The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10), July 14, 2024

When was the last time you danced?

I’m not sure if any preacher can prepare for this lesson from 2 Samuel without having danced in the recent past, and I say that as someone who is not always comfortable when he dances. Exploring that lack of comfort is not the purpose of this commentary, so you can put away your pastoral care and counseling antennae.

I guess, then, a better way to ask the question is this: when was the last time you danced in a manner that enlivened you and your relationships with human, other-than-human, and divine persons?

As silly as this question may feel, our process-relational theological tradition recognizes and celebrates our embodiedness in and with the world. David, dancing before the Lord and the ark of the covenant, can become an invitation for process-relational preachers and congregations to think beyond the verbal intellect in their worship life and practices.

Some of our Christian traditions are well-practiced in dancing as worship. Others…

…well, others have jokes made about them because of their aversion to dancing at all, let alone in worship.

With this story from the histories, the process-relational preacher has an opportunity to foster the goodness of our bodies with and within this world. We know the world through our bodies, after all. The drops of experience at the base of reality are felt.

The story from 2 Samuel presents a multisensory, multimodal, fully embodied worship experience. With extensive opportunities for education and discussion beyond the worship service, discussions about our embodiedness could follow process-relational themes of the world as God’s body or questions of justice for the diversity of bodies in our world, including the holy refrain “nothing about us without us” from the disability rights struggle; especially important given that July is Disability Pride Month. In just the sermon and worship service, however, many themes are still available to the preacher.

How do we bring our whole bodies to worship? How do we worship together in ways that stimulate our taste, smell, touch, sight, and hearing? How does worship teach us to trust our bodies, to trust our relationships in the world–with God, ourselves, and one another–through our bodies? How can those of us from predominantly white Christian traditions learn from communities who have embraced the revelatory beauty of their embodiedness despite centuries of colonial and plantation violence? How can we confess and repent when we have belittled people for their embodiedness? How can we participate in the healing of people and relationships through and in their bodies? When we claim to become the Body of Christ as church, what are the material implications of that claim on creaturely bodies?

Covering all of these questions in a single sermon is likely unwise, so let them serve as process prompts for dancing with David. Each of us, preacher and witness, are embodied folks. Our embodiedness is so deep a commonality that God takes on flesh and dwells among us in Jesus Christ, incarnating throughout the cosmos still today.

With David, heighten your and your people’s awareness of God’s presence, and dance!

~~~

In my commentary on last week’s reading from 2 Samuel, I noted that “God and the people are to live together in a covenant that recognizes a functional ruler as a shepherd from within rather than some demigod, Übermensch, or Chief Executive Officer from above.” That theme continues in this week’s psalm.

The world, and those who dwell therein, are God’s. Abandon modernity’s notions of private property ownership and embrace the interrelationality of a process theological approach to the psalm.

No actual occasion is ruggedly unto itself, nor does any actual occasion exercise a level of mastery over another in any way that could be recognized as “ownership.” How we belong to one another, then, is not an owner-owned dynamic. Our influences upon each other are a mutuality of feeling that evoke responsibilities for well-being and flourishing throughout the life of the world. The process preacher has the opportunity to help the congregation see how the earth, the world, and those who dwell therein are the Lord’s because we are–each of us and altogether–meaningfully influential in God’s own life just as God is in ours, founding us on the seas and establishing us on the rivers.

The liturgical action of the rest of the psalm follows from embracing the divine-world interrelationality. The ascent of the people into the holy place can become an invitation to critical self-reflection, encouraging us to consider how we have participated in the divine life and for the life of the world.

The famous refrain of this psalm–Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, might in battle . . . Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts–is call-and-response liturgical poetry.

For the process theologian, becoming aware of our life with God and within the world is an opportunity to more fully and intentionally participate in divine aims and efforts for the life of the world. We have a chance, to use the psalmist’s language, to ascend the hill of LORD and make God present for the world. We have a chance to answer the inquiry “Who is this King of glory?” with our embodied, journeying, and sacramental participation in God’s very life.

~~~

I am struck by the dominance of the plural in this opening blessing. “Our,” “us,” and “we” all appear in the first five verses, some multiple times, and these are short verses!

This blessing, rich in christological confession, is a chance for the process preacher to practice ecclesiology from the pulpit. What does it mean to be, to become Church?

There are a few of us who have written on process ecclesiology–Marjorie Suchocki’s God Christ Church, Norman Pittenger’s The Christian Church as Social Process, Bernard Lee’s The Becoming of the Church, Joseph Bracken’s Church as Dynamic Life-System, Timothy Murphy’s Counter-Imperial Churchin for a Planetary Gospel, and my dissertation “The Eucharist and Planetary Wellbeing”–yet it remains an underdeveloped aspect of broader process theological writing. Here’s a chance for the process preacher to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way for the Church: preach life in Christ together.

 

One of Norman Pittenger’s many contributions to the process theological tradition is his notion of an ecclesiology of organism. Across many books, Pittenger develops the Pauline description of the Church: “life in Christ” or “the en-Christed life.” As a social process, Church happens. All of these christological markers in the blessing to the Ephesians are significant for process ecclesiology because we recognize that the Church is, first and foremost, an intersubjective organism through whom Christ is made present in the world and the world is made present in the life of God.

