s kind of like I’m running a race and I’m hearing, Push! You can run harder! Push! And it stings, as it would have for the Ephesians, because I know quite well that, like my dad, Paul is right. We are called to be more than wherever we are. Are you living a life worthy of the call that Jesus has placed on you, that he has opened to you through his life, death, and resurrection for you? Are you living as the crucial part of Christ’s body, the church that you are called to be? It’s a heavy question, and it ought to feel kind of heavy. Jesus has called us, made us part of his body by grace alone, not because we worked for it, not because we are worthy of it, but are you living in such a way that you are trying to be worthy of all that you are called and freed to be in Christ? You’ve been pulled into the body of Christ as a gift to you, but are you making use now of that gift to the fullest? Paul is deeply committed to expressing something here that we often either forget or ignore that we’ve kind of lost.

The Christian life is both individual and collective. John Wesley famously said that there is no religion but social religion. So we’re called to grow both as individual Christians, but also together as a body. One feeds into the other.

You help me grow in love, and I help you. You and I are able to become better followers of Christ, and then we become a stronger body, more able to do the will of Jesus in the world, who is our head. And the church, then, isn’t just a place that we go to. It isn’t one that we choose out of many because we like it, although we do like it here, right? It is a living, breathing body to which we belong that shapes you as you shape it.

You cannot be a Christian on your own. Listen to how Paul describes the various spiritual gifts and callings. He gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers. His purpose was to equip God’s people for the work of serving and building up the body of Christ until we all reach the unity of faith and knowledge of God’s Son.

The entire purpose of every gift that you or I may have is for one another, to equip the whole church in service and in growth until Jesus returns. And this sounds very pleasant, but Paul moves in this chapter to make clear that it’s not just sunshine and roses and kumbaya, everyone working together in peace and harmony, right? Paul tells the Ephesian church and our church that we are striving to reach the unity of the faith and knowledge of God’s Son. God’s goal is for us to become mature adults, to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. That’s what he says.

And that comes with expectations and accountability. That is, are you doing it or are you not? A key component of the church’s job is to hold one another to that task of becoming mature adults in Christ, to affirm and support one another when we’re actually working on it, and in Paul’s words, to hear and speak the truth in love when we’re off track. Almost no one in the church expects to be challenged, even lovingly. Paul says it’s got to be lovingly, you’re speaking the truth in love.

No one expects in the church to be challenged by their pastor, let alone their sibling in Christ. We want to hear, Good job from the sidelines, not, Pick up the pace. I know you can do better than that. I know that you are better than that.

But if we’re one body, and there is no religion but social religion, we have no choice but to be actively invested in one another’s spiritual growth and pursuit of holiness. That’s inescapably part of being Christian. This is in Ephesians, this is all over the epistles. And it is the crucial piece of our Methodist tradition.

I’m not going to pour my whole trip into this sermon. I’m not. I’ve been very careful of that, but I want to talk about Wesley for a minute. You’ve heard me say this before, but this is how we get the name Methodist.

John Wesley led his people to be methodical in their faith. He had a routine that you were going to follow. You were regularly committing to pray, to fast, to visit the sick, the imprisoned, the needy, the old. And above all, above all, this was their thing.

To meet together every week, every week, in small groups called class meetings to check in on how it was going with each other and to push each other towards continued growth. That was the social part of social religion. And in Wesley’s words, they watched over each other in love. So you meet with your group and you said last week, I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping up in prayer, or I’m having a lot of anger against my neighbor.

They would check up on you next week. How’s that going for you? And the whole goal was that you would have an answer, that I’m working with God on this, the Spirit’s moving me in this way or that way, and here’s how things are changing. And if you came back and nothing had changed, and nothing had changed, and nothing had changed, then how do we speak the truth in love to get you on a better track towards maturity in Christ? And you can see how that’s a straight line from Paul telling the Ephesians to speak the truth in love. We have to build these spaces of trust where we can speak the truth in love.

Anyone who joined one of Wesley’s class meetings, one of his groups, his societies, and wasn’t interested in receiving constructive support was politely but firmly asked to leave and come back when they were ready. There’s been a real revival of interest in the Wesleyan method for the last 40 years or so. For about 150 years, class meetings, these small groups had faded. I remember Mary Louise telling me, whenever I talked about this a couple years ago, she remembers her aunt talking about a class meeting.

Mary Louise is 94. It’s been a long fade. And there’s good reason for interest in this revival. David Lowe’s Watson is a Methodist theologian and early pioneer of this revival, and he wrote in 1990 that every American Christian, see if this feels right, I think it does, seems to feel like we’re missing something.

