Proper 10B
In the name of God, our source. Amen.
Whenever I hear the Gospel lesson that we’ve read today, my mind instantly goes to two places. First, I’m reminded of one of the first baptisms I did when I was new priest. A parishioner had a beautiful new baby and wanted her to be baptized. I scheduled the baptism, without first checking on what the readings for the day would be. It turns out, it was the beheading of John the Baptist. It didn’t really set the mood I had in mind for the day… But that’s a mistake I’ve not made again.
The other place my mind turns to is the story of Sunset Boulevard. Of course it was a movie a long time ago, but my experience of the story is through the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It tells the story of Norma Desmond, a once-famous star of silent films whose career had been eclipsed with the advent of modern movies with sound. Her story is partly about her inability and unwillingness to adapt to the new medium, but it’s also somewhat about having been left behind, like so many other aging ingénues.
She plans a return to cinema with a new silent film she’s written. She would play the young girl who would woo Herod with her intoxicating dance; and once he’s putty in her hands, she will demand the head of John the Baptist.
In reality, the story of Norma Desmond is, above all, a story of identity. It’s a story of her struggling, and ultimately failing, to understand who she is becoming as her circumstances change. The young writer who stumbles onto her estate eventually recognizes her and says, “You used to be big,” and she responds, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” In her delusional reality, she’s perfectly fine exactly as she’s always been. It’s everyone else in the world that somehow is off-track.
The sort of brilliance of this story – whether intentional or not, I don’t know – is that as Norma struggles with understanding her reality, she turns to the story of the beheading of John the Baptist. A story, which is, in its own way, a story of misunderstood identity.
When Herod hears of the remarkable life of Jesus, like a lot of people of the time, he struggles to make sense of it through his own world view. The most sense he can make of it is his memory of another great man – one whom he, himself, had killed.
So we’re told the story of the beheading of John the Baptist, not so much for its own pedagogical worth, but because it illustrates just how badly the great and powerful King Herod has misunderstood the reality he was seeing in Jesus. Like Norma Desmond, Herod could only make sense of the world through his own experience. He couldn’t imagine a world that grew beyond that experience.
It's a challenge all of us face, at one time or another. We cling to the experiences we’ve catalogued in our lives, and we construct an understanding of the world that coalesces around that catalogue. What doesn’t fit has to be made to fit.
The problem is, none of us has enough experience for that to be truly reliable. We can’t truly grow until we’re willing to admit that our catalogue isn’t complete. There is a bigger picture out there that our own “big picture” can, at best, just imagine. But too often, we limit the big picture by assuming our own view of it is all there is.
Earlier this week I was reading an interview with a retired Astronaut, Ron Garan. Throughout the course of his career, he spent 178 days aboard the international space station. In that time, he traveled more than 71 million miles and orbited the earth nearly 2,500 times. He says that stepping back from the earth and seeing it literally from a bigger picture than any of us do on the ground, he gained a new perspective that led him to realize that we’d all been fed a huge lie.
He said:
When I looked out the window of the International Space Station, I saw the paparazzi-like flashes of lightning storms, I saw dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was as if we could reach out and touch them.
And I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet's atmosphere. In that moment, I was hit with the sobering realization that that paper-thin layer keeps every living thing on our planet alive.
I saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life. I didn't see the economy. But since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly owned subsidiary of the global economy, it's obvious from the vantage point of space that we're living a lie. We need to move from thinking economy, society, planet to planet, society, economy. That's when we're going to continue our evolutionary process.
There's this light bulb that pops up where I realized how interconnected and interdependent we all are.
From the vantage point of space, he “realized how interconnected and interdependent we all are.”
The world tells us again and again that our singular perspective is what matters most. “What do I get out of it?” “What have you done for me lately?” “If it feels good, go with it.”
But that’s a really narrow view. Just as Herod’s worldview obscured the true identity of Jesus; just as Norma Desmond’s experience obscured her own true and changing identity – individualism obscures us from seeing the truest measure of identity we all share. Our interconnectedness is our truest identity. Our relationships – both with God and with each other – are our truest identity.
I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it again: you can see God in a beautiful sunset when you’re all alone. But you can only follow Christ in community. We need each other. And even though the world keeps telling us to be independent and to stand up for ourselves, that’s a very narrow view. When we step back a little, we can see that there’s something more.
And it’s not that our individual lives and stories and experiences don’t matter – it’s just that we have to see and appreciate that they’re a part of something bigger; something interconnected.
Most of us have grown up hearing about Jesus, so it can be a little hard for us to wrap our minds around these questions that come up again and again about who Jesus is. But the truth is, even though we’ve heard about him most of our lives, we still have to seek those same answers that Herod and so many others of the time sought. We have to keep asking ourselves who Jesus is in our own time, and in our own experiences, and for our interconnected lives. The answer that comes up again and again is that Jesus is more than we can imagine. The answer that comes up again and again is that Jesus is best captured by understanding relationships. The answer that comes up again and again is that Jesus’ relationships with both friends and strangers show who he really was, and now our own relationships can help us to keep seeing who Christ really is.
Our truest identity is wrapped up in each other’s, and it’s
wrapped up in those of the ancestors before us.
Our truest identity is not just our own.
It’s bigger than that. And our
calling is to seek it and to embrace it.
Amen.
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