Church happens through an intimate interrelatedness with others that we could call “Life in Love Itself” as that life has been made available to the world through the decisive acts of God in Jesus Christ. The ecclesiology of organism recognizes the dynamism and interrelatedness of the whole cosmos and considers Christian fellowship as distinct societies of events that make holy and creative possibilities into actual experiences of life together in the world. Process ecclesiology is tasked to account for the dynamic and interdependent “fellowship of lovers, lovers of their fellow humans and lovers of God in Christ” (Pittenger, Life as Eucharist, 16).

The blessing to the Ephesians offers influences that shape our life together in Christ–lavish grace, an inheritance of relationship, every spiritual blessing, redemption as adopted children of God–and these influences can be markers of critical self-reflection for the preacher and the congregation alike. The blessing was for the Christians in Ephesus, and it has been handed down the ages through the faithful life of the Church as our ancestors responded to their contexts through and with God’s creative love. It is gracious that we receive this blessing today, but every grace expects response. So, how do these characteristics shape your life-in-Christ together? How do you bear witness to lavish grace in your relationships throughout the world?

~~~

This jarring story of John the Baptist’s execution comes right on the heels of Jesus sending the disciples out and empowering them to preach, heal, and cast out demons. Word has reached King Herod, including rumors that Jesus was John the Baptist resurrected. Herod knows John the Baptist to be dead, and Mark proceeds to describe how it came to be that, by Herod’s command, John had become a political prisoner and was killed.

On the surface, John’s execution story seems to be a break in the gospel’s movement around Galilee. It, seemingly, has little to do with Jesus and the disciples. Yet Mark writes with a dynamic slant that unsettles expectations in storytelling and theology alike.

John the Baptist is a political prisoner, incarcerated for criticizing Herod Antipas and his marriage to Herodias. Herodias was Herod Antipas’s second wife, the granddaughter of Herod the Great and Mariamne I. Herod Antipas was the son of Herod the Great and Malthace. The dancing daughter in this story, named as “daughter of Herodias herself” in the Greek, is traditionally believed to be Salome III, the daughter of Herodias and her first husband, Herod Antipas’s half-brother, Herod II. Though Mark incorrectly identifies Salome III’s father as Philip, Herod Antipas’s half-brother by Cleopatra, Salome III does go on to marry Philip despite being decades younger than him.

Mark uses this tangling web of middling royals–remember, the Hasmonean Dynasty was not, ultimately, in charge as long as the Roman Empire occupied the region–to set the stakes in understanding this story within the broader gospel.

As Jesus’s power spreads throughout Galilee, there are other options for what power looks like in the region, and these options are not good news. The court banquet setting parallels stories of foolish kings in the Hebrew Scriptures, preparing the early Jesus followers to recognize both the lengths to which politically powerful people go to maintain power and the foolishness of these pursuits amid God’s calls to righteousness and holiness. For the process preacher, the dancing daughter may be an important character for theological reflection on these alternatives to Jesus’s power in Galilee.

The dancing daughter is far from the salacious depiction of her in Franz von Stuck’s 1906 painting. She is a young girl; the same Greek word used to describe her as was used to describe Jairus’s daughter in the previous chapter (Mark 5:41-42). Her mother uses her to get her step-father to do something–execute John the Baptist–that he had refused to do.

Process-relational theologies value a person’s agency in their becoming. Of course, not each actual occasion becomes through conscious steps of decision-making. Even still, the human person, as a nexus of events, can be recognized by their abilities to participate in their becoming with self-awareness.

Furthermore, children are not humans-in-waiting. Here, process theology can strongly support and encourage the agency of children in a world that too often belittles them, ignores them, or rushes them into adulthood. Children truly experience the world, and they participate in processes of creative advance through their own integration of their feelings, God’s calls on their life, and their desires for themselves.

Simply put, Mark depicts Herodias’s power to manipulate her daughter and her husband as unrighteous and unholy. To be sure, it is an unrighteous and unholy power because it results in John the Baptist’s death, and we can recognize a further insidiousness in her coercion to thwart her dancing daughter’s participation in possible moments for life, for peace, or for love; in her coercion to cut off possible futures where Herod Antipas liked to listen to John the Baptist (Mark 6:20) and may actually have heard him.

Within the broader context of Mark’s gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ is itself an Ἀρχὴ (arche; Mark 1:1), a norming way of life, for the people who receive him. At its core, the story of the beheading of John the Baptist illustrates the contrast between the righteousness and holiness of the Jesus Ἀρχὴ as prefigured in John’s baptizing and the ruthlessness of the Roman Ἀρχὴ as incarnated in Galilee by Herod Antipas. The Ἀρχὴ of Jesus is a threat to the Hasmonean tetrarch (ruler of a fourth of something) in Galilee–Herod Antipas–and, by extension, the imperial control of Rome itself because the Ἀρχὴ of Jesus influences people to become active participants in healing, transforming, and creating Love.

The process preacher may recognize some classic themes of process christology in this Markan language of “norming ways of life” and “joining Jesus on the Way,” for the Ἀρχὴ of Jesus offers alternatives to what power looks like today, too. How do we participate in the Ἀρχὴ of Jesus so that we and others might experience a love that is empowering and fulfilling their agency in the world? How do we become more aware and encouraging of the full humanity of children in our midst? How do we confess and repent when we have sought and exercised coercive power against another, wounding or killing innocents in the process? How do we receive the Ἀρχὴ of Jesus today?

---