That there’s a hole in our faith lives, but one we’re having trouble locating. It’s not more involvement in mission, he says, or learning more in Bible study. It’s not a lack of action. It’s not a lack of knowledge.

Definitely not that, though those things are great. It’s good to be more involved in mission. It’s good to go to Bible study. He says that the lack is a lack of collective, mutual accountability and growth in discipleship.

The exact thing that Paul is describing here to the Ephesians. So oftentimes we’ll start coming to church, or we’ve been here our entire lives. We get confirmed as teens, join the church as adults, and then we totally plateau in growth and settle into routine instead. So it’s no wonder, I think, that most kids seem to leave church after confirmation, or even in my experience, people will join the church and then rapidly kind of fall off over the course of the next year or two.

Kids leave after confirmation because they feel like they’ve graduated church. They feel like they’ve finished with all we have to offer them. Where do I go now? This is it. But that’s not the kind of Christianity that Paul is describing.

Whether you’ve known Jesus for one year or 80 years, the question is, have you met God’s goal for us to become mature adults? I bet not, because Paul has a pretty high standard for maturity. He says it’s to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. And so are you as mature spiritually as Jesus Christ? Our whole journey of faith is a quest to be remade together in the image of Jesus himself, to become like Jesus in all of our thoughts and words and actions. There is always so much room to grow, and this is intended to be a major function of the church.

Again, listen to Paul in verse 15. By speaking the truth with love, let’s grow in every way into Christ, who is the head. The whole body grows from him as it is joined together and held together by supporting ligaments. The body makes itself grow, that it builds itself up with love as each one does its part.

Our growth is not supposed to stall. You’ll have moments, but it’s not supposed to stall when we are still infants, he describes, who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes. You can do better than that. You can do better than where you are.

You can live as one worthy of the call you receive from God. So how might we become a church that builds one another up in this way, where we’re ready to help one another grow and both offer and accept the hard truth about where we need to grow and change to make that growth happen? For one, here’s my plug, we’re going to restart our small groups in the fall. We had two that lasted about a year and a half. We’re going to start them again, round two, in the fall.

And the purpose of those groups is exactly that. It’s the same as the class meetings. So I’d ask you to start praying now about whether you need to join one, whether you should, whether you’re ready to take a big step in discipleship. I’m happy to talk to you about that.

This is a revitalization of the thing that Wesley did. We had our first groups, we learned what worked well, what we need to change, we’re going to try again. But outside of that, consider, God has given you a wondrous calling, one that lasts a lifetime and beyond. And so if you’ve plateaued in your faith and growth, if we together have plateaued in our faith and growth, let’s change that and use your gifts to build up this body and be built up by it.

Run faster. I believe in you, God is saying. In a few minutes when we come to this communion table, I’d ask you to do it as a recommitment to living a life worthy of your calling. Growing in maturity in Christ.

We come to this table together. We eat this meal and run this race together. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, Paul says. One God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all.

So hear Jesus and your brothers and sisters in Christ from all times and places, shouting to you on the sideline, pick up the pace. I know you can do better than that. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In medieval Europe, as well as ancient China, the Aztecs had this too. A king or other aristocrat in a royal court would have a jester, oftentimes, which is also known as a fool. You’re familiar with the concept of a jester, I’m sure. It was an early type of clown or comedian, and they almost always wore a special costume.

Whatever culture they were in, they had a special costume. In Europe, that consisted of the pointed cap with the bells on the side of it, and they had this stick that was known as a marote. It was something like a staff or a scepter with a clown’s face on it, like a weird, creepy little puppet. Their whole appearance, in some ways, was meant to be kind of a shadow of the king’s.

They had the cap and bells as their crown, they had the marote as their royal scepter, and jesters would sing, they would dance, they would tell rude jokes, and so on. They were one-man shows to entertain the royal court, like a dinner theater sort of thing. But they were more than just pure entertainment. Many historians argue that the court jester played an important political role too, not unlike the king’s advisors and that kind of thing.

They didn’t have any power, but they had an important role. So jesters, unlike peasants, unlike any other servant of the king, had a special kind of freedom that was known as jester’s privilege. And what that means, basically, is that they were allowed to ridicule the king, they were allowed to make jokes about his family or his appearance or his decisions without getting beheaded. That’s what they wanted to say.

They were allowed to tell the truth when no one else was, to say the things that the king’s advisors couldn’t even say for fear of the consequences of what would happen if they said it. One historian says that it went even further than that. She says the jester’s political role was crucial for the king’s own good. Having a designated mocker, someone whose job it is to make fun of the king, helped keep the king grounded in a way that was easy to not be grounded.

