Poolesville Presbyterian Church
07.12.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Mark 6:14-29
LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:
I spend a fair amount of time on the internet, what with blogging and tweeting and emails and Facebook posts, part of the endless cycle of connectivity that seems to link us together these days.
I find social media in particular to be fascinating and peculiar, perhaps because it’s such a new phenomenon. We take it for granted, just part of the background hum of being now, but it’s a remarkably, strikingly new thing.
Twenty three years ago, for example, it did not exist, except perhaps in the fevered sci-fi imagination of William Gibson. That’s a non-random number, a number I pick because this week my wife and I celebrated twenty three years of marriage. It’s one of those anniversaries, that, while it might mark a significant chunk of time, wouldn’t really have been worth doing all that much about in prior generations. Silver? That’d be another couple of years. Gold is still a ways off. This one, having looked it up, was the “Imperial Topaz” anniversary, wedged right in between spinel and tarzanite.
I honestly haven’t paid much attention to those traditional annual gifts, which is probably a good thing. According to the list of recommended gifts I googled recently, I was supposed to have bought my wife copper plate last year, which I totally managed not to do. But the twenty fourth is supposedly the “musical instrument” anniversary, so I’m sure I can make up for it by giving her a copper kazoo.
So we went out, had a nice dinner, and watched a show, and it was the kind of date one has for a anniversary of modest significance. As part of that evening, the big guy took a couple of pictures of us for posterity. Twenty three years ago, such a thing would have been normal. But then, my wife asked: “Hey, are you going to share those on Facebook?” Which I started to do, but then I thought, um, “Why? Aren’t we on a date?”
I mean, sure, it’d get likes. Anniversaries and birthdays and videos of puppies with the hiccups are like-magnets. But, well, why should I want that? Ten years ago, that wouldn’t have been an expectation, couldn’t have been, because Facebook didn’t even meaningfully exist. And if I’d tried to do everything I do now on Facebook with everyone I know? I mean, seriously. Translate this into the analog era. Let’s say this was the distant, distant past, the year two thousand and two. Every single day all of you received in the mail from me a package containing pictures from my last week, little sayings, and a DVD containing a montage of pictures and videos of my dog. Also included in that package would be a return envelope with check-boxes to indicate whether you liked that day’s mailer or not, along with space to write a comment. How’d that have felt? “Please stop sending me this,” I think you’d write in the comments box.
And yet that’s the thing we’re doing, socially, and on a vast scale. We’ve gone from zero to one point four billion human beings using Facebook, and more using other social media, all within a decade. It’s a new and completely different way of being together socially, and yet we human beings aren’t any different than we were twenty years ago. We’re still the same complex, social, smart, and frustrating bipeds we were just a blink of an evolutionary eye ago, and we still deal with and respond to social cues in more or less the same way we did before this new strange magic swept over our consciousness. We have Facebook and twitter and pinterest and instagram, vine and youtube, each clamoring for our attention, each creating forms of interactive community that demand instantaneous, reflexive responses.
Human beings in social groupings become different creatures than we are individually. We look to our neighbors for cues about how to act, about how to live, about how to treat one another. And social interaction shapes our neighborliness, shapes how we look to those around us for approval...or disapproval. And I wonder, looking at this new thing, what that might be doing to our souls, to the essence of who we are as persons and to how we live together.
Because social cues aren’t always the best guide to life, as we hear in the story of Herod and John the Baptist this morning. This Herod is not Herod the Great, but Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, not to be confused with his brother Herod Philip, Tetrarch of Batanea, Auranitis, and Trachonitis. I think I had trachonitis once, but antibiotics cleared that right up.
It was a thicket of social demands and relations that got Herod into some ultimately mortal trouble with John the Baptist, as the story is told by Mark. John had been challenging Herod’s tendency, one he inherited from his father, to have unworkably messy relationships. In this case, it was marrying his brother’s wife Herodias.
This said, Mark presents Herod not as a cartoon cut-out villain, but as a human person trapped in a social mess. It’s funny, for Mark, who usually doesn’t bother with emotional niceties and just goes bluntly barrelling through the Gospel story, but apparently, that detail is important. Herod is presented as a flawed human being, but a human being nonetheless.
Despite John’s attacks on Herod, Mark makes a point of saying that Herod was strangely drawn to him, both fearing his connection to the people and “liking to listen to him.” John, or so the story is told by Mark, was protected by Herod.
But that protection proved nowhere near enough, as Herod is socially obligated into giving the order to kill John the Baptist. As king, his power lay entirely in the relationships he had with others. If he made a public statement, that statement radically defined his identity as Tetrarch. If he made a commitment, he was forced to stick with it. A king is no more powerful than their social connections, without which they’re just a single, solitary, and very vulnerable human being. If those social connections fail you, it’s Et Tu, Brute time.
Herod would have known this, known it with a deep anxiety about his place in the world.
And then, at her mother’s bidding, the daughter of Herodias did her legendary poledance for the royal court. Herod, watching his stepdaughter slash niece ---ew--- was so entranced-- ew--- that he told her she could have whatever she wanted with a grand flourish.
What did she want? She wanted the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Herod was trapped in a web of social commitments.
As the story goes, even though Herod was completely aware that serving up John the Baptist’s head would be wrong, he was compelled to follow through and fulfill the request. Driven by his relationship to the community in whose power his identity lay, Herod acted in a way that both preserved his social integrity and shattered his personal integrity.
Each of us faces similar pressures as we participate in groups that share our basic worldview or interest. But now, with our social awareness changed, it feels as if that has been intensified.
If we understand our identity is shaped by Jesus, it’s not how God works. Our integrity as created beings, as sentient living and aware parts of God’s creation, that integrity rests on an entirely different foundation. That foundation is our capacity to be just, even if it is to our detriment. That foundation is our willingness to be gracious and kind, particularly if that grace and kindness is being shown to someone who opposes us. This is fundamental to the Christian way, the absolute moral and ethical ground of the teachings of Jesus.
The argument could be made, of course, that this is unrealistic. The only way to get anything done is to cling with a deathgrip to the beliefs of your group, and to never for a moment waver in your commitment to your social identity. Your every tweet and post and pin needs to reflect the will of the gathering. Those likes and friends, those followers and retweets, those things take a dominant place in our identities. And in that, there can be real social consequences.
I’ve watched that play out, through twitter-mob-shaming and the forced expulsion of harmless individuals from groups by self-appointed purity police, by the endless predatory pursuit of offense and the stirring of reflexive desires and angers.
If social media is a place where you live and spend time, and if the teachings of Jesus are something that matters to you, then it deserves watching--and checking--just as any social groups demands on our ethical imagination require checking.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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