Since I haven’t been in the pulpit since I got back home, let me bring you greetings from the nearly 7,000 Episcopalians who gathered in Louisville Kentucky for the 81th General Convention of the Episcopal Church. I was at there to serve as a hospitality volunteer for Latino ministries, which was a head-spinning and body-aching experience of running between hotels and Costco and a vast convention center, making sure that people—especially our deputies from Latin America—felt welcomed and had the nourishment they needed to do the legislative work of the church.
Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was all over the place too: preaching and praying and exhorting us to be our best selves. It was his last General Convention in the office he’s held for nine years, so his presence and message were both bittersweet and inspiring. He’s a master of rhetorical repetition and simplicity, but Bishop Curry is so deeply grounded in scripture and the Christian tradition that his message always becomes more powerful the more we linger with it.
So when Bishop Curry refers to God as Loving, Liberating and Life-Giving—something he does all the time—he wants us to remember the Love that birthed creation and all humankind, the Liberation of the Jews from Egypt and their return from exile in Babylon, and the Life that was given in Jesus’ Incarnation and Resurrection.
These are deep, powerful expressions of good news, running from beginning to end of our scripture, reminding us of who God is and what God does. So what then do we make of today’s readings, which appear to be about the exact opposite of Loving, Liberating and Life-Giving? Recall that in Second Samuel we meet Michal, who despised her husband David in her heart. And Mark tells us a story that begins with John the Baptist imprisoned—hardly a vision of the freedom Bishop Curry was preaching about—and then executed in what appears to be a show of royal ego. These are some troubling Bible stories. And I have to wonder where our Loving, Liberating and Life-Giving God is, when people seem intent upon hating, imprisoning and killing.
That’s a question I suspect we’ve all asked ourselves, and not just about Bible stories. Why do people behave so badly? I know I’ve asked it of myself a lot recently, and—spoiler alert—it’s not a question that any 15 minute sermon will answer. But in these stories—in the spaces between the terribly bad choices that people made—runs an invitation to grace that compels our attention. Those characters who practiced hatred, oppression and murder might have made other choices. They didn’t, and God didn’t prevent them from doing evil. But people’s worst decisions rarely happen in a vacuum. And in both of the stories I just mentioned, the haters and instigators of murder were women trapped in terrible marriages
Which doesn’t excuse their malevolence, but since woman are so rarely given agency or even names in the Bible, I think it’s worth paying attention to these two and their motives. Michal was the first of David’s several wives. She thanklessly protected David from her father Saul, and then was bartered between David and Saul amidst various shifting political loyalties. Little wonder she was not delighted by his dancing. More ominously, Herodius, wife of Herod II, was shamed by John the Baptist, but could find no better way to express her anger than to implicate her daughter in his execution.
These are, to put it mildly, some ugly family dynamics. And while the women in them made very bad decisions, they were also people with very little power in a patriarchal system wherein women’s survival depended on being married. And the incentive system was such that the more powerful the man they married, the better for the woman, no? This was certainly true for my grandmother’s generation, and still true for most women in the world. Let us never forget. But notice this: when power is unequal and partnership is coerced, love is always at risk of becoming hatred.
In the two millennia or so since Herodias manipulated Herod into executing John the Baptist, laws and norms for marriage have changed considerably in the west. It is no longer the only way for women to survive. For the most part, women cannot be coerced into marriage, and we have financial and legal protections that would allow partners to avoid or leave a bad marriage. That’s a social policy—a political choice people have made—that allows for the better angels in our nature to flourish.
Which brings me back to General Convention. One of the many topics considered in Louisville—many of which I described in our newsletter last Friday—was a change in the language of the Catechism. Nearly a decade after The Episcopal Church approved trial marriage rites for same-sex couples, we finally changed the language of our catechism to say “Holy Matrimony is Christian marriage, in which two people enter into a life-long union, make their vows before God and the Church, and receive the grace and blessing of God to help them fulfill their vows.” A small but utterly welcoming change from the language of Holy Matrimony being “woman and man entering into a life-long union”.
As communities—as church, as families, as neighborhoods, as cities and states and nations—we actually can make choices for good. We can create cultures and catechisms that increase the likelihood of sustainable love, freedom, and abundance of life. Marriage equality is just one of the many ways our secular laws and church polity encourage people to create families of choice that are freely entered into and healthy. A much-needed corrective to the kinds of situations Michal and Herodius found themselves in.
But is that the Good News of our Loving, Liberating and Life-Giving God? In part, yes. Our prayerful and hopeful policy choices do matter, and we can and should do everything we can to foster households and communities in which freedom to love is the norm. But sandwiched between the stories of David and Michal, Herod and Herodius, our lectionary does a curious thing. It offers us an entirely more radical vision of family.
Remember that Paul wrote that God “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ… [and] this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people.” Adoption wasn’t especially common in the highly stratified context of Roman colonial culture. It upset the carefully-policed categories of who had power, access and ability to inherit wealth. Listening with first century ears, we can better understand what Paul was saying to the church in Ephesus. Paul was effectively telling them that the patriarchal family was not the model for God’s family.
If God’s plan for us is adoption, then there really is—as Paul wrote to the church in Galatia—“no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” God adopted us—chose us—for God’s pleasure and for our good. As God’s own children, we don’t have to get our way through hatred or manipulation because all of us are equipped and empowered to love as the self-giving way of God. All of us—male and female, gay and straight, brown and black and white—have full rights to inherit the riches of grace and of creation, God’s first gift of love.
We have been adopted into the family of the loving, liberating and life-giving parent, who longs to grow us up in the way of love. I’m not going to say that’s easy, but there is a way: Jesus shows us the way. It takes some practice, it takes some policy, it tolerates some imperfection, and it takes a whole lot of grace. But “when love is the way, we actually treat each other well,” as Bishop Michael Curry once preached to a young couple marrying across a chasm of class and color and privilege at Windsor Castle. Our differences are no easier to surmount, but nor are they any harder. We all have the same calling, and the same Spirit empowers us to respond. “When love is the way, we treat each other well,” Bishop Curry said, “like we are actually a family.”