It helped the king remember that he was human and that he was fallible, that he made mistakes despite almost always being surrounded by yes men who would flatter him, who would affirm him all the time no matter what he did. So when you believe that you’re a king who’s been put on the throne by God himself, you can get a little overconfident. But the jester, by mocking him, by joking, was able to draw the king’s attention to potential stupid decisions before he could make them. And that would prevent him from doing harm to the kingdom through pride, through arrogance, just by getting too big for his head here.

In all of this, only the jester was allowed to do, which obviously meant that kings thought it was an important role. All these kings kept the jester. They preserved it. They protected that role.

And the jester’s comedy became something like a safety net for all the people. They prevented a king from getting too big a head, causing his kingdom to get wiped out in some foolish war that they couldn’t actually win. The jester would help prevent the king from oppressing his people until there was a bloody uprising. Now the jester just kept things in check by saying, Look, this is dumb.

Don’t do it. I’ll make fun of you. It helped. The ruler of Galilee in Jesus’ time, King Herod Antipas, does not have a court jester as far as I know.

I don’t think we see those in the Old Testament. But what he does have is a prophet, which is a similar kind of role in more ways than you would think. Herod has a very unexpected relationship with John the Baptist. John prophesied the coming judgment of God over the people.

He called everyone to repent of their sins. He attracted huge numbers of people to hear him in the wilderness of the Jordan Valley on the fringes of Herod’s kingdom. And as you might guess, kings usually like things pretty well the way that they are right now. So hearing someone proclaim the arrival of a new kingdom, God’s kingdom, the Messiah coming, that isn’t often well received by kings.

But Herod, interestingly, Herod really likes John. He can’t help himself. He might not love the content of John’s message due to his own self-interest, but what he recognizes, I think, is that John is telling the truth for his own good, for everyone else’s own good, just like a court jester. What he’s saying might be annoying, but Herod knows he should listen to it.

But Herod gets caught in kind of a sticky conflict here. I’ll try to make this as clear as possible because the way that Mark tells this story is a little bit confusing, especially the characters. But the Herod in our story is properly known as Herod Antipas. He has a brother, Philip, who is confusingly also known as Herod II, and both of them are sons of Herod the Great.

So at least Mark called him Philip. And Philip, King Herod’s brother, divorces his wife Herodias, whom Herod then marries. Does that make sense? So biblically speaking, and in Jewish law, marrying a divorced person is considered adultery so long as the former spouse is alive. And Herod makes this even worse.

He adds this double layer of scandal to it by marrying his brother’s ex-wife. So two layers of scandal here. And Herodias has a daughter from her marriage to Philip, and this is now Herod’s stepdaughter. Mark also calls her Herodias, the same as her mother, but we know her elsewhere as Salome.

The daughter is known as Salome, which makes things a little clearer. So here’s the situation, right? First, Herod’s wife hates John the Baptist. John is, after all, a notorious truth-teller. He doesn’t soften his words for anyone to hear, and he has condemned Herod and Herodias’s marriage as adulterous and wrong.

As the Common English Bible translation puts it, she had it in for John. She wants John gone. Which is also really interesting, I think. Hearing the truth about themselves, a condemnation of their sin, which they’re fully aware of.

This is not a surprise to them. They know they’re not supposed to do this. This affects Herod and Herodias in very different ways. I’m sure Herod doesn’t like it.

No one likes to hear about what they’re doing wrong. But Herodias wants John silenced immediately. Herod’s listening. Herodias wants it to stop.

And so Herod, the husband that he is, and the diplomat that he is, decides to compromise. He’s not going to kill John, but he’ll at least lock him up in prison to make his wife feel a little bit better, to stop him from talking bad about them in public. Mark says that Herod protects John from his wife, puts him in prison as kind of a protective measure. And Herod figures that she should be grateful that at least he’s done something about it.

He’s not bothering you anymore. It’s fine, right? But Herodias is still not happy about the situation. So one night, an opportunity arises for Herodias to get what she wants finally. So Herod, this great king, this powerful king, has done what royalty does, and he throws himself this grand party for his birthday.

And all of his generals are there, all of his officials, all the businessmen, the big names and important guys, all of them are men here, of the Galilean court. And of course he wants to impress them, which is the entire point of big royal gatherings like this. In the middle of the banquet, the entertainment here, not a prophet, not a jester, Herodias’ daughter, Herod’s own stepdaughter, comes and dances for the crowd, thrilling them, the CEB tells us. She danced and it thrilled them.

Biblical scholars debate on this, what the kind of implication is here, but there seems to be an obvious sexual undertone, right? All these men are fawning over the dancing of this young woman. And Herod basically is exploiting his own stepdaughter for the entertainment of his creepy old friends. That’s what’s happening in this scene. They love looking at her.

