If I’ve learned one thing from the scripture we hear this morning, it’s that partying too hard can be dangerous. That’s a story I heard a lot in high school, when we had presentations from Mothers Against Drunk Driving; but the Bible isn’t warning us against drinking and driving,
but rather about what we find in ourselves when we let it all out.
Take Herod.
He’s having a great time at his birthday party. The feasting is fabulous, and when his daughter starts dancing, Herod’s so happy he can’t contain his delight - he offers her half his kingdom, anything she can imagine.
(Don’t get wound up in interpretations of the story that focus on incest and lust - the context is just as suggestive as a proud papa watching his daughter kick the most important goal in a soccer match as anything else. “Great job, honey! I’m going to buy you a new car!”)
The party has gone to his head and Herod has lost his sense of perspective.
And he suffers for it.
Daughter consults mother on how best to use this blank check; mother seizes the opportunity for revenge; and now Herod is on the hook for murder. Required to kill the prophet he kind of likes and respects - his best connection to God, however uncomfortable - and give the bloody head of John the Baptist to the women in his life.
He can’t go back on his word in front of his guests, so he gives up John to satisfy his wife’s desire to avenge her humiliation. An insult to her that was really earned by Herod in the first place. In first-century context, it’s definitely Herod who is at fault for breaking Torah and marrying his sister-in-law, though when John the Baptist calls him on it, her reputation gets tarnished even more than his.
It’s nasty, all around. It’s stupid, vicious, creepy, and the only gospel story I’ve ever found where half the resource websites suggest you shouldn’t even preach on it.
Parties are dangerous.
You can lose your head.
You don’t even need alcohol to get yourself in trouble.
It can happen when you’re high on God.
That’s what’s up in David’s story this morning.
He’s gone out to bring the ark of the Lord, the physical symbol of God’s presence, to a new home in Jerusalem, where it will bless God’s people and underline the success of David’s reign.
They know it’s dangerous - the ark has already killed a man who merely tried to keep it from crashing to the ground - but it’s also blessed the man who kept the dangerous box safe for David. So he goes off to get it in a joyful procession - a moving party, complete with band and feasting - and he’s dancing along the way because he’s caught up in the exhilarating moment.
He brings it into Jerusalem with music and spectacle, free food and public celebration (think Stanley Cup rally and ticker tape parade) and more dancing in the streets.
And David’s wife sees this, and despises him.
The text implies that he’s been partying in his birthday suit, naked as he was born - just with a sort of liturgical apron wrapped around him - and that it’s the last straw for Michal, who loses her respect for him, calls him on the embarrassing nature of his public display,
and starts the fight that ends their marriage.
You can’t really blame Michal for this.
She was in love with David once, when he was a musician in her father’s court and she was a princess, and David fought a hero’s battle against the Philistines to earn the chance to marry her.
But politics are messy, and God picks David to replace Saul.
So Michal’s father and her husband battle to the death.
And her father uses her as a pawn, marrying her off to someone else, while David’s off risking the life she saved for him when her dad was after him. And when the two are finally reunited, David’s already got six other wives and a bunch of kids, and shows no inclination to stop marrying all the pretty girls in sight.
It was a mess before he went dancing in the street; it’s just so clear to her now.
The parties show up the fault lines in families that were already there.
The parties show up the messiness of our human attempts to have our relationship with God work out comfortably, and according to our own moral judgements.
These parties are dangerous, because they expose us to ourselves and one another.
There’s no simple gospel in these stories
No simple takeaway about abundance and generosity.
No healing; no redemption.
Yes, it’s good for the long arc of Israel’s history to have both God and David reigning together in Jerusalem; good for us to be warned by John the Baptist’s fate about the risks of trying to get other people to follow God’s law, but there’s a reason the online resources told me not to preach this stuff.
It’s not good news.
Yet that might be exactly why we need to hear this.
Because I’m pretty sure that lots of families have fights,
and lots of marriages have problems,
and I’m not the only one who’s ever woken up regretting what happened at a party.
(Right??)
There are fault lines in my life, messy compromises in my relationships, plenty of semi-conscious attempts to make God’s way go my way.
If that’s not true for you, you can stop listening. But if it’s even a little familiar, then it’s worth noting that we’re hearing our own story in the Bible today.
We’re hearing the fault lines that are already there, family history that stresses and strains us, in spite of and even because of love and good intentions.
Seeds of bitterness and danger lurk in our lives, the reality of fragmentation and broken relationships, even death, sometimes.
There’s a lot in our stories that’s like the stories of Herod and David: mess ups that just aren’t redeemed; ugly episodes that aren’t good news.
But the news that’s worth listening for today is that our guilt and grief and hurt and errors are part of God’s story, too. That even if they are not healed, even if the losses are not redeemed,
the rifts that don’t get reconciled are still in the story.
God’s story has the bitter regrets and nasty insults and dumb mistakes that my story has,
and that yours might.
And God’s story doesn’t fix them all, heal everything, or wash it all away.
And that’s what I want you to take from this Sunday into your Monday afternoon, or Thursday morning, or the uncomfortable hours of the Morning After -
wherever failure and regret and guilt and anger show themselves in your life.
Work to redeem and reconcile, with all your heart, but remember that all that broken mess is in God’s story too.
Not because it’s good news,
not because it’s redemptive,
but because you’re in God’s story.
I’m in that story, we are in it.
And when God doesn’t fix it,
God still tells it like it is.
God isn’t embarrassed by our nakedness or our shame,
doesn’t hide from our faults or help us hide them from ourselves,
doesn’t smooth out the bitter and rush to put the pain behind.
The truth to listen for today is the assurance that even when it’s not good news,
God tells it like it is, and gets on with the story — that powerful, holy story which will never, ever, leave us out.
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