And so carried away, Herod swears to his stepdaughter that he’ll give her whatever she wants, even half his kingdom because of her dancing, because she did such a good job. And so Herodias, Salome, goes to Herodias, her mother, to think about what she should ask for. And naturally we know what Herodias thinks she should ask for. She wants John the Baptist killed and she wants his head.

None of this putting him away in prison where I can’t see him. Give me his head so I know he’s gone. And so her daughter goes back and tells Herod. And Herod is extremely distressed when he receives this request.

The CEB says that he was upset whenever he heard from his stepdaughter, but the word that’s used here is much more intense than that. It’s perilupos in Greek. The only other place that this word for upset shows up is in Mark’s gospel, is whenever Jesus is in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood about his crucifixion coming up. He’s upset, awaiting arrest and execution.

Herod is as upset as Jesus preparing for the crucifixion. It’s very intense. Herod is miserable. He knows that this is wrong.

He knows that he shouldn’t do it, but he promised her, right? In front of all these big, important people. He doesn’t want to embarrass himself. He promised that he’d give her whatever she asked for and this is what she asked for. Nothing big, really.

And so his conscience takes a backseat to his other commitments. It’s very clear in here that Herod knows better and he has John killed anyway. He knows, but he still doesn’t. And we see here in Mark’s gospel that there is no excuse for what Herod does.

He sucked up into this whirlpool of temptation around power and popularity and prestige and sex until he finds that his foot has been caught in a trap. But he does it eyes wide open. He knows what he’s doing. He heard the voice of God through John and at least to some degree, he kind of understood that.

But he elevated the voices of his own desires and others’ desires above that voice of God. Herod loved to listen to John. Mark tells us that it confused him what John was saying, but he got it. And so the fallout of his sin comes calling really fast.

When it comes, it surprises, it terrorizes him. He’s so upset. It’s as if he’s being threatened with death. This is how sin works.

No one, not even King Herod, wakes up in the morning, maniacally laughing, eager for the opportunity to do something wrong. Nobody who’s sinning thinks they’re a bad person, eager to go do bad stuff. That’s a really immature understanding of sin. It’s a lot sneakier than that.

It sneaks up in the guise of pleasant things, power, wealth, security, pleasure, all this stuff that Herod is trying to build up around himself. Herod’s situation is so fascinating and so tragic because he actually has a conscience. He’s not a caricature. He’s not this cartoon evil person.

He has a conscience. And the reality is that we all do. The prevenient grace of God calls us to goodness and to holiness. It tugs on our hearts.

John Wesley said that every person is born with an understanding of basic moral law written on our hearts. He says that’s the unchangeable law of love, the holy love of God and our neighbor. We know how to do right by people. We know that’s what we’re supposed to do whether we’re Christians or not.

Even before knowing Jesus, we have the basic sense of right and wrong that ends up drawing us to Jesus, whom we can then draw towards further or walk away from. And this is exactly what we see with Herod, this historically evil person in the Bible. We see Herod was sympathetic to John, who was a prophet, proceeding and proclaiming the coming of Jesus. Herod heard that and was compelled by it.

He was listening. Something powerful is churning in Herod’s heart. I think that he really has the opportunity in this moment to turn, to make a very different choice than he does. He could have chosen to listen to John.

But instead, he sells out John because of this careless promise for a couple minutes of entertainment that impresses his friends and exploits his stepdaughter. When we see how upset Herod is at being asked to kill John, which he follows through with immediately, I think the reason for that is that he has this sense of being cornered or trapped that he has no other way to go. That might be familiar. I think it is familiar to all of us.

This notion that sometimes we’re just not able to do the right thing, to make the Christ-like choice because the situation, our situation is special. It’s too hard. It’s too complicated. It’s too sticky, too difficult.

There’s no real good choice here. But the truth is that we are never really trapped. Herod could have said no. He would have faced the consequences.

They would have been bad. He would have faced the consequences. But he could have said no. He knew the right thing.

He could have done it. God was speaking to him. He heard it. He could have done it.

But instead, he ends up capitulating to his darkest impulses. His darkest impulses, his wife’s, the crowds. The crowds can often be just as strong as whatever’s coming from within. He hears the truth.

He even recognizes the truth and he silences it anyway. He cuts off the prophet’s head and with that, any hope of redemption that was offered to him through John. Wise kings have always known that shutting up the jester doesn’t make the truth go away. Just makes it harder to hear.

It’s extremely important that we are willing and able to hear the truth spoken by God, spoken by other people, or we are setting ourselves up for disaster. The word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.